Author Dusty

This Morning

Dusty 1 Comment

This morning, I am thinking about this bullshit.

We celebrated Michael Phelps’s genetic differences. Why punish Caster Semenya for hers?

702C6BCD-EA6D-4032-A263-279D9C2117B8
Semenya is an in­cred­ibly powerful runner from South Africa, a two-time Olympic champion. She has also been the subject of controversy since the beginning of her career a decade ago. Semenya is believed to have an intersex condition, though she doesn’t publicly speak about it: Her body allegedly produces testosterone at a higher level than most women. On Wednesday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that if Semenya wanted to continue to compete, she would be required to take medications to lower it.

The CAS, which was upholding a previous ruling by the International Association of Athletics Federations, admitted that the decision was tantamount to discrimination. But, a statement read, “discrimination is a necessary, reasonable and proportionate means of achieving the IAAF’s aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics.”

“Preserving the integrity of female athletics.” What a remarkable way to phrase a ruling that has nothing whatsoever of integrity in it.

What a remarkable decision: in a world where sports fight tooth and nail to keep people from doping — that is, using artificial chemical treatments to give some athletes an advantage over others — the IAAF is going to use artificial chemical treatments to give some athletes an advantage over others. It’s just that in this case, the chemical treatments are meant to make the other athletes win, rather than the one being forced to take the drugs. The one being doped.

Make no mistake: that’s precisely what this is. The arbitrators here decided to chemically handicap Caster Semenya because she is a better athlete. Because she is more likely to win. When criminals fix horse races, they use two different strategies: one is to give the winning horse a boost, and the other is to give the losing horses a drag. Since the term “dope” comes most prominently from references to opium, it seems likely that the use of the term to represent cheating through chemical substances springs from precisely this: using dope to slow someone down so that someone else can win. [History of the word “doping” found here, which also includes the magnificent user comment, ‘I believe “dope” has also been used as slang for “good”, or “excellent”.’ Thanks, Craig J.!]

I presume the next step is to cut off Usain Bolt’s legs, and replace them with shorter legs; because a large part of the reason why Bolt has won nine gold medals and holds three world records is because he is 6’5″.

But even among top sprinters, Bolt stands out, and this is partly because of his height.

“Bolt is a genetic freak because being 6ft 5ins tall means he shouldn’t be able to accelerate at the speed he does given the length of his legs,” says former Great Britain sprinter Craig Pickering.

“At the beginning of a race you want to take short steps in order to accelerate, but because he’s so tall he can’t do that. But then when he reaches top speed he has a massive advantage over everyone else because he’s taking far fewer steps.”

[Emphasis added] [Source]

So clearly, Bolt has an unfair advantage. Seems to me that is because of his sex: men are taller than women, and so if Bolt has too much height, it’s because he’s a man. A more mannish man than other men. We should add a third category of sports: women’s sports, men’s sports, and super-manny men’s sports; Bolt belongs in the third group, along with Lebron James and Michael Phelps. The only way to maintain integrity in sport is to prevent Bolt from taking advantage of his genetic aberration and unfairly dominating his event.

This entire argument is, of course, preposterous. It’s obscene to take an athlete with a natural advantage — the same description that could be applied to every single dominant athlete in the history of sport; the first article comparing Michael Phelps to Semenya does this well — and decide that their natural advantage is somehow unfair. The whole point of sport is to reward those who have natural advantages. Of course we like it better when the people who have trained harder and worked harder are able to win; but we love cheering for the genetic aberrations who have the natural gifts that give them an advantage. And really, in the modern world of competitive sports, there is no such thing as a top level athlete who doesn’t have genetic advantages: it’s just that some of them are more visible than others. We can talk about Lebron James’s size and strength as part of his gameplay, but though Michael Jordan lacked those genetic advantages, there’s no question that he had agility and speed and coordination and reflexes that were inborn and greater than a normal person’s. Look at Muhammad Ali’s speed, which was unmatched by heavyweight boxers and allowed Ali to dominate over stronger men: wasn’t that a genetic aberration? Wasn’t that an unnatural gift? Am I supposed to believe that the only reason Ali could float like a butterfly was because he trained harder? Ridiculous.

No: the point here is that Semenya has an advantage that we as a society (and by “we” I mean the fucksticks at the IAAF, not myself and probably not you) think is wrong. She has “an intersex condition,” I keep reading, which means her body produces more testosterone than most women’s bodies and which therefore makes her a better athlete.

When someone has a hormonal “condition” that makes them abnormally tall, and therefore gives them an advantage in basketball, we don’t see that as unfair, nor as wrong. When someone has a hormonal “condition” that gives them greater body mass, and therefore an advantage at sumo or in football, we don’t see that as unfair or wrong. Again, as the article points out, Michael Phelps has a genetic aberration that means his body produces less lactic acid than the normal human body, and yet he was lauded as having a lucky gift  — not sentenced to inject lactic acid in order to give other swimmers a fighting chance against that unnatural freak Phelps.

The entire argument, the only argument, against Caster Semenya is that she is not really she, that she is more he than she, and therefore she can’t compete against shes unless she becomes more she-ish. That’s it. If she was abnormally tall and therefore had the same advantage Usain Bolt has, it wouldn’t be a question. If she had less lactic acid, and therefore the same advantage Michael Phelps has, it wouldn’t be a question. She probably does have greater reaction time and naturally greater twitch-muscle  mass, as that is what sets sprinters apart; but the IAAF isn’t talking about that. Just about her lack of sheishness. I mean, it’s not even subtle:

The combination of her rapid athletic progression and her appearance culminated in the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) asking her to take a sex verification test to ascertain whether she was female. (Wikipedia) [Emphasis added, but unnecessary. You saw it too.]

Do you think it’s also a factor that Semenya is a married lesbian?

Of course it is.

This case is much more about humanity’s discomfort with gender. We (Again, not me, and probably not you; mostly fucksticks.)  want to think that there is an easy line to draw, and that line has value. Sports is one place where we really, really like drawing that line. Because men are generally stronger and larger, and therefore have an advantage in most sports, we like to think it’s fair to separate men from women and have them only compete against each other. (You want to talk about unfair advantages, let’s throw some men into women’s gymnastics. Watch some 6-foot dude try to compete on the uneven bars. That will be funny as hell.)

But there’s nothing fair about that. Caster Semenya shows that. Transgender athletes show that, and the fact that most people have far less of a problem arguing that transgender athletes shouldn’t be allowed to compete with their identified gender simply goes to show that this argument is really about what kinds of gender identifiers we are comfortable with.

It’s clearly not about a level playing field. Serena Williams has won 23 Grand Slam titles partly because she is taller and stronger than most women tennis players. (Being taller gives her more reach and a more powerful serve because she can swing the racket in a wider arc, generating more speed and thus more force.) That’s not to say she’s not an incredible athlete; she is. I like using tennis  s an example because it requires an inordinate amount of training in addition to the physical gifts that make a player great, and Williams has obviously mastered the sport to an unprecedented degree. But the simple fact is that one reason she wins is because she hits the ball harder and faster than her opponents can, and part of the reason for that is because she has the genes to be taller and stronger than most people. But because Serena Williams is more she-ish, nobody argued that she should be given performance-debilitating drugs in order to level the playing field and give all the other women a chance.

An even better example is Shaquille O’Neal. Shaquille O’Neal is 7’1″, which is extraordinarily tall, though not unheard of in the NBA: but he was also 325 pounds when he was playing, which is entirely unheard of in the NBA. He outweighed everyone he played against. Because of that, he had an advantage, and in O’Neal’s case, it was his only advantage: I watched him play hundreds of times, and believe me, that man had not a single skill when it came to basketball. No, I shouldn’t say that; he was a good passer, which is a skill and helped him win championships. But as an offensive player, he had exactly one move: he would catch the ball (using his height to reach above any player between him and the person passing to him)  and then, with his back to the basket, he would dribble the ball and simply– step backwards. When he was close enough, he would turn around and shoot the ball, from the kind of range that allows anyone with eyes to hit the shot. He could do that because none of the men defending him could push back, because O’Neal outweighed them. If they tried to set their feet and shove him, it would be a foul; if they tried to out-muscle him, he would win, every time. Because he was bigger. And stronger, which surely came partly from lots and lots of physical training; but mainly because he was bigger. He pushed his way into the Hall of Fame with his enormous ass.

That is an unfair advantage. But because it doesn’t have anything to do with gender, nobody ever investigated O’Neal. Nobody ever ordered him to lose weight before he would be allowed to play. Nobody ever questioned whether he should be allowed to play with other men.

Either accept that Caster Semenya is a woman by any rational standard, and allow her to compete and crush all of her competitors like bugs the same way that Shaquille O’Neal was allowed to use his genetic aberration to win NBA games; or else accept that the separation of men’s and women’s sports along gender lines is stupid, and change to something that makes more sense.

This Morning

Dusty 1 Comment

 

 

This morning I am thinking about singing with my mother.

My mother and I used to sing together all the time when I was small. Whenever we’d drive anywhere, we never listened to the radio; we sang songs. Old songs, silly songs, campfire songs:  John Brown’s Baby and My Grandfather’s Clock and If I Had a Hammer.

She called me the other night, happy because a friend who could handle the interwebs found for her one of the original singers of some of her favorites, which she used to sing with her father.

Here’s the one she mentioned specifically. I don’t know if your mother does this, but my mother drops conversational references that I have never heard before, because she talks about things to someone else — my mother has MANY friends — and thinks she told me. There are also times when she tells me things, and I forget, but she remembers forever that she told me. I don’t know which category this is in, but when she said, “I found the prune song!” I was at a total loss.

Here it is: the prune song. That I don’t remember her ever talking about. Dang sure we never sang it together, though she might have sung it to me.

 

Here’s one I sang with my dad, (Surprising because my dad can’t sing), and he had a different set of lyrics; I had no idea this one had this many verses — we only sang the chorus.

 

(Here’s the version my dad taught me, by the way. I love this man intensely. I love my dad, too — but this guy RULES.)

 

Here’s the same man singing another one I loved singing with my mom; this one made her uncomfortable, I remember, I think because we’re talking about a six-year-old singing about beer and sliding over naked people.

 

This one I loved, and still sing, because it’s pirate-y as hell. Here it is by a chorus, because my mom loves choral music.

 

Here’s the song I remember most fondly: a completely ridiculous, and frequently racist, song about an Ottoman Turk in a feud with a Russian Cossack.

 

 

And here’s a version of it with an equally offensive cartoon — and it says it was banned, but I SWEAR I saw this at some point in my life.

 

I’m going to go sing some songs now. You should, too.

On top of spagheeeeettttttiiiiiii, alll covered with cheeeeeeeseee….

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I’m thinking about how much I wish I was still asleep.

I woke up at 4am again, and tossed and turned for an hour before trying first to write in my journal, and then deciding to go ahead and write this on my Web-log here (I hate that word, actually. I like the word “blog,” have been using that even though I’m sure it’s now passe, that it has been yeeted along with every other “world wide web” term by the new generation who talk more about wifi than internet; but I’ve always hated “weblog” because it looks like “we blog.” And we do, oh yes we do blog, precious; but that’s now how the word is said, it’s said “web log” because it’s a log kept on the web — but there’s no way to indicate that without adding a space or a capital letter or a hyphen, all of which ruin the visual indication that this is where the word “blog” comes from, a shortening of “web log.”) what thoughts are running around in my head and keeping me from going back to sleep.

This. This is what I think about when I wake up at 4am. Along with the thoughts, “God, I’m tired” and “I should really get more sleep” and “Today’s going to suck.” See why I said yesterday that my brain, like everyone else’s brain, is unwell and disordered and just — stupid? Because I really do need sleep, and my brain knows it, but yet somehow it can’t stop thinking “Man, I’m really tired. I should be sleeping now. I’m not though. This day’s going to be awful.”

I would like to apologize in advance to everyone today for my crankiness and slowness, for my confusion and my general inability to remember anything or to think clearly. I blame my idiot 4am brain.

No, the main thing that’s waking me up, and has been all week, is this: we need to move. We’re downsizing to save money, and our lease is up, and we need to find a new house. We want one that is cheap but decent, and that has a good yard with a solid fence for our dogs and our tortoise, who lives in the yard.

That right there is the first problem we’ve been having: most places don’t have a fenced yard, or don’t allow dogs, or don’t allow TWO dogs, or don’t allow anything but small dogs. And if you’re not a dog person, okay, fine, sure, you don’t want hair in the place and you don’t want poop in the yard and you’re scared that they’ll bark or dig. But if you’re willing to allow me to have a dog, what is the problem with me having two dogs? You think two dogs will bark more than one? Are you afraid they’ll fight? Is there some calculation in your head that says the place is too small for that much canine mass? I mean– can’t you let me handle those problems? If you don’t want dogs, fine; but if you allow dogs, what’s with the weight limit? If it’s an apartment without a yard, again, that’s fine, I understand; I wouldn’t move my dogs into a place that didn’t have a yard for them, but lots of people do that, and I think it’s wrong, too; but with tiny lap-dogs it’s much more manageable, so in that case, you can say that you don’t mind tiny yappy puppers. But if you have a yard, why couldn’t I have as many large dogs in there as I can cram in? Why does the landlord care how many dogs I have? Is there a fear that too much will create a canine supernova, which will then collapse into a doggo-black hole?

At any rate, once we find a place, we’re going to have to downsize and get rid of stuff, and we’re going to have to move.

And that’s it. That’s the thought. That’s what keeps me up at night, why I can’t sleep, why I am currently seeing double because my eyes won’t focus well, and having trouble typing because my fingers are not hitting the right keys in the right sequence. Because I’m going to have to get rid of stuff, and then move the remaining stuff from one house to another, and put it all away.

I don’t know why I’m having trouble with this. Sure, there is anxiety about the house hunting: will we find a place that we like? Will we still like it once we move into it with all of our possessions and our pets? What about our neighbors, will they drive us crazy? Will we hate living there after six or eight months? All of that is one thing; but this morning I was thinking about stuff. I was trying to picture how we could cram our current possessions into the condo we looked at yesterday — which was a dump, by the way, as per our expectations; it was in a good neighborhood and it was dirt cheap, but that was because of all the dirt.

Now: why? Why was I trying to make decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of? Why was I worrying that we wouldn’t have room in the garbage can for the junk I’ll want to throw away, junk that has accumulated in our back yard simply because we have room for it, and I haven’t bothered getting rid of it before now? Garbage? 4am, I’m exhausted, and I’m literally worrying about garbage.

Garbage.

I think I need to clear my brain out, too.

That also, I have to say, represents most of the stuff that we’ll need to downsize and get rid of: things we just haven’t bothered to remove because we had room for it. The house we’re in now is quite large, four bedrooms for the two of us and our pets; the bird has his own bedroom. So we have the chair that isn’t as comfortable as it used to be, but we kept because our Boxer mix likes curling up in it. We have a bookshelf full of CDs that only I listen to any more, and that rarely because most of them are either uninteresting to me, or are already ripped onto our iTunes. If I just consolidated my tools, and cleaned out the half-empty plastic bags of hardware that has been left over after assemblies and repairs and installations over the last few years, I’d be able to put all of my home-repair stuff into one medium box.

I just haven’t done it. Because we’ve had room to store everything, so why worry about it?

And now, it seems, it’s time to worry about it. Except there’s nothing to worry about. Not even the move itself: it’s now May, and school will end in three weeks (And THANK GOD FOR THAT), and then we’ll have nothing to do but move; while we’ll need one day with a U-Haul truck and friends to help us move the big furniture, the rest we can do in small trips with our car. We’ve done this many times before, and it’s never been hard, and it won’t be hard now. It’ll be good for us, in fact, because we really should get rid of all of our clutter; it’s not sparking any joy for us.

Now someone, please, I beg of you: explain that to my 4am brain. Because the one thing that will make this move hard is if I can’t get enough sleep.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I’m thinking about mental health.

We talk so much about mental illness. And I find myself wondering — Is there even such a thing as mental wellness? Are any of us right in the head? Just asking that question, even beyond the fact that it implies that people with mental illness are “wrong” in the head, it seems impossible. It seems impossible to me that anyone’s mind could — just… work. 

I mean, don’t we all have invasive thoughts? Self-destructive urges? Moods that overtake everything else? Don’t we all, every one of us, sometimes think just stupid, ridiculous things?

I talk to people fighting depression and anxiety, and obsessive and compulsive traits and habits and thoughts, and I always think and I sometimes say, “You shouldn’t think that way.” (I would probably use different words.) Like if someone says that a possible failure, say if they didn’t get a job they wanted, would be a signal of doom, of complete worthlesssness; I would say, “Don’t think like that, it’s not true, don’t listen to the part of your mind that says so: that’s the depression/anxiety speaking, and it’s lying to you.” And I’d mean it, and I’d be right.

And then I’ll get a rejection letter from a literary agent, and I’ll say to myself, “Welp, that’s it, my writing career is doomed now, I am competely worthless. RIP me.”

I don’t suffer from depression or anxiety, or any other form of mental illness, so far as I know; that’s a difficult statement to be sure of, because there are so many forms of mental illness or disorder (Just that word, disorder. Hell yes my mind is disordered. Does anyone actually have mental order? For real?) and they are so hard to define and diagnose; I know there are specific criteria that move such issues into a specific category such as something that requires therapy or treatment of some kind, and I’m not trying to argue against that; but if someone comes in below that threshold, it doesn’t mean they’re not suffering. If someone’s depression is not persistent  enough or severe enough to warrant medication, that doesn’t mean it’s not depression, and that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt or doesn’t handicap that person’s life in some way. I certainly do go through bouts of anxiety, and depression; I have pretty severe insomnia, and some pretty unhealthy behaviors and obsessions. My brain doesn’t “work right” quite a lot of the time.

Does anyone’s?

An even simpler example: somehow my mind decides to accept things that I know are patently untrue. Like I look in the mirror, and think, “Wow, too bad I’m balding; my hair was my only good feature, and now I’m going to be ugly  forever.” And then I will tell myself — and it’s not really like there’s part of my brain that doesn’t know this and part of my brain that does, IT’S THE SAME BRAIN — “That’s absurd, you look fine. You look good. Your wife, the only opinion that matters, tells you all the time that you are handsome, that she loves your eyes, your smile, the shape of your face — your eyebrows, for Christ’s  sake, she loves your eyebrows!” And then I’ll think, “Yup, too bad about being ugly forever without more hair.” Or weight: I can think I look fat, see someone who is TWO TO THREE TIMES MY SIZE and recognize them as far bigger and more obese than me; see someone who is thin and think they are too skinny, and then still think: I’m fat.

The thoughts don’t make sense. And if I recognize they don’t make sense, why do I still have them? How can I argue with myself, win, and yet still have lost because the problem doesn’t go away? Why doesn’t my own brain listen to logic? Or even simple commands?

My brain at 4am: So those essays. Have to grade those.

Smart brain part: Don’t think about it now, you’ll do them later. Now you should sleep, so you’ll have more energy to do the essays quickly and easily and well.

4am brain: Right, gotta grade those essays. There are twenty of them. Essays.

SBP: Stop thinking about it. Go to sleep.

4am: See, there are these essays, and they need grades. I have to do that.

 

What kind of properly functioning mechanism does that?

I’m very healthy, in general. I don’t have allergies, I don’t have any chronic disorders, I am basically fit (FAT I’M FAT) and things work the way they’re supposed to. I’m 44 and I’ve always been like that; I’m very lucky, but also, this is the way it’s supposed to be, right? Like my parents aren’t eugenic miracles, they don’t have perfect health themselves, it’s not like we’re superhuman; I just — work. Correctly. I know there are lots of people like me whose bodies  work.

So why the hell can’t my brain do that, too?

I guess my point with all of this is that there is a different standard we should be using for our minds, for our mental state. I suspect that no one’s, no one’s, is perfect, is “right,” is “healthy.” I suspect we all have good days and bad, and the proportions change as our circumstances change.

And also, that’s a stupid goddamn thing. Our brains are stupid. I wish they worked the way they’re supposed to.

I hate thinking that this is the way they’re supposed to.

But it probably is.

Dammit.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I’m thinking about Game of Thrones.

Image result for game of thrones

I haven’t watched it.

YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT, I HAVEN’T WATCHED IT. YOU GOT SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT IT? COME SAY THAT TO MY FACE,WHY DON’T YOU?

Okay, that’s probably angrier than the situation warrants. But I know there are people who reacted to this with that level of shock that approaches anger, when the raised  voice of surprise turns into a shout, a roar, of outrage. (Or at least there are people who would. I think all of my readers are calm, contemplative, rational types. But then, maybe those aren’t the descriptors for the average Game of Thrones fan.)

I have been surprised to see the response that this show has gotten, especially these last three weeks as the final season has slouched towards Bethlehem to be born, so to speak. And honestly, it has made me regret not watching the show; I mean, this is high fantasy, this is my kind of stuff: this is the thing that I should have been on board with right from the start, and I should be reveling in this rare moment when fantasy captures center stage, when the imaginations of millions are fired up, all at once, by swords and sorcery. It’s a beautiful thing. I wish I was part of it.

I’m not.

I blame George R. R. Martin.

That’s the problem, you see. Because I didn’t need to watch the first few seasons of this show: I read the books. I started reading The Song of Ice and Fire in 2003, when the third book had just come out in paperback. One of my favorite students from my first school — great guy, smart and funny as hell, the son of one of my fellow English teachers; he was repeating a class in summer school that he had had no business failing over the regular school  year, but it worked out for me, because he had no problem doing anything I asked, and also made the class fun for everyone in it, made the discussions better, told fun stories, asked good questions, everything you want from a student — he recommended the books to me, and I took him up on it. And I was hooked: those are outstanding books, with a level of action and raw blood-curdling savagery that you don’t normally see in high fantasy, which tends much more towards Tolkien and his magical floating elves and roly-poly hobbits. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but can you imagine a sex scene in Tolkien? I really, really hope your answer was no.) I burned right straight through the first three books in the series, and gushed about them with Danny, the guy who got me to read them. I excitedly told him that the fourth book was slated to come out soon. And he warned me: Martin doesn’t make deadlines. The third book had apparently been delayed two or three times before being published, so I shouldn’t expect the fourth book to come out as scheduled.

Danny was right. The fourth book was delayed, and then delayed again; it was finally released in — I think it was 2005? (Wikipedia confirms.) I remember buying it in Portland, at Powell’s City of Books, because we moved to Oregon in 2004. But I bought it, in hardback, and read it excitedly, too; and it was great — but it was incomplete.

If you don’t know, the series goes  through probably twenty different point of view characters, switching between them every chapter. Some of the story lines are wildly separated; part of the interest was in seeing how Martin was going to draw all these threads together into a single web. It was fascinating. But the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, was only half of the storylines. What gives? I thought, angrily, because several of my favorite characters hadn’t made an appearance at all (And I already got burned on this in The Wheel of Time, when a wall collapsed on Mat at the end of one book AND THEN HE WASN’T MENTIONED EVEN ONCE IN THE NEXT BOOK. If you’ve read the series, then you know my pain; if you haven’t, don’t worry about it.) and I wanted to know what was going to happen to them. But at the end of the book, there was an author’s note: Mr. Martin said, “I know, this is only half the story. But don’t worry! It was only because there was too much to put in one volume, so we split it into two books, both covering the same time span, but with different main characters. That other book is almost done; it’ll be out any day now.”

That’s what he said, in essence.

He lied.

It took SIX YEARS.

2011 was when that book, Book Five, was published.

Know when Book Six was published?

Yeah: we all want to  know that. Because it hasn’t been.

A Song of Ice and Fire was projected as a seven-book series. The book that was “almost done” took six years to finish, and the next book is going on eight years. The last book? Well: George R. R. Martin is 70 years old now. And not in the best of health.

Like I said, I got burned by The Wheel of Time. That was my favorite series: and though Robert Jordan, the brilliant author, was in no way at fault for this, he died before he could finish the series; he was diagnosed with a rare blood disease that killed him at just 59. I don’t mean to put too much weight on a set of fantasy books, but those books are a great gift, and it is a terrible loss that Mr. Jordan wasn’t given the time to finish them.

George R. R. Martin has had the time. He just hasn’t done it.

And in the meantime, he started making this TV show.

I’m bitter about it. Unreasonably so, I fully admit. I’m actually extremely glad that Game of Thrones has been so hugely successful; it’s nothing but a bright moment for fantasy, and something that can only help the genre, and would-be fantasy authors like me. I’m grateful to Mr. Martin for penning the series, and for getting it on TV, and for helping to make it so good that it has become a cultural phenomenon.

I’ll watch the show eventually. I’m curious, my wife is curious; I want to see it. I need to get over this grudge against Martin. I realize that. And the show isn’t only his, and I have nothing against the other excellent people who have done, it seems, an amazing job of storytelling.

But no matter how good it is, no matter how well the show has done, and no matter how unfair it is of me to berate an author for not writing fast enough (and worse, hypocritical, because my first novel was published in 2009, and was the first in a trilogy — but I haven’t written the second book yet), I still can’t help but be bitter about Martin taking so goddamn long, and letting himself get distracted by television when he should be first dedicated to writing the books, and finishing the story for his first fans, his readers.

Know why?

Because Danny’s never going to get to read the end of the series.

Danny died of leukemia. He never even got to read Book Five.

It’s stupid to put these things together like this; Danny’s loss would have been tragic any time, and there are a million things he never got to do, and reading these books was not the top of that list, not the saddest nor the most important. But I talked to him, near the end, on the phone, and you know what we talked about? Books. Fantasy books. So yeah, I put them together. And I blame George R. R. Martin for not writing those books fast enough for my friend to get to read them all. And I blame the show for being the final distraction that now likely means the book series will never be finished. And I don’t give a shit if none of this is reasonable.

I hope you all enjoy the show, I really do. And I’ll watch them eventually.

But right now, I’m not watching Game of Thrones.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I’m thinking about being sick.

I have a cold. Came down with it Friday, and spent my weekend not feeling very well. Fortunately it’s not severe enough to really limit me: I still walked my dogs, ran errands, looked for new rental houses, read books, and even graded a half-dozen rough drafts. But the whole time, doing all of those things, I felt pretty crappy. Friday at work was the worst: I could barely get myself to teach anything at all, some periods, and others I was more cranky than teacher-y. (I can’t even think of a better word than teacher-y. More pissy than pedagogical, how’s that?) Now it’s time to go back to work, and I still feel under the weather.

It’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? Under the weather? Aren’t we always under the weather? I assume it’s supposed to mean directly under the weather, meaning out in the storm without a roof to keep off the rain or walls to block the wind; that would be pretty miserable, all right, which seems apropos.

Regardless, though, I do not feel like working. The fact that I was sick this weekend already put me behind, both in my grading — I got a half-dozen rough drafts done, but I should have finished all of them, and maybe done the other class’s essays, too — and in my relaxing, because while I did nap several times a day, I never felt a whole lot better. At least, I don’t feel a whole lot recovered now.

This is one of the problems with teaching, too. We get more sick days than most professionals, I think — that is, other than the ones who are simply trusted to make up their own minds about when they can and cannot come in to work, and they are considered responsible adults who can get their work done even if they don’t actually show up every day, you know, like professionals — but we can’t just call in sick: we need to arrange for a substitute. This school the administration actually gets the sub, which is an improvement over my last school, where the teachers did it themselves: yet another example of something teachers are all too willing to take on themselves because we want to help, and because we want every petty shred of control, including, apparently, the ability to select who we give control to when we can’t have it ourselves. But in any case, I have to plan lessons for my classes. It’s both easy and hard for me: because I can always give them something to read  — but nobody can run my class the way that I can. Other people could surely run a discussion, but you have to really know the literature to run it the way I do, and subs would not, of course. So every day I’m out is basically wasted, because it can only be something extra, never the thing the class would be doing if I were there. My students realize this, of course, and so they are not as dedicated or as involved as they would be with me there. That’s not to say they’re all that dedicated or involved regardless; they are teenagers and it is almost May.

That’s the worst thing. It’s almost May. My school starts its year ungodly early — August 1, usually — which is a hideous ordeal in August; but it means we finish school in May, before Memorial Day. I only have three weeks left before finals. My students, as you may expect, are done already; the only thing keeping them going is my will to keep dragging them behind me. That and a certain amount of fear of bad grades. (But the smarter ones realize that as the semester nears the end, grade inertia sets in: because new assignments are just added to the pile, and so no specific assignment will change the overall grade very much. When the total points in the class is, say, 100, then a 50 point assignment means everything; but three months later, when the total points are 5000, 50 points is kinda nothing. Shhh — don’t tell the rest of them.) So the point is, the temptation for me, not feeling well, cranky, and behind on my grading anyway, to just throw up my hands and say, “That’s it, we’re done: somebody put on YouTube and get out the Uno deck,” grows daily. And my students would like nothing more.

But I can’t complain too much. Because my wife — God, my poor wife — has all of these same problems: only worse. She got sick too: with the flu. Knocked her down for three full days two weeks ago. And then, because the flu made her cough nonstop the whole time, it gave her laryngitis: she basically coughed her voice out. She went back to work last week barely able to whisper. Spent the whole week coughing and wheezing and suffering. And now it’s pollen season, and her allergies are kicking in: so she feels almost as miserable now as when she had the flu.

On top of that, when this school year ends, she’s done. She’s quitting, to go back to doing art full time (and not a minute too soon). So think of how eager she is for these three weeks to pass. And when it comes to subs, she not only can’t get a sub who can do what she does, because no sub understands drawing and painting like she does, but also her students don’t really care about her class, because they see it as some elective they have to get through to graduate and nothing more, a problem only exacerbated by our school’s focus on STEM. There are exceptions, of course, but most of her students are pretty indifferent to art. So they’re even less likely to work for a sub, or for my wife; and they are that much harder to drag behind her towards the finish line.

And by the way: where do you think we both caught these diseases? That’s right, from the little germ factories that surround us every day. It’s like being in the trenches while they’re chucking biological weapons in at us. For three more weeks. Three long, tiring, sickly weeks. I expect they’ll be three of the longest weeks in my wife’s life.

That’s what really makes me sick. That I can’t make these last three weeks go faster for her.

If any of you could do something about that, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks.

This Morning, This Week

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I get to listen to music again.

This is the end of my first experiment in week-long fasting; for the past week, I have not intentionally listened to music in the background. I did play music in class (Tool’s “Die Eier von Satan,” because that was this week– and it was wonderful, as always), and I watched videos that had music and went into stores that had music. A few times my wife turned the radio on in the car —  once yesterday specifically when I said that I was looking forward to listening to music again, because that’s what  you do for the people you love, you skirt the rules (or just straight break them) in order to make your people happy — but since she is not as attached to music in the car as I am, and she has a lower tolerance for mediocre overplayed pop on the radio than I do (Also a lower tolerance for heavy metal first thing in the morning, and though I can listen to good grungy metal any time, I do have to wonder: who seriously wants to wake up to Korn? Really? Discord and screaming is how you want to start your day?), she is more willing to have the radio off while we drive around, so it has been mostly quiet on the road this week.

I’d love to say that it was a revelation. But I suppose maybe I’m past the age of shocking bursts of self-knowledge; I know myself pretty well at this point. I’ve gone without music before, of course, most simply when my music player was broken or when the batteries died right when I got out the door and down the block. So while it was a longer time without music, and more frequent moments during the day when I had to think about playing music and tell myself not to, there weren’t  any new experiences.

I did have more thinking time while I was walking my dogs, and I think that was probably positive. I think my walks may become more meditative, more present, less about distracting myself. It’s probably better that way, anyway: I’ll pay more attention to my dogs and what they’re doing, so my big doofus of a Boxer  won’t go sniffing after a GODDAMN RATTLESNAKE like she did today. (99% chance it was dead, because it didn’t react to her. But I didn’t realize what she was sniffing at until she’d already gotten within what would have been striking range if the thing felt like striking, and it was a big fucking snake. So now I think I need to be better about keeping this glorious idiot out of the bushes.) But the other times when I usually listen to music: when I first get to work, while driving, and for the hour or so that I have my birb out of his cage in the evenings, going without music just made the time quieter and more melancholy. I think it has made my mood a little bit worse for this past week, and I don’t really see any benefits.

However: I did go for the whole week without breaking my fast. I’m pleased with that. A week was long enough to give me a pretty good sense of what the thing I was going without meant to me, what part it played in my daily routine. I didn’t learn about myself so much, but I did solidify my opinion about one of my unconscious habits; so now I think it will become — has become — more of a conscious habit, and I like that a lot.

Therefore, I’m going to keep doing this.

This week I will be giving up video games. Again, they’re not a large part of my day, but I play a round of Candy Crush pretty regularly, during breakfast, while I have the birb out; and I play Solitaire on my phone and have gone through various farming/sim type games over the years, several of which have taken up time in idle moments, and sometimes they have crept into other moments, and have tempted me away from things I should be doing so that I can accomplish a goal or win an achievement. I just played a round of Candy Crush, wasted ten minutes, won nothing, felt frustrated. So I want to see if the loss of the frustration is worth the loss of the entertainment and the rush of victory — tiny victories, but victories easily won, so generally positive for my mood but negative for my time management.

At least I can listen to music again.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning — and now, this afternoon — I am sick. Not terribly, just enough so I am uncomfortable and determined to rest so I do not get worse. I have nothing to say that isn’t cranky, unhealthy bitchery. I’m torn between wanting to feel better, and wanting to stay vaguely ill so I don’t have to do anything other than be vaguely ill. It’s a handy excuse for doing nothing productive: not even feeling content.

I suspect that a fair amount of our conflict in life comes from the fact that contentment takes effort.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about paradoxes.

(I have to ignore the absurdity of this in the hopes of finding some profundity beneath. Because absurdity is deadly serious business.)

The more I teach, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I teach.

We all know the chestnut about the beginning of wisdom being the acknowledgement that we know nothing; I think that’s true, but not the end of it, because I don’t think humility is the end of wisdom. The desire to observe and consider, rather than jump to conclusions, is wisdom, but not, I think, the only wisdom. Along with that, though, is this: the smarter one is, the more one does not know; because one measure of intelligence is potential, and the more potential one has, the more capacity — meaning the more empty space in the mind can be filled up with knowledge.

I knew I was in love when I wanted nothing from her, but I wanted everything of her. When I wanted to be everything for her.

Suffering pain makes us stronger; suffering through another’s pain makes us softer. And you must be strong to be soft.

Learning hurts. And hurting makes us learn. (Not always, in either case. But not never.)

It is life that kills us, and death that makes us live. Endlessness is the end of all.

 

Here are a few more: I want this post to be thought-provoking, but it’s not; it’s glib and silly. I didn’t spend time thinking about these and exploring the underlying contradictions, I thought of clever ways to say them. Because I couldn’t think of anything to write about, while at the same time I have a dozen things I could write about: and all those ideas I could be writing about gang up and block the exits, so no other ideas can get out. This is what actually causes writer’s block: it’s not that you run out of ideas, it’s that you have too many ideas you need to write about but don’t want to, because they’re  boring or repetitive or challenging for you, for some reason.

It’s not just writing, either. I want to get better at teaching, and I want to stop teaching entirely. I want to read all the time, yet I want to do mindless things. I want to be mad at myself for it, but I don’t want to be mad at myself. I want to be motivated, but I don’t want to work.

It’s okay, because I’m young: but I’m not. I’m middle-aged at best, and probably likely past that. So it’s not okay that I want to waste my time, MY time, doing things that I myself don’t think are important or valuable.

And it all comes back to the same place, doesn’t it? There are truths that I don’t want to face. When I teach paradox, I tell my students that most paradoxes are resolvable; they are only paradoxes taken from a specific point of view. But if you change your perspective, the paradox is not actually a contradiction. One classic example: to have peace, you must prepare for war. This is only a paradox if you think of “peace” as the total absence of even violent potential; but clearly such a state doesn’t exist. If we mean “peace” to be a lack of a certain scale of conflict, then we’ve had peace in this country for a long time. (That’s not to say we are at peace; I would generally argue  that this country is a war-mongering nation and has never been at peace. But the point is about the contradiction, which is only paradoxical with an exaggerated standard for “peace.”) The truth is that at least the potential for war, and also the fact of some violence at least on the scale of police work or violent self-defense, are necessary because of the nature of humanity, which does not allow for perfect “peace.”

It’s only a paradox because we don’t want to face the truth.

The truth is that I fear these blogs are pointless and glib, because I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what to say, nor a lot of time writing them carefully. I don’t always write them in the morning, sometimes it’s the night before, but rarely do I think about them much before sitting down to the keyboard. The kindest comparison (Dunno if it’s apt) is that they’re like jazz improvisations.

Huh. I just thought of that. Maybe that is a good way to see these. Also, they may be practice scales, attempts just to put words down, to express thoughts, so that I can stay in shape doing just that, preparing for the more serious performances — my fiction.

Actually, I like that a lot. That also allows me to be perfectly happy when nobody or very few people read these posts; practice scales aren’t meant to be heard. Maybe these don’t need to be read. But I still want to write them. I still want to publish them, in case anyone does  want to read them and could gain anything from them, and because the pressure of deadline and audience keeps me on my toes, keeps me sharp. Well. Sharp-ish.

The truth is also that I have opinions that I think people won’t like, and so I haven’t written about them. I haven’t thought clearly and methodically about them, largely for the same reason. Those are the ones that seem to be crowding my brain, while I look for excuses that are a good bar to hold them back. But they’re only excuses. If I’m going to trust my own opinions, then I should make them trustworthy: work through those opinions and come to a definite conclusion; I can do that here or on my own, and then present the conclusions in some kind of valuable way. Either method would be useful, but one of them needs to happen. I need to be willing to put forward the idea that is occupying me.

How the hell can my own mind hold so many nooks and crannies and secret rooms and traps and dead-ends and mazes and hidden monsters? What the hell are we? Are we miracles? Are we gods? Demons? Is it just me? How do other people put up with their brains being so goddamned weird?

I think that’s all for today. I’ll try in the future not to let the brambles grow up around my feet and hands.

This Morning

Dusty 2 Comments

This morning I am thinking of a strange question. It is: how right do I have to be?

My thinking of it now comes from an ill-advised dip back into a particular cesspit of an argument from my past. I didn’t win the argument, because I threw up my hands and walked away. I think I did the right thing for my sanity, but I’ve never been happy with failing to win the argument. I want to be entirely right. I am still somewhat haunted by the idea that I may not be right at all, because if I’m not right in an argument that I feel strongly about, but can’t muster the intellectual chops to actually win on the battleground, as it were — what does that mean for my other ideas that seem right, that feel right? Does it mean that nothing I think is right, at least not right enough to win an argument over it?

Does that matter?

Hence my question. How right do I have to be?

Let me give an example, and see if I can illustrate the conundrum here. I have found myself, as a high school teacher of English and therefore of persuasive essays, rhetoric, and argumentation, discussing the legalization of drugs in the U.S. time and time again over the last twenty years. It  is always a topic that comes  up, and now that I’m doing argument with three of my classes, it has come up again.

My opinion on the issue is complex, and not worth hashing out again now; I’ve written about it too many times. (Here’s one. And here’s another. Second one has a better soundtrack.) For this example, all I want to say is this: I waver on whether or not it would be a good idea to legalize all of the drugs. I see arguments for both sides. I don’t know which side has the better points, the truer final argument; I’m not sure which to choose. That’s why my opinion is complex, and why I keep coming back to it, never fully comfortable with my decisions about what policy to support, not sure how to come to a final conclusion.

The question is, should I keep doing this? Should I keep coming back and thinking about it again and again? On some level that is valuable, as it keeps making me revisit my own past opinions and decisions, and I think the changed perspective through time gives good insight. I also think it’s valuable not to get too dogmatic about things — though I confess I enjoy appearing dogmatic, and I often act as if I have not a scintilla of doubt in my mind about various opinions; but mostly that’s for show. There are few things that I’m 100% sure about — mostly it’s that my wife is the best wife in the whole world, education is entirely good  as a concept, if not as an institution, and reading is the greatest thing in the world, except maybe for the satisfaction of basic needs like food and sleep and hugs.

So it may not be bad that I can’t come to a final determination. On the other hand, if there is a 100% right answer and I can know it, then that is the thing I should be working towards and supporting and arguing for, right? Shouldn’t I do the right thing? If I can know the right thing, then I can do the right thing; and that means I should figure out how to know the right thing and go from there. Because  if I’m not doing the right thing, then I’m doing or on some level participating in the wrong thing, and I don’t want that.

How much do I have to know to know the right thing? Beyond a reasonable doubt? 110% entirely completely sure, with evidence and logic to back me up? If it’s the second one, then I have to be very careful about what arguments I take up, as settling them with absolute clarity and certainty would take a crap-ton of time and effort, and I can’t do that with every argument; so I need to be selective.

How do I know which arguments are worth taking up and finding out the definite answer to? Is there a 100% true answer as to which arguments I should be arguing? Is that what I should spend my time on  first, deciding what to know?

If it doesn’t have to be 100% certainty before I can know the right thing, then what else do I use as the basis of my decisions? They feel right? They seem right, based on my upbringing and my culture and my morality? Why would I assume those things are right, especially in the face of obvious arguments to the contrary, things about this culture that strongly imply that this culture is wrong? I am and have been wrong countless times; why would I ever trust my gut on anything of import?

But if I don’t trust my gut, who or what do I trust?

This comes up in my writing, too. I have to decide what the right story is to tell. Writers’ advice tells me to tell the story I feel I have to tell, and satisfy my own inner critic first; but what if I have several stories I feel I have to tell? Which one comes first? And what if my inner critic is an idiot? How can I know?

Do I actually need to trace out the entire epistemology and philosophical basis for all knowledge, so I can be sure of my knowledge,  so I can be sure of my decisions? How long will that take? How many aspects of life will it apply to — and how many will I lose because I’m focusing on this one endeavor, seeking purity of knowledge and purpose? And if  I go out and read all the books that underpin Western reason, how sure can I be that those authors followed the same rigorous standard for confidence in their ideas? What if they went with their guts, rather than establishing a sound logical basis for everything they say?

Does that mean they were wrong?

Does that mean I can’t actually trace perfect knowledge and understanding and thus make a 100% perfect decision?

Yeah, I don’t think I can do that last one, either. So if there can’t be a 100% perfect decision, is there at least a sound basis, a bedrock to build knowledge on? Or is it just turtles all the way down?

Image result for turtles all the way down

Image taken from here. And it’s for sale, and you can vote for it.

So that’s the question, then: how right do I have to be before I make a decision about what side to choose, who to support, how to argue? How right is right enough? How aware is aware enough? And is it even so bad to be wrong, or to change my mind?

I don’t know this answer. I’m genuinely not sure I should know — but regardless, I want to.

I suppose I can only start  by asking the question.

If anyone has an answer, I’d surely like to hear it. And if I have confused you entirely, I apologize; I feel the same way, believe me.

And I don’t know what to do about it.