I heard something on the radio this morning that's inspired me to make a notable addition to the list from yesterday. Notable enough that it gets its own post, and not just an editing addition to yesterday.
Captain Sully.
The radio blurb this morning was about how today will be his first flight (piloting, lord knows he traveled via plane since the incident for media engagements and what not) since the famous landing on the Hudson River in January.(1) Of course they carried on the tradition of liberally using the word "hero" in describing the man.
Now let's get this straight. What he did was impressive and admirable but not heroic. He was just doing his job, for chrissakes. I checked his bio and he joined the Air Force in 1969, so he's been piloting planes for at least 40 years. I'm pretty confident that any person licensed to fly commercial airplanes has the expertise to successfully land a plane on a smooth body of water, let alone one with 40 years of experience.
The act of flying is inherently dangerous.(2) People have constantly claimed that he saved the lives of the 155 people on board in January. If you accept that as truth you must also accept that every single pilot who ever captains a plane and lands it successfully then saves the lives of all passengers. This is not heroic, this is what these people do for a living. They take off, they usually kick it into autopilot for several hundred miles, then they land. Over and over. Oh, sometimes there is turbulence and they have to take it off autopilot.
Let me step back and say that clearly it's tougher to land a plane on water with no wheels than on land with wheels, but again, I'm sure all pilots are put through in-case-of-emergency training so that they know how to land on water and on non-runway land. I'm also not going out on a limb by saying that landing a plane with no engine power must be tougher than with, but then of course I'm sure they are all trained at that too.
And now a sidebar complaint about "heroes." A man doing his job is not by itself heroic, no matter what that job is. If heroism enters the equation (debatable but acceptable), then it exists only when the man decides to embark upon a career such as aviation, or firefighting, another profession that is constantly called heroic. It's a noble pursuit. It is admirable. It is not heroic.
Maybe my definition is just a bit stricter than others.
1. The radio blurb finished up mentioning that if anyone wanted to take his first flight back, you are out of luck because the flight is sold out. If there was any earnestness in that statement, then I really don't know what to think of our human society. To think someone would take a flight from NYC to Charlotte purely because it's the first one for the pilot after an eight-and-a-half-month layoff is beyond ridiculous.
2. Dangerous, meaning there is always a chance of death, not dangerous because death is likely. Sorta like walking on the yellow part of the subway platform while a train is coming into the station. But not dangerous like walking through a minefield.
Showing posts with label ANNOYANCES. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ANNOYANCES. Show all posts
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Understanding Island
I have opinions like everyone. I don't think I get any more passionate about my opinions than a normal person. But I do tend to judge others based off of my opinions, and probably do that more than a normal person. This is likely due to the fact that I can be rather arrogant about things, that I'm very sure of myself.
In my own defense, I will not lapse into true arrogance about something unless I've gone over it in my head a few times and come to the conclusion that I'm just right, damnit, more right than you at least.
But lots of times these arrogant judgments aren't fair, or they are simply hurtful. Even in some very rare instances they may actually be wrong. Gasp. Sometimes I introduce an objective opinion into a subjective field. Sometimes I judge someone/something when it's not needed or welcome. Sometimes my opinions might just innocently diverge from another's, in which case a judgment(1) is both unnecessary and unwelcome.
The reason I'm thinking about this now is that I was reading something I think yesterday and John Cusack was mentioned in terms of how everyone like him. Well, I can't stand John Cusack. I don't like really any of his movies (particularly the 80s ones that he might be most famous for), and I don't really like any of his roles. People seem to think that he would be a nice guy in real life based on his acting. Setting aside for a second that that's a pretty stupid assumption to make, I feel like he'd be insufferable based on the same thing. It seems my personal opinion just severely differs from that of the general population. I might be tempted to make a judgment about the general population because of this (and have done similar things in the past, to be sure), but really why? It's ok for me to hate John Cusack and for everyone else to love him. Lots of times, there may be a subliminal explanation for this divergence, but not always.
On a vaguely similar note, I had an argument with Sara a week or two ago about the movie I Heart Huckabees. It seems she is a big fan, and she made me watch it when it was randomly on TV. I was less than impressed. Actually, I thought it was pretentious garbage, and offered this opinion to Sara, who naturally took some offense.
I say "naturally" because, while it's perfectly ok--actually very healthy--to engage in dissenting conversation about one of the arts, it's usually(2) not ok to do so as arrogantly as I did in this case. I led off with the judgment and never really backed off to the opinion, and that's an important distinction to make in a lot of cases.
Anyway, in the spirit of all of this, I thought I'd come up with a small list of topics in which my strong opinion/belief/judgment differs strongly with most people. I do this as a way of highlighting that yes it is ok to have differing viewpoints and not have anyone be "wrong," but also as reinforcement to myself to be more forgiving and benevolent.
So here, in no particular order, are some things I (sometimes improbably) have a strong but very minority opinion about, and where there is nothing wrong with that.(C) I only make a note where necessary:
1. John Cusack
2. Coffee -- don't drink it, can't stand it.
3. Music -- I've talked about this before, and I guess I'm still not completely ready to give up the idea that my viewpoint isn't a little more enlightened than others, but I include it here in a spasm of benevolence. To recap: hearing other people talk about music is utterly noxious to me. I appreciate it only for its innateness.
4. Tabasco sauce -- I love spicy things, but think the flavor of this is repulsive.
5. Sketch comedy.
6. Doctors -- not impressed.
7. Champagne.
--I just now realized that all of these so far are things I don't like--
9. Tofu -- no, really, it's not too bad.
10. Facebook/Twitter -- no.
11. Guinness -- if this is in fact an acquired taste, then I am in complete ownership of it.
A. You can't tell because this thing automatically highlights spelling errors and therefore notified me of the problem, but right here I spelled that word wrong for the second time in the same paragraph. That's almost unforgivable.
B. I don't care, if you try to claim that Ron Howard is as good a director as someone like Kubrick, then yes I am fully permitted to humiliate you. There is a line below which vaguaries don't exist. But then, I don't usually waste time in engage people making such dumb claims, so maybe this is moot.
C. Here is a list of things where my minority opinion is correct and the popular one is just flat wrong, and yes there is something wrong with the populous:
1a. Ron Howard -- hack.
1b. Tom Hanks -- overrated, very. Also frequent collaborator with 1a, which is a black mark.
2. American Idol/Reality TV in general
3. Celebrity worship -- I would say "obviously," but the fact that I think I fall in the minority about this rather amazingly means maybe not so obvious.
In my own defense, I will not lapse into true arrogance about something unless I've gone over it in my head a few times and come to the conclusion that I'm just right, damnit, more right than you at least.
But lots of times these arrogant judgments aren't fair, or they are simply hurtful. Even in some very rare instances they may actually be wrong. Gasp. Sometimes I introduce an objective opinion into a subjective field. Sometimes I judge someone/something when it's not needed or welcome. Sometimes my opinions might just innocently diverge from another's, in which case a judgment(1) is both unnecessary and unwelcome.
The reason I'm thinking about this now is that I was reading something I think yesterday and John Cusack was mentioned in terms of how everyone like him. Well, I can't stand John Cusack. I don't like really any of his movies (particularly the 80s ones that he might be most famous for), and I don't really like any of his roles. People seem to think that he would be a nice guy in real life based on his acting. Setting aside for a second that that's a pretty stupid assumption to make, I feel like he'd be insufferable based on the same thing. It seems my personal opinion just severely differs from that of the general population. I might be tempted to make a judgment about the general population because of this (and have done similar things in the past, to be sure), but really why? It's ok for me to hate John Cusack and for everyone else to love him. Lots of times, there may be a subliminal explanation for this divergence, but not always.
On a vaguely similar note, I had an argument with Sara a week or two ago about the movie I Heart Huckabees. It seems she is a big fan, and she made me watch it when it was randomly on TV. I was less than impressed. Actually, I thought it was pretentious garbage, and offered this opinion to Sara, who naturally took some offense.
I say "naturally" because, while it's perfectly ok--actually very healthy--to engage in dissenting conversation about one of the arts, it's usually(2) not ok to do so as arrogantly as I did in this case. I led off with the judgment and never really backed off to the opinion, and that's an important distinction to make in a lot of cases.
Anyway, in the spirit of all of this, I thought I'd come up with a small list of topics in which my strong opinion/belief/judgment differs strongly with most people. I do this as a way of highlighting that yes it is ok to have differing viewpoints and not have anyone be "wrong," but also as reinforcement to myself to be more forgiving and benevolent.
So here, in no particular order, are some things I (sometimes improbably) have a strong but very minority opinion about, and where there is nothing wrong with that.(C) I only make a note where necessary:
1. John Cusack
2. Coffee -- don't drink it, can't stand it.
3. Music -- I've talked about this before, and I guess I'm still not completely ready to give up the idea that my viewpoint isn't a little more enlightened than others, but I include it here in a spasm of benevolence. To recap: hearing other people talk about music is utterly noxious to me. I appreciate it only for its innateness.
4. Tabasco sauce -- I love spicy things, but think the flavor of this is repulsive.
5. Sketch comedy.
6. Doctors -- not impressed.
7. Champagne.
--I just now realized that all of these so far are things I don't like--
9. Tofu -- no, really, it's not too bad.
10. Facebook/Twitter -- no.
11. Guinness -- if this is in fact an acquired taste, then I am in complete ownership of it.
A. You can't tell because this thing automatically highlights spelling errors and therefore notified me of the problem, but right here I spelled that word wrong for the second time in the same paragraph. That's almost unforgivable.
B. I don't care, if you try to claim that Ron Howard is as good a director as someone like Kubrick, then yes I am fully permitted to humiliate you. There is a line below which vaguaries don't exist. But then, I don't usually waste time in engage people making such dumb claims, so maybe this is moot.
C. Here is a list of things where my minority opinion is correct and the popular one is just flat wrong, and yes there is something wrong with the populous:
1a. Ron Howard -- hack.
1b. Tom Hanks -- overrated, very. Also frequent collaborator with 1a, which is a black mark.
2. American Idol/Reality TV in general
3. Celebrity worship -- I would say "obviously," but the fact that I think I fall in the minority about this rather amazingly means maybe not so obvious.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Slappic Discord
Some questions:
1. We have a couple of trash bins at work that are used specifically for people to place documents that are to be shredded. It's my responsibility to empty these bins on a consistent basis. Something that drives me about as nuts as I can be driven is when someone tears up their paper into four or more pieces before dropping it into the bin. Are you freaking kidding me? It's going to be shredded, why in god's name would you ever think you need to tear it into pieces beforehand? It's stupid, it's inconsiderate, and above all, it's embarrassingly inefficient.
2. I was watching Seinfeld last night for the first time in a while and found myself laughing harder than normal. But something I never paid much attention to: why in the hell are they always driving places in that show?
3. Does anyone else agree with me that it's time we come up with some new words to describe familiar things? Ironic is a word that used to clearly communicate something specific, but it's been so heavily used in our culture that it's taken on a life of its own and doesn't often effectively communicate the idea that it's supposed to anymore. Maybe you could say something is slappy instead, so that slappy represents the actual dictionary definition of irony, whereas irony will then only represent the popular usage. Irony isn't the only or even the best example of this, of course. Pathetic or pitiful are two similar words. When people now hear that something is pitiful, they probably think of something bad or weak or shameful, while either missing entirely or only getting secondarily the simple true meaning of pitiful: something that inspires pity. It's a word that is more about empathy than judgment or condescension, but due to it's commonness, it has lost its specific meaning. When using pitiful, I find myself having to state that I mean it in the dictionary way, and to me that signifies that pitiful has stopped being an efficient and effective word.
Imagine that blue, in our culture, was a word that described not just what we now know as blue but more broadly the whole range of colors including purple, violet, and green, and that the words purple, violet, and green have become too obscure to have much meaning. In this scenario, we've lost effective descriptive words for purple, violet, and green, which is a lamentable thing, but we've also lost the word for blue, since blue has been bastardized into encompassing all of purple, violet, green, and blue. In this scenario, not only would we be wise to recover those words purple, violet, and green, but we'd also probably need to give up and scrap blue and come up with a new word for blue.
Basically, the more popular a word becomes, the less communicative it becomes. Kinda slappy, actually.
1. We have a couple of trash bins at work that are used specifically for people to place documents that are to be shredded. It's my responsibility to empty these bins on a consistent basis. Something that drives me about as nuts as I can be driven is when someone tears up their paper into four or more pieces before dropping it into the bin. Are you freaking kidding me? It's going to be shredded, why in god's name would you ever think you need to tear it into pieces beforehand? It's stupid, it's inconsiderate, and above all, it's embarrassingly inefficient.
2. I was watching Seinfeld last night for the first time in a while and found myself laughing harder than normal. But something I never paid much attention to: why in the hell are they always driving places in that show?
3. Does anyone else agree with me that it's time we come up with some new words to describe familiar things? Ironic is a word that used to clearly communicate something specific, but it's been so heavily used in our culture that it's taken on a life of its own and doesn't often effectively communicate the idea that it's supposed to anymore. Maybe you could say something is slappy instead, so that slappy represents the actual dictionary definition of irony, whereas irony will then only represent the popular usage. Irony isn't the only or even the best example of this, of course. Pathetic or pitiful are two similar words. When people now hear that something is pitiful, they probably think of something bad or weak or shameful, while either missing entirely or only getting secondarily the simple true meaning of pitiful: something that inspires pity. It's a word that is more about empathy than judgment or condescension, but due to it's commonness, it has lost its specific meaning. When using pitiful, I find myself having to state that I mean it in the dictionary way, and to me that signifies that pitiful has stopped being an efficient and effective word.
Imagine that blue, in our culture, was a word that described not just what we now know as blue but more broadly the whole range of colors including purple, violet, and green, and that the words purple, violet, and green have become too obscure to have much meaning. In this scenario, we've lost effective descriptive words for purple, violet, and green, which is a lamentable thing, but we've also lost the word for blue, since blue has been bastardized into encompassing all of purple, violet, green, and blue. In this scenario, not only would we be wise to recover those words purple, violet, and green, but we'd also probably need to give up and scrap blue and come up with a new word for blue.
Basically, the more popular a word becomes, the less communicative it becomes. Kinda slappy, actually.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
A Conversation, Part II
So I was drifting along the fringe of this little conversation, mostly just waiting for it to be over and trying not to make it seem so, kinda enjoying the fact that I didn't have to join in much, when the other woman finally focused on me, and I'm pretty sure she only did so in a trying-to-be-nice way so I wouldn't feel excluded or so she could show how nice she is by showing interest in me, someone she'd probably never see again. Her question was so predictable that you might be amazed that at this point in my life I haven't ever bothered to create a stock answer for it.
"So what do you do?"
This is not even a difficult question to answer. And yet. I hate this question. It's not just the chit-chat banality of it, either, though I do hate mindless chatting.
When engaging in conversation with someone you don't know, 99.9% of the time the other person will be looking for a quick and easy way to stereotype, judge, and compartmentalize you(1), in that order; or, if you're lucky, they're not doing that very actively and are instead just trying to ask the flattest questions possible so as to fill the time until someone else shows up without having to mentally engage at all. "What do you do?" is the quintessential example of the latter, but its insidiousness lies in that after your brief chat is over, the other person will quite often actually remember how you respond to it and from then on that is how they will know you. To them, you will not be you, but instead a first name and an occupation(2).
Ah but this is my blog and this is going to be more personal than that. So let me admit that the other big reason I loathe "What do you do?" is because--at least compared with most people--I don't have a very good answer to it. I've been seriously employed for 6 years now so naturally I have a perfectly suitable answer, but I don't have a "good" one, an answer that engages the interest or, presumably, respect of the questioner.
My official title is Assistant Facilities Manager, but mostly I answer the question with Office Manager, because that word Facilities tends to confuse a lot of people. But everyone knows what both an Office and a Manager are. Telling a near-stranger that you are an "Office Manager" doesn't really elicit much interest; I know this because I don't often get a follow-up question outside of "Where at?" or "What company?"
Some of the reasons people don't find much interesting about my job title: I usually don't like talking to strangers all that much, I don't with any comfort brag about myself(3), I am pretty much biologically wired to hate all things pompous, and am therefore unable to engage in the same phony bullshit that people do to try to impress other people, and finally, I myself simply am not all that interested in talking about jobs, so my general inability to disguise my feelings about a subject can pretty easily influence another person's reception of it.
I am not what I do. A lot of people are, but not me. I don't take my work home with me, and I would change careers almost instantly if that were to ever change. I'm not usually very productive with my spare time, but I rather zealously will defend my right to it.
For me, a job is a way to make enough money to make myself, and now my future wife and presumptive family, happy. I've never really had much of a desire for a specific job. Maybe that's laziness and maybe it's a lack of ambition that's followed me most of my life, but I don't really care. It's hard to make other people interested in what you do if you don't devote terribly much of your own interest to it.
None of this is to say that what I do is boring or unfulfilling or in some way shameful. Well, I work in an office, so sometimes it actually is boring, but not usually. I will say that at one point I did wonder how essential my position was. Basically how replaceable was I? But that passed because I realized that yes indeed some of my personal skills provide sometimes great value to the company. It can be hard to effectively explain with any brevity what I truly do. Mostly this is because I do a lot of different things. Truly, I am not an Office Manager. I do many different things in many different degrees of intensity for almost random durations, and so I often don't know what I'll be doing in the next week.
Sometimes I am an Accountant. Sometimes I work in Real Estate. Sometimes I stock shelves. Sometimes I am a Financial Analyst. Sometimes I am a plain old Manager. Sometimes I work in HR. Sometimes I am a Project Coordinator. Sometimes I am a Painter. Sometimes I pass myself off as a Lawyer. Sometimes I clean up messes. Sometimes I am a Creative Consultant. Sometimes I am a Carpenter. Sometimes I work in Demo. Always I am looking for ways to be more efficient. Almost always I am a professional. I could probably get a lot more milage out of some of the specific aspects of my job when trying to impress people talking about what I do, but I don't try to impress people. I have heard friends or acquaintances answering the "What do you do?" question in the way that you are supposed to: embellished and aggrandized. I cringe when this happens. You see, it's the delivery and acceptance of this practice that makes people seem almost let down when I answer simply and reservedly. "What do you do?" isn't even really a question, it's an invitation to show yourself off. It's like a job interview question. And most people will bullshit with the best of them when given the opportunity.
Fuck those people. If you ask me what time it is I will say "4:15" or whatever, I won't talk about how great or expensive my watch is. If you ask me what I studied in college I will say "English," I won't give a dissertation on why I so dislike Charles Dickens. If you ask me if I have a girlfriend I will say "yes," I won't talk about how I often honestly feel like I have a better relationship than anyone else in the world. If you want to honestly know about my relationship experiences, then you're going to have to honestly ask. If you want the description of my job to sound like a CEO or a famous artist or goddamned race car driver(4), then you're going to be disappointed. Contrary to the way most people talk about themselves to strangers, those interesting or prestigious jobs are filled by a tiny tiny minority of the population.
What I do is I enjoy myself. Who I am is a much deeper and more complex topic than could or should ever be discussed with a stranger.
1. Those other 0.1% of people are the ones who become my friends.
2. This is only vaguely related, but I went through a phase a while back where I used to not want people to tell me their names when I met them. This was for two reasons: first, I would often just forget the name anyway; and second, since a person's name isn't of their choice it really doesn't say anything about him. I much preferred to see first if I enjoyed the other person any, and if so, only then would it really be necessary to know the name. After all, if I turned out not to like the person, I would not be communicating with him again and would have just wasted a tiny space of my brain by putting his name there. Efficiency.
3. I should say "truthfully" brag about myself. I used to, and sometimes still do, love to display a faux arrogance. I do it for laughs or to diffuse situations, but since I'm such a naturally gifted actor I can give people the wrong impression that I actually am that arrogant.
4. This is almost straight out of the movie Swingers, but I don't care. What kind of pretentious asshole society are we in where we are just as well making up some ridiculous fanciful lie about ourselves as telling the simple truth? It doesn't seem to matter that a person is happy with his life if he doesn't get appropriate approval from a stranger. Being proud of yourself is a 100% internal personal emotion.
"So what do you do?"
This is not even a difficult question to answer. And yet. I hate this question. It's not just the chit-chat banality of it, either, though I do hate mindless chatting.
When engaging in conversation with someone you don't know, 99.9% of the time the other person will be looking for a quick and easy way to stereotype, judge, and compartmentalize you(1), in that order; or, if you're lucky, they're not doing that very actively and are instead just trying to ask the flattest questions possible so as to fill the time until someone else shows up without having to mentally engage at all. "What do you do?" is the quintessential example of the latter, but its insidiousness lies in that after your brief chat is over, the other person will quite often actually remember how you respond to it and from then on that is how they will know you. To them, you will not be you, but instead a first name and an occupation(2).
Ah but this is my blog and this is going to be more personal than that. So let me admit that the other big reason I loathe "What do you do?" is because--at least compared with most people--I don't have a very good answer to it. I've been seriously employed for 6 years now so naturally I have a perfectly suitable answer, but I don't have a "good" one, an answer that engages the interest or, presumably, respect of the questioner.
My official title is Assistant Facilities Manager, but mostly I answer the question with Office Manager, because that word Facilities tends to confuse a lot of people. But everyone knows what both an Office and a Manager are. Telling a near-stranger that you are an "Office Manager" doesn't really elicit much interest; I know this because I don't often get a follow-up question outside of "Where at?" or "What company?"
Some of the reasons people don't find much interesting about my job title: I usually don't like talking to strangers all that much, I don't with any comfort brag about myself(3), I am pretty much biologically wired to hate all things pompous, and am therefore unable to engage in the same phony bullshit that people do to try to impress other people, and finally, I myself simply am not all that interested in talking about jobs, so my general inability to disguise my feelings about a subject can pretty easily influence another person's reception of it.
I am not what I do. A lot of people are, but not me. I don't take my work home with me, and I would change careers almost instantly if that were to ever change. I'm not usually very productive with my spare time, but I rather zealously will defend my right to it.
For me, a job is a way to make enough money to make myself, and now my future wife and presumptive family, happy. I've never really had much of a desire for a specific job. Maybe that's laziness and maybe it's a lack of ambition that's followed me most of my life, but I don't really care. It's hard to make other people interested in what you do if you don't devote terribly much of your own interest to it.
None of this is to say that what I do is boring or unfulfilling or in some way shameful. Well, I work in an office, so sometimes it actually is boring, but not usually. I will say that at one point I did wonder how essential my position was. Basically how replaceable was I? But that passed because I realized that yes indeed some of my personal skills provide sometimes great value to the company. It can be hard to effectively explain with any brevity what I truly do. Mostly this is because I do a lot of different things. Truly, I am not an Office Manager. I do many different things in many different degrees of intensity for almost random durations, and so I often don't know what I'll be doing in the next week.
Sometimes I am an Accountant. Sometimes I work in Real Estate. Sometimes I stock shelves. Sometimes I am a Financial Analyst. Sometimes I am a plain old Manager. Sometimes I work in HR. Sometimes I am a Project Coordinator. Sometimes I am a Painter. Sometimes I pass myself off as a Lawyer. Sometimes I clean up messes. Sometimes I am a Creative Consultant. Sometimes I am a Carpenter. Sometimes I work in Demo. Always I am looking for ways to be more efficient. Almost always I am a professional. I could probably get a lot more milage out of some of the specific aspects of my job when trying to impress people talking about what I do, but I don't try to impress people. I have heard friends or acquaintances answering the "What do you do?" question in the way that you are supposed to: embellished and aggrandized. I cringe when this happens. You see, it's the delivery and acceptance of this practice that makes people seem almost let down when I answer simply and reservedly. "What do you do?" isn't even really a question, it's an invitation to show yourself off. It's like a job interview question. And most people will bullshit with the best of them when given the opportunity.
Fuck those people. If you ask me what time it is I will say "4:15" or whatever, I won't talk about how great or expensive my watch is. If you ask me what I studied in college I will say "English," I won't give a dissertation on why I so dislike Charles Dickens. If you ask me if I have a girlfriend I will say "yes," I won't talk about how I often honestly feel like I have a better relationship than anyone else in the world. If you want to honestly know about my relationship experiences, then you're going to have to honestly ask. If you want the description of my job to sound like a CEO or a famous artist or goddamned race car driver(4), then you're going to be disappointed. Contrary to the way most people talk about themselves to strangers, those interesting or prestigious jobs are filled by a tiny tiny minority of the population.
What I do is I enjoy myself. Who I am is a much deeper and more complex topic than could or should ever be discussed with a stranger.
1. Those other 0.1% of people are the ones who become my friends.
2. This is only vaguely related, but I went through a phase a while back where I used to not want people to tell me their names when I met them. This was for two reasons: first, I would often just forget the name anyway; and second, since a person's name isn't of their choice it really doesn't say anything about him. I much preferred to see first if I enjoyed the other person any, and if so, only then would it really be necessary to know the name. After all, if I turned out not to like the person, I would not be communicating with him again and would have just wasted a tiny space of my brain by putting his name there. Efficiency.
3. I should say "truthfully" brag about myself. I used to, and sometimes still do, love to display a faux arrogance. I do it for laughs or to diffuse situations, but since I'm such a naturally gifted actor I can give people the wrong impression that I actually am that arrogant.
4. This is almost straight out of the movie Swingers, but I don't care. What kind of pretentious asshole society are we in where we are just as well making up some ridiculous fanciful lie about ourselves as telling the simple truth? It doesn't seem to matter that a person is happy with his life if he doesn't get appropriate approval from a stranger. Being proud of yourself is a 100% internal personal emotion.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Hey Yankees--Go Fuck Yourselves
Post title directed more at the team's ownership and management. The players I'm basically ambivalent about.
Most people know that I am a pretty big baseball fan. Since I've lived in NY, I have zealously attended many games (highlights: 2006 Mets playoffs, 3 Sox-Yankees matchups in 2003-04, including one Pedro start, and a Yankee/Shea stadium same-day double last September) and would reasonably be expected to continue to do so as both the Mets and Yankees open new stadiums this year. For the Mets, this remains true, for the Yankees, not so much.
In fact, I am stating now for the record that I will never attend a game at New Yankee Stadium, unless I'm getting the ticket for free (and I don't mean a friend buying the ticket, I mean free from some corporate kickback). Even then, I will have to think long and hard before ending my boycott.
You see, what the Yankees have done in the last year with ticket prices and ridiculous arrogance is just absurd. Go to their website and check ticket prices. For the first sections (I said "section," not "row") in the outfield that used to be bleachers and cost $12-15, they are now charging $95-150. For the lowest field level, even several sections away from the dugout, they are charging a minimum of $525 per seat. For the best sections behind the plate and dugouts, they are charging $2,625 per seat. Again, that's $2,625.
For comparison's sake, the Cubs (another large-market, popular, recently-successful team) charge $325 for an equivalent seat. The $525 seats at Yankee Stadium are $90 at Wrigley. The $95-150 outfield seats at Yankee Stadium are $50.
For a breath of reality, the Pirates charge $27-35 for their equivalent of the $525+ Yankee tickets (the "Legends Suites").
On top of this, the Yankees have been getting a lot of bad press lately for their brashly condescending attitude toward fans, and especially their refusal to let other people even so much as enter the Legends Suites during batting practice. These overpriced seats have been largely empty most of the year, fyi.
Probably the most egregious example of what's cause me to tell the Yankees to go fuck themselves is their refusal to seat people in these precious Legends Suites during the recent NYU graduation held at the stadium (pic at left). They're not even playing a game and they still won't let even the people taking part in the ceremony that they're hosting to use these overpriced seats? Really? No thanks. I'm sure your new stadium is nice enough, but I'm equally sure I have no interest in finding out.
Most people know that I am a pretty big baseball fan. Since I've lived in NY, I have zealously attended many games (highlights: 2006 Mets playoffs, 3 Sox-Yankees matchups in 2003-04, including one Pedro start, and a Yankee/Shea stadium same-day double last September) and would reasonably be expected to continue to do so as both the Mets and Yankees open new stadiums this year. For the Mets, this remains true, for the Yankees, not so much.
In fact, I am stating now for the record that I will never attend a game at New Yankee Stadium, unless I'm getting the ticket for free (and I don't mean a friend buying the ticket, I mean free from some corporate kickback). Even then, I will have to think long and hard before ending my boycott.
You see, what the Yankees have done in the last year with ticket prices and ridiculous arrogance is just absurd. Go to their website and check ticket prices. For the first sections (I said "section," not "row") in the outfield that used to be bleachers and cost $12-15, they are now charging $95-150. For the lowest field level, even several sections away from the dugout, they are charging a minimum of $525 per seat. For the best sections behind the plate and dugouts, they are charging $2,625 per seat. Again, that's $2,625.
For comparison's sake, the Cubs (another large-market, popular, recently-successful team) charge $325 for an equivalent seat. The $525 seats at Yankee Stadium are $90 at Wrigley. The $95-150 outfield seats at Yankee Stadium are $50.
For a breath of reality, the Pirates charge $27-35 for their equivalent of the $525+ Yankee tickets (the "Legends Suites").
On top of this, the Yankees have been getting a lot of bad press lately for their brashly condescending attitude toward fans, and especially their refusal to let other people even so much as enter the Legends Suites during batting practice. These overpriced seats have been largely empty most of the year, fyi.
Probably the most egregious example of what's cause me to tell the Yankees to go fuck themselves is their refusal to seat people in these precious Legends Suites during the recent NYU graduation held at the stadium (pic at left). They're not even playing a game and they still won't let even the people taking part in the ceremony that they're hosting to use these overpriced seats? Really? No thanks. I'm sure your new stadium is nice enough, but I'm equally sure I have no interest in finding out.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
No B.S.
In a haze this morning, and wondering what the weather was up to, naturally I turned on NY1. The All-Canadian Hero, Pat Kiernan, was just finishing up In the Papers and he segue-ed (no idea how to write that and too lazy to check) like the pro that he is to a bit about local schools re-opening after the swine flu scare. He concluded the segment by very calmly remarking that global cases have plateaued, no new cases have been reported in NYC, and that of the confirmed local cases, all were mild, in fact only resembling a simple seasonal flu.
And that was it. Shove it up your ass, national media. Go find somebody else to try to hook with your irresponsible fearmongering with your proclamations of terror and plague. I'll have none of that because I have the calming voice of reason that is Pat Kiernan. I'm not the first nor the thousandth person to extoll his journalistic virtues, but some things ought to be repeated.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Keep It Down
I really don't like loud things. I'm extremely uncomfortable in a loud restaurant. I hate it when the TV is above a certain volume. One of the big reasons I can't stand going to music shows is that it's just a wall of noise.
I get annoyed even by people with loud voices. Everyone hates that loud person walking down the street on the cell phone, though that's probably more a look-at-me thing than just ignorant noise. It also drives me nuts when I listen to someone else talk on the phone and that person raises their voice about five steps too high just because the person on the other end is talking loudly.
I was at dinner last night and there were at least two people at a big table behind me talking extremely loudly. There was one woman's voice in particular that I was later completely amazed belonged to a 30ish woman. The tone, volume, and subject matter of her words more befit a 16year old, though I could just be projecting that opinion based solely on the loudness. What kind of adult talks like that? Do you really need to call attention to yourself that much? Sometimes I feel bad criticizing people for having low self-confidence (because I have effortlessly always had plenty, and I can appreciate how that might be a semi-genetic trait, I try to understand), but for godsakes it drives me nuts. Often.
I experienced a different form of obnoxious loudness on Friday night: the drunken loud. I was about four hours late arriving at a friend's party and evidently I missed quite a bit in those four hours, because I was hit with semi-inappropriate speaking volume from all angles. It's a little abrasive. I won't mention who, but some parties were more guilty of this than others. Generally, when I find myself in a situation where I am less drunk than most everyone else, I will try not to judge and will be liberal in giving the benefit of the doubt, but there are instances when the drunken loud is just shameful. I'm sure everyone has walked mostly sober down the street and come across a group of people who are mostly drunk. The drunk group will not only be loud, they will also be stupid. It's hard to reconcile with the fact that even the most seasoned and responsible drinkers will act far less intelligent when drunk. That might seem like an obvious statement, but look yourself in the mirror and admit that, when drunk, yes indeed, you are at best a fucking moron and at worst a fucking douche. It's hard to accept that you are not special. Long story, but recently I happened to view an old party video I used to tape from college parties we hosted. This was 8-10 years, and many degrees of maturity, ago; but still it was a little surprising to recognize what a dumb douche I was. (I'm naively now going to attribute this solely to the drunkenness, because clearly my 21-year-old-Ohio-State-attending self couldn't possibly have exuded anything close to douchitude when sober. Clearly.)
I get annoyed even by people with loud voices. Everyone hates that loud person walking down the street on the cell phone, though that's probably more a look-at-me thing than just ignorant noise. It also drives me nuts when I listen to someone else talk on the phone and that person raises their voice about five steps too high just because the person on the other end is talking loudly.
I was at dinner last night and there were at least two people at a big table behind me talking extremely loudly. There was one woman's voice in particular that I was later completely amazed belonged to a 30ish woman. The tone, volume, and subject matter of her words more befit a 16year old, though I could just be projecting that opinion based solely on the loudness. What kind of adult talks like that? Do you really need to call attention to yourself that much? Sometimes I feel bad criticizing people for having low self-confidence (because I have effortlessly always had plenty, and I can appreciate how that might be a semi-genetic trait, I try to understand), but for godsakes it drives me nuts. Often.
I experienced a different form of obnoxious loudness on Friday night: the drunken loud. I was about four hours late arriving at a friend's party and evidently I missed quite a bit in those four hours, because I was hit with semi-inappropriate speaking volume from all angles. It's a little abrasive. I won't mention who, but some parties were more guilty of this than others. Generally, when I find myself in a situation where I am less drunk than most everyone else, I will try not to judge and will be liberal in giving the benefit of the doubt, but there are instances when the drunken loud is just shameful. I'm sure everyone has walked mostly sober down the street and come across a group of people who are mostly drunk. The drunk group will not only be loud, they will also be stupid. It's hard to reconcile with the fact that even the most seasoned and responsible drinkers will act far less intelligent when drunk. That might seem like an obvious statement, but look yourself in the mirror and admit that, when drunk, yes indeed, you are at best a fucking moron and at worst a fucking douche. It's hard to accept that you are not special. Long story, but recently I happened to view an old party video I used to tape from college parties we hosted. This was 8-10 years, and many degrees of maturity, ago; but still it was a little surprising to recognize what a dumb douche I was. (I'm naively now going to attribute this solely to the drunkenness, because clearly my 21-year-old-Ohio-State-attending self couldn't possibly have exuded anything close to douchitude when sober. Clearly.)
Friday, May 1, 2009
The Good and the Bad of HGTV
Sara watches pretty much just two channels: TLC and HGTV. Sometimes she wanders over to Discovery Health, but that's about it. And since I spend lots of time watching MLBTV on weeknights, I try to give her some space. Basically, I can't stand anything that I've ever seen on TLC (The Learning Channel, btw. Good luck "learning" anything while watching numbing reality crap about little people or prodigiously fertile familes), and most of the junk on HGTV is hardly better.
BUT--I've got to say that the block of homebuying/renting shows that air most weeknights from 8-11pm or so have got me a little bit hooked. Most of it is the timeliness of my own relatively recent decision to purchase a condo next summer upon our expected move to Chicago. Watching people look at houses (they even have one called "Property Virgins," which is what it sounds like and naturally a good fit for me), and seeing the way they approach the lending process, is quite informative. One big complaint I have is that, in an attempt to keep engaged a larger audience, they don't do a very good job of reminding viewers where their Virgins or Hunters are lookng. It's great for me to see that the house they are touring costs $195,000, but it makes a giant difference if that house is in Arkansas or Connecticut. You more or less have to take their $$ with a grain of salt.
Outside of the actual informative value of these shows, it's fun, and sometimes maddening, to watch the prospective buyers. For one thing, I love to see the idiots hone in on totally inconsequential things like the paint color or the carpet, or to be excited about the furniture. You're making a $200k+ investment so please don't focus on $500 worth of paint or multi-thousand dollars worth of furniture that doesn't actually come with the house. Unbelievable. There was one couple that was looking in the $500K range in suburban Atlanta that was completely and totally consumed with a "formal dining room." It was the first thing they asked for and the first thing they commented on in each house. If a single--and let's face it, stupid--issue is that important to you, you're probably not qualified to be signing away half a million dollars that you don't have. Which leads me to my next troubling observation: no one understands how mortgages work as they relate to down payments. No one. Even the most seemingly intelligent, prepared, and thoughtful people on these shows will never put more than about 12% down on their purchases. I've seen numerous people buy places for over $200k with zero down payment. It's particularly troubling/amusing to know that most of those shows were filmed in early 2008 or before, and that all these idiots and the banks that loaned to them were partially responsible for the collapse of the US economy. Thanks, folks.
So anyway (poor segue), what I started off intending to talk about was design shows that HGTV sometimes sneaks into their evening homebuyers lineup. Last night I was treated to one of these. Correction: I was subjected to one of these.
Right up front I should say to all of those people out there who actually subsist as "designers:" congratulations. I'm going to say wholly disrespectful things about your profession, but at the same time I can totally respect a good con artist. So, bravo.
I've long been mystified by the whole field of design. No, not the whole field of design but more the idea of re-design that manages to sell many magazines and fill many TV hours. (People who actually initially make something functional from abstract ideas, or who figure out how best to put something together I admire greatly. Whoever was responsible for making a fan's blades in just the right shape and tilt scores big points from me. Same for the person who came up with the famous London subway map.) What drives me nuts are the personal or home "designers." They are full of shit, basically.
Last night, some relatively attractive woman (that's her to the left) who is no doubt full of herself and her "talent" was charged with redecorating another woman's bedroom. Basically what she did was spend some money to buy new things and also add a few pretentious flourishes, most onerous was the creation of a "sitting area" where previously the owner had a dresser and a TV. The "designer" was extremely proud of herself with this change, but she never really mentioned what she did with the dresser or the TV. I guess the owner will just have to find some other place to keep her clothes, but hey, at least she has a nice place to formally sit down and read the paper--in her bedroom. Also, I guess she won't be watching HGTV's design shows from the comfort of her bed anymore.
The "designer" also described the room before as a style-less "mishmash" of "hand-me-down" items. After she had finished working her magic, she described the room as an "eclectic" combination of pieces that she had "re-used" (this last bit was to brag about how she saved money).
Let's take the SATs -- ECLECTIC:MISHMASH::RE-USED:___________.
Give up yet? How about "HAND-ME-DOWN"? Yeah I think that would work well there. Hey designer lady: go fuck yourself. You're full of shit. Apparently all it takes to become a "designer" is a thesaurus. I don't know why this stuff bothers me, but it does.
BUT--I've got to say that the block of homebuying/renting shows that air most weeknights from 8-11pm or so have got me a little bit hooked. Most of it is the timeliness of my own relatively recent decision to purchase a condo next summer upon our expected move to Chicago. Watching people look at houses (they even have one called "Property Virgins," which is what it sounds like and naturally a good fit for me), and seeing the way they approach the lending process, is quite informative. One big complaint I have is that, in an attempt to keep engaged a larger audience, they don't do a very good job of reminding viewers where their Virgins or Hunters are lookng. It's great for me to see that the house they are touring costs $195,000, but it makes a giant difference if that house is in Arkansas or Connecticut. You more or less have to take their $$ with a grain of salt.
Outside of the actual informative value of these shows, it's fun, and sometimes maddening, to watch the prospective buyers. For one thing, I love to see the idiots hone in on totally inconsequential things like the paint color or the carpet, or to be excited about the furniture. You're making a $200k+ investment so please don't focus on $500 worth of paint or multi-thousand dollars worth of furniture that doesn't actually come with the house. Unbelievable. There was one couple that was looking in the $500K range in suburban Atlanta that was completely and totally consumed with a "formal dining room." It was the first thing they asked for and the first thing they commented on in each house. If a single--and let's face it, stupid--issue is that important to you, you're probably not qualified to be signing away half a million dollars that you don't have. Which leads me to my next troubling observation: no one understands how mortgages work as they relate to down payments. No one. Even the most seemingly intelligent, prepared, and thoughtful people on these shows will never put more than about 12% down on their purchases. I've seen numerous people buy places for over $200k with zero down payment. It's particularly troubling/amusing to know that most of those shows were filmed in early 2008 or before, and that all these idiots and the banks that loaned to them were partially responsible for the collapse of the US economy. Thanks, folks.
So anyway (poor segue), what I started off intending to talk about was design shows that HGTV sometimes sneaks into their evening homebuyers lineup. Last night I was treated to one of these. Correction: I was subjected to one of these.
Right up front I should say to all of those people out there who actually subsist as "designers:" congratulations. I'm going to say wholly disrespectful things about your profession, but at the same time I can totally respect a good con artist. So, bravo.
I've long been mystified by the whole field of design. No, not the whole field of design but more the idea of re-design that manages to sell many magazines and fill many TV hours. (People who actually initially make something functional from abstract ideas, or who figure out how best to put something together I admire greatly. Whoever was responsible for making a fan's blades in just the right shape and tilt scores big points from me. Same for the person who came up with the famous London subway map.) What drives me nuts are the personal or home "designers." They are full of shit, basically.
Last night, some relatively attractive woman (that's her to the left) who is no doubt full of herself and her "talent" was charged with redecorating another woman's bedroom. Basically what she did was spend some money to buy new things and also add a few pretentious flourishes, most onerous was the creation of a "sitting area" where previously the owner had a dresser and a TV. The "designer" was extremely proud of herself with this change, but she never really mentioned what she did with the dresser or the TV. I guess the owner will just have to find some other place to keep her clothes, but hey, at least she has a nice place to formally sit down and read the paper--in her bedroom. Also, I guess she won't be watching HGTV's design shows from the comfort of her bed anymore.
The "designer" also described the room before as a style-less "mishmash" of "hand-me-down" items. After she had finished working her magic, she described the room as an "eclectic" combination of pieces that she had "re-used" (this last bit was to brag about how she saved money).
Let's take the SATs -- ECLECTIC:MISHMASH::RE-USED:___________.
Give up yet? How about "HAND-ME-DOWN"? Yeah I think that would work well there. Hey designer lady: go fuck yourself. You're full of shit. Apparently all it takes to become a "designer" is a thesaurus. I don't know why this stuff bothers me, but it does.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Things I Learned in Columbus
Here are some things that might offend some people:
1. I think it's time for airlines to start charging extra to fat people. An airline isn't actually a part of the service industry anymore, it's merely a form of transportation. (Why are there even stewardesses anymore? Just hand out drinks before boarding and call it a day. Or scrap the drinks and charge me $2 less up front; I'd survive. It's not like the old days when they were passing out meals and blankets and ashtrays and whatnot.) An airplane has a finite amount of space and they should charge you by the amount of cubic feet you occupy. Obviously, there should be a limit under which everyone pays the same, because a seat is a seat even if it's only got a kid in it. But I'd say maybe anything above a 46 inch waist or hips should have to pay extra. Taking it an extra step, when you are selecting your seats, you should know how much space each person is consuming and those who select a seat next a larger individual should pay less for the inconvenience, exactly the amount that the fat person has to pay extra.
Yesterday on my return flight from Columbus, I was stuck in a window seat next a woman who's, uh, body was spilling over into my seat. She was nice about it at least. I mean to say, she was cognizant of her life failure and seemed to feel the appropriate amount of shame. Even though it must have been slightly painful, she kept the armrest down, I'm pretty sure as a futile attempt to keep herself contained. I accepted this gesture of goodwill, and since it was a short flight, I simply leaned over toward the window and read my magazine. She seemed like one of those fat people who fears being in crowds, and I'm sure that if I weren't sitting next to her, that she would have been very content to just stay in her third row seat until everyone else on the plane left so she wouldn't bump into or slow anyone down.
2. A fixture of my college years, Bob Evans has gone downhill. It's gone downhill enough for me to say I don't really care to patronize it again. I will go if in a group and that's the majority desire, but I will never suggest it and I can't imagine craving it again.
I had the sunshine skillet and a bowl of sausage gravy. The skillet was far worse than I remember them being and the gravy was thin and the sausage therein was curiously tasteless, given that it was made of pig. I can make breakfast food at least as good myself, and I don't consider myself anything like a great cook. Saving grace is that my huge meal only cost $11 and the biscuits are still spectacular. But either Bob's has changed or I have changed, because it just doesn't do it for me anymore.
3. I was playing pool with a guy named Broshaun (BroShaun? BroShawn? Bro'Shawon?) on Friday night. He seemed to be a genuinely nice human being but he wasn't going to win any IQ contests. He casually mentioned being "locked up" when he was younger, and that makes me really regret not having asked him why the first two fingers on his right hand were missing everything above the first knuckle. It doesn't take much to live an interesting life. Every person has a story.
4. It's inevitable to feel this way at least a little, given that I've lived now almost six years in NYC, but Columbus--or rather the campus area--is a lot less interesting to me than it used to be. I seriously wonder now if I were to go back and relive my four college years at OSU, but do it in the current climate, that I would enjoy it as much. Granted, that's not saying much, because I will always be incredibly grateful and appreciative of all I got out of my college experience, but I wonder if that level of satisfaction would still be possible for an 18 year old me in 2009. The degree to which it would be less enjoyable is likely much smaller than I'm assuming right now, but I'm quite sure it is still less.
5. This won't offend anyone, but on the return flight I was buried in my magazine most of the way. In fact, the first time I looked out the window, would you even believe that the town thousands of feet below was good old Steubenville, OH? It's really not so bad looking from that height.
1. I think it's time for airlines to start charging extra to fat people. An airline isn't actually a part of the service industry anymore, it's merely a form of transportation. (Why are there even stewardesses anymore? Just hand out drinks before boarding and call it a day. Or scrap the drinks and charge me $2 less up front; I'd survive. It's not like the old days when they were passing out meals and blankets and ashtrays and whatnot.) An airplane has a finite amount of space and they should charge you by the amount of cubic feet you occupy. Obviously, there should be a limit under which everyone pays the same, because a seat is a seat even if it's only got a kid in it. But I'd say maybe anything above a 46 inch waist or hips should have to pay extra. Taking it an extra step, when you are selecting your seats, you should know how much space each person is consuming and those who select a seat next a larger individual should pay less for the inconvenience, exactly the amount that the fat person has to pay extra.
Yesterday on my return flight from Columbus, I was stuck in a window seat next a woman who's, uh, body was spilling over into my seat. She was nice about it at least. I mean to say, she was cognizant of her life failure and seemed to feel the appropriate amount of shame. Even though it must have been slightly painful, she kept the armrest down, I'm pretty sure as a futile attempt to keep herself contained. I accepted this gesture of goodwill, and since it was a short flight, I simply leaned over toward the window and read my magazine. She seemed like one of those fat people who fears being in crowds, and I'm sure that if I weren't sitting next to her, that she would have been very content to just stay in her third row seat until everyone else on the plane left so she wouldn't bump into or slow anyone down.
2. A fixture of my college years, Bob Evans has gone downhill. It's gone downhill enough for me to say I don't really care to patronize it again. I will go if in a group and that's the majority desire, but I will never suggest it and I can't imagine craving it again.
I had the sunshine skillet and a bowl of sausage gravy. The skillet was far worse than I remember them being and the gravy was thin and the sausage therein was curiously tasteless, given that it was made of pig. I can make breakfast food at least as good myself, and I don't consider myself anything like a great cook. Saving grace is that my huge meal only cost $11 and the biscuits are still spectacular. But either Bob's has changed or I have changed, because it just doesn't do it for me anymore.
3. I was playing pool with a guy named Broshaun (BroShaun? BroShawn? Bro'Shawon?) on Friday night. He seemed to be a genuinely nice human being but he wasn't going to win any IQ contests. He casually mentioned being "locked up" when he was younger, and that makes me really regret not having asked him why the first two fingers on his right hand were missing everything above the first knuckle. It doesn't take much to live an interesting life. Every person has a story.
4. It's inevitable to feel this way at least a little, given that I've lived now almost six years in NYC, but Columbus--or rather the campus area--is a lot less interesting to me than it used to be. I seriously wonder now if I were to go back and relive my four college years at OSU, but do it in the current climate, that I would enjoy it as much. Granted, that's not saying much, because I will always be incredibly grateful and appreciative of all I got out of my college experience, but I wonder if that level of satisfaction would still be possible for an 18 year old me in 2009. The degree to which it would be less enjoyable is likely much smaller than I'm assuming right now, but I'm quite sure it is still less.
5. This won't offend anyone, but on the return flight I was buried in my magazine most of the way. In fact, the first time I looked out the window, would you even believe that the town thousands of feet below was good old Steubenville, OH? It's really not so bad looking from that height.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
your efforts are futile
ive come to realize that i have a real talent for something. hold on now, because no this isnt going to be any kind of back-slapping exercise like i sometimes engage in. i only realize it's a talent because ive noticed that not only do not many people share this talent, but quite a few are actually utterly incapable of it in any regard.
i have an effortless ability to not feel another person's uncomfortability in conversation. basically, i do not naturally feel any empathy in conversational settings. ive only come to notice this over many years, as i watch other people get sucked into things they dont want any part of simply because they do the normal thing and act interested and nod their head and otherwise dont ignore the other person imposing on their time/space.
if you find yourself with me in a social situation and neither of us has anything natural to add, then you can just save yourself the agony and know that i wont say anything and i wont judge you for doing the same. see, what happens for the huge majority of people is, while they might be able to recognize that i wont add anything to the "conversation," almost no one is able to come to terms with the latter fact: that it really is ok for them to do the same. pretty much everyone i ever come across finds it impossible to leave well enough alone and forces some attempt at chatter, only to find that their efforts only enhance the awkwardness.
i say awkwardness because i can appreciate the sensation that most people have in these situations. i am capable of feeling awkwardness, though it is relatively rare. the important thing to know here is that, with extremely small exception, i dont feel awkward during conventionally "awkward" social conversational situations.
if you want to talk to me about your cat or something and you cat doesnt happen to interest me (this is an apt example, fyi), then i wont really engage in your conversation and youll end up basically talking out loud for no good reason. if you tell me something about the weather being hot, i will recognize this as a forced attempt at breaking through, but i will do nothing to help you there; instead i will either agree or disagree about the actual point you make regarding the heat, and then stop talking.
i dont want this now to sound like im not ever interested by things people say or merely people themselves. this is far from true. sometimes the smallest or most banal things will completely engage me. i think i am interested by things a pretty normal amount. normal, meaning about the same as most people. which, given the fact that i felt the need to write this post on this subject, would seem to suggest that most people who are normally interested by things do not actually behave that way. they will act like they are interested in far more things that they really are. they will be phony. i am sorry but this is true. if it's a bad thing to be phony on a macro level then surely it should be just as bad to be phony on a micro level.
i think this ties back into how i started this, actually. it's ok to feel uncomfortable. it's ok not to care about things, just as much as to care about things. do not get frustrated by my seemingly poor social skills just because you have a hard time understanding this, and i promise not to let your lack of awareness further degrade my social abilities around you.
i have an effortless ability to not feel another person's uncomfortability in conversation. basically, i do not naturally feel any empathy in conversational settings. ive only come to notice this over many years, as i watch other people get sucked into things they dont want any part of simply because they do the normal thing and act interested and nod their head and otherwise dont ignore the other person imposing on their time/space.
if you find yourself with me in a social situation and neither of us has anything natural to add, then you can just save yourself the agony and know that i wont say anything and i wont judge you for doing the same. see, what happens for the huge majority of people is, while they might be able to recognize that i wont add anything to the "conversation," almost no one is able to come to terms with the latter fact: that it really is ok for them to do the same. pretty much everyone i ever come across finds it impossible to leave well enough alone and forces some attempt at chatter, only to find that their efforts only enhance the awkwardness.
i say awkwardness because i can appreciate the sensation that most people have in these situations. i am capable of feeling awkwardness, though it is relatively rare. the important thing to know here is that, with extremely small exception, i dont feel awkward during conventionally "awkward" social conversational situations.
if you want to talk to me about your cat or something and you cat doesnt happen to interest me (this is an apt example, fyi), then i wont really engage in your conversation and youll end up basically talking out loud for no good reason. if you tell me something about the weather being hot, i will recognize this as a forced attempt at breaking through, but i will do nothing to help you there; instead i will either agree or disagree about the actual point you make regarding the heat, and then stop talking.
i dont want this now to sound like im not ever interested by things people say or merely people themselves. this is far from true. sometimes the smallest or most banal things will completely engage me. i think i am interested by things a pretty normal amount. normal, meaning about the same as most people. which, given the fact that i felt the need to write this post on this subject, would seem to suggest that most people who are normally interested by things do not actually behave that way. they will act like they are interested in far more things that they really are. they will be phony. i am sorry but this is true. if it's a bad thing to be phony on a macro level then surely it should be just as bad to be phony on a micro level.
i think this ties back into how i started this, actually. it's ok to feel uncomfortable. it's ok not to care about things, just as much as to care about things. do not get frustrated by my seemingly poor social skills just because you have a hard time understanding this, and i promise not to let your lack of awareness further degrade my social abilities around you.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Another for the "Well, No Shit" File
Today is a cover-the-reception-desk-at-work day. It's also a leave-early day, as I'm out at 4:15 to catch a flight to Chicago for a long weekend. Because of this, I knew I knew I'd have some time to maybe do a post, and almost jokingly I asked Sara what I should write about. She said "getting married." Ok.
1. For reasons that will become clear, I believe that the one thing a man should keep secret from his woman (above your ATM pin or any other important financial passwords) is the password to his Netflix account.
2. Over the last two nights, I spent a total of 134 minutes watching the Sex and the City movie.
3. Ommitted for effect.
4. If you've watched a movie and are having a hard time deciding if it was any good, let me offer this tip: start it up somewhere randomly in the middle and make your judgement soon after; you don't need to watch more than the first 4-5 minutes. Make sure you start it up cold, meaning without any memory or residual emotion leftover from your first viewing. When you do this, you are getting only the quality of the film and you're most likely not getting a big climactic scene (that would have been closely edited by the filmmakers). You're also totally divorced from the emotional build-up, so the natural tendency of even the worst movies to suck you into the story is gone. (A feature film is like a book in that the simple time investment to complete it implants an automatic austerity to it. A thiry minute TV show that's of equal production value to a two-hour movie will never feel as good as a movie. Even two hours worth of TV shows would not be the same. After you've read even a mediocre book, there is always a period of time immediately afterward where you are smitten with the book and would be inclined to inordinately praise it. So too with movies, and that's why you need to strip away that bond.)
5. You noticed before I said I saw Sex and the City spaced over two nights. Sara gets sleepy early and so we only got through just under an hour on night one. She was angry with me for the first 20 minutes because I couldn't stop picking on the movie's shortcomings, but I started following the story and quieted down eventually.
6. Sex and the City is a horrible, horrible movie.
7. On night two, we started it back up where we left off and yowzer once again I couldn't stop make comments about how bad it was.
8. There wasn't anything different about the first five minutes we watched on night two (maybe minutes 55-59 of the movie) and the last five minutes from night one (minutes 50-54), but it was painfully easy to find fault with the former while glossing over the shortcomings of the latter. The emotional flow of the movie had been interrupted and the movie was left open for me to see it for what it was.
9. This effect might be in some ways similar to why it's often difficult for an actor to do live theater work, compared to films. In a theater, the actor has to do his own work in sustaining that emotional bond, while in film, any number of editing or directorial choices will cover an actor's deficiencies.
10. It almost feels frivilous to comment specifically, but Sex and the City is really bad. I will admit that I've watched several episodes of the TV show, sometimes enjoying them, sometimes even respecting their relative quality. The movie, however, is terrble. Almost every actor just phoned it in, though not so much as the writers. You would think that a writer constrained to 30 minute storylines would love the opportunity to add real depth to his characters when given two-plus hours to play with. Not so here. If anything, the characters are flatter and less interesting. Again, it's probably a waste of time to criticize this stuff as the movie was clearly made with its only purpose being to lure women into the theater. As with lots of our contemporary culture, mission accomplished commercially, mission big fat fail substantively. I guess it just offends me when someone who has the option to make something at least passably competent with what wouldn't even be any additional effort, but chooses instead to fill the cracks with shit. I don't really like the term "sell-out" as a slander because usually it's used hypocritically, but pretty much everyone involved in this movie sold out. Good for them, as long as they knew that's what they were doing.
11. Someone does indeed get married in the movie, in case you couldn't stand the garbage and turned it off before getting to the end.
12. On a brighter and barely relevant note, I read somewhere recently that Chris Noth's character on Law & Order is being replaced and the character is to be played by Jeff Goldblum.
1. For reasons that will become clear, I believe that the one thing a man should keep secret from his woman (above your ATM pin or any other important financial passwords) is the password to his Netflix account.
2. Over the last two nights, I spent a total of 134 minutes watching the Sex and the City movie.
3. Ommitted for effect.
4. If you've watched a movie and are having a hard time deciding if it was any good, let me offer this tip: start it up somewhere randomly in the middle and make your judgement soon after; you don't need to watch more than the first 4-5 minutes. Make sure you start it up cold, meaning without any memory or residual emotion leftover from your first viewing. When you do this, you are getting only the quality of the film and you're most likely not getting a big climactic scene (that would have been closely edited by the filmmakers). You're also totally divorced from the emotional build-up, so the natural tendency of even the worst movies to suck you into the story is gone. (A feature film is like a book in that the simple time investment to complete it implants an automatic austerity to it. A thiry minute TV show that's of equal production value to a two-hour movie will never feel as good as a movie. Even two hours worth of TV shows would not be the same. After you've read even a mediocre book, there is always a period of time immediately afterward where you are smitten with the book and would be inclined to inordinately praise it. So too with movies, and that's why you need to strip away that bond.)
5. You noticed before I said I saw Sex and the City spaced over two nights. Sara gets sleepy early and so we only got through just under an hour on night one. She was angry with me for the first 20 minutes because I couldn't stop picking on the movie's shortcomings, but I started following the story and quieted down eventually.
6. Sex and the City is a horrible, horrible movie.
7. On night two, we started it back up where we left off and yowzer once again I couldn't stop make comments about how bad it was.
8. There wasn't anything different about the first five minutes we watched on night two (maybe minutes 55-59 of the movie) and the last five minutes from night one (minutes 50-54), but it was painfully easy to find fault with the former while glossing over the shortcomings of the latter. The emotional flow of the movie had been interrupted and the movie was left open for me to see it for what it was.
9. This effect might be in some ways similar to why it's often difficult for an actor to do live theater work, compared to films. In a theater, the actor has to do his own work in sustaining that emotional bond, while in film, any number of editing or directorial choices will cover an actor's deficiencies.
10. It almost feels frivilous to comment specifically, but Sex and the City is really bad. I will admit that I've watched several episodes of the TV show, sometimes enjoying them, sometimes even respecting their relative quality. The movie, however, is terrble. Almost every actor just phoned it in, though not so much as the writers. You would think that a writer constrained to 30 minute storylines would love the opportunity to add real depth to his characters when given two-plus hours to play with. Not so here. If anything, the characters are flatter and less interesting. Again, it's probably a waste of time to criticize this stuff as the movie was clearly made with its only purpose being to lure women into the theater. As with lots of our contemporary culture, mission accomplished commercially, mission big fat fail substantively. I guess it just offends me when someone who has the option to make something at least passably competent with what wouldn't even be any additional effort, but chooses instead to fill the cracks with shit. I don't really like the term "sell-out" as a slander because usually it's used hypocritically, but pretty much everyone involved in this movie sold out. Good for them, as long as they knew that's what they were doing.
11. Someone does indeed get married in the movie, in case you couldn't stand the garbage and turned it off before getting to the end.
12. On a brighter and barely relevant note, I read somewhere recently that Chris Noth's character on Law & Order is being replaced and the character is to be played by Jeff Goldblum.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
The Big Republican Problem
This ought to be the last political post for a while, or at least the last one focused mainly on politics. They're fun in doses, and I'm sure I will have had my fill soon enough.
During the last several weeks as I've habitually politics-loaded, I've tried to make sure I get a little of both sides. The problem with internet surfing for legit but opinionated information is that similar-minded sites tend to link to each other but not as much to dissenting ones. To get around this, you have to follow a link where a liberal is making fun of what a conservative is saying, and then once at the other site, to browse around rather than simply read what was linked. For your information, one site that's dedicated to conservative thinking (and no I'm not using that phrase ironically. I think it's terribly stupid when liberals (or any group that might ever drift toward elitism) act like it's impossible to find extremely intelligent arguments from the other side. No one has a monopoly on good ideas.) which I have found to contain plenty of smart, readable content is nextright.com. There are many others but my laziness has limited me mostly to revisiting this one.
Anyhow, in reading some of these Republican sites, I can't help but notice some of the comments to articles. As with any site, the comments are on another planet than the articles, quality-wise, but since I don't have as many righty friends anymore, and I don't see many here in Manhattan, it can be slightly if curiously informative. Being from Eastern Ohio, and raised in a somewhat culturally conservative household, I have some experience with both sides of the political debate. Of course over time I have tended to the left in my own thinking but I can certainly respect and often agree with either side.
Now, there are a lot of conservatives lamenting their performance Tuesday, for good reason, but there may be even more (the more ambitious or enthusiastic at least) that are attempting to lay out how to regain traction and eventually return to national power. Many of the excuses/ideas offered are reasonable, but I've found that my own personal feeling regarding the biggest Republican problem has gone laregly unmentioned.
Somewhere along the line (I'll leave others to decide when exactly), Republicans made a decision that, sure, it's ok if a large portion of our base consists of bigoted, ignorant, uninformed, and homogenous individuals. By letting too many of these types of voters run amok as a big chunk of their base, the Republicans took up residence on the wrong side of history. By consistently doing this, they ensured that no matter what else happened in the present, sooner or later, they were going to fall. I talked about this is my gay marriage post a few back, but it's a guarantee that fairness and virtue will win out in this country in the long run (And let's pause here to note that no matter the flaws of the country or its people, this fact stands high as evidence of its true greatness).
You could probably trace today's versions of the Democratic and Republican parties directly to the civil rights era, when Lyndon Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act changed the south from a Democratic stronghold to the Republican one it has remained to this day. Starting there, they fell behind (in many cases, to say they "fell behind" is very generous, more descriptive to say they "vigorously opposed.") on racism, abortion, guns, the environment, anything science-related, homosexuality, and pretty much any other progressive social/cultural issue. They took the easy road and pandered to the ignorances, fears, and insecurities of the present, somehow not noticing that the supporters of intolerance would shrink as the years went on and people naturally became more accepting of others' differences. They somehow didn't notice that the national share of white males was diminishing every year as this country continued it's centuries-old tradition of receiving immigrants in high numbers (I don't have a source handy, but it's estimated that in the not-too-distant future, there will be no more majority race).
Of course, not all Republicans favor oppression and intolerance. Most of the leaders of the party and a great percentage of its members nationwide are personally appalled at that behavior. But too many of their base is not, and because it's "the base," Republican leaders have gone to great lengths not to alienate it.
The Democrats are imminently capable of screwing up their current majority (also let's not overlook the poorly educated sections of their party) and they might sometimes consider themselves lucky to have stumbled into their preferred socially progressive positions, but assuming they steer the ship reasonably enough, I predict that the Republicans as we know them will never become a majority national party again until they've accepted this as ground zero and simply cast off their lot of ignorant fools. In consecutive national elections, this base has proven utterly futile, so what good is it to them? They need to rework the party from the bottom up. If their various strategists and thinkers can't see that their uneducated and intolerant base is nothing but a huge albatross, then they don't deserve the status as anything more than a minor third-party. Let their factions form their own parties: the Racist Party, the Homophobic Party, the Creationist Party, the Guns Don't Kill People I Kill People Party. What would be left of the Republicans would be absolutely certain to peel off lots of the not-yet-entrenched newly moderate part of the Democratic party. If they were somehow able to commit to their policy issues in any kind of big-tent way, they would probably stand a great chance to defeat the Democrats again.
But this kind of eschewing of their embarrassing base would take time and result in many failures in the near future, so they are sure not to heed it. It's the easy way out, and it's what got them into this mess 40-some years ago.
Finally, from a personal standpoint, can you imagine this country with the various intolerant groups having been marginalized politically? I'd say that's as close as a large society like the US could get to eutopia.
During the last several weeks as I've habitually politics-loaded, I've tried to make sure I get a little of both sides. The problem with internet surfing for legit but opinionated information is that similar-minded sites tend to link to each other but not as much to dissenting ones. To get around this, you have to follow a link where a liberal is making fun of what a conservative is saying, and then once at the other site, to browse around rather than simply read what was linked. For your information, one site that's dedicated to conservative thinking (and no I'm not using that phrase ironically. I think it's terribly stupid when liberals (or any group that might ever drift toward elitism) act like it's impossible to find extremely intelligent arguments from the other side. No one has a monopoly on good ideas.) which I have found to contain plenty of smart, readable content is nextright.com. There are many others but my laziness has limited me mostly to revisiting this one.
Anyhow, in reading some of these Republican sites, I can't help but notice some of the comments to articles. As with any site, the comments are on another planet than the articles, quality-wise, but since I don't have as many righty friends anymore, and I don't see many here in Manhattan, it can be slightly if curiously informative. Being from Eastern Ohio, and raised in a somewhat culturally conservative household, I have some experience with both sides of the political debate. Of course over time I have tended to the left in my own thinking but I can certainly respect and often agree with either side.
Now, there are a lot of conservatives lamenting their performance Tuesday, for good reason, but there may be even more (the more ambitious or enthusiastic at least) that are attempting to lay out how to regain traction and eventually return to national power. Many of the excuses/ideas offered are reasonable, but I've found that my own personal feeling regarding the biggest Republican problem has gone laregly unmentioned.
Somewhere along the line (I'll leave others to decide when exactly), Republicans made a decision that, sure, it's ok if a large portion of our base consists of bigoted, ignorant, uninformed, and homogenous individuals. By letting too many of these types of voters run amok as a big chunk of their base, the Republicans took up residence on the wrong side of history. By consistently doing this, they ensured that no matter what else happened in the present, sooner or later, they were going to fall. I talked about this is my gay marriage post a few back, but it's a guarantee that fairness and virtue will win out in this country in the long run (And let's pause here to note that no matter the flaws of the country or its people, this fact stands high as evidence of its true greatness).
You could probably trace today's versions of the Democratic and Republican parties directly to the civil rights era, when Lyndon Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act changed the south from a Democratic stronghold to the Republican one it has remained to this day. Starting there, they fell behind (in many cases, to say they "fell behind" is very generous, more descriptive to say they "vigorously opposed.") on racism, abortion, guns, the environment, anything science-related, homosexuality, and pretty much any other progressive social/cultural issue. They took the easy road and pandered to the ignorances, fears, and insecurities of the present, somehow not noticing that the supporters of intolerance would shrink as the years went on and people naturally became more accepting of others' differences. They somehow didn't notice that the national share of white males was diminishing every year as this country continued it's centuries-old tradition of receiving immigrants in high numbers (I don't have a source handy, but it's estimated that in the not-too-distant future, there will be no more majority race).
Of course, not all Republicans favor oppression and intolerance. Most of the leaders of the party and a great percentage of its members nationwide are personally appalled at that behavior. But too many of their base is not, and because it's "the base," Republican leaders have gone to great lengths not to alienate it.
The Democrats are imminently capable of screwing up their current majority (also let's not overlook the poorly educated sections of their party) and they might sometimes consider themselves lucky to have stumbled into their preferred socially progressive positions, but assuming they steer the ship reasonably enough, I predict that the Republicans as we know them will never become a majority national party again until they've accepted this as ground zero and simply cast off their lot of ignorant fools. In consecutive national elections, this base has proven utterly futile, so what good is it to them? They need to rework the party from the bottom up. If their various strategists and thinkers can't see that their uneducated and intolerant base is nothing but a huge albatross, then they don't deserve the status as anything more than a minor third-party. Let their factions form their own parties: the Racist Party, the Homophobic Party, the Creationist Party, the Guns Don't Kill People I Kill People Party. What would be left of the Republicans would be absolutely certain to peel off lots of the not-yet-entrenched newly moderate part of the Democratic party. If they were somehow able to commit to their policy issues in any kind of big-tent way, they would probably stand a great chance to defeat the Democrats again.
But this kind of eschewing of their embarrassing base would take time and result in many failures in the near future, so they are sure not to heed it. It's the easy way out, and it's what got them into this mess 40-some years ago.
Finally, from a personal standpoint, can you imagine this country with the various intolerant groups having been marginalized politically? I'd say that's as close as a large society like the US could get to eutopia.
This is slightly unfair for its generalism, but do you want to see where racism lives in America?
Take a look at what is my favorite election map so far (it's my favorite for two reasons, just one of which is racism). Click on "Voting Shifts" on the left, and just leave the "Compare to" button over 2004 for simplicity, and because the farther back you go the more and larger political variables you encounter. That is one ridiculously blue map. It shows how each county voted as compared to 2004. Things to remember when looking at the map:
1. Nationally, the number was red +2 in 2004, blue +6 in 2008, so on average those counties should be 8% redder in 2004 (or bluer in 2008).
2. Campaigning and thus exposure to both sides is hugely disproportionate to the battleground states, so those should have smaller swings.
3. Many states overall flipped red to blue in 08: VA, NC, FL, OH, IN, IA, NM, CO, NV, so these states should include bluer counties than other states on average.
4. Indiana and Arizona contain home-state advantages to consider. This is why Arizona holds 8 of the 10 counties to go more red in the entire Mountain and Pacific time zones, and also why Indiana is the bluest state on the whole map.
So, absorbing all that, what does the map tell us, besides the obvious and instant fact that the Democrat did much better this time? Or, given the 8 point swing from 2004, plus the more inclusive nature of this campaign's advertising, leaving us to expect a generally bluer map all over, what would be the reason for the clustered deep red on the map?
John McCain received his greatest disparity of support over what Bush received primarily in one congruent area of the country centered over Arkansas but running from East Texas and Oklahoma across Tennessee and up into Eastern Kentucky and far western Virginia and West Virginia. The national vote (from D perspective) went from -2 to +6, but Arkansas managed to go from -10 to -20. Softening the national swing because Arkansas is a deep Republican state, we still should have expected something more like -6 for the Democrat this time, not -20, and that is a huge difference.
Outside of this corridor of increased Rep support, look at one of the blue flip states, Ohio. As I said before, we might expect some of the margins in this massive battleground state to be smaller than nationally; however, the vote there almost exactly mirrored the national in 04 and 08: -2 and +4. So why did 13 of its 88 counties vote more red in this election? Those 13 mostly reside in southern or eastern parts of the state.
I think it's clear that there is one possible answer to all of these questions, the one I mentioned at the beginning: racism. It's always controversial to accuse people of racism but sometimes the truth is hard, and problems will never be overcome if they are kept hidden. (I'm obliged to say that I'm no expert on local politics of the Ozarks, so there might be some mitigating factor that causes the region to buck the national trend. My perhaps lazy conclusion just seems fairly likely. At the very least, it's a large part of the whole answer.)
The other striking thing about the map is how it illustrates the comprehensive nature of Obama's performance relative to Kerry. As per my usual, I'll use numbers: 22 states saw every single one of their counties with increased Democratic numbers. Four more had all but one county, and three additional had only two counties show Republican increases. 29 out of 50 states had two of fewer counties give more support to Republicans. That's amazing. It wasn't just pockets of strength that gave the Democrats the edge, it was across the board. That would be ominous news for Republicans. They better hope that most Americans view Obama as a transcendent figure and crossed idealogical lines just to vote for him personally, rather than his party.
Take a look at what is my favorite election map so far (it's my favorite for two reasons, just one of which is racism). Click on "Voting Shifts" on the left, and just leave the "Compare to" button over 2004 for simplicity, and because the farther back you go the more and larger political variables you encounter. That is one ridiculously blue map. It shows how each county voted as compared to 2004. Things to remember when looking at the map:
1. Nationally, the number was red +2 in 2004, blue +6 in 2008, so on average those counties should be 8% redder in 2004 (or bluer in 2008).
2. Campaigning and thus exposure to both sides is hugely disproportionate to the battleground states, so those should have smaller swings.
3. Many states overall flipped red to blue in 08: VA, NC, FL, OH, IN, IA, NM, CO, NV, so these states should include bluer counties than other states on average.
4. Indiana and Arizona contain home-state advantages to consider. This is why Arizona holds 8 of the 10 counties to go more red in the entire Mountain and Pacific time zones, and also why Indiana is the bluest state on the whole map.
So, absorbing all that, what does the map tell us, besides the obvious and instant fact that the Democrat did much better this time? Or, given the 8 point swing from 2004, plus the more inclusive nature of this campaign's advertising, leaving us to expect a generally bluer map all over, what would be the reason for the clustered deep red on the map?
John McCain received his greatest disparity of support over what Bush received primarily in one congruent area of the country centered over Arkansas but running from East Texas and Oklahoma across Tennessee and up into Eastern Kentucky and far western Virginia and West Virginia. The national vote (from D perspective) went from -2 to +6, but Arkansas managed to go from -10 to -20. Softening the national swing because Arkansas is a deep Republican state, we still should have expected something more like -6 for the Democrat this time, not -20, and that is a huge difference.
Outside of this corridor of increased Rep support, look at one of the blue flip states, Ohio. As I said before, we might expect some of the margins in this massive battleground state to be smaller than nationally; however, the vote there almost exactly mirrored the national in 04 and 08: -2 and +4. So why did 13 of its 88 counties vote more red in this election? Those 13 mostly reside in southern or eastern parts of the state.
I think it's clear that there is one possible answer to all of these questions, the one I mentioned at the beginning: racism. It's always controversial to accuse people of racism but sometimes the truth is hard, and problems will never be overcome if they are kept hidden. (I'm obliged to say that I'm no expert on local politics of the Ozarks, so there might be some mitigating factor that causes the region to buck the national trend. My perhaps lazy conclusion just seems fairly likely. At the very least, it's a large part of the whole answer.)
The other striking thing about the map is how it illustrates the comprehensive nature of Obama's performance relative to Kerry. As per my usual, I'll use numbers: 22 states saw every single one of their counties with increased Democratic numbers. Four more had all but one county, and three additional had only two counties show Republican increases. 29 out of 50 states had two of fewer counties give more support to Republicans. That's amazing. It wasn't just pockets of strength that gave the Democrats the edge, it was across the board. That would be ominous news for Republicans. They better hope that most Americans view Obama as a transcendent figure and crossed idealogical lines just to vote for him personally, rather than his party.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Enough with the Ignorance Already, People
I've been inadvertently reading a lot of political election-related content online the last couple days. It's pretty easy to ride the wave of web info in this particular subject, and I've got to say I haven't stopped myself. Something that caught my attention was California's Proposition 8. It's a proposed ban on gay marriage in the state, something doubly important because California is one of only three(1) states that actually currently recognizes gay couples.
Many states have put gay marriage bans to a vote in the last few elections, so that on its own is not noteworthy. But the current polling on the issue that calls the proposal's chances a toss-up is, especially when you consider that California has the fifth-highest percentage of same-sex households in the nation, as well as the ninth-highest score on a liberal-conservative Likert scale (meaning it's the ninth-most liberal). So what we have is quite clearly a very liberal state, and beyond that, in fact a very progressive state, which has been traditionally gay-friendly so that it's population is made up of a high number of gays, but that is still about a 50-50 shot to outright ban gay marriage in less than two weeks.
I find this slightly amazing. But I find the culture that allows Prop 8 to be a toss-up and not a clear failure endlessly more amazing.
What is a gay person? What is so fundamentally different about a gay person that should disqualify him or her from being married? What is it inside a seemingly rational person that prompts him from deciding that a gay person is so different that he should be disqualified from marriage?
A gay person is not an animal. He is not a monster or a devil. He is not an infidel worthy of assassination.
I try pretty hard to understand both sides of any issue. I mean I can empathize very well and I try always to give the benefit of the doubt. But the continued prejudice against homosexuals in this country--LEGAL prejudice--is just embarrassing. There is no argument, there is no appropriate opposing viewpoint. If you oppose gay rights today it is just like if you had favored slavery in 1850. People who oppose gay rights have to know that they are on the wrong side of history, that opposition to equal rights has, in the long run, been defeated every single time in the history of this country. You can fight it all you want today--and you might be able to prey on certain fears or ignorances--but you will lose in the end. I guarantee you will lose because you have nothing to stand on but hate. Were the US a fascist country, then the ultimate resolution of this issue might be in doubt, but fortunately for us, it is not.
I don't know how many times I can say this or how many times I can be utterly disappointed in the American people and especially those in power who allow these things to happen. There is simply no excuse.
I understand now of course that banning gay marriage is a more specific issue than general gay rights, that there are narrow factors at play, that it can be more of a political issue than a civil one.(2) But I know that this is about more than specific laws or political procedures. It's about fairness and the freedom to live in this country as a human being. It took a war, but eventually no one worried about whether or not it was prudent before ratifying the 13th amendment to the constitution (3), they just did it because it was right. It's a shame we had to effect such a serious course of action as a constitutional amendment, but that speaks more to the sorry state of a large minority of the American population at the time that was ,as we all know, on the wrong side of history.
Unfortunately since close to half of the people in the largest and usually one of the most progressive states in the country still seems to oppose equality for homosexuals, maybe we'll eventually need to draft another amendment.
I'd rather that we as Americans woke up and stopped being so goddamned ignorant.
1. I'm counting Connecticut even though it hasn't taken effect there yet.
2. So let's talk about them briefly. You could argue that gay marriage should be banned because god wants marriage to be one man and one woman. Fine. Make it a church issue. Let dumbfuck preachers decide who they want to join in holy matrimony. But then you'd have to eliminate the tax breaks for married couples cause that would be 1) unfair and obviously discriminatory, and 2) a clear violation of the constitution's separation of church and state. If you get rid of the federal tax breaks and simply make marriage a religious ceremony (as it should be), then I think over time, the idea of "marriage" would rightfully lose some of its perceived luster, as more and more people in this country seem to be making the inevitable drift away from organized religion. Back to the point though. Putting the power in the hands of the churches would clearly have the effect of legalizing gay marriage because the whole reason these ballot initiatives are always for a BAN on gay marriage is that some churches have already stepped up and begun marrying homosexuals in some states. And as much as I like to find flaws with religion in general, it's adherents are not all bad of course, and their overall mission is to spread good, so definitely some preachers and churches actually support equality and happiness and love for all. Good for them. Welcome to modern civilization. Or to the ideals of their friend Jesus.
3. Abolition of slavery, of course.
Many states have put gay marriage bans to a vote in the last few elections, so that on its own is not noteworthy. But the current polling on the issue that calls the proposal's chances a toss-up is, especially when you consider that California has the fifth-highest percentage of same-sex households in the nation, as well as the ninth-highest score on a liberal-conservative Likert scale (meaning it's the ninth-most liberal). So what we have is quite clearly a very liberal state, and beyond that, in fact a very progressive state, which has been traditionally gay-friendly so that it's population is made up of a high number of gays, but that is still about a 50-50 shot to outright ban gay marriage in less than two weeks.
I find this slightly amazing. But I find the culture that allows Prop 8 to be a toss-up and not a clear failure endlessly more amazing.
What is a gay person? What is so fundamentally different about a gay person that should disqualify him or her from being married? What is it inside a seemingly rational person that prompts him from deciding that a gay person is so different that he should be disqualified from marriage?
A gay person is not an animal. He is not a monster or a devil. He is not an infidel worthy of assassination.
I try pretty hard to understand both sides of any issue. I mean I can empathize very well and I try always to give the benefit of the doubt. But the continued prejudice against homosexuals in this country--LEGAL prejudice--is just embarrassing. There is no argument, there is no appropriate opposing viewpoint. If you oppose gay rights today it is just like if you had favored slavery in 1850. People who oppose gay rights have to know that they are on the wrong side of history, that opposition to equal rights has, in the long run, been defeated every single time in the history of this country. You can fight it all you want today--and you might be able to prey on certain fears or ignorances--but you will lose in the end. I guarantee you will lose because you have nothing to stand on but hate. Were the US a fascist country, then the ultimate resolution of this issue might be in doubt, but fortunately for us, it is not.
I don't know how many times I can say this or how many times I can be utterly disappointed in the American people and especially those in power who allow these things to happen. There is simply no excuse.
I understand now of course that banning gay marriage is a more specific issue than general gay rights, that there are narrow factors at play, that it can be more of a political issue than a civil one.(2) But I know that this is about more than specific laws or political procedures. It's about fairness and the freedom to live in this country as a human being. It took a war, but eventually no one worried about whether or not it was prudent before ratifying the 13th amendment to the constitution (3), they just did it because it was right. It's a shame we had to effect such a serious course of action as a constitutional amendment, but that speaks more to the sorry state of a large minority of the American population at the time that was ,as we all know, on the wrong side of history.
Unfortunately since close to half of the people in the largest and usually one of the most progressive states in the country still seems to oppose equality for homosexuals, maybe we'll eventually need to draft another amendment.
I'd rather that we as Americans woke up and stopped being so goddamned ignorant.
1. I'm counting Connecticut even though it hasn't taken effect there yet.
2. So let's talk about them briefly. You could argue that gay marriage should be banned because god wants marriage to be one man and one woman. Fine. Make it a church issue. Let dumbfuck preachers decide who they want to join in holy matrimony. But then you'd have to eliminate the tax breaks for married couples cause that would be 1) unfair and obviously discriminatory, and 2) a clear violation of the constitution's separation of church and state. If you get rid of the federal tax breaks and simply make marriage a religious ceremony (as it should be), then I think over time, the idea of "marriage" would rightfully lose some of its perceived luster, as more and more people in this country seem to be making the inevitable drift away from organized religion. Back to the point though. Putting the power in the hands of the churches would clearly have the effect of legalizing gay marriage because the whole reason these ballot initiatives are always for a BAN on gay marriage is that some churches have already stepped up and begun marrying homosexuals in some states. And as much as I like to find flaws with religion in general, it's adherents are not all bad of course, and their overall mission is to spread good, so definitely some preachers and churches actually support equality and happiness and love for all. Good for them. Welcome to modern civilization. Or to the ideals of their friend Jesus.
3. Abolition of slavery, of course.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Get Real: Two Points on Election 2008
Gee, this is two straight posts about politics. You'd think there was an election going on or something.
1. As it seems more likely that Obama will win (see #2), it's interesting to view his candidacy and campaign and compare it to the past couple elections. Please now note the seeming superficial absurdity of comparing GWBush to Obama, with all the attendant automatic shock involved therein.
- Democrats now hate that part of why Bush beat Gore in 2000 was the simple and irresponsible fact that many people voted for him based on the fact that he seemed like a more personable guy (The infamous "who would you rather have a beer with" approach to voting, which seemed like a benign enough idea in fall 2000 as both the economy and the twin towers were still riding fairly high).
So, how is election 2008 going? Not like I am a perfect national bellweather, but it seems pretty obvious that a large chunk of Obama's advantage right now could be attributed to the fact that most of America finds him to simply be more personable and generally attractive.
The most instructive way to react to this analysis is not to revel in the hypocrisy of any Obama-supporting Democrat who complains about how dumb Americans vote not on issues but on superficialities, but instead to realize simply that most presidential elections are won by the more attractive candidate, and to accept that in the current climate that's just the way it is (not that that makes it right).
- Probably the other major reason Obama is ahead at the moment is due to his huge financial advantage. It's almost a waste of time to mention that the oil-rich Bush family and the well-known Republican money machine contributed mightily to GW's two victories.
I'd like to think that with the almost infinite expansiveness of media lately, this $=win effect has become more and more important. Elections have always been about money, but naturally as the amount of money required simply to compete increases exponentially, so too does it's importance as a single end-all issue.
2. Using info I've absorbed partially through the excellent site http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ (warning: the editorial content is admittedly slanted), I can't help but see how this election could more and more likely turn into an electoral college rout, even though such a result would seem impossible given the tightness of recent presidential elections. I'm not saying now that McCain has no chance, but that if Obama wins as is currently expected, it could end up a much wider margin than expected.
Let's break it down a little:
Obama looks very safe in 16 states worth a total of 197 EC votes (the Northeast: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Marland, Deleware, and DC; the Pacific: California, Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii; plus his home state of Illinois and the corn capital of Iowa (McCain is strangely stubborn against biofuels)).
McCain is very safe in 16 states worth a total of 134 EC votes (the South: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma; and the Great Plains: Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming; plus his home state of Arizona and Palin's home state of Alaska).
197 - 134 doesn't look terribly bad but to that we can add all the 10 states that are clearly favoring Obama right now (New Hampshire 4, plus the Big Ten: Pennsylvania 21, Michigan 17, Wisconsin 10, and Minnesota 10; plus "battleground" states of Florida 27, Virginia 13, Colorado 9, New Mexico 5, and Nevada 5). This adds a huge 121 EC votes to make it 318-134. Note that this also puts Obama well over the 270 needed to win, and we've only included states where he is currently in very good shape; there are still 86 votes unaccounted for.
If we give McCain three states he clearly leads in (Montana 3, North Dakota 3, and South Dakota 3), that only moves it to 318-143, with only six states left (Ohio 20, Indiana 11, North Carolina 15, Missouri 11, West Virginia 5, and Georgia 15).
For the purposes of this exercise, and because it's still almost four weeks to go, we are going to take some liberties. But if you look at the polls and give Obama wins in all the states we've already given him, then it becomes very easy to give Obama Ohio and Indiana. It's also not hard at all to assume that if he maintains a strong lead into November, that McCain's status will have deteriorated in many of these tight states, so that we can go ahead and turn current close Obama leads in Missouri and North Carolina into wins. It might end up closer than currently but go ahead and let McCain keep West Virginia.
This changes the total to 375-148, with only Georgia not counted. I think you would agree that 375-148 would be considered a pretty big victory, important insomuch that it would allow Obama and the Democrats to actually declare something close to an actual mandate, which is usually not much more than posturing but would have some credence considering a black man had won such support and in the process knocked off many states that had been recently locked in as Republican.
Let's turn for a second finally to Georgia. Georgia is a Deep South state. It would be big big news for a Democrat to win there, not to mention a black Democrat. But if Obama's national numbers mostly hold til election day, it's a real possibility.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/in-georgia-small-improvements-in-black.html
This is a good and interesting synopsis. He might need to gain a point or two generally but support of blacks and a higher-than-usual turnout (indicative of his superior organization possible through his vast budget) could actually push him over the top. It's something worth watching as a barometer for how some extremely important beneath-the-surface issues will play out all around the country.
Unless something big happens to change the course of the election, I think everything is going to start cascading for Obama and lead him to a huge victory. The likability factor will keep him ahead in the polls and his massive funding advantage will turn all these little things in his favor. In the end, he probably won't even need both advantage, just one or the other would suffice.
1. As it seems more likely that Obama will win (see #2), it's interesting to view his candidacy and campaign and compare it to the past couple elections. Please now note the seeming superficial absurdity of comparing GWBush to Obama, with all the attendant automatic shock involved therein.
- Democrats now hate that part of why Bush beat Gore in 2000 was the simple and irresponsible fact that many people voted for him based on the fact that he seemed like a more personable guy (The infamous "who would you rather have a beer with" approach to voting, which seemed like a benign enough idea in fall 2000 as both the economy and the twin towers were still riding fairly high).
So, how is election 2008 going? Not like I am a perfect national bellweather, but it seems pretty obvious that a large chunk of Obama's advantage right now could be attributed to the fact that most of America finds him to simply be more personable and generally attractive.
The most instructive way to react to this analysis is not to revel in the hypocrisy of any Obama-supporting Democrat who complains about how dumb Americans vote not on issues but on superficialities, but instead to realize simply that most presidential elections are won by the more attractive candidate, and to accept that in the current climate that's just the way it is (not that that makes it right).
- Probably the other major reason Obama is ahead at the moment is due to his huge financial advantage. It's almost a waste of time to mention that the oil-rich Bush family and the well-known Republican money machine contributed mightily to GW's two victories.
I'd like to think that with the almost infinite expansiveness of media lately, this $=win effect has become more and more important. Elections have always been about money, but naturally as the amount of money required simply to compete increases exponentially, so too does it's importance as a single end-all issue.
2. Using info I've absorbed partially through the excellent site http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ (warning: the editorial content is admittedly slanted), I can't help but see how this election could more and more likely turn into an electoral college rout, even though such a result would seem impossible given the tightness of recent presidential elections. I'm not saying now that McCain has no chance, but that if Obama wins as is currently expected, it could end up a much wider margin than expected.
Let's break it down a little:
Obama looks very safe in 16 states worth a total of 197 EC votes (the Northeast: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Marland, Deleware, and DC; the Pacific: California, Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii; plus his home state of Illinois and the corn capital of Iowa (McCain is strangely stubborn against biofuels)).
McCain is very safe in 16 states worth a total of 134 EC votes (the South: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma; and the Great Plains: Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming; plus his home state of Arizona and Palin's home state of Alaska).
197 - 134 doesn't look terribly bad but to that we can add all the 10 states that are clearly favoring Obama right now (New Hampshire 4, plus the Big Ten: Pennsylvania 21, Michigan 17, Wisconsin 10, and Minnesota 10; plus "battleground" states of Florida 27, Virginia 13, Colorado 9, New Mexico 5, and Nevada 5). This adds a huge 121 EC votes to make it 318-134. Note that this also puts Obama well over the 270 needed to win, and we've only included states where he is currently in very good shape; there are still 86 votes unaccounted for.
If we give McCain three states he clearly leads in (Montana 3, North Dakota 3, and South Dakota 3), that only moves it to 318-143, with only six states left (Ohio 20, Indiana 11, North Carolina 15, Missouri 11, West Virginia 5, and Georgia 15).
For the purposes of this exercise, and because it's still almost four weeks to go, we are going to take some liberties. But if you look at the polls and give Obama wins in all the states we've already given him, then it becomes very easy to give Obama Ohio and Indiana. It's also not hard at all to assume that if he maintains a strong lead into November, that McCain's status will have deteriorated in many of these tight states, so that we can go ahead and turn current close Obama leads in Missouri and North Carolina into wins. It might end up closer than currently but go ahead and let McCain keep West Virginia.
This changes the total to 375-148, with only Georgia not counted. I think you would agree that 375-148 would be considered a pretty big victory, important insomuch that it would allow Obama and the Democrats to actually declare something close to an actual mandate, which is usually not much more than posturing but would have some credence considering a black man had won such support and in the process knocked off many states that had been recently locked in as Republican.
Let's turn for a second finally to Georgia. Georgia is a Deep South state. It would be big big news for a Democrat to win there, not to mention a black Democrat. But if Obama's national numbers mostly hold til election day, it's a real possibility.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/in-georgia-small-improvements-in-black.html
This is a good and interesting synopsis. He might need to gain a point or two generally but support of blacks and a higher-than-usual turnout (indicative of his superior organization possible through his vast budget) could actually push him over the top. It's something worth watching as a barometer for how some extremely important beneath-the-surface issues will play out all around the country.
Unless something big happens to change the course of the election, I think everything is going to start cascading for Obama and lead him to a huge victory. The likability factor will keep him ahead in the polls and his massive funding advantage will turn all these little things in his favor. In the end, he probably won't even need both advantage, just one or the other would suffice.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
ipod/stroller digressions
fuck all you people and your ipods. there is enough white noise drifting through my world today that i really really don't need your trebled dissonance permeating my consciousness during our shared 18-flight ascension of the elevator shaft. i'm sure it sounds quite lovely way back there in your ambivalent eardrums i'm sure, but out here in the other 99.99999999% of the world it's quite obnoxious. i don't mean to be too utilitarian here, but we of the rather vast majority would appreciate if you might sacrifice whatever joy it causes you to pass the volume meter beyond what can be contained to your own audibility so that we can catch a break.
now that i've got that little bit of nuisance out of the way, let me turn to the truly evil consequence of the small white menace: complete social and spatial ignorance, where i place particular selfish emphasis on the latter. i've had just about enough of having to bump into someone because said someone is mindlessly drifting in and out of the reasonable or expected flow of pedestrain traffic.
do you know how some people think it ought to be illegal to drive while talking on the cell phone? ipods are only very slightly less malevolent devices. it's been proven that drivers have less awareness when talking on a cell phone, not to mention that it usually means the person is using only one hand to drive. i've always been annoyed by the inconvenience it would cause to ban cell phones while driving but resigned to complete agreement with the reasons for and the effects of such a law. for me, it seems like anytime there is a car accident, three questions arise when wondering how it happened: was he speeding? was he drinking and driving? and was he on the phone? any of these three questions answered affirmatively will cease any investigation because they are accepted as severe hindrances to safe driving.
before you call me a prude, just stop and think about what it means to live in a crowded place such as nyc. we all learn very early on that one of the important sacrfices we must make is to always share at least a little consideration for those around us. if we all walked around the city with utter self-determination, then the violence levels would be off the charts.
now let me make another car-related example. imagine a smaller city with no traffic lights. what would happen, or what would drivers be forced to do? after an intial period of accidents, of course, drivers would learn that they can't go careening through intersections, that they must stop and consider other drivers going the other way, and eventually a simple kind of truce will be formed wherein every driver understands that he has a responsibility to every other driver not to crash into them. cars running into each other can kill, people doing the same usually do not. this is no excuse for people to behave differently than cars (controlled by people, yes i understand).
pedestrians learn at least one basic rule of high-traffic movement early on: always stay to the right. if this rule were not followed, there would literally be chaos in the streets of new york. allow me to suggest another extremely important rule: when a large group of people is approaching a single person on the sidewalk, it's the responsibility of the group to partially give way to allow the single to continue along unabated. basically, if you are taking up more space that you should reasonably be expected to, then you must move. if you're carrying a wide load of groceries, i'm sorry if it's heavy but you don't get the whole sidewalk. this rule is especially important if you're carrying an umbrella: if you're one of those dicks who uses a giant golf umbrella to navigate the city, then you sure as shit better be the one who's constantly raising it up above everyone elses so you don't knock into them, and you also better be a passive walker, never cutting in front of people or making unnecessary passes.
now, i suppose it was inevitable, but this whole thing has led me to baby strollers. i hate baby strollers. they serve a need, and i accept that. but if you think that because you happen to be pushing a stroller, then you are entitled to whatever path you choose as you walk down an extremely crowded steet, well you're sadly mistaken. you and your giant stroller are taking up much more than the expected amount of space, so it's you who should be patient and try to accommodate everyone else walking down the street. instead, because of little precious sitting in the stroller, these people pushing them have the highest sense of entitlement. get this through to yourself: you are not more important than me simply because you have a child. it was your choice to burden yourself, do not take that shit out on me.
even a bit more on the strollers:
1. i'd like to take a swing at the genius designer who decided that these damnable things needed to be so big. there are cars in europe smaller than some baby strollers. a kid is maybe 2.5 feet tall and weighs maybe 40-50 pounds. think of a sack of concrete. do you need something so massive to push around a sack of concrete? if what you have is bigger than what you need to move on bag of concrete, it's too big.
2. people pushing strollers have a harder time navigating crowded streets, obviously. this can cause the pusher of the stroller to get agitated, obviously. when standing behind theses behemoths, these pushers can also tend to get a sense of invincibility (call it the SUV principle). what happens is, people use the fronts of their strollers as plows. this is not only unnessarily aggresive and rude, but also extremely selfish on behalf of the pusher at the expense of the presumably precious cargo just inches away from the parts being used as plows. sometimes, it is ok to tell other people how to raise their kids, that's all i've got to say about that.
3. if i am ever stricken with a case of fatherhood, i can assure you that i will do all that's in my power to avoid adding to the scourge of the city. i've seen people who tie a sheet or some other large garment around their back/neck so that it forms a pouch in front into which you can easily and comfortably fit a child too small to walk on its own. this is a superb solution to the problem and i salute these people. it's not hard to be reasonable toward others. it doesn't take a huge sacrifice. just a small one, or a tiny amount of thought.
now that i've got that little bit of nuisance out of the way, let me turn to the truly evil consequence of the small white menace: complete social and spatial ignorance, where i place particular selfish emphasis on the latter. i've had just about enough of having to bump into someone because said someone is mindlessly drifting in and out of the reasonable or expected flow of pedestrain traffic.
do you know how some people think it ought to be illegal to drive while talking on the cell phone? ipods are only very slightly less malevolent devices. it's been proven that drivers have less awareness when talking on a cell phone, not to mention that it usually means the person is using only one hand to drive. i've always been annoyed by the inconvenience it would cause to ban cell phones while driving but resigned to complete agreement with the reasons for and the effects of such a law. for me, it seems like anytime there is a car accident, three questions arise when wondering how it happened: was he speeding? was he drinking and driving? and was he on the phone? any of these three questions answered affirmatively will cease any investigation because they are accepted as severe hindrances to safe driving.
before you call me a prude, just stop and think about what it means to live in a crowded place such as nyc. we all learn very early on that one of the important sacrfices we must make is to always share at least a little consideration for those around us. if we all walked around the city with utter self-determination, then the violence levels would be off the charts.
now let me make another car-related example. imagine a smaller city with no traffic lights. what would happen, or what would drivers be forced to do? after an intial period of accidents, of course, drivers would learn that they can't go careening through intersections, that they must stop and consider other drivers going the other way, and eventually a simple kind of truce will be formed wherein every driver understands that he has a responsibility to every other driver not to crash into them. cars running into each other can kill, people doing the same usually do not. this is no excuse for people to behave differently than cars (controlled by people, yes i understand).
pedestrians learn at least one basic rule of high-traffic movement early on: always stay to the right. if this rule were not followed, there would literally be chaos in the streets of new york. allow me to suggest another extremely important rule: when a large group of people is approaching a single person on the sidewalk, it's the responsibility of the group to partially give way to allow the single to continue along unabated. basically, if you are taking up more space that you should reasonably be expected to, then you must move. if you're carrying a wide load of groceries, i'm sorry if it's heavy but you don't get the whole sidewalk. this rule is especially important if you're carrying an umbrella: if you're one of those dicks who uses a giant golf umbrella to navigate the city, then you sure as shit better be the one who's constantly raising it up above everyone elses so you don't knock into them, and you also better be a passive walker, never cutting in front of people or making unnecessary passes.
now, i suppose it was inevitable, but this whole thing has led me to baby strollers. i hate baby strollers. they serve a need, and i accept that. but if you think that because you happen to be pushing a stroller, then you are entitled to whatever path you choose as you walk down an extremely crowded steet, well you're sadly mistaken. you and your giant stroller are taking up much more than the expected amount of space, so it's you who should be patient and try to accommodate everyone else walking down the street. instead, because of little precious sitting in the stroller, these people pushing them have the highest sense of entitlement. get this through to yourself: you are not more important than me simply because you have a child. it was your choice to burden yourself, do not take that shit out on me.
even a bit more on the strollers:
1. i'd like to take a swing at the genius designer who decided that these damnable things needed to be so big. there are cars in europe smaller than some baby strollers. a kid is maybe 2.5 feet tall and weighs maybe 40-50 pounds. think of a sack of concrete. do you need something so massive to push around a sack of concrete? if what you have is bigger than what you need to move on bag of concrete, it's too big.
2. people pushing strollers have a harder time navigating crowded streets, obviously. this can cause the pusher of the stroller to get agitated, obviously. when standing behind theses behemoths, these pushers can also tend to get a sense of invincibility (call it the SUV principle). what happens is, people use the fronts of their strollers as plows. this is not only unnessarily aggresive and rude, but also extremely selfish on behalf of the pusher at the expense of the presumably precious cargo just inches away from the parts being used as plows. sometimes, it is ok to tell other people how to raise their kids, that's all i've got to say about that.
3. if i am ever stricken with a case of fatherhood, i can assure you that i will do all that's in my power to avoid adding to the scourge of the city. i've seen people who tie a sheet or some other large garment around their back/neck so that it forms a pouch in front into which you can easily and comfortably fit a child too small to walk on its own. this is a superb solution to the problem and i salute these people. it's not hard to be reasonable toward others. it doesn't take a huge sacrifice. just a small one, or a tiny amount of thought.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Embarrassing
"Two in 10 Democratic voters in Kentucky said race was a factor in their choice, and they overwhelmingly voted for Mrs. Clinton."
Read that again.
Link at the bottom for NYTimes article.
So we have evidence that close to 20% of Democratic voters in Kentucky are admitted racists. Admitted racists. And this is the Democratic party, the supposedly more liberal and progressive party. Let's assume for a second that KY Democrats are twice as accepting as Republicans (maybe that's not fair to Republicans but it's a round number). So we can then assume that 30% of Kentuckians are openly racist. But wait, there's more. About 8% of Kentucky's population is black, and can be safely assumed not to have voted for Clinton based solely on her race. Remove them, and we're talking about roughly one-third of Kentucky being openly racist. Surely there are enough racists there who are simply too shy or--one would hope, ashamed--to actually admit it to a reporter, so that probably half of the state is racist. Half the state is over 2 million people.
I grew up in Eastern Ohio in an area that fringed Appalachia and therefore had as much in common with Kentucky and West Virginia as it did with the rest of Ohio. My mother grew up in Northern Kentucky and met my father at a small college in Ohio near the Kentucky border. We used to travel to visit my grandparents in Wurtland, KY about once a year until I went to college. And still the above math shocks and disgusts me.
I don't have the article handy, but my memory tells me the percentages for West Virginia were strikingly similar. We are not dealing with an isolated phenomenon, or a glitch in the polling.
When I was younger I used to think the issue of racism was overblown, that in the 1990s it was just not as relevant as it used to be. I thought we as a nation had been through it all and had successfully turned a corner. Now I don't know. We've obviously turned some kind of a corner, but we just as obviously have further to go. Could it be that racism has breathed new life and is spreading? Have we in our haste to pat ourselves on the back for doing a good job in extending equal rights slacked off and therefore left the smoldering pit of racism too much room to sit and fester? Have we allowed it to occupy too large a corner of the demographic so that to others it might still appear legitimate?
Whatever it is, the current state of affairs in this country just isn't acceptable.
I guess this is why I try not to read too much political election news, because the results invariably anger/upset/disappoint/confuse me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/us/politics/21cnd-campaign.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Read that again.
Link at the bottom for NYTimes article.
So we have evidence that close to 20% of Democratic voters in Kentucky are admitted racists. Admitted racists. And this is the Democratic party, the supposedly more liberal and progressive party. Let's assume for a second that KY Democrats are twice as accepting as Republicans (maybe that's not fair to Republicans but it's a round number). So we can then assume that 30% of Kentuckians are openly racist. But wait, there's more. About 8% of Kentucky's population is black, and can be safely assumed not to have voted for Clinton based solely on her race. Remove them, and we're talking about roughly one-third of Kentucky being openly racist. Surely there are enough racists there who are simply too shy or--one would hope, ashamed--to actually admit it to a reporter, so that probably half of the state is racist. Half the state is over 2 million people.
I grew up in Eastern Ohio in an area that fringed Appalachia and therefore had as much in common with Kentucky and West Virginia as it did with the rest of Ohio. My mother grew up in Northern Kentucky and met my father at a small college in Ohio near the Kentucky border. We used to travel to visit my grandparents in Wurtland, KY about once a year until I went to college. And still the above math shocks and disgusts me.
I don't have the article handy, but my memory tells me the percentages for West Virginia were strikingly similar. We are not dealing with an isolated phenomenon, or a glitch in the polling.
When I was younger I used to think the issue of racism was overblown, that in the 1990s it was just not as relevant as it used to be. I thought we as a nation had been through it all and had successfully turned a corner. Now I don't know. We've obviously turned some kind of a corner, but we just as obviously have further to go. Could it be that racism has breathed new life and is spreading? Have we in our haste to pat ourselves on the back for doing a good job in extending equal rights slacked off and therefore left the smoldering pit of racism too much room to sit and fester? Have we allowed it to occupy too large a corner of the demographic so that to others it might still appear legitimate?
Whatever it is, the current state of affairs in this country just isn't acceptable.
I guess this is why I try not to read too much political election news, because the results invariably anger/upset/disappoint/confuse me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/us/politics/21cnd-campaign.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Monday, May 19, 2008
1. "God is great, you know. God is great. That's I been telling them."
"Yeah, every day, that's what they say. God is great."
"Uh-huh, God is great, every day."
-The entirety of the words heard just now during a one-floor ride on the freight elevator here at 90 Park Ave, exchanged between the elevator operator and a postal employee doing his morning rounds.
You just can't get away from it.
2. This morning on the elevator TV the news page displayed three bullet-point items. First one: "Sen Kennedy still in hospital recovering from seizure." Second one: "China plans three minutes of mourning today." The third one was of course superfluous.
3. Sara wanted me to watch "Angels in America" with her and so I did. It's six hours long, so my doing so does represent some kind of a commitment (though I did once read an 1100-page book at Jocelyn's behest, so this sort emasculation is not without precedent).
Hopefully this is not a sign of ignorance, but I was a little distracted by how gay it was early on. As it progressed, it was perfectly natural, but at the beginning it just seemed like too much. Of course I didn't know that homosexuality was the central theme, so it only made sense that nearly every character was either openly or closeted gay. Nonetheless, it took an hour or more to get used to it (as I am a fan of realism in movies).
It's a well-done movie (can you call it a film if it's made specifically for TV, in this case HBO?) based on a play that forced me to actively wonder how it might have been staged and whether or not the transformation to screen was effective. In the end I decided yes it was good but not great in this regard. The aspect that was spectacular was the acting, but then I guess it's to be expected when Al Pacino and Meryl Streep play large roles. The former is perfect for his part as he gets to do his Pacino intensity thing but he was also effectively kept in check unlike many of his more recent performances where he's just a silly representation of a charater as opposed to simply a character. I particularly enjoyed his speech patterns and general delivery (I think I might be becoming a speech/delivery fetishist regarding movies; this is also one of the main reasons I loved my boy Javier Bardem so much). Streep is also pretty much classic Streep: calm and not always the center of attention but pretty much always the best person on screen and the reason every scene she's in works so well. In this as in many of her roles, she's somewhat underappreciated unless you're looking for her.
The real reason the acting was so amazing though was not the top two names but all the rest. Everyone does very well. It's such a comprehensive display of good acting that I'm forced to give the director and the writer some credit for it. In fact, the only actor I didn't like a lot was Mary-Louis Parker, whom I think a lot of people liked. Maybe the guy who played her husband was just above-average as well, but that would be nit-picking.
Jeffrey Wright in his two roles was awesome. He played a gay queen in the most substantive one and was never ever overplaying it: that is impressive. That role was maybe the most important one in the whole movie and he was amazing. I've got to save some specific praise for a guy I'd never seen before named Justin Kirk who played what I think is the one main central character, if one exists in this movie. First thing I will say is this: I guess it's only been less than five years since this debuted, but I'm somewhat amazed that I haven't heard or seen much else from him in the interim. He played probably the most flamboyant character but like Wright he did it with a measured brilliance. As the movie progressed, I found myself wanting more and more scenes with his character, which I think is saying something considering both the talent he was surrounded by and the sheer length of the movie. I could be wrong, cause this is the only role I've ever seen him do, but if I were making a movie, no matter the subject, I think I'd find a way to get him in it, and that's about the best thing you can say for an actor.
4. In talking to her about the movie, of course encompassing the topic of homosexuality, Sara expressed to me her strong distaste for the way people use derogatory terms--even in jest and privately amongst a few friends--such as fag or retard or the like. Now, this is a definite talking point because the way I interact with people quite often is to say or do things that might knock the person off-balance a bit or make him feel uncomfortable. This can sometimes be achieved through a well-placed taboo word. I never do this in company that would be offended by it, and I'm quite sure (you can't ever be completely sure in our culture) that I don't actually harbor any predjudices or hatreds for minority groups, so I've never felt regretful about using these terms in such a way. Also, I'm actively aware of the power and the ugliness of these words (that's why I've used them for their full effect), so I feel a little more qualified than some ignorant cuss to use them every so often. However, as Sara effectively pointed out, even if somehow used respectfully or comically or privately, a word like fag is still a largely inappropriate word. It only has its power because it's derogatory and necessarily tied to it's insensitive genesis, so even using it as a jarring point in an attempted humorous way still must call to mind the ugly nature of the word, therefore of course reinforcing and perpetuating the ugliness. This is a big thing to realize.
But the biggest argument against my using these words is that, no matter how sensitive and sympathetic I may be to actual stigmatized groups of people, and no matter how certain I am that my usage of filthy words isn't directly injurious to anyone, it's really not up to me to decide whether a word is offensive or not. Since I'm not a homosexual and have never been subjected to the negative emotional impact of the word faggot, I am in no position to decide when it's ok to say it and when it's not. I thought about this for a while and concluded that it's really just that simple. And I can't now really find a way to justify using words like that, so I've resolved to stop doing it. But since it's almost second-nature to use them, albeit sparingly, I've asked Sara to mention it to me when I do slip up. So perhaps you will start to notice this in my speaking going forward. It will not be an accident. I'm curious to see how it goes.
"Yeah, every day, that's what they say. God is great."
"Uh-huh, God is great, every day."
-The entirety of the words heard just now during a one-floor ride on the freight elevator here at 90 Park Ave, exchanged between the elevator operator and a postal employee doing his morning rounds.
You just can't get away from it.
2. This morning on the elevator TV the news page displayed three bullet-point items. First one: "Sen Kennedy still in hospital recovering from seizure." Second one: "China plans three minutes of mourning today." The third one was of course superfluous.
3. Sara wanted me to watch "Angels in America" with her and so I did. It's six hours long, so my doing so does represent some kind of a commitment (though I did once read an 1100-page book at Jocelyn's behest, so this sort emasculation is not without precedent).
Hopefully this is not a sign of ignorance, but I was a little distracted by how gay it was early on. As it progressed, it was perfectly natural, but at the beginning it just seemed like too much. Of course I didn't know that homosexuality was the central theme, so it only made sense that nearly every character was either openly or closeted gay. Nonetheless, it took an hour or more to get used to it (as I am a fan of realism in movies).
It's a well-done movie (can you call it a film if it's made specifically for TV, in this case HBO?) based on a play that forced me to actively wonder how it might have been staged and whether or not the transformation to screen was effective. In the end I decided yes it was good but not great in this regard. The aspect that was spectacular was the acting, but then I guess it's to be expected when Al Pacino and Meryl Streep play large roles. The former is perfect for his part as he gets to do his Pacino intensity thing but he was also effectively kept in check unlike many of his more recent performances where he's just a silly representation of a charater as opposed to simply a character. I particularly enjoyed his speech patterns and general delivery (I think I might be becoming a speech/delivery fetishist regarding movies; this is also one of the main reasons I loved my boy Javier Bardem so much). Streep is also pretty much classic Streep: calm and not always the center of attention but pretty much always the best person on screen and the reason every scene she's in works so well. In this as in many of her roles, she's somewhat underappreciated unless you're looking for her.
The real reason the acting was so amazing though was not the top two names but all the rest. Everyone does very well. It's such a comprehensive display of good acting that I'm forced to give the director and the writer some credit for it. In fact, the only actor I didn't like a lot was Mary-Louis Parker, whom I think a lot of people liked. Maybe the guy who played her husband was just above-average as well, but that would be nit-picking.
Jeffrey Wright in his two roles was awesome. He played a gay queen in the most substantive one and was never ever overplaying it: that is impressive. That role was maybe the most important one in the whole movie and he was amazing. I've got to save some specific praise for a guy I'd never seen before named Justin Kirk who played what I think is the one main central character, if one exists in this movie. First thing I will say is this: I guess it's only been less than five years since this debuted, but I'm somewhat amazed that I haven't heard or seen much else from him in the interim. He played probably the most flamboyant character but like Wright he did it with a measured brilliance. As the movie progressed, I found myself wanting more and more scenes with his character, which I think is saying something considering both the talent he was surrounded by and the sheer length of the movie. I could be wrong, cause this is the only role I've ever seen him do, but if I were making a movie, no matter the subject, I think I'd find a way to get him in it, and that's about the best thing you can say for an actor.
4. In talking to her about the movie, of course encompassing the topic of homosexuality, Sara expressed to me her strong distaste for the way people use derogatory terms--even in jest and privately amongst a few friends--such as fag or retard or the like. Now, this is a definite talking point because the way I interact with people quite often is to say or do things that might knock the person off-balance a bit or make him feel uncomfortable. This can sometimes be achieved through a well-placed taboo word. I never do this in company that would be offended by it, and I'm quite sure (you can't ever be completely sure in our culture) that I don't actually harbor any predjudices or hatreds for minority groups, so I've never felt regretful about using these terms in such a way. Also, I'm actively aware of the power and the ugliness of these words (that's why I've used them for their full effect), so I feel a little more qualified than some ignorant cuss to use them every so often. However, as Sara effectively pointed out, even if somehow used respectfully or comically or privately, a word like fag is still a largely inappropriate word. It only has its power because it's derogatory and necessarily tied to it's insensitive genesis, so even using it as a jarring point in an attempted humorous way still must call to mind the ugly nature of the word, therefore of course reinforcing and perpetuating the ugliness. This is a big thing to realize.
But the biggest argument against my using these words is that, no matter how sensitive and sympathetic I may be to actual stigmatized groups of people, and no matter how certain I am that my usage of filthy words isn't directly injurious to anyone, it's really not up to me to decide whether a word is offensive or not. Since I'm not a homosexual and have never been subjected to the negative emotional impact of the word faggot, I am in no position to decide when it's ok to say it and when it's not. I thought about this for a while and concluded that it's really just that simple. And I can't now really find a way to justify using words like that, so I've resolved to stop doing it. But since it's almost second-nature to use them, albeit sparingly, I've asked Sara to mention it to me when I do slip up. So perhaps you will start to notice this in my speaking going forward. It will not be an accident. I'm curious to see how it goes.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
ran at least a mile more than i intended. got lost in Prospect Park. worst part of it is that the extra parts my foolishness subjected me to were largely uphill.
i have a thing about baby strollers. don't want to get into it now, but some of them seem more like aircraft carriers than simple transportation aids. this distaste is of course activated any time i come to Park Slope. on my walk from about 10th st down to 15th st, i passed six strollers. only one of which was of what i'd deem an acceptable size. i also passed one three-legged dog. he was moving slowly but seemed to be doing ok. interestingly, he hadn't been neutered. i guess the vet determined that since he didn't have two hind legs it would be somewhat difficult for him to mount a bitch. so in a twist of beautiful irony, he got to keep his manhood. his left hind leg was mere stub, and that coupled with a big pair of balls bouncing around, was rather odd to see.
i'm feeling weak in a way that's ok because i just finished running but distressing in that there is a keg being delivered here in about an hour. i sense some legitimate hot dog consumption in my future.
i have a thing about baby strollers. don't want to get into it now, but some of them seem more like aircraft carriers than simple transportation aids. this distaste is of course activated any time i come to Park Slope. on my walk from about 10th st down to 15th st, i passed six strollers. only one of which was of what i'd deem an acceptable size. i also passed one three-legged dog. he was moving slowly but seemed to be doing ok. interestingly, he hadn't been neutered. i guess the vet determined that since he didn't have two hind legs it would be somewhat difficult for him to mount a bitch. so in a twist of beautiful irony, he got to keep his manhood. his left hind leg was mere stub, and that coupled with a big pair of balls bouncing around, was rather odd to see.
i'm feeling weak in a way that's ok because i just finished running but distressing in that there is a keg being delivered here in about an hour. i sense some legitimate hot dog consumption in my future.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Manufacturing Dissent
Probably sometime today the governor of my adopted state will resign. His name is Eliot Spitzer and it seems he likes the ladies, and this is why he has to resign. My name is Josh Folger, I too like the ladies, but no one is clamoring for me to willfully unemploy myself.
Those three sentences are temptingly simple, and yet for a discerning man with a sense of perspective (me, hopefully you too), those sentences are all that's necessary. For a world that is more complex but unfortunately filled with simpler-minded people, they are woefully inadequate.
1. Why exactly is prostitution illegal?
2. Why exactly is a john completely stigmatized in our culture?
3. Why are people seemingly inherently hypocritical?
4. Why must admitted philanderers always conduct their press conferences with their wives by their side? (The wives didn't do anything, right? I can see it as a show of strength if the wife has weighed the situation and ultimately truly forgiven her husband, but what kind of woman rolls over and plays subservient so quickly?)
5. If the wife-at-press-conference is just a show, what is it in our culture that demands such a show?
6. If in fact this show isn't demanded by anything culturally intrinsic, then who is responsible for deciding that this show is needed?
7. For the person(s) responsible for making this decision, what is his motive exactly?
8. As a responsible member of the society (culture), is it our responsibility to accept (or even consider) this motive?
9. Further, must we also question the decider, the culture itself, the wife, the philanderer?
Yes, we must. And once we've finished doing that, we must finally and fundamentally question ourselves, for buying into the false escalating circle of importance in the first place, for allowing someone else to determine what's acceptable and what's not, for creating this faux world of constant posturing and acquiescing to the assumption of what's preferred by the masses, only it's not preferred by the masses, it's what has been decided that the masses prefer (should prefer), so that the masses are then being spoken for and being spoken to by the same entity and never unfortunately are they encourged to think (let alone to speak) for themselves.
Media, I'm talking to you.
I don't see why a woman can't take money from a man (or a man from a man, etc) for sexual favors if the man is willing to give it. If a doctor prescribes me a pain reliever, I am expected to pay him. Body, mind, and spirit.
I don't care that Eliot Spitzer likes a high-class ho. (Disclaimer--I would care if he was stealing from the public to pay for it.)
I am wholly unaffected by the presence of his wife at the press conference.
I am angered that those in our culture with a voice have used it to decide that all this shit is necessary, that this whole thing is even a story.
I am angered that those in our culture without a voice accept all this and respond in kind, sometimes hysterically.
Those three sentences are temptingly simple, and yet for a discerning man with a sense of perspective (me, hopefully you too), those sentences are all that's necessary. For a world that is more complex but unfortunately filled with simpler-minded people, they are woefully inadequate.
1. Why exactly is prostitution illegal?
2. Why exactly is a john completely stigmatized in our culture?
3. Why are people seemingly inherently hypocritical?
4. Why must admitted philanderers always conduct their press conferences with their wives by their side? (The wives didn't do anything, right? I can see it as a show of strength if the wife has weighed the situation and ultimately truly forgiven her husband, but what kind of woman rolls over and plays subservient so quickly?)
5. If the wife-at-press-conference is just a show, what is it in our culture that demands such a show?
6. If in fact this show isn't demanded by anything culturally intrinsic, then who is responsible for deciding that this show is needed?
7. For the person(s) responsible for making this decision, what is his motive exactly?
8. As a responsible member of the society (culture), is it our responsibility to accept (or even consider) this motive?
9. Further, must we also question the decider, the culture itself, the wife, the philanderer?
Yes, we must. And once we've finished doing that, we must finally and fundamentally question ourselves, for buying into the false escalating circle of importance in the first place, for allowing someone else to determine what's acceptable and what's not, for creating this faux world of constant posturing and acquiescing to the assumption of what's preferred by the masses, only it's not preferred by the masses, it's what has been decided that the masses prefer (should prefer), so that the masses are then being spoken for and being spoken to by the same entity and never unfortunately are they encourged to think (let alone to speak) for themselves.
Media, I'm talking to you.
I don't see why a woman can't take money from a man (or a man from a man, etc) for sexual favors if the man is willing to give it. If a doctor prescribes me a pain reliever, I am expected to pay him. Body, mind, and spirit.
I don't care that Eliot Spitzer likes a high-class ho. (Disclaimer--I would care if he was stealing from the public to pay for it.)
I am wholly unaffected by the presence of his wife at the press conference.
I am angered that those in our culture with a voice have used it to decide that all this shit is necessary, that this whole thing is even a story.
I am angered that those in our culture without a voice accept all this and respond in kind, sometimes hysterically.
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