Category Archives: people

To absent friends…

people,

Today is World AIDS Day. Each year, I spend part of the day remembering people I have known who left this world too soon because of that disease.

So: Frank, Mike, Tim, David, Todd, Chet, Jim, Steve, Brian, Rick, Stacy, Phil, Mark, Michael, Jerry, Walt, Charles, Thomas, Mike, Richard, Bob, Mikey, James, Lisa, Todd, Kerry, Glen, and Jack. Some of you I didn’t know for very long. One of you was a relative. One of you was one of my best friends in high school.

I miss you all. It was a privilege to know you.

Michael Spectre has a piece at the New Yorker that everyone ought to read (not just gay people): WHAT YOUNG GAY MEN DON’T KNOW ABOUT AIDS.

“Why’d ya do it?”

people, ,

Ant colonies in temperate regions will close off all the entrances to the colony at night to prevent the interior temperature from dropping to fatal levels. In order to properly seal the entrances, a small number of ants have to push material into the entrance and pack it down from outside. Trapped outside, they die when the temperature drops. Their sacrifice contributes to the ongoing survival of the colony, so from a genetics and evolutionary viewpoint, the death of a few members of the colony is a good thing.

Not that the ant actually thinks of that. They aren’t nobly volunteering to make this sacrifice for the rest of the colony. The species has evolved a series of behaviors in response to various stimuli, and they just do it when it’s time.

When a person like me—a very analytical guy prone to introspection, and who watches everything amd everyone looking for patterns and drawing conclusions—talks about the behavior of other people, the reasons I ascribe for their behavior are an awful lot like our academic analysis of the ants. We understand the benefit which the colony as a whole gains from the sacrifice of a few ants, but the ant doesn’t.

Most of people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about why we do the things we do. Even someone as notoriously over-analytical as me doesn’t spend much time thinking about why I’m doing something while I’m doing it. A person on the street asks me a question, and I answer. How I answer, from my tone of voice, to my body posture and facial expressions, are the result of a complicated process going on mostly unconsciously.

If I saw the person before they asked the question, likely part of my brain did an assessment of them based on how they looked and acted. I may be in a slightly defensive mode if my brain has seen similarities between them and people who have harassed me on the street in the past, for instance. I will be very defensive if my subconscious assessment has tagged them as a certain kind of prostelytizing jerk (lately more likely to be some sort of teabaggy political sort, but I’ve also been harassed by nuts of a religious variety).

I may feel quite friendly and welcoming if I recognize them—even if it is only as a stranger who has nodded and said, “good morning” when we’ve passed on that street before.

Similarly, how they behave toward me is going to be influenced by their own subconscious assessment of me based on the same sort of superficial features. I’m a short, overweight, grey-bearded white guy. Depending on the other person’s past experiences, that might mean I look harmless, or annoying, or potentially a source of unwanted attention.

So they might frown at me because I seem likely to cause them some annoyance or inconvenience. Or they may only appear to be frowning at me, but they are actually just trying to figure out what is written on the t-shirt of a person walking behind me. Or maybe they’re just squinting because of a blinding reflection from the windows on a building across the street.

So, if when they ask me a question, my tone of voice might sound annoyed or even angry, while inside I’m only aware that I’m worried that this person is going to make me late. And because I sound angry, they may give me a less than enthusiastic thank you after I give them directions to the place they can’t find.

And we both walk away thinking the other person was rude.

I try to remind myself of that when I rant about someone like the guy on the bus last week. I remember the experience from my perspective. Which has its own biases. Maybe I was the one giving off attitude and expecting other people to respect my wish to listen to my music and read my book.

Defining me

people,

I’m a member of several tribes.

I’m queer. I end up writing a lot about LGBT issues because:

  • I’m gay;
  • society is still pretty messed up in how it deals with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and otherwise queer people;
  • many parts of society are becoming less biased about all of that, so there is frequently cool news to share about that;
  • and the parts of society that aren’t feel threatened by all this change and are going to ever more ridiculous efforts to make us go away, which also generates news items worth sharing (or ranting) about.

I’m a nerd. I write slightly less frequently about fantasy, science fiction, and related subjects. But a rather larger portion of my life is involved in pursuing various forms of the fantastic than everything else. It forms another of my tribes. Or a loose confederacy of a bunch of related tribes. Or something.

I’m a geek. I majored in mathematics in university, and took some classes that were supposed to be only for engineering and physics majors. I work with computers. I was a LAN administrator back when most companies didn’t have IT departments, I have racked and stacked, I’m reasonably fluent at the command line of UNIX and Linux systems, I’ve done a bit of programming, I design interfaces, and I routinely figure out (and by figure out, I mean digging into configuration files and scripts and sometimes compiled components and making the software do stuff they don’t tell you it can do) large complicated software systems without consulting manuals.

I’m a writer. By avocation I’m a storyteller. I’ve been lucky enough that my day job has been about writing/creating/designing documentation for a quarter of a century now. I’m at a point in my career where I do a lot more information architecture than actual typing of words, but it’s all about telling someone about something and how to use it. At home I write fantasy, science fiction, and mysteries. Sometimes I get them published. Sometimes I publish them myself.

I make art. I’m not great at drawing or painting, though I do both. I am pretty good at designing books and book covers. I’m inordinately fond of fonts. I sing, I compose music, I play some instruments. I assemble unrelated bits and pieces into weird wholes which some people find interesting.

I’m a collector:

  • Books
  • Dictionaries
  • Dice
  • Plushies
  • Gadgets
  • Pencils
  • Encyclopdias
  • Music
  • Tigers
  • Toys
  • T-shirts
  • Otters
  • Reference books
  • Sketchbooks
  • Ponies
  • Movies

I love purple. Of all the tribes to which I belong, the purple tribe is perhaps the hardest to explain to non-members. It isn’t just about the color, but purple is everything.

I believe. I believe that the universe makes sense on a fundamental level, even though it is also deeply weird and fuzzy. I believe in the power of mathematics, which is just a way of saying that I believe in the power of thinking, because mathematics is simply an extremely formalized way of applying our thinking processes. I believe that people are capable of breathtakingly beautiful acts of love and kindness. I believe that there are absolute matters of right and wrong, but an infinite variety of mitigation; and by absolute I do mean absolute—morality doesn’t come from a divine being, if divine beings exist he/she/they are subject to morality and just as capable as we are of screwing up.

Hi, I’m Gene, and I’m a ________.

You’ll feel different when…

life, love, people, ,

When I was in my late teens, I once got into a peculiar argument with a slightly older friend. I had made a comment to the effect that I could never see myself being happy living in a city. It had taken me a few years to get used to living in a town that was big enough to require more than one high school, after spending most of my life living in very small towns.

He was attending college in a nearby city at the time. He said he had felt the same way just a few years before. “You haven’t actually lived in a city,” he pointed out. “You’ll feel differently after you do.”

At least, that’s what I heard. It is quite possible that he actually said, “You may feel differently,” but I heard the firm assertion that he knew exactly how I would feel, and it activated my obstinate streak. I pointed out that I had been visiting a couple of cities fairly regularly, and I had a pretty good idea what they were like. Except I probably said it a bit meaner. I know I made a lot of disparaging observations about cities during the course of it.

A year or so later, I was attending college in a city. By the time I finished college, I had some good job prospects, and I had become quite enamored with several aspects of city life. So I stayed. And the longer I stayed, the more I liked living here. When I visit my mom in the town where I went to high school, I find I feel a lot differently about several aspects of living there which I used to think of as advantages.

My friend was right, and I was wrong.

Another time another friend and I had gotten into a discussion about my dismal love life. Most of the time there had been no love life at all. The few exceptions had failed spectacularly, though each in a different way. I trusted this friend more than I had ever trusted anyone, so I told him that I suspected I was bisexual, and I thought that perhaps that might be playing into my difficulties.

He immediately asserted that 1) I could not possibly be bi, and 2) once I stop doubting myself I would find the perfect girl for me. He argued his point with such emphatic certainty, that I doubted my own feelings and experiences.

Of course, I wasn’t being entirely honest. I didn’t merely suspect that I was not heterosexual. I had quite incontrovertible evidence. My friend was also operating under the same societal brainwashing that was responsible for the megaton of internalized homophobia I was carrying around at the time.

Eventually, I worked through that baggage (though it got more than a bit messy) and came to understand that my friend was wrong. I had only been half-right in understanding myself and my future, but the half I was wrong about was part and parcel of the parts he was wrong about.

Of course, one could argue that my friend was partially correct. Because eventually I did find the right person for me—a guy who made me so happy, who I couldn’t imagine living without, and who made me brave enough to stop living the lie of being closeted.

Our fairytale ending didn’t last as long as I hoped—Ray died a bit over six years after we moved in together. I had to figure out how to have a life that no longer had him in it. I have since been lucky enough to fall in love with another wonderful man, who has stuck with me for 15 years, so far, and even said “I do” when we finally could do so, legally, a few months ago.

The two friends who were adamantly convinced that I would feel differently one day were correct that my perspective changed, but their certainty about the way my perspective would change was at best guess work. It was also a bit of projection. Like people who insist that another person saying they don’t want to have kids “will feel different when you have your own,” they’re unable to conceive of anyone being happy and fulfilled living differently than themselves.

Just like I was when arguing with my first friend that I’d never be happy in the city.

Because we all do it. At one time or another everyone has either offered advice along that line. Or we’ve complained to a mutual friend, wondering why the person doesn’t see the obvious solution and do things this way. We may be right that there’s a better way, but it isn’t our life. No matter how smart or sympathetic we think we are, we don’t know what it’s like to be them.

Douche-dar

people,

You know how sometimes the moment you meet some one you just know, before they say a single word, that you’re just not going to get along? Usually you can’t put your finger on it. It’s just a gut feeling. Something about the other person just puts you off right away.

The term “gaydar” has been around for a long time, referring originally to the ability of some gay men to identify closeted gay men through casual interaction. It’s been broadened over the years to refer more generically to the ability (or inability) of people to intuitively guess another person’s sexual orientation through a variety of non-verbal cues. A humorous discussion of occurs in the lyrics of the Ari Gold & Kendra Ross duet, “He’s on My Team”:

For a long time people explained the phenomenon away as being about looking for stereotypical behaviors, hair styles, and so on. But there have been numerous studies that show that people can guess a person’s sexual orientation correctly at a rate significantly above pure chance from very incomplete information. My personal favorite was the one that showed test subjects photos cropped down to a rectangle that showed only the person’s eyes, not even the entire eyebrow, so just the bridge of the nose and two eyes, nothing else.

On the other hand, some studies have shown that things people assume would be a giveaway aren’t. A study of whether the way a person walked could identify orientation showed that people did only slightly better than a coin toss at guessing correctly. Others have shown that even though watching extremely brief, silent video of a person’s mouth (other parts of the face not shown) while talking was enough to let people guess the sexual orientation of a person correctly, listening to recordings of a person talking is not.

My personal gaydar’s accuracy is spotty. I have a few amusing stories of not only not realizing another guy was gay, but completely misinterpreting his attempts to flirt. On the other hand, there have been a few guys I was certain were gay or bi, who friends insisted couldn’t possibly be, that I eventually learned were.

But while my gaydar can’t be relied upon, my douche-dar is a finely honed instrument. I can spot that arrogant jerk who blends an inflated sense of self-worth with a complete ignorance of how unpleasant others find him, compounded by a lack of manners. He’s the sort of person who uses “I’m just being honest” as an excuse to be rude, cruel, and nasty. He thinks he’s the life of the party because people are frequently laughing around him, because he doesn’t realize that sometimes they are laughing at him instead of with, but even more importantly, he doesn’t understand that laughing is often a self-defense mechanism. People laugh when someone is being mean to them as a way to communicate that they aren’t a threat. It’s a nonverbal way of saying, “Please, don’t hurt me!”

They aren’t completely lacking in social skills, they just lean very heavily on the manipulation and coercion end of the scale. So they have “friends” but this crowd generally falls into three categories:

  • Other douchebags—though usually minor or wannabe douchebags. Like scavengers following a big predator to live off the scraps.
  • Codependent victims. These people have very low self-esteem or suffer from some other emotional baggage that makes being a punching bag or the butt of the douche’s jokes seem like better than being lonely. The group includes the douche’s boyfriend/girlfriend.
  • People who have some social obligation to spend time and be civil to this person, as much as they’d rather not. Includes relatives of people in the first two categories.

I don’t know what cues I pick up on with these guys. I have correctly assessed the personality traits from a single photograph seen before meeting the person. I’ve even correctly guessed it from watching them play a completely different character in a dramatic production. And so far as I know, I’ve never been wrong.

Seriously. So I wasn’t surprised when the star of a long running TV show which has a very active fan following that writes lots of slash-fic lashed out at a question about gay subtext at a recent convention, ending his spiel by yelling that, “Normal people aren’t gay!”

Guess I’m glad I disliked the show when I watched the pilot eight years ago, huh?

Regret is the mind killer

people, , , , ,

I read this great post, “The Reading Police of the Young,” and found myself remembering the weirdly inconsistent way my reading habits were monitored when I was a kid.

For example, I remember longing to read my mom’s copy of Dune, the paperback sitting squeezed between a bunch of her Agathe Christies and Robert Heinleins. Mom had told me I wasn’t old enough after she finished it. When she realized I kept looking at the book–not reading it, not even opening it, just looking at the cover–she moved it to the small shelf in the bedroom, the one that had Dad’s books that I wasn’t allowed to read (mostly Matt Helm and James Bond books, whose sexual situations were considered pornographic back in the day, but are rather quaint and downright prudish when compared to modern prime time fare).

And so I wondered what forbidden topics were hidden within. When I finally did read it, some time in my teens, I was a bit disappointed. Not at the book, I found the story quite interesting. I was disappointed because there didn’t seem to be anything in it that should have been forbidden.

I mean, yes, it is clear that the Baron has a thing for pretty young men, but there is nothing about the way it is described that anyone could call erotic. And Herbert’s unconcealed homophobia, manifested primarily with the old cliche that the more gay a character is, the more evil they are, should have resonated quite nicely with Mom’s evangelical sensibilities.

Those evangelical sensibilities waxed and waned throughout my childhood. At one point she was encouraging me to read Asimov (both his fiction and nonfiction), Tolkein, LeGuin, and Bradbury. At another point we had the first book-burning incident–when under the influence of a new pastor, she decided that the astronomy books I’d checked out from the library were astrology books, and since astrology is the same as satanism, the books needed to be destroyed.

(I still occasionally have bad dreams that include a reenactment of my tearful explanation to the librarians about why I couldn’t bring the books back. When they called Mom to ask for the books, she harangued them for letting children check out satanic books. The library set up a special spot for my books from then on. I could check out books and read them in the library, but couldn’t take them home.)

The second book-burning had been Dad. Dad’s reasons weren’t overtly religious, my dad is the kind of atheist who is angry at god for not existing (think about that for a bit). No, he decided that I was getting bullied at school so much because I spent too much time “living in a fantasy world.” His book burning was worse because he forced me to pile up the books, pour the accellerant on, light the match, and watch it burn. With random slaps and punches because I was crying while doing it.

Then a year or so later, he bought me an encyclopedia set and told me that I was going to go to college and “make something of yourself” or else.

For the longest time I attributed those mixed messages to the ebb and flow of Dad’s alcoholism and abusive behavior. The worse Dad got, the more intense Mom’s fundamentalism got. When Dad appeared to be changing for the better, Mom loosened up and re-embraced her inner sci fi and comics fangirl.

Those were definitely major factors in the dysfunction in our family, but I wonder how much of the inconsistency was also due to their youth. My parents were both 16 years old when they married, then I was born 6 days before my dad’s 18th birthday. Current brain research indicates that the prefontal cortext (the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, foreseeing consequences, emotional modulation, et cetera) doesn’t fully develop until around the age of 25.

That couldn’t have helped.

While both of them were readers who believed in the value of education, I know both of them felt they hadn’t done as much with their own lives as they could have or ought to have. So while hope for their kids drove some of their decisions, regret played a very big role, as well. Regret drove them to push me to do better in school, which is a good goal. But regret also drove them to micromanage my behavior on all levels, which isn’t just impractical, but if they had been successful would have had the opposite of the desired effect.

We can’t learn how to do anything correctly without learning from our mistakes as well as our successes. That’s just as true for thinking and imagining as it is for basketball or playing the piano. And while there is value in studying what other people have done, it isn’t sufficient. You have to try, fail, and improve on your own. Avoiding someone else’s mistake is no guarantee you won’t make new mistakes. Trying to duplicate someone else’s success may help you find a good way to do something, but it should also lead you to new directions they couldn’t explore.

And when you are buried in your own frustrations and regrets, you’re least likely to possess the objectivitely required to identity just which if your own past actions were mistakes, and which weren’t.

Regret, in that case, becomes both the mind-killer and dream-destroyer. You can’t wallow in the regret. Face it, yes. Let it serve its purpose of motivating you to do better. But then, let go. And become the better you.

Abyss gazing

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It was 1986 and I was twenty-six years old, attending a regional science fiction convention with a bunch of my friends. One of the guests of honor was an author (we’ll call him Mr. C) that two of my friends were very fond of. I had read a couple of his short stories and thought they were good, but he hadn’t really wowed me.

But hearing Mr. C talk about the writing process, his influences, and so forth, made me much more intrigued. It didn’t hurt that when another panelist made a disparaging joke about my favorite science fiction author (who was not in attendance), Mr. C rather emphatically jumped to the defense of my favorite author.

After that panel, one of my friends commented that Mr. C’s takedown of the other panelist had been mean. It was true. Mr. C had ended the rebuttal with something along the lines, “…and it infuriates me when writers who don’t have a fraction of his understanding of how to write or a sliver of his talent make thoughtless critiques.” But, she had called my favorite author a fossil, I pointed out. Once one makes an ad hominem attack, you invite something similar in return. Since it was my favorite author being defended, I was more than a bit prejudiced.

So I wound up standing in line with one of my friends, clutching a pair of just-purchased books of Mr. C’s work, waiting for his autograph. That is the one and only time I have met Mr. C in person. He was pleasant enough, despite having had to smile, listen, and sign however hundreds of times.

After the convention, I tried to read one of the books. It was a collection of his short stories, which included the couple I had read before. They weren’t bad by any means, but after reading a few in a row, an unsatisfying feeling was developing. I sat the book down, not quite sure why I wasn’t enjoying the reading.

A few weeks later, I picked it up again and started on the next story. Again, the story itself was well written and interesting. I read another, then started on the next after that and, well, a few paragraphs in I realized that same feeling of wrongness was building up.

I did eventually finish the collection, but it took a few months, reading only a few stories at a time. And by the end I couldn’t really say that I’d enjoyed them all, but I also couldn’t put my finger on their shortcomings.

The other book was a novel. A novel for which he had won a lot of awards. It was based on one of the short stories in the previous collection. And the short story in question had been one of those I had enjoyed more than the others. Plus, I had friends who swore this book was a masterpiece. And it had garnered all those awards, so it had to be good, right?

I couldn’t finish it. I don’t think I’d even gotten a quarter of the way through before I found myself intensely disliking it.

I tried explaining what I didn’t like about it to one of my friends who loved it. As we were talking, I kept finding myself talking about abstract concepts, rather than actual events in the story. My friend said it sounded more like my baggage than the story. So I started explaining how a similar philosophical assumption underpinned one of the short stories. And that’s when I finally managed to connect the dots and say what was bothering me about all of the stories.

There was a fundamental notion forming the foundation of all the tales: if you don’t know your place and stay in it, horrible things will happen to you. A corrollary was that if you prevented someone else from achieving what was “rightfully” theirs, even more horrible things would happen to you.

When I articulated that, my friend began to argue. That wasn’t what was going on at all, he said. So then I made a guess at how the book I hadn’t finished would end. Specifically what would happen to certain characters.

My friend blinked. “How did you know?”

“Because, if you don’t know your place and stay there, forces, whether they be social, cultural, or fate, will strike you down. And if you stand in the way of someone else’s destiny—”

My friend grinned and interrupted. “Oh, wow! You’re right! That’s so messed up, because it’s like the opposite of what the main character says, but it’s really what happens!”

“Mr. C believes in hierarchical, patriarchic societies in which you behave according to societal expectations, and people who have the temerity to want to choose their own way of living are evil,” I said.

My friend shrugged and said, “You’re probably right. But I still love the stories.”

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Just a few years later, a controversy erupted in a forum dedicated to Mr C on the (now long defunct) Prodigy network. The controversy was about a protagonist in another of Mr. C’s novels who experimented with gay sex midway through the book. Some people were angry Mr. C had included an “abomination” as a sympathetic character. Others thought people who thought gay people were abominations were bigots.

As the arguments raged, Mr. C waded in with a rather long discussion about the sin of homosexuality, why he felt he had to include it in the book (his reasoning, as I recall, was that in any community where people amass power there will be people who must dominate, possess, and destroy others, and of course homosexuality is all about dominating and destroying each other), and then had the gall to claim that anyone who called him homophobic were themselves bigots. Because he didn’t hate any gay people. They were just sinners, and if they refused to repent and stop being gay, well, they would face consequences.

His comments were quoted far and wide. And he got angrier and angrier as people “mischaracterized” his comments. He repeated, again and again, that he didn’t hate gay people. He wound up writing (in 1990) a long essay and getting it published in a magazine that catered to the members of the church Mr. C had been raised in, in order to explain his side in context.

While the essay repeatedly said that he did not condone violence against sinful people, it talked about how just as children must be punished in order to learn right from wrong, then adults will face greater penalties when they continue to act outside the bounds of propriety. He talked abstractly about the “day of grief” that each homosexual would eventually experience if they did not repent. He talked about the horrible consequences homosexuals face if they refuse to adhere to propriety. But he was not advocating violence even then, he said. If the faithful, such as himself, had been compassionate but firm in condemning the sin, they would “keep ourselves unspotted by the blood of this generation.”

It’s an old lie that bigots of a religious persuasion tell themselves all the time. They don’t advocate or condone violence, it’s just that god’s law causes these things. And when it happens, they pretend that the people who did resort to violence never took all the words of condemnation as permission to commit violence.

Think about it: if it’s god’s will that homosexuals should experience a “day of grief”; if god’s law demands that “blood of this generation” must be shed, then the person who inflicts the violence is doing god’s will. They are a special tool of god!

Heck, it isn’t just permission to commit violence: it’s encouragement!

I had already guessed most of this about Mr. C before he began writing publicly about his reasons for opposing the decriminalization of gay sex and other topics back in 1990. And so I had already made my decision not to buy any more of his books. I didn’t post rants about him, nor try to organize boycotts of his work. If I was asked, I would say that I disagreed with what I perceived to be the underlying philosophy espoused by his work.

Once he did make his very public statements, I felt it was appropriate to go a step further and point out that Mr. C was a hypocrite and a bigot who advocated against the rights of myself and others. I would suggest that perhaps there were other writers whose works were more deserving of people’s money, but wouldn’t go further.

In the years since, he has continued to write and speak out against gay rights of all sorts, eventually becoming an officer for a large organization that says it is out to protect “traditional marriage.” They try to portray themselves as narrowly focused on marriage, but anyone paying attention to their rhetoric and some of the other causes they support, can see that they want to roll back the few rights gay people have won. He donates his own money to the cause, he has organized efforts that have raised millions of dollars for the cause. He has claimed victory for every anti-gay amendment, law, proposition, or initiative that has been passed in the last ten years.

He has, now, gone far beyond the point of simply stating his opinion and trying to persuade others to it. He has gone beyond that disingenuous tactic of saying he was opposed to violence while providing double-speak that actually encouraged it. He has helped spread distortions and outright lies about all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons. His organization has refused to obey public disclosure laws regarding their election activities in several states. He continues to fight to prevent gays, lesbians, trans people, and bisexuals full equality before the law. He continues to put forward arguments to take away what rights have been extended.

So, for that reason, yes, I agree with the people who have been disappointed that DC Comics hired him to write a prominent new Superman series. Yes, I support the comic book shop owners who have said they will not sell comics written by him. I support the artist who decided not to illustrate his stories after learning of Mr C’s views and activities. I urge everyone I know not to buy things he writes, not to go see the movie that is being made of his most famous novel.

I re-iterate: this isn’t just about a difference of opinion regarding marriage equality. For over 20 years he has advocated for restoring laws that made it a crime for consenting adults to have gay sex in the privacy of their own homes, and against laws that protect people from being fired, evicted, or denied medical care just because they are gay. And he has done more than just advocate those things, he has taken action to make them happen. It is not hypocritical of us to advocate a voluntary boycott of his work, it is hypocritical of him and his apologists to decry a voluntary boycott while they are campaigning for laws that will take away jobs, housing, health care, and more from entire classes of people.

Orson Scott Card is a hypocrite and a bigot who uses distortions and outright lies to hurt innocent people. Those are the facts.

In traffic

people,

Yesterday while I was waiting for my bus to go to work, I watched a woman dressed oddly step off the curb across the street. The street in question is a six-lane major arterial that is nicknamed, among regional transportation professionals, “the little freeway.” It isn’t an actual highway, but it is very busy, and drivers routinely zoom along over the speed limit.

She stepped off right in front of a car. My heart jumped a beat. The driver swerved and missed her (luckily the next lane had an opening for him to swerve into). The driver tapped his horn. Just a quick tap, not a long, angry lean on the button thing. The woman flipped off the car and started shouting.

She did not retreat to the curb. She ambled further, crossing lanes, as cars stopped for the crazy person. She kept yelling angrily, occassionally flipping the bird in random directions as she craned her neck and tried to look over all the cars now stopped for her, as if she were trying to see if a bus was coming (there’s a big bus stop going the other way right across from the one I catch my work bus to).

Still yelling angrily, she ambled back to the curb and started walking toward the corner.

Traffic began moving again.

She got to the corner, and without waiting for the light or even looking, she stepped off in the crosswalk. Again, miraculalously, cars stopped. She crossed, getting honked at only one more time. Once she reached our side, she was still angrily yelling, apparently at some invisible person right in front of her.

I had a brief moment of worry that the crazy lady was going to try to get on our bus (which was one of the vehicles that had had to stop to let her cross). She didn’t; she stalked right through the crowd waiting for the bus, yelling all the way, without meeting anyone’s eyes.

Later, during lunch, I was reading my usual news sites. At about the same time this lady was playing chicken with traffic, in another part of town, a man was seen sitting in the middle of a road. His legs were crossed, elbows on hos knees, and his face buried in his hands as if he were crying. A couple pedestrian passers-by called to him to get out of the road. One stepped off the curb and approached him.

A car came careening down the road. The bypasser who had stepped off the curb jumped back. The car did not stop. It struck the man, killing him, and kept going as if nothing had happened. Police apprehended him a short distance away. The 23-year-old has been booked into jail for driving under the influence and vehicular homicide.

Reading that made my heart skip a beat again, and I marvelled, briefly, that the woman I watched had avoided a similar fate.

In the evening, shortly after I got home, my husband came into the house and told me about his day. The second thing he told me was that he had been run over on his way into work. He rides his bike to and from work. He said he was riding along in the bike lane, when a woman chatting on her cell phone suddenly turned right.

“I was banging on the front of the car after she stopped, trying to get her to back up, because my leg was pinned under my bike, which was pinned under her car.”

He insisted he was uninjured, and I couldn’t prove otherwise. Amazingly, all he had to do for the bike was replace his front tire. There’s a bicycle repair shop right next to his place of work.

He rode the bike home from work.

Three times, yesterday, traffic incidents made my heart skip a beat.

Of the stories, the one that still amazes me most is the crazy lady who was never struck. Not because she did anything to protect herself. It was entirely because a large number of drivers were alert enough to see her and stop.

The saddest is the guy killed by the drunk driver. Why was he sitting in the rode? Was he mentally ill or severely impaired and just didn’t realize where he was? Was there some sort of medical issue playing out? Was he hoping to get killed? We’ll never know.

The one that most frightens me, of course, is my husband’s accident. Unlike the others, he was right where he was supposed to be: obeying the laws, wearing his helmet, flashing lights on his bicycle, the whole thing. He came only inches from injury or far worse because a driver was paying more attention to something other than her driving.

I don’t tell him I love him often enough.

Not an excuse

people,

During the last 27 years I have shaved off my beard exactly twice. Both times it was for a Halloween costume. The first time, a friend who was attending one of the parties we went to had just completed medical school the year before and was in his internship. I had noticed him looking at me oddly. The first time I attributed it to this being the first time he’d seen me without a beard.

Eventually he asked, “So, how did you get your lip tore so badly it required stitches?”

I had forgotten about the scar. I didn’t think it was that noticeable even when there wasn’t facial hair to hide it.

So I told him the story of one of my dad’s worse drunken Sunday afternoons when I was 10 years old, and how he’d come to beat me badly enough to break my collar bone, split my lip, and so on. This led other people who had starting listening in to ask some questions, so I wound up talking way more about Dad’s abusive behavior than I like. The sum up is: I, my sister, and our half siblings each has our own small collection of physical scars thanks to dad’s beatings.

One of the people listening observed, “Wow! You seem so much more together than I would expect.”

I made some kind of self-deprecating comment, such as, “Oh, I’m far less sane than you realize” or something, and tried to change the subject.

One of the others started telling a story of an ex who had had a similarly abusive childhood, and how incredibly messed up he was after. A couple others chimed in with similar tales. And then one person said he had known a few people like that, who blamed every time they screwed up—particularly when they hurt people close to them—on that abusive childhood.

“It’s just an excuse to be as thoughtless and irresponsible as they’d like,” he said. And then looked at me as if the fact that I at least try to think and be responsible proves his statement.

Which I wasn’t completely comfortable with. I agree that a dysfunctional childhood isn’t an excuse for such behavior, but life is very seldom as simple as that.

My paternal grandmother doesn’t believe in mental illness. She would insist that it’s all just excuses or someone wanting attention. Never mind that for some mental illness we can point to specific physical problems in the brain, or a lack of ability to produce or regulate a particular neurochemical, she always believed that if the mentally ill person wanted to be well, they would be. This was particularly troublesome when one of my sisters began having epileptic seizures, and grandma announced that as far as she was concerned, epilepsy was in the same category as mental illness, and it wasn’t a real problem at all.

So, while I agree that a bad childhood doesn’t excuse any and all bad or troublesome behaviors a person may exhibit in adulthood, it’s no less arrogant and cruel to dismiss those experiences as totally irrelevant than my grandmother’s thoughts on epilepsy.

It is a gross oversimplification to say that people like me have “gotten over it” and everyone else is just using it as an excuse. More accurate to say that some coping strategies are more socially acceptable and less disruptive than others.

While I do think that I’ve done a fairly good job of moving past that unfortunate history, I can’t honestly take all the credit. Some of it is just luck. I inherited a certain amount of arrogance and bullheadedness from that same abusive father, reinforced by an extra dose of stubborn refusal to give up from the grandmother on Mom’s side of the family. When my parents finally divorced and we moved more than 1000 miles from Dad, I was lucky enough to find a group of sci fi geeks and music nerds my own age. That gave me a new sense of family and belonging I hadn’t had before. I’ve built a career out of a knack for language, a predilection for troubleshooting, a level of curiosity some might describe as unhealthy, and a compulsion for explaining things to anyone I can corner.

A lot of my “talents” would be exceedingly annoying characteristics in a different context.

Which isn’t to say that we are obligated to put up with behavior from someone who doesn’t seem to want to change. We all have our limits. Sometimes we have to make that cold calculation: is having this person in my life worth the effort and trouble they put me through? If the answer is “no,” then we find a way to gracefully bow out of their life. No need to make a dramatic statement, or try to convince everyone else to drop the friend. Drastic measures are only required if someone’s health or safety is in danger, or if the other person willfully pursues you and tries to drag you back into their crazy.

Because troubling or annoying behavior isn’t an excuse for you to be a jerk.

Too young to remember

life, people, ,

“You’re probably too young to remember…” was a phrase that sometimes I dreaded. Other times it signaled a bit of a history lesson I would find interesting.

I’m not entirely happy with how often I find myself using that line. It’s just a natural consequence of getting older. But that’s the problem. We’re not socialized to be happy about getting older.

I’ve known people who got quite radical and angry when they heard that phrase. “It’s nothing more than an ageist attempt to disempower me for being young!” Which sometimes it can be, but most of the time it is simply a literal statement of fact: you weren’t alive when such and such happened, so you have no personal memories of the event.

I read the phrase this morning on a few news blogs because the man who played the clown host of a morning children’s show that was popular in the 60s and 70s died last night.

I don’t have the excuse of being too young to remember the glory days of his show, but I don’t remember them. It was a show produced and seen only on a Seattle channel, and when I was young enough to be in the target age, I lived far, far away. So I’m just as detached as a bunch of much younger people about this. I can understand, in the abstract, how people feel, but I may never quite get it.

He never completely retired, continuing to make public appearances, raise money for charity, and so on, showing up in his patchwork painted limosine. By random chance earlier this year I nearly attended his final public appearance. I was buying salmon at the wild salmon market at fisherman’s terminal and confused that there was a giant crowd of people, and a bunch were wearing red clown noses. Then, as I was driving home, I passed his limo going the other way.

The memories of some experiences we have sometimes carry far more emotional weight and importance to us years after the fact than we expect them to. And that can be hard to explain to another person. When we describe it, even to us, it sounds silly. So he told some jokes and acted silly on screen. And you watched it every single morning when you were supposed to be getting ready for school. And?

But we all have experiences like that. It might be a family ritual, or a thing we used to do in church, or a favorite food at a chain restaurant.

In the abstract it is no big deal. But the human heart doesn’t live in the abstract.