Tag Archives: people

What you like, what other people like…

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How to be an adult: eat what you like to eat, don't eat what you don't like, and mind your own damn business about what other people eat.
How to be an adult…(Click to embiggen)
I was rather amazed at a conversation that went past one of my social media streams: one person said, “What? You mean candy corn is supposed to look like real corn???” and another said, “I had no idea! Why had no one ever told me?” and a third said, “This changes everything I thought I knew!” And all three were people who said they loved candy corn and always had.

I was too busy being flabbergasted that someone who was smart enough to operate a keyboard, was apparently an adult, had survived many years of having to defend their love of this strangely polarizing candy, had never realized that the little candies are essentially caricatures of kernals of corn (sweet corn, maize, et cetera). Seriously? How can you never at least ask, “Why is it called ‘candy corn’?”

mystery-seed-104-2Okay, to be fair, I realize that there are people who go through life without ever seeing seed corn or feed corn. They may have seen corn on the cob and actually eaten it, but otherwise the only time they’ve seen corn is processed corn kernels cut-off the cob by a machine, then canned or frozen before being cooked and served. And those cut kernels don’t look like a full kernal of corn. It’s similar to the time when I was talking to someone about popcorn and discovered that they had never realized that the seed in popcorn were actual dried corn, the same plant (though a different cultivar or subspecies) as is canned and sold as corn. Or the time that I had to explain to someone what the phrase “seed corn” meant—they had never known that the vegetable they were eating were actually the seeds of the corn plant!

I don’t know what it is about candy corn that gets some people up in arms. I’m not saying that I don’t understand that some people like it and some don’t. What I don’t understand is why some people dislike it so much that they make other people feel defensive about liking candy corn.

I don’t happen to be one of the great fans of the candy. I don’t dislike it, but it doesn’t really do anything for me. When I was a kid, I liked the color and the shininess of the candy. It probably helped that it was a seasonal thing that was only available around Halloween time. But I would gladly let me sister eat nearly all of it herself and not feel that I was losing out. Yes, that means one of my sisters is one of those people who absolutely adore candy corn.

I sometimes take comfort in that fact that people can get militant about something like candy. Because when I read about things like this: Hate group (World Congress of Families) looks to criminalize gays on global scale my initial reaction is a combination of fear and depression. Then I realize that a lot of their supporters are just being as irrational as the folks who hate on candy corn. Which isn’t to say that none of this hatred is real: Dallas Police Seek Public’s Help In Solving String of Brutal Anti-Gay Attacks or Trans Woman Run Over With SUV In Possible Hate Crime Is 17th Murdered This Year or Study finds LGBT people not reporting hate crimes because they happen so frequently.

The kind of irrationality that makes people trash others over candy is part of the reason that folks either stand by silently while nutjobs at the World Conference of Families spout off their hate, or why people can look at death and rape threats hurled about by GamerGaters and make the ridiculous claims that there are two sides to the argument.

Hint: if a group is resorting to death threats, rape threats, doxing, and bomb threats, that isn’t an argument. It is a crime. That “side” is the perpetrator. Period. The other “side” are victims. Period. If you claim that it is a “side” then you are an accessory after the fact to a crime. Period.

And you’re being ridiculous and childish. As childish as someone getting angry at people over a candy preference.

And it’s so silly. It isn’t like we’re talking about something truly important.

Pronoun trouble

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Bugs and Elmer are © and ® Warner Brothers.
Bugs and Elmer are © and ® Warner Brothers.

Unlike Bugs Bunny, I have never been terribly good at drag. Part of the problem is simply a lack of practice, to be honest. Contrary to the stereotypes that some people still hold onto, not every gay many wants to be a a woman or do drag. Another part is I’m hairier than a hobbit. The vast majority of my adult life I’ve been bearded, (and I literally don’t have much practice at shaving my own face, either).

When I was a kid people used to talk about men who had five o’clock shadow: their beards were so dense or fast growing that after shaving in the morning before going to work, by late afternoon they had a noticeable “shadow” of stubble on their face. My dad had something like 10:00am shadow, and by the time I was in my early twenties I had it, too.

Even when I have silly expressions, in person I'm almost always called "sir."
Even when I’m being silly, in person I’m almost always called “sir.”

Despite that, I am no stranger to being mis-gendered. Back in the days when people used phones to (verbally)  talk to other people in distant locations (I think it was the early Triassic), I was constantly being addressed as “ma’am” on the phone. Never mind that when I was still regularly singing that I can hit an E-flat below the bass clef and was usually stuck in the bass section (because choruses never have enough basses), I clearly talk in my upper register. It isn’t something I consciously do. In fact, because the “way” I talk was frequently the excuse for a lot of the bullying I experienced in school (and teachers and administrators were always mentioning to my parents that I’d surely get along better in school if I could just stop talking like “that”) I went through quite a long phase of trying to talk in my lower register.

And it was irritating, to say the least, to have customer service people and other strangers on the phone call my “ma’am” or “miss.” So I can barely imagine how infuriating and demeaning it must feel for trans* people when others call them the wrong pronoun.

Especially when it is being done on purpose. It’s rude and disrespectful. And it infuriates me that there are people who claim that they don’t understand why it is rude. The very same people would get upset if someone refused to address them by their preferred name, right? I’ve known many grown men whose legal name is Thomas who absolutely despise being called “Tommy” for instance. So why is it so hard to wrap your head around preferred pronouns?

Of course, just like those people who would call me “ma’am” on the phone weren’t being intentionally rude, sometimes we use the wrong pronoun because we don’t know or we forget. When a person who is trans*, agender, or gender-fluid is a good friend or close colleague or family member, it’s easy to remember their pronouns. But when it’s at best a casual acquaintance or one of a bunch of strangers you’ve just met, it’s a lot harder.

There are also pronouns that are difficult. A trans woman acquaintance who prefers she/her/hers is fairly easy to remember. A genderqueer casual acquaintance who prefers they/them/theirs is a teensy bit more awkward for some of us. And then there’s the one trans* person who preferred to be called it. That word just has so much emotional baggage for me—bigots of many stripes I’ve had to endure loved calling anyone who was gay, lesbian, in any way gender non-conforming, or otherwise not conforming to their ideas of being “it.” I’ve known racists who referred to anyone non-white and with an accent “it.” I’ve known people bigots of other kinds who call atheists “it” for goodness sake! The point is that I carry a lot of emotional baggage with that word, and can’t use it myself without feeling that I’m dehumanizing someone. 

Which is not a justification for intentionally using a non-preferred pronoun. When you can’t remember or have some other difficulty with someone’s preferred pronoun, it is perfectly okay to just call them by their name. It isn’t that difficult to phrase things without pronouns. And it’s not a bad habit to get into with everyone you interact with, because the other kind of pronoun problem still occurs with everyone. If you use people’s names, everyone is less likely to be confused, in any case.

If you don’t remember someone’s name, well, there are ways to fix this. “Hi! I know we were introduced earlier, but I’m always getting names mixed up. I’m Gene, nice to meet you!” Admit to being less than perfect, and show that you’re making an effort to get to know them.

It really can be that simple!

Talent doesn’t mean what you think it means

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My uncle Joe was a metal-smoothing wizard. Most of the men on Mom’s side of the family were car mechanics of one sort or another, and Joe was good at troubleshooting engines and fast at replacing various engine components, but where he really shined was body work. He took it as a personal affront if someone suggested filling in mangled, crumpled fender with Bond-o. Joe didn’t just believe in pounding a metal fender out, he wanted to take the time to smooth the metal back into the shape it had been. He rolled and tapped it until you couldn’t tell there had ever been anything amiss, before saying it was ready for primer and painting. Watching him work on a car’s quarter panel was like watching true magic.

Joe is my mom’s baby brother and only four years older than me. As a teen-ager working in a body shop, he did a better job coaxing the crumpled car body parts back into shape than men who had been doing the job for decades. But people outside the body shop didn’t seem to value it as a talent. It was something he had a knack for, they might say. Or it was a skill you could make a decent living at. But it wasn’t really talent.

A lot of those same people insisted that I had Talent, with a capital-t. Because I was clever with words. I could think quickly on my feet, recalls enormous amount of data, construct compelling arguments, and paint vivid pictures with words. They were certain that god had given me these gifts and intended me for great things.

I wasn’t so sure… Continue reading Talent doesn’t mean what you think it means →

March Forth! March Fourth!

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I’ve written before about an acquaintance in college who was shocked that I’d never heard the pun about this day: March Forth! It’s a date and a command!

For the last few years I’ve been observing my own March Forth tradition. I urge you all on this March Forth, to go please donate to The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

March forth, and spread the word.

Pulling the trigger (warning)

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Safety sign reads "Warning: Unpredictable Triggers"
says-it.com/safety
Years ago, when I was a member of the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus, there was one particular controversy that surfaced from time to time, in slightly different forms: that a particular piece of music we were rehearsing perpetuated oppression and therefore should never be performed.

This debate was triggered one time by a particular piece of classical music which included religious text, and we wound up setting aside some time at the spring retreat to discuss the issue. There was a large group discussion, then we broke into small groups, then back to the large group again. A very curious fact came to light during this process: every single one of us who felt strongly that we wanted to perform this piece, in part because as an out queer group our performance would be “taking it back” had been raised in conservative Christian families, and had experienced various traumatic events at the hands of people claiming to be acting on god’s behalf… Continue reading Pulling the trigger (warning) →

The War on Valentine’s Day

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6280665297_ebed2a645aParticularly in the online world, February 14th is a terrible mine field. You can’t go online without running into angry rants and bitter commentary about those of us who are happy on this day. If you make the mistake of actually admitting that you are happy and wish other people a happy day, someone’s feelings will be hurt. If you try to avoid the topic altogether, someone will ask you why you’re not waxing eloquent about your husband/boyfriend (or wife/girlfriend or whatever significant others you normally talk about). When I avoided saying anything anywhere online at all one year on February 14, I got an angry message accusing me of being too busy celebrating with my boyfriend to even spare a moment to help some of my single friends feel less unloved.

How can you possibly answer that?

Not that I don’t understand where all these mixed feelings come from. I do. I haven’t always been in a relationship. I got so used to being in the emotional space of being single and not terribly happy about it, that it’s still something of a shock to me every morning to wake up and discover I’m not alone. Even after seventeen wonderful years with Michael. So, yes, I understand what it’s like to be single.

I know what it felt like seeing people happily paired off when I wasn’t. I knew the pain of being completely smitten with someone who was in love with one of my best friends. I knew the double-pain of having a crush on a guy and not being able to share my misery with anyone else or seek sympathy from anyone because not even my closest friends knew I wasn’t straight. So I understand, really, I do, why just seeing Michael and I together being happy can cause someone else heartache.

There were times I felt that heartache. There were times I said something to one of my friends that might have made them feel guilty for being in a relationship. There were times I lashed out, making a snide remark to make them hurt as much as I did. So I understand where the negative comments come from.

I’ve had the incredible luck (and luck does have more than a little bit to do with it) of falling madly and deeply in love with someone who loved me back. When you find that kind of relationship it’s impossible to keep it to yourself. You want people to know what a great person your significant other is. You want to share the joy with your family and friends. Even when you’re a gay man living in a very homophobic society, it’s very difficult to be in love and keep it a secret. So I understand why people want to talk about their relationship with other people they care about.

I don’t need the calendar to remind me to tell Michael I love him. I don’t need a holiday to give me an excuse to buy him presents. More than once we’ve celebrated Valentine’s Day by just taking an exhausted nap together. I don’t think we have ever remembered to make reservations for a dinner at a restaurant on the big day. Michael scolds me for buying flowers on the day because prices are always jacked up. Just a few days ago I asked him if he wanted his Valentine’s gift then (since it had arrived that day), or wanted me to wait until the actual day.

I don’t believe in the so-called coupled ideal. I don’t believe that there is one and only one soulmate out there for everyone. I don’t believe that no one is capable of loving more than one person at a time. And I don’t believe that everyone would be happiest if they were in a relationship with their “one true love.”

But I refuse to feel guilty for being in love. When I was single and made other people feel guilty, their guilt didn’t alleviate my loneliness by one iota. When I lashed out and hurt their feelings, it didn’t get me one step closer to happiness. All that happened was they were hurt, and I wallowed in self-pity.

So, it’s Valentine’s Day. The eve of the Ides of February, which was the beginning of an ancient Roman celebration of fertility and purity (hard for some people to believe those go together). Some parts of the Roman festival were rather shocking to the prudish sensibilities of the early Catholic church, which is probably the reason that a pope declared Feb. 14 the Feast of St. Valentine in 498 AD. The oldest surviving Valentine Greeting (a love letter which specifically mentions St. Valentine’s Day as a day to celebrate one’s love) is a letter written by the Duke of Orleans to his wife in 1415, while she was imprisoned in the Tower of London (take that, everyone who claims the holiday was invented by greeting card companies; in fact it was the other way around).

For the last several years, the biggest celebration we’ve done on Valentine’s Day is meeting up with a bunch of friends to celebrate our friend Jared’s birthday. It’s an evening of laughter and love with a diverse group—some single, some not. The important thing is that we’re together and not mired in bitterness nor guilt.

Maybe it wasn’t as funny as I thought

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Rodin's 'The Thinker.' Photo by Andrew Horne at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons
Rodin’s ‘The Thinker.’ Photo by Andrew Horne at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons
Earlier in the week I read an amusing story someone was sharing on Tumblr about a parent who found out her kid had tricked her into buying video games she didn’t approve of, and what she did about it. After chuckling, I re-blogged it and got on with my day. It was just a silly story on Tumblr, right? A little later I was reading a news story about some state legislators proposing a law banning so-called reparative therapy (the new code for ex-gay quackery), and I suddenly was thinking about that story I had re-blogged.

Maybe it wasn’t as funny as I thought?

But then I reminded myself that it’s just a silly story on Tumblr, and scores of people have shared it before me, and maybe I was just over thinking it. Right?

Right… Continue reading Maybe it wasn’t as funny as I thought →

This goes way beyond double-standards!

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I wasn’t going to comment on the story about the kid who is admitting now that he lied several years ago when he woke up from a coma and told an extremely elaborate and detailed story of going to heaven and playing with angels. I was a little disturbed to learn that there is an entire genre of such books about people who claim to have gone to heaven while unconscious (and related materials) being sold in “Christian” bookstores (the Washington Post calls the genre “heaven tourism”). Now that I think about it, I know exactly how that kind of snake oil would be gobbled up by a lot of people, and I shouldn’t be surprised that some people are willing to sell anything, as long as they make a profit.

Then an acquaintance posted one of the articles on Facebook, and another person commented that they were appalled that the publishers and the kid’s father have been exploiting this transparently false story for years, which prompted another person to become very outraged. “Are you going to tell some poor sick six-year-old who’s just awakened from a coma, ‘Proof, or shut the frak up?'” Continue reading This goes way beyond double-standards! →

How could they? How could we?

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levarburton_2014-Nov-24

I was raised by a racist jerk.

My dad is such a stereotype that people didn’t always believe me when I described him. To this day he regularly throws around the n-word, refers to the latino men who work on his crews as “wetbacks” and “spicks,” refers to any eastern asian-looking person as a “gook” or a “chink,” and so on. He will go on and on about all of the bad qualities he believes each of those groups share, if you let him. It is simply toxic to talk to him. The fact that he also speaks with a pronounced Oklahoma drawl, and that his conversation is peppered with words and phrases people associate with the south is just icing on the redneck cake.

My dad is the kind of racist that is almost too easy to spot. Guys like him make it very easy for the rest of us to pat ourselves on the backs and congratulate ourselves on being more enlightened. Because compared to him we clearly are.

But that doesn’t mean we aren’t racist… Continue reading How could they? How could we? →

Selection bias, confirmation bias, or…?

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Conservatives Converge Around Fox News as Main Source; No Single Source Dominates on the Left (Source: Pew Research Center)
Conservatives Converge Around Fox News as Main Source; No Single Source Dominates on the Left (Source: Pew Research Center)
The news seems to have been dominated by a couple of themes this week. I could easily write a whole series of blog posts extending my “Bullied Bullies” series into the double digits, what with The entire Idaho wedding chapel story is a lie, and NC officials refuse to marry gay couples, claim religious oppression, and Gamergate Goons Can Scream All They Want, But They Can’t Stop Progress, and No, The City of Houston Isn’t Bullying Anti-Gay Pastors – This Is Basic Lawyering. I could go on and on.

But I don’t want to only write about people being clueless and/or bigoted all the time. I have to remind myself that one reason I see so many stories clustered around particular topics is because I tend to read news sites that report on topics of interest to me, and as an out gay man who was raised Southern Baptist, studied math and science at university, and have always been a sci fi/fantasy nerd, I gravitate toward news sites that cover social justice, science, technology, and nerd culture. So I’m going to see a lot of stories like Gamer Gate, or the propaganda efforts of anti-gay folks, and so on.

It’s not just which news sites I choose to go to, of course. If some sites are covering a story, similar sites will pick it up, even if only to summarize and point to the original piece. Seeing these stories, and seeing people respond to them, make the news gatherers, reporters, and editors look for similar events in subsequent news cycles.

Sometimes, of course, there really are a lot of things happening all related to a particular topic. The recent Appeals Courts’ rulings about marriage equality, and the Supreme Court’s decision to let them stand, has put a lot of states that no one expected to be dealing with marriage equality so soon into the crosshairs. This makes people who oppose same sex couples having the right to marry feel even more threatened. And because each circuit court covers a bunch of states, these people who feel threatened are scattered over a wide geographical area. You have a lot of people in a lot of places all reacting to a perceived threat, you’re going to have a lot of incidents that will rise to some level of newsworthy. A whole lot.

And of course, I’m not the only person who is reading selective news. The folks who feel exactly the opposite as I do about some of these topics are reading their favorite sites. Or should I say their favorite site, singular (Conservatives Converge Around Fox News as Main Source; No Single Source Dominates on the Left)? Where they find the same stories being couched in a very different light, fanning those flames of fear.

I had about four half-written pieces that I could have finished to post yesterday, but they were all about the sorts of stories I link to up in the first paragraph. One of my goals for the year has been to reduce the outrage, and focusing so much attention on those stories does not help me with that goal. The problem is, the only other topic I had nearly ready to publish was about people who look down on other people because of the kinds of books they like to read. Which had a very same-y feel to it.

Which all led me to here, contemplating how everything I’m writing about (other than my novel) is processing exactly the feelings I don’t want to be spending so much time on. I suppose it could be argued by writing them down, I have gotten some of it out of my system, but I’m not sure that publishing them all would further the purpose.

So I’m going to try to concentrate my attention for the next few days on my fiction writing. I’m overdue for writing about the craft of writing, any way.