Conceding Authority, Part 1

Romney's concession speech last night was pretty classy, especially as compared to the rest of his campaign.  I don't like the man much, and I certainly don't have much use for high muckity-muck religious elders that just seem to expect subservience as the natural order of things.  My feelings about him personally aside, what stood out to me as he spoke was this bit:

We look to our teachers and professors, we count on you not just to teach, but to inspire our children with a passion for learning and discovery. We look to our pastors and priests and rabbis and counselors of all kinds to testify of the enduring principles upon which our society is built: honesty, charity, integrity and family. We look to our parents, for in the final analysis everything depends on the success of our homes. We look to job creators of all kinds. We’re counting on you to invest, to hire, to step forward. And we look to Democrats and Republicans in government at all levels to put the people before the politics.

While I note at least 3 problematic elements, notice what the thrust is of the entire paragraph:  a big, sloppy kiss to authoritarianism in all it's civic forms.  Which is interesting, but not the focus of what I want to talk about today, other than to say it's fascinating that he assumes the strength in our future lies not with us and our choices individually, but in the mid-level authority figures (pastors, priests, teachers, parents and bosses) between us and God making the rest of us better.  The job creators line is also spectacularly amusing, but again not my focus today, except to say it's really amusing to frame this topic entirely in terms of the benevolent authority of job creators, and never mention other vital elements to job creation like, oh say, demand from middle class consumers.

The part I marked in bold is the bit that jumped out at me.  Initially, I thought he was ceding morality entirely to religion, but noticed later he had thrown in "counselors of all kinds" as a sort of catch-all.  But, as this is one of my pet topics, the language still kind of bothered me.  In my experience, at least in the Adventist church, churches do indeed believe that all moral authority stems directly from God him(her/it)self.  That all of us, as beings, are naturally fallen, and require divine intervention to be good.    It naturally follows that the elders, pastors and ministers of a church having presumably studied God's words closely, are best suited to guide you, the lowly individual, in learning how to connect with God more completely and let the goodness flow.  This is why they consider it imperative to convert the non-believers to the fold.  You can't be good without God, you see, therefore you cannot be good without THEM to tell you how to be good.  In some cases, they will graciously concede that the elders of other religions (the imams, the buddhist monks, the popes), all have some connection to God, however imperfect their particular conception of God may be.  Therefore other religious elders can assumed to still be guzzling the good from the gourd of God to one degree or another.  I'm aware that not all Christians think this way, but in Adventism at least, it's a core belief.

I view this entire philosophy as highly problematic for a variety of reasons I have discussed and will discuss another time, but the specific problem with relation to civic authority leaders, is there are many millions of people (19.6% of the country as of 2012) that identify as non-religious.  This seems problematic for a religious community intent on involving itself in politics.  How do you come together and find common ground with people you think are unwitting agents of satan, or morally unguided at best?  Granted, they won't always say this to your face, and guys like Romney dance around it from a political point of view, but having sat in church pews for many years and listening two years of evangelical political rhetoric, I can guarantee that there are a lot of christians out there who think just that.  So the question of "how do Christians relate to 'the fallen', when converting them outright is off the table?" seems interesting to me, but is also not really what I want to focus on.  I have no vested interest in how Christians reconcile this, except to hope that they would follow some of their humbler, quieter, wiser congregations in remembering that if, according to their theology, everyone is sinning and falling short of perfection, including themselves!, then they don't have much justification for a high horse built out of church pews.

The question that DOES interest me, is how is the secular community going to respond to this assertion of de facto moral authority by the religious types?  I honestly don't know, because while I've completely abandoned the idea that I need to submit to religious authority or beg a god for goodness, I haven't considered myself part of the secular community very long, and I'm not sure what particular handy book I would point someone to to assure them that I do indeed have a moral compass.  I am clearly a secular humanist at this point, which was not something I chose, just something I discovered describes my moral views nearly exactly.  But even among the 20% of the non-religious, I'm not sure even a majority of them would describe themselves as secular humanist, whether they fit the definition or not.  My point being, as a Christian, you can point to the Bible as the source of your morality, a book that has been invested with authority, if not by God, then by tradition and endless affirmation of millions and billions of people for 2000 years that it is, indeed, authoritative.  Which is to say, independent of its actual authority, a thing can be seen to be authoritative if enough people assert it is so, for a long enough period of time. And the secular, humanist or otherwise, don't have a similarly revered book to point to.  Indeed, the point of secular humanism is that having a moral compass does not require an authority of any sort to compel their goodness.

So what, then, is the secular answer to "why am I good?"  What can they say that would reassure a christian of any sort, that just because they don't believe in God, it does not mean they are 5 seconds away from stabbing the god-fearing at any given moment?  It seems obvious to me that one doesn't need to fear the gods to see the benefits of being good, to value it as a philosophy, to have a set of principles and then follow them.  But this is a lengthy conversation to have with every single believer I come across.  In the same way it becomes exhausting to re-assure every old friend that I am still an okay person, even though I'm gay, it's exhausting to explain to a whole bunch of people that I'm still good, even though I don't claim religion anymore.  For me, for now, I think the answer is going to simply be, "I'm a secular humanist" and leave it to them to look up exactly what that means.  Of course, I have heard secular humanists defined as some of the modern, deceptive agents of Satan in my time at church, so I'm not sure if that isn't just the start of a whole new exhausting conversation, but at least it's a start.

  So, while I clearly don't know what the exact answer his, I do have a couple of assertions I draw from all of this.  It's vital that certain massive segments of christianity learn to accept that the non-religious have a moral compass and values that have elements in common with Christianity.  More importantly, it's vital that the non-religious refuse to cede moral authority to the churches.  How specifically they go about doing this and how much work it might take, I'm not sure, but we HAVE to stop letting religions get away with saying they are the gatekeepers of morality, when we know that isn't true.  I think we have the edge philosophically, but this does us no good when they have such a huge edge organizationally.  I think as more and more people identify as non-religious, this will happen anyway, someone will eventually write an accessible humanist "bible" or start a non-religious community that people find appealing.  But I wish we'd get started sooner, rather than later.  I think we'll all be a little saner if we can agree that, religious or not, we have a lot in common in terms of moral philosophy.

Counties are for Counting

Thank god election day is here.  I'm so tired of politics and the election right now.  Specifically the massive stupidity with which we conduct most of it.  Leaving, for now, the inherent stupidity of a 3-year election cycle, which leaves our politicians somewhat less time to focus on actually governing than I think most people are willing to admit, for the best, greatest, most compelling, handsome and intelligent democracy that has ever, or will ever exist, we are curiously poor at the thing central to all of it: counting the damn votes.  David Frum, of George W. Bush speech-writng fame agrees, we do not proceed with our elections in a robust or trust-worthy manner.  And as nostalgic as it can be to wistfully deify our messy, chaotic, glorious democracy we may want to consider whether it's actually necessary that the act of voting and counting votes be the subject of too much messiness and chaos.  In fact, there's no reason at all, that it can't be extremely easy, transparent, fair and tamper-proof for every county in this country.

I don't know why we wouldn't want every county, both rich and poor, to have access to safe, expedient, reliable voting.  I know we're allergic to taking ideas from other countries (we're the best!  we have nothing to learn from anyone!), but other modern countries have managed to bring reliable, trusted voting systems to their citizens and we, at the very least, could start there.  But the way we're currently doing things, is actively fueling our partisan woes, and it flat out doesn't need to.  We have officials in some counties trying to extend voting hours in republican districts, and limit them in "urban" ones.  We have absentee ballot shenanigans.  And widespread distrust on both sides that voting is being handled fairly and accurately.  There's no reason to leave vote counting to highly partisan elected officials, and every reason to think that's a terrible idea (in that highly partisan officials are increasingly showing themselves unable to put partisanship aside in the performance of what should be non-partisan duties).

Look, voting is something that should be simple, and that fact that it isn't implies that we are dangerously close to being so disfunctionally partisan that we can't agree that one plus one equals 2 anymore.  That's a problem.  Here's the simple, for the love of god, solution to all of this.  If we can agree that all citizens should have the right to vote, and that we should minimize any roadblock that keeps voting from being free and easy, and that partisan elected officials should not be able to use their power to corrupt the vote counting in their party's favor, then we HAVE to do the following to make sure that's true:

1.  No poll taxes.  Voter ID of some sort is a fine anti-fraud device, but ONLY if a legal voter ID is absolutely free and relatively quick to obtain.  Yes, people should be able to verify they are who they say they are, NO this should not be an expensive or multi-week process.  Not if we're making it the basis of tamper-proof voting.

2.  Standardized election counting machines/systems.  There's no reason people in poor counties should  risk not being able to vote because the county is too poor to afford voting machines that work, or the voting machines are so broken that votes are hard to even read.  There's also no reason to leave the specific methods of vote counting to the whims of local officials, who may or may not be capable of putting their partisanship aside and count the votes accurately.  Either give the counties guidelines, and the funding to meet them (and the oversight to make sure it's followed), or just federalize the whole damn thing.

3.  Provide a transparent system of checks and balances (this would be extremely necessary if we federalized the system).  All parties should be able to inspect the voting machinery, and the process of voting from start to finish should be entirely transparent.  If people insist on using electronic voting machines, THEY must have a paper trail, and publicly available computer code to meet this standard.  Any code-literate citizen should be able to read voting machine code to make sure it's fair, and parties should be able to check that the code on each machine matches the code example for each machine that has been released by the manufacturer.  There's no national security reason any part of the voting process, except for the identity behind each individual vote of course, should be secret, and anyone wanting to keep any part of the process secret, should be viewed with immediate and deep suspicion.  Your vote should be secret, the counting of it should not be.

4.  Make voting day a holiday.  No one should be unable to vote because of a work shift.  Or a double-work shift.  Or even to leave a voting line because they have to get to work.  Everyone gets to vote.  And election day, the day most fundamental to our democracy, has ample reason to be a holiday anyway.  Celebrate the vote by making it easy for everyone to vote.

These things aren't hard to do.  The fact that we haven't done them yet indicates that the people in charge either don't think there's a problem or don't think confidence in the voting system is a high priority.  We should disabuse them of that notion.  And if we're really at the point where we can't agree that 1 + 1 = 2 when counting votes, then the greatest, best most heavenly-scented democracy that God has ever put on this earth is kind of in trouble, don't you think?  We seem to have a great deal of trouble agreeing on objective reality at all any more in this country.  I humbly submit that voting reform that generates confidence in objective reality and our ability to count would be a great start to turning that around.

The Last Shall be First to Leave

Taking a few moments from their 30-year-old discussion on whether women are capable of being spiritual leaders (currently, women's ordination is viewed as a "mistake" by the General Conference, because people with penises are always pointing forward), the Seventh-Day Adventist church recently decided it was time to revise their position on homosexuality.  They are very proud to announce that they have changed one adjective in describing the brokenness of homosexuals to be slightly less condescending and caustic.  They have decided not to describe homosexuality as a "disorder" and instead label it a "disturbance" (like we're the dark side of the force).  The statement now reads:

Homosexuality is a manifestation of the disturbance and brokenness in human inclinations and relations caused by the entrance of sin into the world.

Yes, thank you for stating your prejudice in slightly less inflammatory terms.  They also are now willing to refer to the homosexual as "loved by God" instead of just a "children of God", although there's only a hair's difference between those two statements and "homosexuals exist", because Adventists believe God loves everybody.  They are now also excited to announce that they have taken the great risk of including compassion in the closing statement, which now reads:

As His disciples, Seventh-day Adventists endeavor to follow the Lord’s instruction and example, living a life of Christ-like compassion and faithfulness.

Which is a funny cap to put on a public statement about how there's totally a splinter in that other guy's eye, because that's what Jesus would have done.  Made sure you knew you were broken, and needed to  grovel before him before he would allow you into his community.  My favorite are the quotes from the committee members.  First, the old inspirational hymn, "we are good, and are persecuted":

The institutions of marriage and family are under attack.

Somehow, they are under attack.  We'll get back to you on just exactly how straight christians are going to be prevented from marrying whomever they choose in their churches any day now.  Followed by the response to a committee member suggesting they eliminate the "disturbance" line:

Though many of us have family members who are homosexual, we understand the thought process, we still embrace them, we still love them, we still care for them.  However, as a church, we must take a stand for what is right. 

What could be more right than declaring that two men loving each other above all else has no historical or biblical precedent (*cough*  *cough* David and Jonathan *cough*).  But especially the line, "we understand the thought process," because no, they don't.  They certainly think they do.  In the Adventist world, not living according to the cherry-picked "rules" found in the bible means living "apart from God" and it is their contention that no one can live happily apart from God.  And not just the gays, anyone living outside of Adventism is considered fallen, led astray by the devil, and doomed to a live of darkness and depression unless they submit to divine authority, by casting all notions of self aside, and instead living by their very poorly argued and maintained rule system.  So, if you're gay, you're not playing by their rules, and are by default living outside of their rule-system, and therefore must be unhappy. Because only living by the rules makes you happy  Ipso facto.

Except, they're so busy running gay people out of their congregations, they never let them stick around to see that that's not exactly true.  Nor do they every seem to notice that there are a wide variety of people leading happy, moral lives outside of their church.  And if they'd actually deign to talk to gay people, they might hear how happy dating the gender they're attracted to actually makes them.  Even then, in my experience, they don't really hear gay people (or me) when they say that kind of thing.  That there's nothing inherently unhappy about being gay.  It's kind of great!  It's just as great to find a fulfilling, exciting homosexual relationship, as it is to find a fulfilling heterosexual relationship.  But, since that can't be true according to their belief system, the average Adventist is still likely to believe you are either deluding yourself at best, or led astray by Satan and soon the other shoe will drop or in the worst-case, that you are an agent of the devil, actively seeking to undermine God's Holy Authoritarian Bureaucracy.  Knock, knock.  Who's there?  Gays out to destroy your marriage by being happy.

So no, they don't understand the thought process, otherwise they could not say it is not "right" that gays be in happy marriages of their own.  For one thing, you'll notice they don't specifically state just HOW marriage is under attack by gay people.  Will straight people leave the institution of marriage in disgust if gays do it too?  Is marriage really a form of group think?  Are most married people looking around to see how other marriages are doing it and modifying their own accordingly?  Do polygamists ruin it for everybody?  Why or why not?  Are marriages more concerned with people outside the marriage or more concerned with the people within it?  What does it mean to not be in the "right" marriage?  What specific harm does two dudes hitching up cause your community?  What great evil comes from two men declaring their life-long commitment to each other?  They do not say.  It is just "understood" that first gays marry, then ???, then the church and marriages everywhere are poisoned forever.  Exactly how, is left as an exercise for the bigoted reader.  How gay marriage hurts marriage more than divorce and infidelity is left as upper level Cognitive Dissonance Jujitsu, for the advanced irrationalist.

Look, I have no interest or investment anymore in the acceptance or approval of the Adventist community.  Not only would they NOT have me, as a openly and unrepentant homosexual who will just not stop loving other men (and all the horrors increased tenderness brings), but I don't believe in any of the 28 fundamental beliefs anymore, and I have no interest in being part of an institution that insists you abandon the empirical evidence of your life experiences and your critical thinking when it conflicts with poorly interpreted, and cherry-picked biblical passages.  And I don't see what hope their is for an institution that still thinks it's a mistake to have women as leaders (because they can't bring themselves to see them as equal).  But as someone who's still deprogramming myself from a lot of the terrible ideas I was told as a kid, and has a large amount of friends and family who still consider themselves Adventist, this shit drives me crazy.  The truth is, I've found substantially more acceptance and compassion outside of the church than within it.  Ironically, I see Adventists chafing under a poorly maintained rule system as pretty unhappy people.  My parents are currently having a very hard time because their religion insists I'm a bad person, even though that dramatically conflicts with their experience with me.

And what's especially frustrating about all of it, is it doesn't need to be this way, even from within their system.  They allow every other open sinner among them.  They allow people with anger problems, with gossip problems, with forgiveness problems, with compassion problems (clearly), with fidelity problems to sit among them every week in the pews without complaint.  Even from the viewpoint of "homosexuality is a sin", what is the logic of excluding the gays, while allowing the meat-eating, jewelry-wearing, freely divorcing remnant to remain?  They either believe in the power of Holy Spirit to change lives, to cure anger problems, eating problems, pride problems and "gay problems," or they don't. And they shouldn't believe in ex-gay therapy, of course, God continues to choose to not cure even those desperately trying to be straight, and even ex-gay organizations are admitting that now.

 Personally, I think they exclude gays because having happy, committed homosexuals week after week in their congregations, would show the "gays are inherently depraved and unhappy" rhetoric to be a lie.  They can't allow gays to exist among them, because they have no confidence that any of their rhetoric around homosexuality is even remotely true (quite rightly, considering they don't actually take the experience and knowledge of gay people into account).  White people can't tell black people what their experience as black people is, men can't tell women what their experience as women is, the religious can't tell the non-religious what their experience is, and straight-people CERTAINLY can't tell people what their experience as gay people is.  The only way any of those groups get to know what the other group's actual experience is is to interact with them and listen to them and BELIEVE them when they relate those things.  And until the Adventist church is wiling to put their belief system where their mouth is, and let their rhetoric stand against actual contact and socialization with Adventist gay people, they don't know SHIT about homosexuality and should not claim to.

Or would socializing and making friends with people their community normally shuns and looks down upon be too un-Jesus-like?  Ah, modern christianity:  followers of Jesus, as is comfortable and convenient.

New Blogs for Everyone!

Considering whether I should start a new blog for Adventist stuff, or just keep it here, and start labeling things.  Should blogs be focused and topic-driven?  Written with intent for a specific audience, or written in one place, hoping the multitudes within me don't overwhelm the casual reader?  Am I even going for a readership?  I am not sure I know.

I suspect I'll just write more about it here, and label accordingly, and y'all can skip my cranky rants about my childhood religion if you like.  Still, there's an OCD part of me that wants blogs to more or less be focused by topic, so the reading experience is somewhat cohesive.  However, I concede that it's annoying to try and keep up with "which blog I am updating now."

All of this is simply to say:  incoming rant about the Adventist churches new position on "teh gay." soon.  Finally got around to reading the actual news report, and: what the actual fuck.  Nothing too surprising, but Jesus, do they not resemble Jesus.

Bull in a China Shop

Existentially and economically speaking, shit is fucked up and bullshit and I know that to be true.

Shit is not fucked up cataclysmically just yet, but naggingly so nonetheless.  I was trained to be good, to be fair, to do no harm, to help the less fortunate, and conserve natural resources, but society has made being bad just so EASY.  Not in a seductively evil way, of course, I'm not sold on being overtly evil, I'm sold on being sold.  I'm encouraged to make the purchases right for ME, and not ask any pesky questions about what happens behind the scenes to make such bargains possible.  For the most part, because I don't have the time to comprehensively research the business practices of every corporation I buy from (in other words, I am lazy), I choose not to know.

Except I do know, don't I?  A bunch of earnest, persistent reporters have taken great pains to point out for many years that the phone I bought so cheaply was made possible by work conditions in another country that I would consider immoral in mine.  Because when we told corporations that they couldn't treat workers as slave labor, they simply took production to a country where the slave labor would be done by people less like us, whose plight would be less immediate, using workers with less recourse and fewer champions to fight for them.  And not just my phone, but all of my electronics.  And not just my electronics but my clothes.  And not just my clothes, but my coffee.  And not just my coffee, but my chocolate.  And not just my chocolate, but much of my food.   All relying in part, somewhere down the line, on cheap labor, with unsafe business practices, with some form of human misery meted out on the assumption that the #1 priority in the world today is to make sure the citizens of the western world get their goods as cheaply as possible.  And if that leaves foreign children or undocumented workers minus a few fingers due to unsafe-but-cheap working conditions, so be it.  

I don't really like where that leaves me ethically.  I know I am perfectly in my rights to continue, as I always have, politely ignoring the dubious business ethics of the modern age, and just take my cheap crap and go home.  It's what most everyone else does, after all.  Ideally, my culture's expression of common will and priorities in the form of self-government would have watchdogs to prevent against those kinds of abuses, but I know corporations have been busy for many years defanging government oversight and have been otherwise successful in defining profit as the ultimate good, no matter the human cost for far too many people.  I know there is much good mixed in with the bad, and that combined with the size of the problem, learned helplessness and general apathy means it's fairly unlikely that we'll rise up en masse against the injustices of the age, in a way that would effectively change anything.  For one thing, where would we start?  Nobody seems to care anymore if 100,000 are out in the streets protesting something.  Occupy only got people's attention once they made a nuisance of themselves on public land.  But even though I know all these things, I find this state of affairs a little soul-crushing.  It is hard to think of myself as a good person, when I enable bad things, however structurally built into my daily existence, and however little direct responsibility I hold for any of it.

And, on top of all that, no matter who is president next year, my vote enables someone to use drones to kill innocent people, and I have no real choice in the matter.  The "adults" have decided innocent people need to die to feed combat terrorism, and that's that.  The problems in our political system is a whole other ball of wax of course.  So much corruption, stagnation and stupidity it's hard to know where to start.  All of which I am unable to separate my vote from.  Which is not to say I cannot do some good with my vote, just that I can't keep it pure.  I enable some bad along with some good.  Which does not make me feel great either.

None of which is to say this registers very highly on a day-to-day basis.  I am not constantly wracked with over-whelming guilt about the things I buy.  But it's always there, and it always bothers me at least a little bit, and I wish I were smart enough to figure where one would even start to try and fix any of it.  And it's not to say we're all monsters, or it's all hopeless, or we all should envision ourselves as constantly covered in the blood of a million small children.  I know people taking advantage of other people is just a part of life and I can't be responsible for other people's bad behavior.  I just wish going to the store didn't feel so much like enabling it.  And I wish it didn't feel like I have to choose between fighting an endless war against unethical consumerism and living my life.

I will let you all know if I discover the magic bullet to the world's ethical problems and how to avoid the myriad systems that taint me by association.  I am not optimistic about my chances of doing so.  In the meantime, I may look here from time to time.  It seems like a start.

Your Vote is a Mess

I will now utter the words that make me hate the future:  I got into a political debate on twitter a few times this week.  Both because we don't know how to debate effectively in this country, and twitter fails so spectacularly as a debate venue for any meaningful thought.  So I'm going to explain myself in this blog post and let the subject drop, because I know who I'm voting for and I know why, and I want to have some sort of rebuttal to the odd liberal slacktivism that always seems to crop up in the last month of an election.  And I'm tired of getting into arguments on twitter about it.  I will understand if some readers find this too tedious to wade through.

Am I being too harsh when I declare it slacktivism?  Maybe.  I just think real political change takes consistent, boring, hard grass roots work and you can't just throw a protest vote at the last minute for president and expect any sort of lasting change.  It's like trying to catapult yourself to the top of the mountain and hoping to plant the flag as you fly by, instead of just building a solid, stable platform to get yourself there.   I firmly believe that if you want the american public to seriously consider a green (or any 3rd) party candidate as an alternative to the existing two behemoths, you're going to need to show first that they are capable of working within the existing structure.  This means they're going to need to see that party working for them at the city, state and congressional level before they even begin to trust that they can get things done at the presidential level.  As much as I like Jill Stein's platform, the Green party has been a spectacular failure for 20 years at building a local ground game, gaining influence in local and state politics and building name recognition.  And trying to bypass all of that with accumulating enough protest votes to sneak in a quick, bloodless decapitation just seems like slacktivism to me.  It's a seductive idea because it's easy, not because it's effective.  You can't start an effective 3rd party from the top down, you have to start at the bottom and do the work.  Presidents are typically picked from people who've worked many years as an effective state or national politician of some sort.  Until the green party has one who can claim the same credentials, and the same levels of support, they're just not going to get anywhere.  There isn't a shortcut to the top.  That idea is too good to be true.

I've also seen the, "the Democrats will never pull to the left unless we punish them by voting for a third party" argument.  Bullshit.  We did this dance in 2000.  I'm not sure Nader voters can make the argument that George W. Bush ushered in a new liberal paradise or a more liberal democratic party.  If anything, there's been a huge backlash in people willing to vote third party, if it means we get another Bush.  I think both the Tea Party and Occupy have both proved that you CAN shift the existing monoliths to the left or the right, but they both did that from within the party, not by sabotaging the party more in favor of their policies than not in general elections.  Occupy didn't push Obama far enough to the left for your tastes?  Then you'll have to try harder in the next 4 years, eh?  In the meantime, I fail to see what publicly shivving the only viable candidate closest to your goals a month before the election achieves.  Sinking Obama from the left will really only give progressives the opportunity to smugly intone "And THAT'S what you get for not being progressive enough!" while they enjoy all the liberal freedoms Romney will undoubtedly rain down upon them for their progressive purity.  "Cutting off your nose to spite your face" is a thing people actually do.  It's a thing to watch out for in ourselves.

And then there's the old, "they're both the same, it's all fucked up, I'm above it."  Again, bullshit.  Politics is messy. Every time you vote, you vote for policies you want, and policies you don't want.  Political groups, especially the Democrats, are built by building coalitions with people who agree on many things, but not everything.  Your vote is never now, and will never be, for a candidate that reflects your political views 100% down the line.  And especially in this country, you don't get to vote for either of the existing parties without voting for some pretty icky things.  And I'm not sure why anyone would suddenly think that they deserve this privilege above anyone else.  Ask gays, African-Americans and women how long it took them to get the changes they wanted and how many times it took voting for candidates that had other policies they weren't exactly in love with.  Why do you think your fight for a better government should be any easier than theirs?  And, as mentioned above, no one has built a viable 3rd party option yet nor has shown how they're using Jill Stein vote this election to launch one.  But none of this means the two existing parties are the same.

For you, in particular, they might be relatively the same.  If you're not gay, and don't need some basic human rights recognized, they're both the same.  If you're not a woman, and don't need some basic protections on when you get to make your own health decisions and when you don't, they're both the same.  If you don't really care about the state of the health care system, they're both the same.  Because there's only one party talking about gay rights, about contraception rights, about abortion rights, about trying to make the health care system better, and it's not Republicans.  It's not even on their agenda, and if it is, it's to tear down rights I feel are important.  Their explicit policies with regards to health care was to change nothing.  If Obama hadn't been elected, they wouldn't have even talked about it.  They don't even recognize that there was a problem.  And on the other issues, they're actively trying to time travel back to the 50s and demonize gay marriage, restrict abortion AND, mind-mindbogglingly, contraception and their science committee members think science is the work of Satan.  And since I have some skin in the game on the gay rights issue, you're going to have to forgive me if I can't bring myself to vote against my best interests, by voting for anyone but Obama.  Who is, again, the only pro-gay rights option that has any chance of affecting my life in a material way.  Especially given that Romney is not exactly neutral on these topics.  He will actively try and move things the other way.  And really, the side that thinks science is satan's work or equal to your emotional instincts in terms of merit are JUST the same as Democrats?  Please.

Economically, it's more of a mixed bag of course.  Even so, the Republicans remain batshit insane on the idea that tax breaks for the wealthy lead magically to job creation.  And only one party shits on the poor for being poor at every available opportunity, and has policies it would like to implement to punish them for their 'laziness'.  Are they both substantially more corrupt than I'd like them to be? Absolutely.  Wall Street has a strangle-hold on both.  But one of them is enthusiastically planning on doubling down on the practices that nearly destroyed us and one seems like it maybe could be convinced to be less crazy economically if its base pushed them that way.  I make no apology for voting for someone who at least might be convinced, cajoled or bullied by his base to see things my way.  The two parties aren't great economically, but are still not "the same."  Voting defensively is not the same things as being mind-controlled by the two-party system.  Obama, at the beginning of his term, said, "if you want more liberal policies, you have to give me political cover in the base to do that."  He's right.  Maybe we should start doing that?

Foreign policy-wise?  The only difference I can detect is Romney would really love to drop some bombs on Iran, and so would his base.  Drone assassinations suck, but since they poll over 60% in terms of popularity, we're getting the assassinations we deserve.  We're getting drones regardless, and that sucks, but I can't do anything about that.  And we're backing israel mindlessly regardless, and that sucks, but I can't do anything about that.  I DO think that invading Iran would be worse than not invading Iran and continuing sanctions.  and I DO prefer someone relatively calm-headed like Obama, with a base that pushes for peace as commander-in-chief instead of a wish-wash like Romney in charge, with a base that will be chanting "push the button!  push the button!  Show them how strong we are!" at every hint of conflict.  So again, I vote conservatively (by voting for Obama), because it seems flat out immoral to stack the immorality and carnage of war with Iran on top of the existing immorality and carnage of drone warfare.  And we aren't getting a president who will stop all foreign aggression this year.  So I vote for the less bad, because it seems so MUCH less bad.

Of course, this only matters in swing states.  And if you would have normally voted for Obama, but are voting Green in protest, then you ARE helping Romney.  But even there, I fail to see how spoiling the election for Obama from the left, gets the left further.  "I enabled a Romney win, ???, Liberal Paradise!" is just not a winning argument to me, and I have yet to see a ??? that's anything but hand-waving and fairy dust.  Your vote is a mess.  It will be a mess morally so long as western culture is a mess morally.  It will be frustratingly binary until the hippies in occupy or their supporters get to filling city councils, mayorships  state legislatures and governorships with 3rd party politicians, so americans have a broader pool to pick from when picking experienced politicians for president.  And in the meantime, the policy differences between my two choices DO matter.  In the end, I choose to vote for a guy who will move it an inch in my direction, rather than 6 inches the other way OR has zero chance of moving it all in the next 4 years.  I don't really lose sleep over that decision.  My idealism and my pragmatism are NOT mutually exclusive.

Signal Boosting

During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. 

Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch - the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything. At Salem, the parson clung pathetically to his witch text after the laity had abandoned it in remorse and tears for the crimes and cruelties it has persuaded them to do. The parson wanted more blood, more shame, more brutalities; it was the unconsecrated laity that stayed his hand. In Scotland the parson killed the witch after the magistrate had pronounced her innocent; and when the merciful legislature proposed to sweep the hideous laws against witches from the statute book, it was the parson who came imploring, with tears and imprecations, that they be suffered to stand. 

There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.

 -- Mark Twain, Bible Teaching and Religious Practice

Wow, this essay from Mark Twain was fucking beautiful.  Where was I educated, that I'm only just now reading this?  I'm tempted to assume my mostly-Adventist education neglected a few crucial tomes that are critical of the christian faith.  In any case, it is becoming increasingly clear that I have a lot of educating myself to make up for both my upbringing (to some degree) and my last 15 years of intellectual laziness (to a much larger degree).  I have a growing list of homework, and Mark Twain's essays have just now rocketed to the top of the list.

The more I learn, the humbler I get.  Every big thought that I think can change the world has already been said by someone smarter than me, decades ago.  It's astonishing to me how much good and reasonable thinking back in the day has either been ignored or forgotten.  In any case, it doesn't matter if I said it first (he said to his inner 5-year-old), what matters is I use my very small megaphone to amplify good and important ideas as best I can.  And the congregation said, "well duh."

Status report - Habit

*static, crackling*

*click, click*

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

  - Habit, William James, 1887

The above is very insightful.  I'm sure this is something many of you have known for a long time, but I am just starting to understand.  I've been railing against habit my whole life like it's a kind of death,  and it's made me miserable, frankly, for exactly the reasons expressed above.  I routinely agonize over things like bed time, clothing choice, and food.  In truth, I think I've been conflating habit in general with habits other people have tried to foist upon me.  Interesting to think that if my habits are mine and intentional, it might actually free me up to do other things.  As my dad would say, "Well, huh."

Upon a Dark Horse

New movie review for Dark Horse at Contents May Settle.  The reviews themselves are a work in progress, but I'm having fun with practicing them.

Mic Check

“The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
It wasn’t just that the cave was cold, it wasn’t just that it was damp and smelly. It was the fact that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there wasn’t a bus due for two million years.
Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.
He was stranded in prehistoric Earth as the result of a complex sequence of events which had involved him being alternately blown up and insulted in more bizarre regions of the Galaxy than he ever dreamt existed, and though his life had now turned very, very, very quiet, he was still feeling jumpy.”

 -- Life the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams

Lately, it's been hard to explain what's going on in my head without sounding like I'm crazy.  I've been through some serious changes in identity recently, and it feels in many ways like I'm still adjusting to it all.  To paraphrase the quote above, even though my life has calmed down from some craziness, I'm still feeling pretty jumpy.  As much I would love to be instantly adaptable, my brain and body suffer from the same limitations and programming defects as the rest of you mortals and it keeps wanting to return to old habits and resists new ways of thinking.  But, as mentioned in my last post, it seems a little gross, or at least self-indulgent, to talk about it anymore.  This becomes increasingly clear the more I read OTHER writers droning on and on and on about becoming who they are.  Sometimes I think personal development is like that dream you had last night.  Fascinating to you, less fascinating to someone who wasn't there to feel it all with you.

This was most recently brought home to me in a review mentioned in passing for the book How Should a Person Be.  The work in question is an auto-biographical pseudo-novel about a young artist exploring the question written in the title.  The reviews seem to indicate it's something you're going to love or you're going to hate, but the extreme antipathy in the negative reviews is interesting to me.  I've been seeing a lot of grumbling about 20-somethings droning on about who they are, and what they're going to be, and to just shut up and pick something already.  And to some degree, I get that.  Who cares what you decide to be?  All people really care about is if you're going to be a dick about it to the people around you in the process.

On the other hand, this is a pretty interesting topic.  Haven't we been asking this question in one form or another since we gained sentience when we found that Monolith?  Isn't the appeal of religion that it answers that question simply and lets you get on with life?  Anyway, however tedious the individual stories of personal growth may seem from time to time, I am, in general, happy that people are at least self-aware enough to ask the question, even if they must drone on about it.  And I feel that people asking it at a younger and younger age can only be a good thing.  Because in general, I think most people are going to come back to, basically:  I want to feel accomplished, and I want to feel like a good person who has friends.  Not necessarily in that order.  

Which is a long way of saying, one of the things I've been thinking about is who I want to be, and I understand if this question is really of no particular interest to anyone but me.  And of course, for me it came back to:  I want to feel accomplished and I want to be a good person, in my own definition of those things.  What defines a good person we can leave for later, but "how do I feel accomplished?" has been weighing on me.  What is the perfect intersection of my potential and my passion?  I initially thought it was science (physics/astronomy), but have been seriously second-guessing that decision of late.  That feels more like the career I was expected to take, than the career I was really passionate about.  I regret nothing about the degree itself, and the critical thinking and problem-solving skills gained from it, but I can't believe I never noticed how little passion I actually have for the nuts and bolts of science until just recently.

So, if what I've done hasn't been working out for me as well as I'd like, what should I do instead?  I feel like a teenager all over again trying to figure it out.  And my thoughts return to the grandiose delusions I never completely left behind in my teenage years, just let slumber all those years I was in the closet.  And now, waking them up and looking at them in the light of day, it astounds me how much of an artistic sensibility  I seem to have.  I am good with numbers, and occasionally employ logic to good use, but most of the things I seem to want to MAKE are artistic in nature.  I want to write poems, and novels, write music to make men weep, draw faces, paint portals to other worlds, to share what I've learned about life, the universe and everything the best I know how.  I want to make something beautiful and share it with you.  Of course, I have no idea how to monetize any of that in a way that would enable me to live comfortably, although I assume it's unlikely, whatever grandiouse delusions may briefly cloud my view.  I think it's enough, for now, to recognize that I want to do it, even if I never share it with more than a few people.

Neil Gaiman once said, more or less, that we owe it to each other to tell each other stories and I really agree with him.  So, for the time being, I have contented myself, more or less, that I will continue to plug away at the day job, but will start trying to develop my artistic skills in my off-time.  And while I have vague plans to take an acting class, a drawing class and possibly a dance class at sometime in the next year and see how they feel, what I REALLY want to do artistically right now is play piano and write.  There are days when all I hear in my head is piano music.  And mornings I wake up and sit on the couch reveling in ideas for a new or existing story.  I have stories to write and songs to play that give me a rush of emotion just thinking about them.  I feel, as I think about how they would go, what I would want the reader/listener to feel as they experience it and I have no idea if I can ever actually make that happen.  But I badly want to try.

So, for the time being and as long as it suits me, I am going to work on developing the skills necessary to translate my feelings into a song or a story that might be worth sharing with someone else.  It's going to be boring for a while while I work through the basics of the forms, and lord knows I'm going to have to keep the grandiose delusions and corresponding ego in check, but I think it will ultimately be rewarding if I keep at it.  I am just really very curious to find out if I am capable of  playing a song worth listening to or writing a story worth reading.  And honestly, I think it's time I found out.

So, who do I want to be?  Among some other things I hope to be a musician and a writer.  And somewhere in there, a good person, with friends.

Status Update - input parameters

The altercation with the objectivist pick-up artist got me thinking about the purpose of this blog.  Among my many grandiose delusions was an idea to build the readership of this blog somehow by relating bit of things I've learned since coming out of the closet, which, I think, is quite a lot.  Which isn't to say I learned nothing in my depressed, closeted years, but the difference between what I think I know now, and what I thought I knew then still sometimes staggers me.  And then, I am further staggered to realize just how much it is I don't know yet.  So, you know, lots of staggering.  But what I said to the opua applies to me as well, who am I to be telling anyone else how to live just yet?  Wouldn't any advice from me be more compelling coming from a guy who's been awake and thriving for a decade, instead of just waking up? Probably, in fact.  Which is probably why this blog has a readership of about 2 (hi handsome!).  In any case, the taste the opua's blog and modus operandi has left in my mouth has left me wanting to make ANYTHING but that kind of blog.  So I've ruled out one possibility:  I am not here to be your guru or sell you my shit like it doesn't stink.

I am here, I guess, to share what I think I know, but you can take it or leave it.  Because I am also partly here to process my thoughts by writing them out orderly.  And believe me, I actually do most of this properly offline in my own notebooks.   But I have, and will in the future, sometimes decide that I want to write it out here.  It's not that I think my thoughts on anything will necessarily help you, or that you should do just what I write about doing, because that's not my decision to make.  Some things I might just want said, and out in the world because I think they are important ideas.   Mostly, I'll share these things because I want to be better understood by the friends who read this blog, or at least paint a picture of where I'm at.  So if someone hasn't heard from me for a while, they can take a gander at one of my semi-coherent posts and go, "ah, I see.  He hasn't called because he's been crazy."

I definitely have an opinion about Things, of course.  And the more I wake up, and the more I use my critical thinking skills to process my life instead of passively letting it carry me along, the more I have to say about these Things.  And while the ongoing midlife crisis that emerged from my coming out process hasn't yet rolled to a stop, I am still making progress and figuring things out.  One of the important things I've figured out, for a variety of historical reasons, is that I have just about zero tolerance for manipulative bullshit from other people.  I don't like it when people try to define myself or my purpose from the outside.  I don't like it when people mislead others for their own benefit.  I don't like it when people tell me up is down and then fall on their fainting couches when I call them on it.  I don't like people who slap me in the face (verbally or otherwise) and then get huffy and condescending when I'm not nice about it.  I especially don't like other people wildly projecting their issues onto me and everyone else instead of admitting that the problem they might be having is with themselves (something I am guilty of more often than I care to admit).  And I will not hesitate to call bullshit on these things when I see them.  And these things make me angry enough that I have a hard time sugar-coating them, even though that generally gets better results.  I don't like getting called on any of this stuff either, but I'd rather get called on my own odious bullshit then have that stench stinking up my relationships indefinitely.   So, occasionally, on this blog, I'm going to call some bullshit out.  Even if it just amounts to screaming into the ether.

What I'm going to try and do less, not that you could tell from this post, is use this blog as an online diary.  I have notebooks to whine into if I really need to.  And increasingly, it has been occurring to me that I might process my stupid shit better by writing it into stories, and posting those on Contents May Settle.  That way, I get my emotions processed and thoughts examined and at the end, I at least I have a story that may be worth sharing with someone, as opposed to self-indulgent complaints which, in my experience, don't go over so well as dinner conversation.

As for my delusions of grandeur, I will try to leave them a ways behind.  I have ambitions still, yes, but I mostly just hope my friends read this blog and understand more about me.  Beyond that, I'm not here to develop a following.  And if I do, I hope it's because, after a couple or more years of hard work, I've written stories people want to read, music people want to hear, or programs/apps people want to use.  Even then, that's just the potential aspirations for this blog.  If it only ever acts as an echo to the real and meaningful life I am starting to build, which will hopefully be rich in other ways, if not in money and fame, then it will have served it's purpose.

Status Report: Working

*twisting knobs*

*increasing coherence*

So I was directed to this article  over the Twitter machine, and I have some thoughts about it.  His assertion is that we all owe the world massive amounts of productivity, and must, to make our fortune and be worthwhile people, work a 14-hour day, abolish the idea of weekends and just work another 2 14-hour days, and really get things done.  We must also stop watching movies, except maybe documentaries, those we may watch.  We are allowed high culture such as an opera or symphony once a week, because those are done by similarly high-achieving people and are therefore acceptable.  We must never let ourself slow down, so if we have a success at work, we don't take too long to celebrate, just pump our fist and keep going.  This, according to the article, is what we all must do to be productive, happy, and people he would personally find worth talking to.

The first mistake this article makes is wildly projecting the author's problems and mistakes onto his audience.  Not everyone spent their life gambling and traveling the world leading, by his own account, a very privileged and wealthy life on winnings, and then having a crisis of identity at age 30 about producing things.  Therefore, not everyone feels the need to work 14-hour days to make up for what they perceive is lost time.  Neither are all of us objectivists who worship at the alter of Ayn Rand.  This is all the author's problem.  And he's coping with it admirably, but the idea presented in the article that this is our collective problem and we all need to do just what he did is false.  Everyone's unhappy life imbalance is arranged differently, they all require a different solution to find their own future happiness.

Status Report: Meet the new H, same as the old H

*adjusts dials*
*flips switches*

Hello?  Is this thing on?  Great.

Operation "change into someone else completely overnight" is going just about as well as you think it would.  Monday and Tuesday were fairly successful.  Which was then, of course, followed by a massive cascade failure of motivation and discipline for the rest of the week.  I remain committed to "collapsing the waveform" though, however difficult.  I'm trying to limit the universe of possible me's to the one I so desperately want to be and am not.  My attitude probably needs adjustment of course, I'm just so frustrated with myself right now.  I keep trying to develop new habits and keep actively sabotaging myself out of, I believe, complete cowardice over changing.  I am, and have been for far too long, comfortable in my misery, apathy and purposeful lack of achievement.  I mean, I know the brain gets comfortable with its chemical balances, and actively resists changing them, but this is ridiculous.

I have been under the persistent delusion that coming out of the closet was what I needed to fix for my life to suddenly move forward with purpose, drive and satisfaction.  And don't get me wrong, coming of the closet was VITAL to my sanity.  It's just been dis-enheartening to realize that this is not the end of my struggle.  For one thing, I seem to be fighting some form of learned helplessness I picked up somewhere down the line, probably back as a kid.

Approaching Event Horizon

*********INFINITE H CONTROL SYSTEM******************

ENTER USERNAME:  PARALLEL H 7164

*********GOOD MORNING H 7164, WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?*******

1) SURVEILLANCE FEEDS
2) STATUS REPORTS
3) ORDER PIZZA
4) COLLAPSE WAVEFORM
5) THERMONUCLEAR WAR

> THERMONUCLEAR WAR

**********HA HA HA, WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT TO DO?*********


1) SURVEILLANCE FEEDS
2) STATUS REPORTS
3) ORDER PIZZA
4) COLLAPSE WAVEFORM
5) THERMONUCLEAR WAR

>  COLLAPSE WAVEFORM

***********DO YOU REALLY WISH TO COLLAPSE 2 REALITIES?  YOU WILL ONLY HAVE [INFINITE] REALITIES REMAINING  . . . *******************

1) Y
2) N

> Y

Yet Another Movie

Reviewed Bernie.  Up next, Dark Horse!

sick and sleepless

I got sick last Friday with some mucuzoid creature that has traveled, from my throat, to my sinuses, to my brain, to my stomach and back to my throat again.  It's been a wonderful parade of coughing, sneezing, dripping, fever, nausea and mucous.  But that's neither here nor there.  The weirdest symptom has been the insomnia.  I'll feel exhausted or wiped out from being sick, ready to sleep and just end up laying in the dark feeling perversely fidgety.  Last night was no better, even though I went to bed relatively early.  I just lay there thrashing until I eventually feel asleep sometime after dawn and then woke up with a bizarre crick in my neck that's taken me hours to stretch out.

In short, being sick has funked with my sleep, which was already funked enough thank-you-very-much and I'm cranky about it.  And that is the end of my story.

The Fantastic Adventures of Parallel Me

It's a strange feeling, trying to break out of my old habits.  Every night I go to bed with a clear idea of how I want tomorrow to go, with a long list of things that would make me feel good and satisfied to accomplish.  And every day I wake up and do the same stupid things, on the same stupid schedule, in the same stupid way.  And through my pan-dimensional port hole, I can see parallel me doing those other things, and achieving the goals I laid out the night before, in ways that I seem reluctant to, and I think, "why can't I make the decisions that that guy makes?  What's so special about him that he just gets up and does all those things?"

It is a common and popular fact that people rarely change their personalities on a whim, or a dime or a bet.  Past a certain age, changing your behavior, plowing new ruts into the grey matter of your brain, just becomes more difficult.  Or at least, this is true for me.  And I'm basically offended every day that I can't just flip a switch and go from apathetic, depressed under-achiever to the fantastic adventures of hyper-productive, enthusiastically happy, casually cool parallel me.

I am desperate to converge these timelines (as is everyone tired of me talking about them).  I gaze at my doppleganger across the infinite/microscopic void of parallel time-space  with envious eyes and imagine how I can merge my world with his without destroying all of reality.  Which is perhaps what is holding me back, this irrational feeling that, should I start to change and merge with parallel me, my world will somehow explode.  And I suppose it might.  But maybe sometimes, in the name of science, truth and progress, you just have to push the blinking red button just below the letters "collide worlds" and see what happens.*

*Recovered from the notes of notorious scientist Soylent H, Age 36.**

**(this post brought to you by the Time Cube and the letter Pi)***

***Yes, sometimes I work out my issues in strange ways.

Forever Futurama

Are the new futurama shows not that funny?  Or have I just lost my sense of humor?  Or grown out of it?  These are the weighty questions that pre-occupy my tremendous intellect.

Prick-fil-a

Do I really want to say something about Chik-fil-a?  I guess.

First, how hypocritical is it of people who were calling for boycotts of Oreos because of their support for gay rights to be falling dramatically onto fainting couches now that Chik-fil-a is getting boycott calls for opposing gay rights?  The mental gymastics it takes to justify this opinion is kind of mind-boggling.  They basically have to assume their opinion is privileged because it comes from the bible.  It isn't.  If it's okay that you boycott gay rights supporters, it's okay if other people boycott gay rights opposers.  It's not discrimination of your beliefs that other people don't like your beliefs and tell you so.

Second, it was stupid of democratic mayors to try and interfere with chick-fil-a.  Absent active discrimination of employees or customers, there's no reason for the government to get involved (and I know some would argue, even then).  They actually do have a right to sell chicken and be run by a bigot without government interference.

Third, seriously?  You want to be known as "that guy who lined up for a bucket of chicken to make sure everyone knew how much he hated gays?"  Good luck with that.

Fourth,  I look forward to reading about this in the history books.  That moving, and emotional moment in history when a bunch of people bought chicken to make sure gay people knew their shallowly examined religious beliefs prevent them from considering gay people full members of society.  I would say, "our cultural conversations could not get any stupider," but I know I'll be proved wrong in the next 3 months.

Fifth, this is not a both sides do it kind of thing.  Gay people want the right to marry and they want religious bigots to get out of the way.  Yes, both sides need to understand the other side doesn't have to celebrate them for their beliefs or lifestyles.  Certain evangelicals are acting like it's a tremendous intrusion on their rights to have a civic government recognize the marriage rights of consenting adults in monogamous, committed relationships, and then have to live with those people in the same society.  This is so patently and obviously untrue I'm not sure how grown-ass adults make this argument.  It's a big world, and we all have to interact with people who don't live their lives in the way we would choose to.  They might still be good people even so.  It will be okay.  Jesus.

Arise Chicken, Chicken Arise!

I fell into a tumblr
and kept on tumblring down
I stumbled and I tumbled
until I came back around.

So. Tumblr. True story, funny story: I left this blog for a boy.

 I just checked back through the archives of this blog and remembered two things. 1) I was very angry for quite a long time and 2) it was because I was gay, in the closet and hated myself for it. As it turns out, outward and inward harmony is not achieved by living lies contrary to my values. So, shortly after I had my afore-mentioned elbow surgery, I met a boy (well, 37) who had a tumblr, and so I tumblred with him, so to speak. At the time, I just thought dating men was something I needed to experiment with, and get out of my system, so I could end my internal speculation once and for all and then get back to a life of, hopefully, enthusiastic heterosexuality (contrary to all past experience). Believe it or not, it was kind of a surprise to realize I had had it backwards for my entire adult life. So I dated a boy. And soon enough, after the angel choir had faded, and the light from heaven blessing my sinful union was gone, I lay on my bed thinking: "Well shit. That clears a few things up."

 Of course, the stunning realization that the reason I had never felt comfortable with women in my bed was the "wo" at the beginning was life-alteringly amazing. I realized I could finally have a relationship that I found satisfying on a level I didn't know I had. Everything clicked and everything suddenly made sense, in ways it should have made sense long before. This was followed by the immediate knowledge that I was not going to be in the closet for one second longer than I possibly had to . . . which meant I was going to have to tell everyone I knew. So out I came. First on Tumblr, then to close friends, then to my parents, then to a select group on Facebook, representing the last group I really felt i needed to tell. I just didn't want people to wonder. I wanted them to know, and I didn't want to feel like I was hiding.

 Which isn't to say the transition was smooth. I went a wee bit crazy for a few months, while I tried to come to terms with who I now knew I was, and who I'd always thought I'd been, or at the very least thought I had tried to be for everyone else. Coming from a conservative fundamentalist background did not make it any easier. Of course, this is not the most amazing mindset to maintain a relationship with (I was not a great boyfriend at this time), and my boyfriend left me after four months, somewhere in the middle of my coming out process. That wasn't fun either. I had chemically bonded to him in a way I had never experience before, and it took me quite a while to pull myself back together again. But, of course, I did, if not gracefully. But I regret nothing. I learned an amazing amount from that relationship.

Where were we? Ah yes, Tumblr. Why Tumblr? For one thing, I wanted to "practice" coming out of the closet before I did it to everyone, and Tumblr seemed gay friendly. For the record: Tumblr? Gay ENTHUSIASTIC. And I liked making new gay friends, and gif culture, and whining about every damn thing and having it just float away in a sea of cat gifs. But after the relationship fragmented, and I had finished coming out of the closet, I started to need it less. I still enjoy tumblr (and in fact will be linking posts like this straight through to the tumblr blog indefinitely), but the coming out process has morphed nicely into an ongoing mid-life crisis, and I find tumblr is not really the place I want to explore that. So I return, at the turn of the tide, to my old Blogger home.

 Also, holy shit! Blogger is so much better than it used to be.

 Not that you really needed to know any of this, or didn't already know it, but here I am: Super gay and ready to blog. I have a new boyfriend, heights I aspire to, and a pathological fear of falling. Should be a good time.

 Soylent H (still people), Age 36

#a tumblring down

I have started up a new tumblr blog. I am not sure what I am going to do with it just yet. I'm mostly just going to try it out, see if I like it. I have the RSS feed from this blog feeding into it though, so if you start reading the tumblr blog you shouldn't miss much if you're reading the tumblr blog. I have a suspicion I'll reserve large posts for here, and then mostly silliness on the tumblr blog but we'll see. I have yet to see anyone using tumblr for anything other than meme pictures, so we'll see how it goes. Anyway, check it out here.

Also, I have a proto-story blog here. The initial intent is to put very tiny stories there. We'll see how often I manage to add to it.

#existentialdrift

Is a line I just read in an OK cupid profile (sent to my mailbox, I am not, for the time being, looking per se, as I am seeing someone). Anyway, it explains where I'm at remarkably concisely. I kind of love it. It's like tokyo drift except there's not vin diesel, fast cars or women with self-esteem problems. So, I guess nothing like tokyo drift except that they share the word "drift". My bad.

I'm thinking of starting up my own short story blog (I am aware that there are many of these already in existence, I am not claiming to have invented the form). What I'm wondering is if I should do it under my real name or my blog avatar (which is totally throwaway obviously. I just don't want my parents to google me and find my half-baked rants on creationism floating around.

Anyway, drifting along, existentially speaking. Wondering where I'll wash ashore. And how many clothes I'll have on when I get there.

#famouspeople!

I had no idea who Esperanza Spalding was until she upset Justin Bieber at the grammies (I was entertained and hearted to find actual talent winning out over over-produced hype . . . not to mention a certain amount of schadenfreude over the ensuing pre-teen angst . . . young people :) ). So it's completely strange and weird to me that the soft spoken, shortish woman who walked into my favorite coffee shop yesterday actually WAS Esperanza Spalding, who apparently used to live in Portland and was back in town visiting. This is a shop close to my house, off the beaten path, in the middle of a very quiet portland neighborhood, 6 blocks from my apartment building. And the barista who was working that day was in a recent episode of Portlandia! Of course, in the grand scheme of things, none of this relates to me in any way, other than that I shared their air. Still, random and odd. I find my natural human urge to kiss the ass of famous people is currently at war with my long-time position of not worshipping famous people as gods.

#almostgettingit

What's really funny about today's PA comic is that the conversation between Wolverine and Magneto is essentially the only thing critics wanted on the dick wolves thing. It shows they understand the power of apology in repairing old wounds! I don't think an apology is necessarily owed for the original comic, but I think a genuine apology (not the adolescent, "I'm sorry you're so feminine that you're easily offended and too stupid to get my joke" kind of apology that they've been giving) for their response to rape victims would have pretty much smoothed the whole thing over (no they didn't suck precious metals out of anyone's skeletal structure, but making fun of rape victims for being too sensitive is pretty shitty, especially coming from a gender that doesn't have to worry about sexual harassment or rape AND continually insists that women can't possibly experience such things with any frequency). You're so close to getting it guys. Keep trying! Remember, just because you don't experience fears of rape and sexual harassment yourself, doesn't mean it doesn't happen to women! Maybe you could try listening to women rather than explaining to them condescendingly how their life experience couldn't possibly be different from yours! It's fun and easy!

Also, free advice, try and let go of this "I am technically correct so you have no right to be upset" mentality. "My motives were pure so I don't have to apologize" is something most people grow out of. Learning to apologize when you've unintentionally hurt someone, especially someone you're trying to have any sort of meaningful relationship with!, is a valuable life skill and will make you popular and less awkward at parties. It means you understand part of being in a community is learning to not put yourself and your feelings first in every situation. It also means you're confident enough in your own character that you know one mistake doesn't define you. Restraint! Consideration! Confidence! It's how civilized apes do it. It helps everyone get along better, and it doesn't really cost you anything other than your immaturity. If you MUST be 12-years-old at least part of the time to feel like a whole person, try and keep it to "guys night" okay? And if you need PA comics to be "guys only" why not just come out with that so women gamers can find other, more welcoming gaming communities?

Okay, really ignoring PA (and sadly, by extension PVP) and removing from RSS feeds this time. For reals. Starting . . . NOW.

#forthatmatter

Why does the deficit suddenly become a matter of extreme importance under a democratic president? I see no compelling reason why the deficit is a clear and present danger now, compared to, oh, any time in the Bush presidency. For that matter, I don't see why anyone let's the Republicans forget that most of the current deficit would have been corrected by letting the Bush tax cuts expire when they were supposed to. This happened 2 months ago, it's not ancient history.

I just don't understand the odd deference to Republicans on matters of war and economics. They've been profoundly wrong and hypocritical on both matters (see Iraq and "Curveball" as well as exploding deficits under Reagan and both Bush's) and no one seems to notice. I'm all for an antagonistic press, I'd just rather they not lose their nerve entirely when a republican strides into a room and announces himself as a big daddy who must not be questioned. There are other responses to that other than meek obedience people. Outright laughter for instance.

#letmegetthisstraight

Wasn't the Tea Party supposedly a grass roots movement concerning government spending/deficit, etc? Why the hell has the first priority of the new Republican congress been restricting abortion? Did they run on that platform at all? Who got played here, the Tea Partiers or the rest of the country?

#Takingtheshame

I have re-subscribed to twitter after my epic rage quit. Taking the shame. This time I will try and use it for my little "witticisms" that I've been torturing my Facebook friends with since I quit twitter. Longer stuff I'll try and contain here with a tweet link if I must reference a long thought in the twitter verse. For the record, I'm still irritated at the 140char limit, it seems hostile to anything remotely approaching a complicated thought. And the arguments for seem to be: gimmicks are cool! Anyway, that is all. You may continue ignoring or reading my crankiness at your leisure.

#dickwolveswasastupidhilltodieon

I wrote a huge post on the penny-arcade dickwolves controversy, but have since decided I don't want to get into it. I'm just done with those guys. They had an opportunity to discuss the real issues women face regarding rape and the misogyny issues in modern gamer culture and chose instead to mock and dismiss those concerns. I've been on the fence for a while and after this I'm just done. What type of entitled assholes make a "team raping dickwolves" shirt as a way to stick it rape victims for being too sensitive? The Penny Arcade guys of course! Who doesn't understand that ostensibly "pro-rape" shirts that are really ironic in a hard to explain way aren't a good idea?

Not that it matters because I think I'm done following them, but for the love of god keep Gabe away from the front page on PR issues. Of all the people there he is by far the worst person to address controversy of any sort.

Anyway, I'm moving on with my life. They won't miss me. I don't care.

#twitterupdate

I almost, but not quite, miss posting to twitter. I'm still spying on most of you though. I may yet take the shame and resubscribe, but so far, meh. Twitter is not fascinating anymore. I'm all about Burp. Send your thoughts in 4 characters or less.

Editing to add: Have I mentioned I'm going on no sleep today? It's true. And no one has shown up at the office yet so I have to keep myself entertained. I would feel bad, but I'm not chaining any of you to my blog, eyelids clipped up so you have to read it. Well, except you Ed. You'll be released when you pass the test. It's no use complaining, no one can hear you.

#IlovePaulSimon

Every now and then I accidentally hit the Paul Simon section of my itunes collection and wonder how I forget how much I love "Diamonds on the soles of her shoes" and "You can call me Al". Perfect. So many of his songs are just perfect.

#thepromisedrant

The rant I was referring to earlier is this:

In general, the most common response to my complaints of "it's monumentally stupid that our society does X thing" is something along the lines of "oh, you worry too much. It's the human condition, it will work itself out." Which I understand the point of, who can say what our society will eventually end up like? And it is a very complicated question, and establishing metrics for "smart and constructive" society versus "shallow and self-destructive" society would be very hard to construct, in that society is a fancy word for a bunch of really different people all mushed together.

But is it impossible to establish ANY metrics, or to comment on broader trends? If our society were dumbing itself down into full-blown idiocracy, would there be any way to call it out without being shouted down as a worry wart? There are many days I feel it would be a vicious circle of people getting dumber, with all the idiots shouting down people who "think too much". The problem, of course, with calling out other people (be it individuals or as a whole) on their shit is that we all have our own shit, and run the risk of being ah hypocrite, which seems to translate for most people as "calling people out on anything is hypocritical" which is not really true. I think there is still room to call people out on stupid, dangerous or self-destructive activities, without being too much of a hypocrite. At least, as long as you're willing to take what you dish out.

And that's my story. This was a better rant a few days ago when it was fresh in my mind. Ah well.

#IguessI'mcrazy

News that the gun-toting psycho from this weekend is probably mentally ill was not surprising. If you read what he wrote, he'd lost connection with reality. As I said on my Facebook feed, it's kind of surreal to read someone bragging about his command of grammar in garbled, almost gibberish, sentences.

But it's made me a little bit self reflective. His kind of craziness resonates a tiny amount with me (really just a tiny amount, this isn't my usual understatement). I CERTAINLY don't feel violent, but I do frequently feel frustrated by the grand absurdities of our society. And fixate on them to a degree that other people seem to find unhealthy. It probably is. I kind of resent attitudes that I just don't have enough to do though. Is the only way to get through life happily thinking as little as possible? If you don't find your life filled with mind-numbing tedium that keeps you from thinking you aren't doing it right? I find that train of thought disturbing. But again, am I fixating too much?

In the spirit of experimentation I am going to try and focus on other things for a few weeks. Well, aside from one more blog post on our stupid society that I've been wanting to write for the last week or so. But after that one I swear. Or may be the next. No, no the next one for sure. ;).

Also, related to the shooting I read some anti-pot propaganda about how "the pot" must have set him off. I think it's rubbish, largely because he'd apparently been clean for a few years. But apparently research exists to show schizophrenia can be exacerbated with pot use (but also sometimes helped with the right kind of pot!). The main point being the new strains of pot with high THC (schizo enhancing) are a little more destabilizing since they have less CBD (anti-schizo) in them. Regardless, I think I'm going to start smoking less as well. I think it probably hasn't helped that my means of ingestion give me a huge dose every time. But this news times nicely with my internal feeling of "I'd like to be sober for a while." Although that includes alcohol as well. I'm more or less done getting drunk too I think.

Anyway, that's the news from crazy-town. I think my overall feeling is, if I want to obsess about all the wrong-headed ways our society operates, then I need to become a politician or somehow focus my career on advocacy of some sort. Maybe the crazy thing is obsessing about broken things that you have no intention or inclination to fix. "People should listen to my words," is not really enough reason to bloviate endlessly about the state of the world.

Although having said that, isn't the whole reason blogs exist so you can scream endlessly into the ether about things you can't change? Wait, or is that just me? Just me? Okay.

#ragequit

I rage quit twitter because someone hit a little too close to home about my bloviating. Prouder moments I have had.

Having said that, I am unswayed by "aw you have too much time on your hands" arguments trying to figure out new technology's effects on our behavior and thinking. I think trying to argue whether new trends are better or worse is kind of a fool's game, as it can be hard to prove either way. But, the environments we build for ourselves have effects on our mental and physical habits. So I don't think it's crazy to suggest that confining your thoughts to 140char is going to have an effect on the length and depth of the thoughts you try to express.

We seem to have a raven's sensibility about new technology: It is shiny, therefore I must have it. Twitter feels less to me like "oh hey, this technology is exactly what I've been looking for!" and more "Oh hey, it's the new hip trend!" which everyone excitedly embraces without regard for how it will affect us. I'm not saying it's necessarily evil, I'm just wondering why no one else gets frustrated that it's poorly designed in terms of organizing ideas and conversations and that 140char is not really long enough to express a thought other than texting your friend/lover/robot about what kind of food they want for dinner. And our species seems to have a remarkable capacity to embrace the new and exciting while ignoring possible unforeseen consequences, and dismissing people who bring it up as very silly indeed. Which is to say, for a bunch of apes who got where we are by thinking critically, we seem to dismiss critical thinking a lot.

Speaking of texting, wasn't twitter originally designed with the 140char limit because the creators expected updates to mostly be posted by sms instead of a straight internet connection? How insane is it then that in modern usage, in which twitter is updated and read almost entirely over the internet instead of by SMS, the message limit is still 140char? Is it just the novelty of trying to fit a thought into 140char? It boggles my at LEAST 141char mind that this is superior to being able to write a full sentence, or construct a full thought, complete with proper spelling, big, accurate words, and, in my case, absolutely horrid grammar and punctuation (so many commas in this sentence! I wonder how many are correct!).

I think the most disturbing aspect of twitter is how readily the political class took to it. CNN follows Sarah Palin's tweets, and then tries to infer what she really meant in her tweets, because 140char was not enough to express the fucking thought properly. Watch CNN, watch how much time they spend analyzing twitter feeds and interpreting what the tweeter could possibly have meant and just let the horror of that wash over you (or is it just me? Just me? Okay.). Out-of-context sound bites and "interpreting the will of the founders" by selective reading of the constitution was bad enough, but our solution was to move to trying to interpret the meaning of the tweets of our legislators because 140char is not enough room to express a complex political thought fully. Am I the only one that thinks complex political arguments should be argued in a format friendly to complex thoughts? For instance, one that doesn't hamstring sentence length? There's a lot to be said for simplifying the language and length of legislative bills, but 140char may have been something of an over-reaction.

Perhaps the appeal of twitter is a reaction to the complexity of the internet age. Less drama than Facebook, less time consuming than RSS feeds, simpler to keep track of a small group of friends. In fact, it may be the alternative to facebook for some.

I just don't understand our collective blind spots sometimes. I don't understand the appeal a service that limits the depth of your thoughts and then organizes them poorly.

Regardless, I think what I've decided is it's simply too constraining a format to express myself in. It certainly satisfies my inner egotist, but in all other ways I find it horribly frustrating. I don't like what it does to the way I think and express myself. And the 140char limit just chafes and rankles.

Anyway, now that I've firmly established myself as an old crank, I want to assure real life friends that I will still be following your feeds through Flipboard, since that's the only way to keep track of some of you. I just won't be posting. Since I cancelled my twitter account in a moment of pique.

#OnSleep

I have a crazy relationship with sleep, which is much on my mind because I have once again stayed up all night in a hopefully not futile attempt to reset my alien sleep schedule. Fret not, I actually woke up, somewhat to my surprise, at 6pm last night. So, you know, it's not so bad.

I just have this, I don't know, superstitious, or magic view of sleep, or the sleeping hours. I have problems with "being in the moment" which often expresses itself as avoidance of sleeping (because it brings tomorrow sooner, which is a moment I tend to want to avoid). Beyond that, it seems so unproductive. So much time to spend unconscious, doing nothing, when crap could be done.

And yet, last night's sleep time, passed very quickly and I did nothing worthwhile with it, which reminds me, unexpectedly in a higher primate that I would need it, that it's not "magic" time, it's just time and it's value is based on how it is spent.

So I am sitting in Spunky Monkey, injecting caffeine directly into my esophageal vein, hoping to make it until this evening. Vaguely worried about undue strain on my system, especially so soon after being sick. Wondering how soon I should go home (I imagine it will be fairly performance based). Wondering if I'll ever figure out what my really stupid drama is with sleep. I really feel I would be happier if I could understand and come to terms with basic biological realities of being human.

On the other hand, it's been super fucking awesome to finally understand sex. Ye Gods.

#wtfisthis

So. A few weeks back I decided the mental clarity and joy that comes from never having to see a commercial at any point in my day was worth $20 a month to subscribe to the daily show and colbert report. I didn't have it auto-renew, missed a few episodes, and since I am a completist and a cheap-skate (individual episodes are considerably more expensive than subscription episodes, and it was expensive to go back and watch the two weeks I missed on itunes) I decided to put up with a few commercials to fill in my missing two weeks. I also, in a wild fit of bad judgement, watched the Rocky Horror glee episode (as noted below). In doing so I noticed that both services now have TWO fucking commercials per commercial break.
I can only hysterically assume that it is their plan to eventually make me sit through the same amount of tedious, manipulative and banal fucking advertising on direct downloads as they do on broadcast TV. Bullshit. I think after I catch up on these two weeks I'm done with streaming online episodes that require commercials for the pleasure of viewing. That's more than I'm willing to pay for any TV show.
We're not fucking sheep, we don't need to sit there and let someone else tell us how to live and what we want to buy in the most transparently manipulative fashion. And for those of us slightly more self-aware sheep, we don't want to sit there doing goddamn psychic warfare consciously resisting manipulation every 12 minutes.
WTF.
Also, I pulled all my teeth out this morning. Because that's how they get you!