Stupid

I used to to think that parents who taught their children that "stupid" is a bad word were being overly sensitive, prissy, and, frankly, a bit silly.

I mean, it's a perfectly cromulent word.

Let's look at it, shall we? We shall!

MacMillan Dictionary defines "stupid" as follows:

stupid /ˈstu•pɪd/ adj. 1a) not intelligent, or not able to consider or judge things carefully; 1b) behavior that is not carefully considered or sensible; 1c) used for talking about something that you think is silly or annoying; noun 2a) an insulting name for someone who you think is being stupid.

WordNet boils it down to the following:

noun: a person who is not very bright; adjective: lacking or marked by lack of intellectual acuity; adjective: without much intelligence.

And EtymOnline tells us the origins of the word:

1540s, "mentally slow," from M.Fr. stupide, from L. stupidus "amazed, confounded," lit. "struck senseless," from stupere "be stunned, amazed, confounded," from PIE *(s)tupe- "hit," from base *(s)teu- (see steep (adj.))

(Note: PIE = Proto Indo-European. In other words, a language that is presumed from no actual evidence to have existed, other than a similarity among the languages of India and Europe, and based on known changes languages go through as they evolve.)

Calling something stupid simply because it is an opinion with which we don't happen to agree is undeniably childish. And yet, we've all done it. It's much easier, after all, to dismiss people's opinions if we can dismiss the person with a simple wave of a hand and a scoffing sound, followed by, "What does she know? She's stupid." Or sometimes we try to hedge. Not "she" is stupid, but what she is saying is stupid. Or her opinions are stupid (sometimes masquerading as "uninformed"). But we all know what we really mean.

But it's rarely that simple, is it? The non-stupid among you will have picked up on my usage of the past tense in my opening line. I used to think. I've started to come around to their point of view, at least in some ways.

By teaching a child to dismiss anything s/he doesn't understand or doesn't like or doesn't agree with as "stupid," we've giving them a lifelong habit of not even attempting to see all sides of an argument. We're derailing critical thought before it even has a chance to take hold. They don't know what a good argument is because they've never seen one. They dismiss the 'other' as 'stupid' and that's that. Case closed. I don't have to listen to you. You're stupid.

Religious people are stupid.
Atheists are stupid.
Day traders are stupid.
Gamblers are stupid.
Bull riders are stupid.
People who fling themselves out of perfectly good airplanes are stupid.
Smokers are stupid.
People who drink too much are stupid.
Parents who home school are stupid.
Parents who send their kids to public school are stupid.
<Opposing Team Name Here> fans are stupid.
President Bush is stupid.
Michele Bachmann is stupid.
Nancy Pelosi is stupid.
President Obama is stupid.
Sparkling vampires are stupid.
Vice President Biden is stupid.
Dan Quayle is stupid.
President Carter is stupid.
Sarah Palin is stupid.
Republicans are stupid.
Democrats are stupid.
"The Germans during Hitler's regime were just stupid! How could they not see what was going on and put a stop to it?"
Other drivers are stupid. Heh . . . actually, this one is true. Demonstrably so. :)


See? It's a quick and dirty way to reduce something to a straw man and then dismiss it without a second thought. I can't tell you how many times I've heard—I've said—"Jenny McCarthy is stupid." It's often followed by a selection of other words, such as "ignorant" and an epithet like "whore" or "bitch." I know because I've used some of those words to describe her myself. I will probably do another post at some point about word choices and what they reveal about ourselves, but for now, let's get back to "stupid."

The truth is, she's probably not. I've never met the woman, but she's apparently a pretty savvy business person, or is able to hire people who are. She's a loving mother who only wants what's best for her child. What she is is passionate to the point of obsession about a topic that I dismiss as having zero worth. (We can discuss the actual worth of her anti-vaccination stance at some other point.) By calling her "stupid," I conveniently don't have to examine her motivations. Her ideas. I just bundle them up in a nice, neat little package, write "stupid" on it in red Sharpie, and then toss it over my shoulder, not giving it another thought. Dismissed. So easy to do. So convenient.

The truth is, we don't know what other peoples' motivations are. We don't know what sequence of events caused them to come to the conclusion that is not our own. We don't know that we would not have come to the same conclusion given the same sequence of events in our own lives. We are each the result of every decision—good or bad—that we have made. Every event—positive and negative—that has affected us. Change enough of those and we end up being different people altogether. Maybe even people we wouldn't like or even recognize if we could meet them in some science-fictional manner.

Many times people base opinions on things that we would never, ourselves, trust. A TV preacher says, "God needs you to send me all your pension money." An email from a terribly persecuted widow in Nigeria arrives, and all she wants is to use our bank account to get her own money out of her country and away from the oppressive government who killed her beloved husband. And in return, she'll give us a fortune! A trusted famous movie personality says there's nothing to psychology, and anyone who uses it is an idiot.

There are a bajillion web pages out there encouraging people to believe in something that is not factual. And depending on the mental state of the person reading it—maybe they just lost a family member or were fired or had a baby or found out they got promoted—they may find it strikes a chord with them or sounds reasonable. Perhaps in other circumstances, they would decide otherwise. But forget "factual." What about things that have nothing to do with facts, like bigotry or what political party you prefer? Some people—for whatever reason—believe with all their heart that Jews are trying to take over the world. That certain political leaders are literally trying to undermine the very system that got them elected in the first place. No amount of facts thrown at them can turn that off. It takes . . . I'm not sure what it takes, honestly. But calling them "stupid" isn't a solution. It's an anti-solution. And teaching children to dismiss people as "stupid" is criminal. It ends curiosity. It ends the natural scientific process that all kids demonstrate with that three-letter word that is the bane of every parent's existence: "Why?"

When I was much younger and more impressionable, I believed in everything the least bit occult. Ghosts, alien abductions, out of body experiences, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the Yeti, psychic powers, spoon bending, dowsing, Ouija boards—you name it, I bought it. After all, there were people on TV telling me it was all real. Books filled with how it was real. No one telling me I was "stupid" convinced me that all of this stuff was nonsense; it took literally years of me reading for myself and examining my own beliefs with a critical eye to finally tip me over into thinking more rationally and skeptically. There is no such thing as an overnight change on things like that. You don't go to bed on Thursday believing in Bigfoot and wake up Friday morning convinced it's all an elaborate hoax. It happens gradually over many years. Or it doesn't. Some people go the other way and continue fervently believing in something like Bigfoot. Is that harmful? Well . . . I could go either way on something as inconsequential as Bigfoot. Believing that a giant humanoid exists that science has yet found no proof of or that Loch Ness is home to a non-extinct plesiosaur or that mankind never actually set foot on the moon is, in the end, harmless. No one is hurt by these beliefs. Believing that vaccines cause autism or that you can manipulate chi and stop a sword from chopping into your flesh . . . those are harmful and the skeptical community should—and does, for the most part—focus on things like that instead of ghosts and el chupacabra.

"Stupid" doesn't permit growth. "Stupid" simply is. It's a state one can't recover from. And hanging that label on someone is one of the worst things we can do. It makes them dig in their heels. Makes them believe in whatever it is all the more fervently. Makes them completely dismiss everything else you ever say to them because you called them "stupid." No one has ever, in the history of our species, heard, "You're stupid!" and said, "Why, yes! Yes, I am! And you are brilliant for pointing it out! Thank you from the bottom of my stupid heart for enlightening me!"

I know whereof I speak. I had—note the use of the past tense—a friend I will call "Mark." Mark and I shared an office for a little under a year. We don't have a lot in common, but we're both generally nice people, both fond of books and movies, and both into computers and interesting news stories. We found a lot to talk about, and read books and saw movies the other recommended. After he left the company, we continued to correspond and meet up every few weeks to have lunch and catch up.

Then one day, he met me for lunch all excited over a great documentary he had seen. I was intrigued at first, but then I had a sense of dawning horror. This guy I was friends with and that I had a fairly high opinion of was telling me that the documentary "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" was the best thing he'd seen in years. (For those of you not familiar with the film, it was supposedly an exposé of how the scientific community conspired against those who believe in Intelligent Design to deny them tenure, get them fired, and prevent them from teaching a perfectly reasonable "alternative" to the Theory of Evolution. I will not at this time go into why this film is misleading. My reaction is what I'm talking about.) I don't remember my exact words because at the time I wasn't thinking rationally. I was reacting viscerally as if he had thrown a spider into my lap. I told him it was all bunk, that the people in the film were lying, that Ben Stein was an idiot, and did everything but use the actual word "stupid" to describe him and his taste in movies. He encouraged me to watch it and that it might change my opinion. I told him that I didn't need to watch it to know it was "stupid," and that I already knew as much about it as I needed to because of the website expelledexposed.com and several skeptical-themed podcasts I listen to. Did I honestly think this diatribe was going to sway his opinion? I didn't stop to consider that. I just reacted with the word "stupid."

We have not spoken since that day. Not in email, not in person. I'm not even connected with him on LinkedIn anymore. My reaction—visceral and right as I believe it was—had the same effect on him that it would have on me if he had told me that gravity was stupid and that the reason we all think there's gravity is because everything is expanding at the exact rate to make it look as though gravity exists.

Had I reacted less irrationally and perhaps offered to at least watch the film, and then discussed it with him, we might have maintained a dialog. Might have merely agreed to disagree. Might have had many more discussions about the subject, resulting in him—or me? Doubtful, but it could happen, theoretically—changing his stance. But no, I just had to be stupid.

Yeah, that time, I think it's justified to use it. I was stupid. I've gotten better since then, or at least I've made major efforts to be better. You only have to hit me over the head three or four times with a brick to get my attention.

So I'm sorry to all those parents I've smiled condescendingly at for telling their children that "stupid" is a bad word. Because I now realize that it is. But no one told me I was stupid—I had to come to the conclusion on my own.

Let the Punishment Fit the Father's Crime

I'm reading a book called The Book of Were-Wolves published in 1865 by Sabine Baring-Gould. Here is my rough Modern English translation (it used a lot of Scots dialect and archaic words) of a story he tells of a Scottish punishment that I found particularly gruesome.

About this time (1460), there was a brigand taken with his whole family, who haunted¹ a place in Angus. This mischievous man had an execrable habit to take all young men and children he could steal away quietly, or take away without knowledge, and eat them, and the younger they were, esteemed them the more tender and delicious. For which cause and damnable abuse, he with his wife and children were all burnt, except a young girl of a year old who was saved and brought to Dundee, where she was brought up and fostered; and when she came to a woman's years, she was condemned and burnt quick for that crime. It is said that when she was coming to the place of execution, there gathered a huge multitude of people, and specially of women, cursing her that she was so unhappy [as] to commit so damnable deeds. To whom she turned about with an ireful countenance, saying, "Why chide me, as if I had committed an unworthy act? Give me credence and trust me: if you had experience of eating men and women's flesh, you would think it so delicious that you would never forbear it again." So but any sign of repentance, this unhappy traitor died in the sight of the people.

[Quoted from the aforementioned book, but with liberties taken to replace archaic words and Scots dialect with more modern equivalents to the best of my meager ability.]

So, let's look at this. She was a year old when her family was burnt for being cannibals. Although she could not remember it, no doubt she tasted human flesh as a child. Had they just left well enough alone and raised her not to know her past, she probably would have turned out a fine, upstanding member of the community.

But did they? No. They poisoned her with stories of her family's crimes throughout her entire childhood, making sure that she knew exactly what foul stock she came from. Some versions of the story (I looked it up) say that during her childhood, she would often bite other children on the fingers and suck their blood. I don't know how much credence to put to that, but the crux of the point is this: She would have had no way of knowing the crimes of her family if they hadn't bludgeoned her with it throughout her entire childhood. If she did later harm other children and attempt to eat them, who could blame her? (I'm getting to that.)

The part that chills my blood, though, is that on a website where I found this story, it had this to say.

There was no hope of saving this poor child and the only solution was to execute her. The Dundee authorities were not heartless, however, and could not execute such a young person . . . they waited till she was eighteen then burned her alive in the Seagate.

So, once again: These good, "not heartless" Christian people burned an entire family alive except for one infant, raised that infant until she was 18, made sure that she knew full well for her entire life that she was evil, then, when she was 18, burned her for her family's crimes.

Yes, I'm speculating about the whole "making sure she knew she was the spawn of evil" part because we know for a fact that you can't "catch" cannibalism. She wouldn't have had any idea at all if they hadn't made sure that she did. Probably with every waking moment of every day of her miserable existence.

But, hey. What can you say? It's right there in the Bible, so it must be good and loving and moral and correct. Ex 34:6-7.

And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.

Boy, I'm glad their god is a merciful, gracious, good, and loving god, because otherwise, their actions sure do sound like cold, calculated evil. To me.

But what do I know. I'm just an atheist. I have no morals. I can't tell right from wrong unless it's explained to me. I'm sure someone will come along any minute now to explain to me how it makes sense to blame an infant for the actions of her family. Yep, any minute, now.

Any. Minute. Now . . .

---

1. In the sense of visiting habitually, not our more modern meaning.

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NO! I DON'T LIKE IT!

"Sparkling" © 2011 by Jason A. Samfield

I saw a comment somewhere--maybe it was on Twitter or maybe it was on Facebook; I honestly don't remember--that said, essentially, this: I don't have to actually read Twilight to know how stupid and bad it is, all I have to do is read all the stuff on the Internet about how stupid and bad it is to know that it's stupid and bad. And the commenter then went on to call the non-teenage, adult women who read and enjoy the Twilight books names, insult their intelligence, and make rude assumptions about their hygiene, living conditions, etc.

And I thought, "Why are people so vitriolic over a silly book?"

Seriously, folks. Why? Don't get me wrong: I live for the day when people all over the Internet so love/hate something I wrote that they're willing to yell and scream and call total strangers names. I'd eat that with a spoon.

I've been known to jump on the "VAMPIRES DO NOT SPARKLE!" bandwagon more than once, and frankly without ever having stopped to consider why it matters whether vampires--a mythical creature--do or don't sparkle in sunlight, or burst into flames (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Let the Right One In, others). Or disintegrate (Fright Night, 'Salem's Lot, others). Or cause all the "younger" vampires they "turned" to spontaneously combust (Queen of the Damned). (Question: When Anne Rice wrote this in Queen of the Damned, did people vilify her like they are vilifying Stephanie Myer?)

I think we need to take a moment. Sit back. Chill. Take a deeeeeep breath.

Back in middle school, a new girl joined my class. I'll call her Mary. She was that most dreaded of all things in the history of teenage ever: The Outsider. She hadn't grown up with the rest of us. She hadn't been there. She didn't know us. She didn't act right. I remember hearing two other girls talking one day and the conversation went something like this:

Susan: Ugh! Did you see Mary in the bathroom?

Jessica: No, why?

Susan: She's in there, sitting on the toilet, and eating an apple.

Jessica: Gross!

Susan: I know! I could never do something like that. That's just disgusting!

I have no idea why the conversation (the actual words faded, but the gist of it stayed with me) has stuck with me for so long other than that it illustrates something that I keep coming back to over and over and over again: people expect other people to think exactly like they think. And if they don't, it's inconceivable that there might be a reason for it, or that they might just have a different way of looking at things. It's just one of those little things everyone does, and maybe never thinks about.

Example: how many times have you heard a devoutly religious person say, "I don't see how people can be atheists! What's to stop them from just going out and raping and murdering and stealing? They can't be moral!"

It's the apple argument all over again. "If I could never conceive of doing something, clearly anyone who can conceive of doing it--much less actually do it--must be just wrong on some fundamental level." (One does wonder sometimes if the people saying these things ever stop to think what it says about what they, themselves, would do given the opportunity.)

I admit to the same degree of this as each of you reading it. I look at people with piercings through parts of their body that I don't even want to think about being near sharp objects, and people are getting them pierced and tattooed and scarred... And I admit, a too-great portion of me tends to hold onto the "there's something wrong with someone who would do that" mentality. Sorry, friends of mine who are tattooed and/or pierced in "those places," but there it is. :)

There are some scathing reviews of Twilight out there on the Internet. One has only to search Google to find more words about the book than there are words in the book.

It seems like an inordinate number of them are negative, and written by people who proudly boast that they've never read the book. Never want to read it. Because it's so obviously awful and bad and bad and wrong and wrong and ick-ick-ptui!

But I wonder why. Why do people expend so much energy actively hating something that they admit they're never going to read?

I'm reminded of numerous toddlers I've observed over the years. Picture it: A family sitting in a restaurant, trying to have an enjoyable night out. They have, of course, brought their toddler with them because babysitters went extinct sometime in the mid-80s. (Oh, do not even get me started.)

The waiter comes and the parents order for themselves and their child. Flash forward 20 minutes. The food arrives. The food is placed before the toddler and s/he screams (at the top of its considerable lungs) "NO! I DON'T LIKE IT!"

And what do parents literally around the whole damned world say at this point, in whatever language they speak? That's right: "How do you know you don't like it if you never tried it?"

How, indeed?

I have a housemate, now. A long-time friend who is getting a divorce (amicable) and needed a place to stay while she rebuilds her life in a new city. She's getting a place to stay, and I'm getting someone to talk to and she happens to be a very good cook. I've lost 25 lbs since she moved in. Because I eat at home and I eat less. But I digress.

This friend whom I'll call Velda (because that's one of her online aliases) is very into the Twilight saga. Writes and reads fanfic, has all the books, has seen all the movies, etc.

I never realized just how pervasive the "Twilight hate" is out there until I became aware of it through her. I'd go with her to friends' houses and the topic would come up and literally everyone in the room—none of whom have read a single word of the book—would start trashing it and all people who read it. I introduced her into one of my writing groups, and basically the same thing happened.

I immediately rethought all the times I've said "VAMPIRES DO NOT SPARKLE!" and made derisive remarks about the books, having never read a single word, myself.

So I asked Velda to loan me the first book, Twilight. I started reading it, expecting to just hate it.

Do I love it? No. Am I going to become a total Stephanie Myer fanboy? No. I'm about ten chapters in, and although it is definitely not my style (I've never been a girl, and while I have been a teenager, I was not a teenage girl, :), it does draw you in. It does read a bit like a Mary Sue. But if you just read for enjoyment and not to analyze, I can understand why so many people are so drawn to the books. The main character thinks she's ugly and clumsy, but apparently she has something that makes five very different boys fall head over heels for her, two of whom are a vampire and a werewolf. And who doesn't want to imagine desirable members of their preferred gender falling all over themselves to impress you? (People who read Playboy/Playgirl for the articles, I'm sure.)

And there are certain problems with the narration as well that I won't go into. Suffice to say that while I don't hate the book, I don't love it, either. I am finding it entertaining. I do intend to read it all the way through if for no other reason than to have a common ground to at least discuss the book's strong points and shortcomings with others who have read it.

So how 'bout we make a deal? Instead of saying, "That sucks!" if you haven't ever tried it, why not try it first? Then, if it doesn't appeal to you, you can at least say, "Yeah, I read that, but it wasn't to my taste. To each their own," instead of looking like a toddler yelling, "NO! I DON'T LIKE IT!"

Spring in Atlanta

Here in Atlanta, we have nine seasons, just like everyone else:

• pre-summer, which starts just after spring and runs until about mid-April and is characterized by pollen, pollen, more pollen, temperatures in the upper 70s and 80s, and pollen
• summer, which starts in mid-April and goes to about Halloween and is usually characterized by temperatures in the 90s and 100s 24 hours per day
• pre-autumn, which starts in November and lasts approximately 2 to 3 weeks and is also characterized by lots and lots of lovely yellow pollen
• autumn, which lasts from 8:17 AM to 8:19 AM on a random Thursday in November, usually around Thanksgiving
• pre-winter, which lasts from about Thanksgiving to around Christmas, and is characterized by people wearing winter clothing even though they don't actually need it, because it's expected of them since it's December
• winter, which lasts from about Christmas to early/mid February
• pre-spring, which happens on a random day in early March
• spring, which lasts from 3:14 AM to approximately 5:37 PM on a random Tuesday in early March

You blink, you miss spring. Them's the breaks when you live in Atlanta. Oh, and I forgot monsoon season, which overlaps pre-autumn, autum, pre-winter, winter, and pre-spring. And sometimes spring.

Pre-spring was yesterday. There's no pollen, yet, but the birds are getting excited about the weather changing, and you can sort of feel spring hovering off in the distance, unsure whether to show its face. I think the birds must be cajoling it to come out and play.

It's been cold and warm in turns, wet and dry in turns, and we've had more snow than I can remember seeing in the entire time I've lived here (approaching 11 years, now).

But last night it was glorious. Not too warm, not too cold. With just enough moisture in the air to make things smell fresh and clean, but not so much that it was falling from the sky.

I slept with my bedroom window open, and the entire upstairs of the house smelled like spring even before I got into bed last night. After several months of my breathing the same air over and over, this is a very welcome change.

The cats enjoyed it, too. I woke up at some indeterminately early hour when the sun was not yet out to the sounds of claws scrabbling on hard plastic. I know exactly what this sounds like because I've heard it before: Matt climbs the window unit air conditioner I borrowed from a friend to help keep my utility bills low in the summer. He does this to look out my bedroom window when the shades are up, which is rarely.

The neighbors have a light in their back yard that aircraft use to navigate the city by. The astronauts on the space station see it and say, "We must be over Atlanta." The Nazis could easily have adopted it for questioning prisoners of war. "Tell uz ze location uff ze reziztanze. Ve haff vays uff mehkink you talk..."

So when I awoke to the scrabbling sound (Matt is not aware that, as a feline, he can simply jump. It's kind of sad, really.) I glanced in the direction of the window and saw his silhouette framed therein, the retina-searing light of the Gestapo lamp forming a fuzzy halo around him.

Then I heard a sizzling sound. Someone was making bacon.

Mmmm, bacon. I closed my eyes and tried to drift back into the dream I was having.

Wait a minute, I thought. Bacon? That can't be right. The only ones here are me and the cats, and if they could make bacon, I'd be out on the street.

Fighting my way back into consciousness, I finally recognized the sound as rain gently falling against the house.

"Great," I thought. I wrestled my way out of bed (I have one of those foam mattresses, so "getting out of bed" actually involves a bit of gymnastics.) and over to the window in which Matt was sitting. I felt the sill. Dry. So the rain was, indeed, gentle, and not blowing in.

I left Matt to his silent vigil and crawled back into bed and drifted away again. I think I tanned from the neighbor's back-yard light. (Have I mentioned that it's really bright?)

I woke up again some time later when Matt joined me in bed. Not by jumping (see above), but by grabbing the mattress and pulling himself up.

Graceful, he's not.

I'm hoping that I have a few more weeks of being able to sleep with the window(s) open before it's so stiflingly hot that the house becomes a sauna, but from past experience I fear that I'll be wrestling the window unit back in place before long, and making do with the soothing white-noise sounds of the compressor to lull me to sleep.

"Writing" Tools

A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking over some of the details of an urban fantasy novel I'm tentatively calling Death Scene. It will be the second in my urban fantasy series set in Atlanta, only magic works.

As part of the story, one character has to convince another to leave Atlanta and go somewhere "nearby" that is still within reason for people to travel kind of on a whim, but has places remote enough that, say, a body will not be found for three years. You know, just for example. :)

And you don't want to call up the forestry service and say things like, "So, I'm an author doing research. If I were to want to dispose of, let's say, a body, where would it be least likely to be found for a few years? Hypothetically."

Or maybe you do. I have no idea. I've never done anything like that. :)

Google Maps...is okay, but it's limited in what it can show, so I started casting about for some tool to help me figure out where to set the scene.

I thought, "I could buy a really detailed map of Georgia." So I searched on Google for "detailed map of Georgia."

And what came up was Google Earth.

Now, I've resisted the siren song for a long time and just never found a good enough reason to want to install it. But, that day I thought I'd give it a chance.

Oh. My. God. :)

I'm completely hooked. Not only did I find some nice "wilderness" areas in Georgia (which gives me an idea where to concentrate my research, even if I have to go there), but now when I hear a place mentioned, rather than just looking it up in Wikipedia, I call up Google Earth.

I was listening to a podcast just now where one of the hosts was talking about his volunteer work several years ago on the island of Fogo in Cape Verde. I've never heard of Cape Verde, much less Fogo.

So I whipped out Google Earth and typed in "Cape Verde" and it zoomed into an archipelago off the coast of Senegal in west Africa. Fogo turns out to be a little volcanic island dotted with settlements and a couple of larger cities. And I can zoom in on those population centers and see how they're laid out. Or I can click on YouTube videos or pictures people have uploaded that are tagged with GPS coordinates that put them in that area. It's...just astounding.

I highly recommend Google Earth.

For writing, that is. Yes, as a tool for writing. Not wasting time zooming in on places you've never been and never expect to see with your own eyes.

Research. Yeah, that's it. Research.

[Crossposted to my new site.]

Why I Write: A Ramble

A lot of people who write—whether or not they ever get published, or even try—do so because we have "no choice." I said in a recent post that I write to get rid of the voices in my head. And while I meant that humorously and facetiously on at least one level, to a certain extent, it's also true: stories and characters do have a tendency to knock on the inside of my skull from time to time.

But that's not the whole story (<rimshot>). For me, at least.

See...I may be 44 years old—soon to be 45—but I still want very badly to open a wardrobe door and find myself in Narnia. No, literally. Those books...changed reading for me. I read dozens of books before The Chronicles of Narnia, but I never wanted to crawl into any of those, curl up, close the door, and stay forever.

To make an analogy with drugs that almost pains me to type: Narnia was like my first line of cocaine. I got an amazing high, and I never wanted to come down. But come down I did, and then it took more and more and more to give me that same feeling. Now I'm strung out on multi-book series like Xanth, Discworld, The Dresden Files, The Belgariad, The Malloreon, The Sword of Truth, and The Wheel of Time. All in some hope of recapturing that initial awestruck craving to go there that I had with Narnia.

I would give almost anything if I could wake up tomorrow in a world where it's possible to go to Narnia.

Alas, this is reality. Damn it. And because it is unfortunately reality, the only way I'm ever going to get to visit Narnia afresh—or Oz, The Land, Phaze/Proton, Middle Earth, Prydain, Hed, Majipoor, Earthsea, Discworld, Ringworld, Green-sky, Landover, Pern...or yes, even Xanth—is to create something like them in my own head and then write down the stories in the hopes that it affects other people in the same way that Narnia or Green-sky affected me.

Hmm. To continue my drug analogy from above...that would make me a pusher. Maybe that's not such a great analogy after all. Okay, ignore that part.

The point is that part of the reason I am driven to write—and to (I hope) improve my skills as I go—is to give back some of what other writers were able to do for me.

And even if no one ever reads them, they brought me joy in the making. And for a while, I got to visit Mr. Tumnus. As it were.

[Crossposted to my new site.]

The Persistence of Humor

Prompted by a podcast I just recently started listening to—Podictionary—I looked up the book to which this post is linked: The Jests of Hierocles and Philagrius, by (duh) Hierocles and Philagrius, and translated into English in 1920 by the Rowfant Club in Cleveland, OH.

These are jokes—and I use that term rather loosely—that are at least hundreds of years old. And yet...

...And yet, some of them are ones I've heard before and thought were original with someone else. Take, for instance, this lovely selection from page 21, Jest 18:

A certain person meeting a pedant, said, "The slave you sold me died."

"By the gods," replied the other, "he never did such a thing when he was with me."

Sound familiar? It should. You've probably heard the joke 1000 times in some other form. The host of the podcast even made the point that it bears a resemblance to the famous Monty Python "Dead Parrot" sketch.

Or how about this one, Jest 13 from page 20:

Two pedants were complaining to each other because their fathers were living. One of them asked, "What do you wish? Shall each one strangle his own father?"

"By no means," replied the other, "lest we be called parricides. But if you are willing, you shall slay my father and I will kill yours."

Therein lies the plot of Patricia Highsmith's 1950 novel Strangers on a Train (and the subsequent Alfred Hitchcock film by the same name; and I'm told "Throw Mama from the Train").

In a book I read recently, Hightower said that the idea just popped into her head of two people meeting by chance who trade murders. I wonder if she had read some part of the Hierocles and Philagrius, or if the idea is one that crops up from time to time, like a bad case of ergot poisoning.

Some of them are clearly the precursors of blonde jokes or <Ethnic> jokes or little idiot jokes that I remember fondly from my childhood. Take this example of Jest 3 from page 17:

A certain person coming to a pedant who was a physician said, "Doctor when I awake from sleep I have a dizziness for half an hour and then I recover."

The physician replied, "Get up after the half hour."

I think I detect the "Well, stop doing that!" punchline lurking somewhere in the dim recesses of that Jest.

It seems that some humor is truly ageless. And then, there's this. Jest 45 from page 29:

A pedant visited his mother by night and, being beaten for this by his father, he said, "It is only a short time since you were with my mother and you suffered nothing from me and now you are angry at finding me once with my mother."

Paging Mr. Rex. Paging Mr. Oedipus Rex. Please proceed to the white courtesy phone.

But there are ways in which humor has changed over the years, or perhaps Hierocles and Philagrius wrote for an audience that was far more learned than those of today. I've read Jest 76 from page 38 a number of times, and even looked up "propitious" to make sure it means what I think it means, and it still just makes no sense to me:

The priest, upon giving the suppliant's olive branch to a pedant who was entering the temple of Serapis, said, "The god be propitious to you." He replied, "The god be propitious to my little pig for I do not need it."

I got nothin'. And a whole lot of it.

And then...well, I don't even know what to say about this one, Jest 48 from page 30:

A pedant was tying on some new sandals. When they squeaked, he paused and said, "Do not squeak or you will injure your two legs."

There is a footnote in the text after this one. It very dryly says, "The sense is not clear." Well, no duh, Einstein. It continues, "Eberhard gives two readings with the conclusion utrum verius sit diiudicabit qui intellexerit."

Um...sure, yeah. I...um...get that totally. Verius sit indeed diiudicabit qui intellexerit...uh...dude. Get down with your bad Latin self.

I started to just look up the one Jest mentioned by the podcast. An hour later, I was still reading one or two of them during lulls between bouts of protracted C++. All the examples I've used here are just from the Pedants section. There are some 16 sections.

I will no doubt read the entire thing. I hope I've intrigued those who might be reading this enough to give it a try for themselves.

Coincidences

It's easy to see why it is that so many people believe that Everything Happens For A Reason™.

"Everything Happens For A Reason," they say, especially after you've just told them a bit of bad news.

"I fell down some stairs and shattered my kneecap," you might say.

"Oh, that's terrible!" they exclaim. And then they add, "But, you know, Everything Happens For A Reason."

And you can't argue with them by asking, "What possible, sensible reason could there be for me shattering my kneecap?" because it usually just starts a discussion that you can't win about the motives of some god, God, the universe, Fate, or whatever Big Controlling Influence they happen to subscribe to.

Our brains are hard-wired to look for patterns. We see them everywhere, every day. And sometimes, we see them when they aren't there (pareidolia with maybe some apophenia added, to taste).

A perfect case in point is what just happened to me during lunch, and I found myself actually looking for the chain of coincidences that led to it. Because I couldn't help myself; it's human nature. :)

Last night, I decided to have chili from Los Arcos for dinner. I love their chili, and it's quiet and never crowded, and makes a great place to read.

As a result, I stayed up a little later than normal because my stomach was slightly upset. (I love their chili, but it doesn't always love me.)

Before I went to bed, I shoved a few unread books into my bag so I would have a choice of what new book to start today.

As a result of the late bedtime, I slept an hour into my alarm this morning.

As a result, I ended up getting breakfast late, and thence to work late.

As a result, I decided to have a late lunch, because tonight I'm going to my writers group meeting, and will therefore have a late dinner, as well.

At 12:30, when I left for lunch, I grabbed a book on writing from my bag, thinking it would be a good book to start.

In my car, I decided on a whim to go somewhere I don't often go, because it's a good fifteen minutes from work. And they have mango pie. :)

I arrived at the restaurant and ordered my food, then sat down and began reading.

At a nearby table was a guy diligently writing on a yellow legal pad. After he finished, he got up and started cramming his stuff into a backpack. As he did this, he happened to glance over in my direction.

And saw the book I was reading. Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith. He apologized for the intrusion and asked me how it was. I told him I was on page two and had no idea, yet.

He told me a couple of writing books he had read. I had read both of them. I countered with another couple. He had read those.

He writes screenplays. He asked me if I knew of a decent writing group. I told him about the two I attend.

We exchanged names and mnemonic devices ("I'm Jeff Lastname," he said. "Jambalaya Jeff. What do you like that starts with a 'g'?" And without thinking about it too hard, I said "Gumbo, in keeping with your theme." Thus, I am "Gumbo Gary." I think you probably had to be there....)

I fully expect to see him at least once at the Forum Barnes & Noble on Tuesday night. Probably not tonight (for it is Tuesday as I write this), but maybe soon.

Now, people who believe that Everything Happens For A Reason might be inclined to make more of it than there is. All those seemingly random things that had to happen to get me into a seldom-visited restaurant at an odd time of day and reading the one book of six that I picked up that had to do with writing. And for him to notice it. And for him to have the moxie (Do people use the word 'moxie' anymore? If not, they should.) to speak to a total stranger. And, for that matter, to get him into that restaurant at that time of day.

It must have happened For A Reason. Someone or something—some outside influence—must have had some purpose in setting up all of those seemingly random coincidences.

Nah. It was just that: a series of random events that only take on significance from hindsight. If I hadn't met him at the restaurant, I would not have thought twice about all those seemingly (because they are) random occurrences.

Because that's really the whole point, here. No one—well, no one in their right mind, at any rate—would decide to have chili for dinner and think, "Aha! This is setting off a pattern of coincidences which will lead me to something significant!" Down that path lies insanity, I fear. Or The Celestine Prophecies, which amounts to the same thing. :)

What brought this all to mind was the last thing he said as he left the restaurant. "I don't believe in coincidences. Everything Happens For A Reason. I was supposed to run into you, today!"

And while I don't subscribe to that belief, at least it's harmless. :)

And who knows? I suppose I could be wrong. Maybe Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, or Urania were bored and had nothing better to do. Maybe if you plot out all the subtle occurrences that conspired to get us both into that restaurant, it spells out a complex move in a chess-like game for some vast, alien intelligence that spans megaparsecs, and we're merely the pawns on the cosmic chess board.

But I'm gonna stick with 'random' and 'coincidental.' Your mileage may vary. :)

Quelling the Voices

Used to be, I thought I only had one or two stories in me. That once I wrote them down, I'd be done, and could go back to mindlessly watching reality TV whilst eating Cheetos and drinking Coke Zero. Because, you know...that's what you do. (Okay, that might not be what you (would) do, but I don't drink alcohol, so Coke Zero's about as strong as it's going to get.)

I thought that eventually, the voices in my head (read: stories trying to get out, not schizophrenia; as yet the voices have never told me to kill anyone except my characters) would shut the hell up and leave me alone.

But that turns out not to be the case at all. Au contraire, chers lecteurs!

That turns out to be the farthest thing possible from 'the case.'

I recently wrote my 2010 Writing Goals in the form of a short story. I use "short" here in the sense of "not a novelette, novella, or novel." Sucker came out to 7000 words. Or so.

First, I went into the Place I Keep All My Writing™ and looked over all the stories and fragments thereof.

Then, in the goals story, I wake up to find all my characters from all my other stories have come to life and are inhabiting my house, with the implication being that they aren't going anywhere until I get rid of them by finishing (and submitting) their stories. Between the tentacled alien in the shower, Death (incarnate!) in the closet, three time machines, several vampires, some angels, a murderer, and a few assorted fantasy creatures (I banished the centaur and faun to the back yard; the hooves were wreaking havoc on my hardwood floors), it was rather a full house.

I have three novels knocking on the inside of my head wanting to come out. One of those is clearly the first of a trilogy, and it has been knocking for some 20 years. Or more. I think the first seeds of it appeared in a horribly Mary Sue story I wrote when I was eleven. Yes, eleven.

The other two are the first two in a Dresden Files-esque series.

In a "sanity break" at work, I was just going through the application where I jot down story notes and ideas as they occur to me during the day and discovered ideas for at least two more novels in that series (Get a load of me, talking about a novel series and I haven't even finished one of them, yet!), and that didn't even go back past November of 2009.

In the goals story, I identified no fewer than 14 short stories in some form of completion and the three aforementioned novels. Those short stories range from ~1200 words to whoppers of nearly 20,000. Which is a novella, not a short story. (Over the years, my "short" stories have developed pituitary problems.)

And the funny part is, I managed to miss a few. I totally lost three novellas each of which I had written a good bit of. (Diagram that Grammar Nazis!) Can't find 'em. Gone. Zip. Whoosh. Into the æthyr. (That's writer talk for "it ain't nowhere.")

I guess the good news is this:

• I won't run out of ideas any time in the next 70 or 80 millennia.
• I am getting better as a writer; I can tell by looking over some of those early stories that...basically, I sucked as a writer.
• I'm in no danger of becoming hooked on reality TV or Cheetos. (Coke Zero is already a lost cause.)

Unfortunately, the bad news is that

• There are so many stories fighting to get out, I don't have time to work on them all.
• Any time I get the least bit bored or stuck with a story, I put it on ice and work on something else. Which is what got me into this situation in the first place.

But as far as real goals go, I made one. Or some. Depending on your viewpoint.

There are two writers workshops this year that sound like something I would really enjoy. One is called Taos Toolbox and the other is Viable Paradise. TT is two weeks in the desert in the summer; VP is one week on Martha's Vineyard in the fall. I would be thrilled—THUH-RILLED—to be accepted to either one of them. Both have good instructors and involve a lot of intensive writing.

Toward that end, I'm working on the finished story that I think stands the best chance of getting me into one of them. The story was fully written and critiqued by my weekly writers group. I just never went back to it because in my mind, I was done with it. But after that goals story, I just couldn't get the characters out of my head.

It's a pure science fiction story with (what I hope is) an odd twist at the end. It involves time travel. I got it all edited and was done with the thing, then uploaded it to another writers group so they could critique it...and then read it again and noticed at least two plot holes large enough to drive Jupiter through. And at least three of its innermost moons. Without touching.

Unfortunately, said story is 11,500 words, and the limit for both TT and VP is 10,000. Hmmm. I smell editing in my near future.

I've already said a lot of this on both LiveJournal and FaceBook, but I thought it bore repeating. Because if I keep talking about it, I'm more likely to follow through.

Also, the deadline for the quarterly Writers and Illustrators of the Future contest is rapidly approaching (51 days, I believe), and that's another potential submission destination for Killing Time (yes, the title blows goats).

So...I'm going to try to keep this more up-to-date as a "writing journal." We'll see how I do. :)

[Crossposted to my new site.]

It's Been a While, Hasn't It?

Another of my friends recently posted after a long absence, and it made me think about this blog and that I haven't said anything here in a long while. Nine months. Heh. I could have had a kid in that time.

Well, not had one, per sé, but...well, you get my point. Nine months is a long time.

So, golly. What has changed?

Well, I've got two cats again. Both of my maternal grandparents died last year. Nanny in March and Granddaddy in December. I promised Granddaddy that I would look after his cats. Now, what he meant by this and what I meant by this may not have entirely matched up, but...lemme 'splain.

Nanny and Granddaddy had three cats: Tiny, Lucy, and Matt. Tiny was an ornery beast who liked Granddaddy and only Granddaddy. His idea of "affection" was to reach up and poke his claws through your skin to get your attention, then demand food.

Lucy was Nanny's cat, for the most part. She only has three legs after she lost an argument many years back with either a car or a dog; I don't remember which.

Matt was the odd man out. He's a gigantic orange beast with vision and hearing problems. At least we think this is true. He could just be ignoring us. Like a teenager, only with fur and claws and fangs. Bad metaphor similie, but I went with it anyway.

After Nanny became wheelchair-bound, Lucy became sort of neglected, and she and Matt were mostly just there. They came in for food and stayed outside for most of the rest of the time.

When I promised Granddaddy I'd take care of his cats, I meant Lucy and Matt, not Tiny. Tiny was a fairly loathesome little beast. We did eventually find someone who was willing to take him, but he unfortunately died before that could happen.

Then, on the weekend of July 4th, I brought home Matt and Lucy.

I won Lucy over very quickly. It took her a couple of days to come out from under the chair she found immediately upon entering my house, but when she did, I caught her, picked her up, ignored the growls and the claws, and gave the right side of her head and neck a thorough scratching.

It's her right hind leg that's missing. And she can't scratch over there. After about two head-scratching sessions, she was mine. :)

Matt...well, he's been a bit harder to win over. He doesn't like change, you see. Like, you know...people coming into my house. Or me moving furniture around. Or noises that might mean people might be thinking about possibly coming into my house, at some point. You get the idea.

We'll see how it pans out. They're both 16, and resistant to change.

What else?

Oh, yes. Atlanta had a torrential downpour of nearly biblical proportions in mid-September. It was bad enough that it leaked into my house in five places, causing ceiling damage.

I dealt with insurance and a roofing company and all that's been fixed, now. And simultaneously with the roof repairs, I've been refinancing my mortgage. The rates dropped into the 4.5% range, and I couldn't pass that up. I'm waiting on a fax now that will be one of the last three steps toward finalizing that. Closing day is December 3rd.

Hmmm. Oh, yeah. One of my friends who is one of those people who can just "do things" offered to help me with some tasks that needed doing around my house. Like installing new garage-door openers and finally getting that home theater set up in my living room. (Hey, it's only been 8 years!) It's been over a year since I could park my car in my garage. I'd almost forgotten how to maneuver my Element through the opening. :)

Oooh! And I got a new laptop! I decided at some point that I needed a machine I could use to write on that had a battery that wouldn't die in less than two hours. I have some friends who are Mac people...and one of my other friends who was a die-hard Windows person got a Mac...and it pushed me over the edge. I got a Macbook Pro. A 17", glossy-screened one.

And I bought Scrivener, which is lovely software for writers.

Speaking of writing, I've been writing a lot. Some time back in the summer, I was frustrated with the story I was writing. Sometimes, what you need to do when you're stuck is just change what you're writing. So I started to do a little something I call "The First Sentence Exercise." You come up with first sentences to stories you may or may not write. The goal of the exercise is to grease the wheels of creativity. I used to do it daily, but I stopped.

I wrote down: The fire had burned with an unnatural speed and intensity. Looking at it, I thought, "Hey, I kind of like that." I tried a second sentence: It was a mystery and <some name> lived for mysteries." I then heard someone say "...die in a fire..." and the plot popped into my head.

I kept writing. And writing. And then I realized that the protagonist of the story was a character I'd already developed for another story into which he didn't fit. But he fit into this one. So I changed <some name> into Nick Damon.

Somewhere in my head, a bell rang.

I've now written some 31,000 words on that story, which started out as Necromancer and then became Perdition's Flames. And it's no longer a story but a novel.

It's also a murder mystery that I started writing not knowing who the killer was or why he was killing people. Nuts? Why yes, I believe I will have some. Oh. You meant me. Oh.

My Tuesday Night Writing Group seems to be enjoying it, and they are helping me tweak it to get some of the details more...detail-y.

Then November was approaching and I needed a project for National Novel-Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, as we call it. I "won" last year (which means I wrote 50,000+ words in 30 days), so I wanted to see if I could do it again. But...what to write? I was already 31,000 words into Perdition's Flames.

I could continue the novel I started last year. I had lots of ideas, but nothing would gel.

Or...or I could write the second novel that comes after Perdition's Flames. The ideas flowed easily, and before I knew it, I was penning the first scene of Death Scene.

By midnight, tonight, I will be approximately 30,000 words into it. This means I will have written two novels approximately halfway through. Simultaneously. Bananas? Sure, I like--wait a minute. I'm onto you, now.

It would seem I might have found my genre. I've tried sci-fi, epic fantasy, horror, humor, and dark fantasy. But these two are both "urban fantasy."

Like Jim Butcher, only, like totally different. His series takes place in an alternate Chicago where magic is real. Mine, on the other hand, takes place in an alternate Atlanta where magic is real.

Totally different, I assure you. Totally.

And that's really about it. I haven't updated the blog in a while because I didn't have anything all that important to say. And I still don't. But I hate to see abandoned blogs. :)

Vaccines and Autism: A Rational Discussion

As a non-parent, I can't say that I know the helpless feeling of watching a child suffer with some horrible disease like measels or polio or rotavirus. Nor do I know the anguish of having a child with autism. My heart goes out to those families.

And I'm sure it must be powerfully convincing evidence that something must be wrong with vaccinations when these parents take their children to the doctor to be vaccinated, and soon after that, they are diagnosed with autism.

It is entirely rational to look for a link between the two. And it's understandable that parents want something to point to and say "This caused the horrible thing that happened to my child."

However, every study has consistently shown that there is no causal relationship between vaccinations and autism. None. But both sides are yelling and calling the other side stupid and often refusing to sit down and just talk.

Scientists have listened to parents' concerns. In fact, they spent millions of dollars doing study after study after study looking for some causal relationship, just in case there was something there to be found. It's just that scientist-types find it so very difficult to talk to people instead of over their heads, so their calm message of "there's no way vaccines cause autism" fall on deaf ears when emotional parents know what they saw.

Enter Dr. Ginger Campbell. She has a podcast called Books and Ideas. This month's episode features an interview with Dr. Paul A. Offit, author of "Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure." Dr. Campbell interviews him about the issues surrounding this "controversy." You'll learn that eating tuna will put more mercury in your system than a vaccine, even before they removed the thimerosal. You'll learn why mercury-bearing thimerosal was removed from vaccines in the early 2000's, and why it was there in the first place. But mostly, you'll learn how very dangerous it is for children today to remain unvaccinated.

If you have any curiosity about the issue or just wonder what all the brouhaha is about, I urge you to listen to this episode with an open mind.

Please. It's just one hour out of your busy schedule. You'll probably learn something. I know I did.

Just click on the title of this post and it'll take you to the podcast, and you can listen to it right there at the website.

People Are People, Unfortunately

Back in November, after more than two years of being in a Yahoo group that I participated in off and on, I removed myself from their membership.

The group was the Atlanta Freethought Society, of which I'm still a paying member until March, and at which point I will not renew.

The list is populated mostly by snarky, older, left- or central-leaning atheists and agnostics who used the list to comment on news stories and such, usually having to do with the clash between the religious and the non-religious or anti-religious, but also including "woo" topics like Bigfoot or alien abduction.

And I'm okay with that. These are my peeps when it comes to that. Who better to appreciate stories of ignorant people in some backward, podunk town expelling a teenage girl from high school on the grounds that she's a witch? The list abounded with stuff like this, day in and day out, for most of the time I was on it.

Last summer, I went to one in-person meeting of the group and was not impressed, but still remained on the email list.

And then, the Troll occurred.

The group acquired a troll back sometime during the summer. He was from Indianapolis, which was clearly stated in his Yahoo bio. Yeah, we're the Atlanta Freethought Society, but there's nothing in the charter (I checked) that said only people from the Atlanta environs could join and participate. In fact, there is nothing anywhere that states that a person has to believe, not believe, think, or not think anything in order to participate. I want to say this up front because it becomes important later.

So, this guy whom I'll call "Jim" starts posting to our group. It becomes readily apparent from the get-go that Jim is a Christian, because he takes every opportunity to make sure that we knew this. Not in what I'd call an obnoxious way, at all, but simply stated as part of his responses.

Now, when you have a list of people who all believe in X and you introduce someone who believes in !X, it will inevitably cause some conflict. The sane response for the X people is to ignore the !X person, and eventually the !X person will get bored and go away.

Right?

Well, actually, no one has ever tested this hypothesis, nor are they ever likely to. Because, like the question of how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, no one has ever gotten past three. :) People are constitutionally unable to ignore a troll. Trolls, knowing this, gleefully stay where they are clearly not wanted, because their sole purpose in life is to stir up trouble. But I digress.

People in the Atlanta Freethought Society—and I stress this to point out the absurdity of what you're about to learn—attacked. Mercilessly. Because he didn't agree with their point of view. "Hey, idiot, this is an atheist group, and so all your preaching isn't appreciated!" was the general tone of most of it. A few people popped up at this point and said, "Actually, you know, it's a free-thought group, and I'm {an agnostic|a deist|a theist|whatever}," but these people were ignored or shouted down.

Jim stated on several occasions that he was there to learn and be exposed to other points of view. He stated that although he was a Christian, he had no truck with organized religion, hated the Catholic church¹, was in complete favor of church-state separation, etc. The only substantial way that he differed from the majority of our group was that he was not an avowed atheist or agnostic.

As soon as people started snarking off at him, he started snarking back. And so the snark got snarkier and snarkier until it was barely concealed (or just plain raw) contempt.

Where I got involved was when someone just out of the blue asked Jim if he was a "reformed" homosexual. In other words, a gay man whose Christian values have convinced him to deny his nature and proclaim he's "cured" of homosexuality.

Whoa. Where did that come from? So I jumped in. "What does Jim's sexual orientation have to do with anything?" I asked. "We were talking about <whatever>."

"Well, he just sounds like he's one of those guys. He has all the hallmarks," came the reply.

"But why does that matter? What does whether he's straight, gay, bisexual, transsexual, or something else have to do with the issue you're arguing with him about?"

"He's a troll! And I have to make him admit he's gay! Because he's gay! And until he admits he's gay, he's dishonest!" (I wish I were making this up. This is not a direct transliteration, obviously, but it captures the spirit of what was said.)

It went on like this for several more exchanges. People were getting downright nasty. And then a couple of the gay people on the list got involved, and were actually supporting this nonsense, calling for Jim to admit to his homosexuality. Which he did, openly. He claimed that, like me, he just had no clue why it was such an issue, and didn't answer because it was not relevant. But eventually, he said, "Yeah, I'm gay. I'm proudly gay, out, and have been for 30 years. Now what?"

So they they started in with the "Aha! I thought so!" nonsense, even though they didn't seem to remember that the entire brunt of their argument had been that he was trying to hide something. They then quoted all the parts of the bible back to him that have been used on a bunch of religious sites to condemn homosexuality.

Do you see it? Right there. They became the very people they claim to be fighting against. Here were a bunch of avowed atheists and agnostics using the Bible to try to catch a gay Christian man in a contradiction.

What the hell is wrong with people? I mean it. There has to be something just wrong in our heads to make us do this kind of crap.

It reminded me all too much of scenes in Frankenstein movies where the villagers have pitchforks and torches and they're all yelling at once and waving their weapons at the poor monster.

That really opened my eyes. I started to pay more attention to not only what was being said but who was saying it and how it was being said. I never did get back into participating at my usual level. I started looking at what was really being said behind the posts, and I decided it wasn't my kind of message. But that was later. Back to the summer.

One other person joined me in a call for civility (for which, incidentally, I was given grief), and for a couple of weeks, most people (there are always a few who just can't keep anything civil) treated Jim as a visitor, took him at his word that he was there to share ideas and learn different points of view, and basically engaged in a conversation instead of a verbal fist-fight.

It didn't last long, though, and soon, the gloves were back on and the moderator (who, although he didn't participate in the flame war, took no steps to try to end it, either) ended up banning Jim from the group. I state again that Jim did nothing wrong, because there is nothing in the charter that said his beliefs--or lack thereof--had to be in lockstep with the rest of the group in order to participate.

But it really showed what these people are made of. At the very first hint of an opinion that didn't match their own, they started shouting "Faggot!" and throwing figurative stones. And one of the very people shouting "faggot" the loudest was a self-avowed lesbian in a long-term relationship. It boggles the mind, really. I stress again that these are self-proclaimed free-thinkers, who are supposed to welcome discourse on a variety of topics and from a wide range of points of view.

I mean, isn't that what free-thought is all about?

Instead, this group turns out to be nothing but a cabal of back-patting, self-congratulatory jerks who just want a captive forum where they can bash religion and right-wingers—well, basically anyone who disagrees with them—at will.

---

1. This seems to be a common misunderstanding of non-believers by believers. They believe that all of us hate the church. Yes, there are some non-believers who fall into the "anti-theist" category who believe that all religion should be abolished. There are others, like myself, who don't care what religion you are as long as you don't proselytize us.

The Best Advice

For some time, now, I've been concentrating on my writing. Fiction writing, that is. I've joined a couple of critiquing groups, one of them in what can be referred to as "Real Life," "Meatspace," or "First Life," and one of them in Second Life.

I've had several of my stories critiqued now by insightful people—most of whom are themselves unpublished—who have uncanny ability to point out any problems I have.

I'm about to attempt to get something published. Toward that end, I decided that I would use Ralan to find markets.

Late last week, I discovered a writing contest. It was for a literary magazine, and the idea was to write a 750-word essay on the best advice you ever got. Two possible sub-themes are "...And Took" and "...And Didn't Take."

It truly is amazing what having a word-limit can do for your ability to edit your own work. I wrote it, and it was hugely over 750 words. So I edited it, honed it, tuned it, cut it mercilessly, and finally got it down to precisely 750 words.

And only then read the requirements again and realized that it was supposed to be writing advice. Ah, well.

So...what to do with a 750-word non-fictional account of the best advice I ever got and took? Why, post it on my journal, of course. My "serious" journal.

---

In 1999, I had been working at a job I loathed for nine years. It had been great for four of those years, but by then I dreaded going to work each morning. Phil, the man who had hired me, had moved on to another opportunity in 1997, but we still kept in touch by e-mail.

One morning I got an e-mail from Phil. His new company was looking for software developers. He thought immediately of me. He knew I was dissatisfied, knew my work, knew he could trust me, and knew I would be a good asset for his team.

At last! A light at the end of the tunnel! For the first time in years, it wasn't an oncoming train.

But the job was in Atlanta, Georgia. I lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, within 35 miles of my mother and grandparents. This nearness was important to me. I had been raised in the same small, rural town where they now lived, and where my father, David, had lived his entire life. He had died young of lung cancer twelve years before.

I also wasn't sure I could hack the position Phil was recruiting me for. After nine years in a place that didn't value me at all, would I be able to make it somewhere else? Had my programming skills atrophied? Was I doomed to stay at a job I hated because I was suited for no other?

Still undecided, I drove to Atlanta and interviewed with Phil's company. The interview went well. They liked me and I liked them. An offer arrived in the mail the following Monday. The salary was a substantial increase for me, and they wanted me to start ASAP. I had one week to decide.

I lost sleep. I didn't eat well. The decision gnawed at me constantly.

On the Thursday before the deadline, my mother called. She knew I was wrestling with the decision, but knew I had to decide for myself. But as a mother, she wanted desperately to step in and make it all better. To tell me what I should do.

"I know you're struggling with this decision," she said, "and I think I know which way you're leaning. Before you make a final decision, I want to tell you a story about your father.

"David majored in Accounting at the University, and he was very good at it. Before he graduated, he received a job offer for after graduation. The firm was in Crossett, Arkansas. It was a very good offer, but he knew that if he accepted, we would be comfortable, but you would grow up in a bigger city and likely never know your family.

"You knew your father; he would have been miserable away from home. He was uncomfortable with change.

"David turned down that offer. He started working for Uncle Wilson and lived here all his life.

"I thought you should know what HIS decision was before you made yours."

It was crystal clear to me what she was telling me. On top of that, I felt closer to my father than I ever had. He had been faced with a similar dilemma, and he had chosen family, the simple life, and safety over money, big-city life, and risk. He had been happy.

I faxed my acceptance letter the next morning.

I called my mother. "I've decided to accept the offer," I said.

"Oh, I'm so glad!"

We talked for a few minutes more. Then I said, "You know, that story you told me really helped me make up my mind."

"You're so much like David, I was afraid you were going to give up a chance at happiness because you were too comfortable. Change is uncomfortable, but I think you made the right decision."

I still live in Atlanta. I've never regretted the decision I made for a moment.

Years later, telling this to some friends, I realized that the story she had told me could actually have been interpreted either way. I had interpreted it to match the decision I had already made—but didn't realize—in my heart.

I called her on it.

"You're right. I figured you would interpret it however you needed to, but I was really hoping you'd do what you did."

"Why didn't you just say that?"

"Because it wouldn't have been your decision."

The best advice I've ever gotten, and I find out it didn't actually say what I thought it said. That's a mother for you.

On Being Abrasive About Atheism

  by  Public Domain Photos 

I composed this as a response to a post on a freethought forum I belong to. It got long, and I decided to put it here, as well.

---

There are a good number of nutjobs on both sides of the fence (and probably a few who sit on the fence, too). I mean, Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly are almost in a class by themselves for the amount of truly offensive crap they spew into the environment.

But one thing about them is this: people talk and have opinions about what they say. They are brash, harsh, abrasive, blunt, opinionated, and completely and totally in-your-face about what they say and believe. They don't give a rat's ass about who they offend. Their job is to be that person. To be the total nutjob who takes things that extra step, who says things that no sane person would believe, but who make people think and react and talk about them, and perhaps examine their own viewpoints more closely than they ever would have done without the provocation.

And Hitchens and Dawkins are doing the same thing for "our" side. Dawkins says that bringing a child up in any religion is child abuse. Do I agree with that? Maybe a little, in principle, but I wouldn't go that far. The same goes for some of the things Hitchens says. But it got them noticed. People know who they are. People talk about what they say. They are brash, harsh, abrasive, blunt, opinionated, and completely and totally in-your-face about what they say and believe. They don't give a rat's ass about who they offend.

A lot of parallels get drawn between the "rationalism movement" and the "gay movement." It must be working at least in part, because gay people are less reviled by society as a whole, now, than atheists are. If you believe the polls. And what did it take? A lot of people decided they'd had enough of being marginalized, put down, and discriminated against for something they couldn't control. They became brash, harsh, abrasive, blunt, opinionated, and completely and totally in-your-face about what they said and believed. They didn't give a rat's ass about who they offended. Don't want to see two men or two women dance together, hold hands, or kiss? "Then look away," they said, "because we're not going to go away."

Love them or hate them, Dawkins and Hitchens (and others) are doing something that needs to be done just to compete for air time. Do you think Ann Coulter would get the kind of recognition she gets if she was polite but firm about her beliefs? No! Making that quip about how she'd have to go to therapy if she called Senator Edwards "gay" was one of the most successful things for her career that she's ever done. It was offensive on so many levels that almost everyone out there had an opinion about it. And it got talked about. And people thought about what she said and why it was offensive (or wasn't). If Bill O'Reilly were anything other than the asshole he is, no one would know his name, because he'd be some third-rate reporter working in some podunk market instead of Fox News. But as it is, very few people don't know his name, and the ones that do have an opinion about him one way or the other. Again, because of the way he says what he says, he makes you think about why it offends you or doesn't. I could include Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and even Keith Olbermann in the same category, but on different levels and with different goals.

I guess my point is that we need MORE people like Dawkins and Hitchens. Maybe people in general really do instinctively understand that for every complete nutjob you see out there saying outrageous things, you have a legion of decent, honest people who believe some of the same things, but aren't so in-your-face about it. Penn & Teller come part of the way on their show on ShowTime, but they aren't mainstream enough, yet, to get the kind of reaction that the other guys do. Randi mostly takes on people that the majority already know are charlatans. In the big scheme of things, the Sylvia Brownes, Uri Gellers, and John Edwardses of the world are small potatoes compared to the issues that Dawkins and Hitchens and a few others are taking on. I hope Roseanne Barr is an atheist. I think Kathy Griffin is. Maybe we need a few more abrasive people out there making an issue out of it so that it gets in the public's craw and makes them a little uncomfortable. "Gee, what if the neighbors are atheists? Does that mean they're suddenly bad people?" (Maybe I'm giving the public too much credit, but maybe not.)

I'm not overly fond of some of the things Dawkins says, either, to be honest. I think he goes too far. I'm not as harsh as he is, but I make no qualms about my atheism, either. I've laid it pretty raw on my other journal a number of times, and I've lost a few friends over it, but the majority of them stay even though the vast majority of them disagree with me. Because even though I rant and rave, I try to do it in an entertaining way, at least, to get across the message that I have my passions and my windmills, too, and I'm not all that different than they are.

I think the biggest compliment I've ever gotten on that front is a passive one. My father's family--almost all of whom are devout Southern Baptists--have no idea that I'm an atheist, except for a couple of cousins. I don't make it a secret, but most of them don't see it because...I'm nice. I'm pleasant. I don't eat babies, worship Satan, or murder and rape indiscriminately or any of the other horrible things they've been taught that we nasty ol' atheists do. I don't chant Latin backwards while they're saying grace before Thanksgiving. My hope is that as the knowledge of my atheism trickles through the family (and it will), they'll be able to look at me as a positive example that you can be an atheist and have morals, be a nice person, support charities, and even--gasp!--love your family, all without God being necessary.

Positive Steps

Years ago, I was lying in my dorm room one Saturday morning, enjoying the fact that it was Saturday and I didn't have to get up to go to class. My roommate was already gone to some ROTC thing, so I had the room to myself. I started to introspect about life and what I was doing with it, and right there, lying in my twin bed on a Saturday morning in May, it came to me: I need to get in shape. I was maybe 20 years old and weighed over 200 lbs. It was time.

So I went out that day and joined a gym. Had my first work-out in two or three years. And it felt good. I went religiously. I didn't eat all that much better, so my progress was slow, but it was steady, and even though I didn't lose a lot of weight, I put on muscle mass. I was benching > 200 lbs. I could do 400 crunches (and still didn't have washboard abs, dammit). I felt better, certainly looked better, and at least had the knowledge that I was doing something about a personal goal.

I don't know why I stopped going. I honestly can't recall it. But stop, I did. And let my membership lapse after two or three more aborted attempts at regaining the momentum I'd lost.

Several years later, I'd graduated and was in grad school. I had watched my father get sick with lung cancer and die over a nine-month period. During that same nine-month period, I gained 50 lbs. I gained the weight so fast, I got stretch marks which I still have to this day. And then I had another epiphany. Well, it was the same one, really. I needed to do something about this weight. So I began to look around Tuscaloosa to see what was available. I didn't want some namby-pamby "lose 10 lbs in 10 weeks" nonsense. I wanted real results. I weighed 260 lbs and that was ridiculous. Then I saw and ad for Physicians Weight Loss.

Their whole thing is, basically, starvation. And they examine you medically every time you come in, which is three times per week. You take massive doses of vitamins and minerals (especially potassium), and you eat protein supplements to maintain muscle mass. The goal: remain in ketosis so that you know it's fat that's burning and not muscle mass.

I was restricted to 500 calories per day for something like two weeks, then 750 calories per day for the next four and a half months. I lost a total of 88 lbs, and honestly, I felt wonderful about myself. And then...my will power just dissolved. During those months, I'd go to restaurants with my mother and her friend Peggy and literally watch them eat and then go home and eat my 200-calorie dinner and my 50-calorie bedtime snack, and somehow I managed not to cheat...very often. I was in ketosis and the fat melted off me, yet I wasn't starving all the time. I got down to ~180 lbs, which was ~23 lbs shy of the PWL-set goal. See, PWL relies too heavily on those ancient charts that say, unequivocally, that someone of my height, gender and age was to weigh between 150 and 157 lbs. Period. And PWL won't let you set a goal that is above your "optimal" weight. So my goal was 157. But...

To get to 157 lbs, I would have had to start cutting things off me. The measure of my wrist circumference doesn't take my barrel chest into account. I may have had a 34-inch waist for the first time since high school, but I still had a 50-inch chest. And that's without working out, which you can't do on PWL because you don't get enough calories. So I couldn't remain in ketosis anymore, and without ketosis, I started to get hungry.

And 750 calories per day wasn't going to cut it. So I dumped PWL against my mother's wishes and tried to maintain my weight.

Hah!

By 1990, I was up to 270 lbs. Over the next 9 years, I worked one job at a local steel mill. I tried a few more times to lose the weight, but it was no good. I slept irregularly, ate irregularly and poorly, got little to no exercise...in short, I was a couch potato. The only diet I ever maintained without any will power was The Zone, but unfortunately with that one, you have to eat at the same time every day and sleep at the same time every day and...I was on call 24 x 7. I might stay up 36 hours at a stretch or sleep 15 at a time. The Zone was doomed to failure, even though it had just started to work when I had to give it up.

In 1999, I left that job and moved to Atlanta to work for the same guy who'd hired me at the first job. It was a huge thing, moving out of my "safe" world into an unknown territory, but I did it, because I thought it was the best move for me. And then after I'd been at this little dotcom startup <ominous chord> for about a year and a half that I had the same epiphany yet again: I needed to do something. I'd been hearing about the Atkins diet. A lot of people swore by it, and it sounded like it was something I could handle. I was massively overweight and rapidly approaching 40. So I gave it a try. I lost 50 lbs before the Unholy Allure of Sugar™ coaxed me back to the dark side. But I was determined to keep the weight off. So I took the advice of a co-worker and joined his gym: LA Fitness. I even sprang for the extra bucks to get a personal traininer through Body of Change, which is basically also LA Fitness.

From the get-go, I should have known something was wrong. The trainer they saddled me with wouldn't listen to a thing I said about taking it slow, and he made me work out on his schedule. When I asked about other trainers, there were none available at the times I wanted to work out.

While all this was going on, I bought a house using some of the proceeds from the sale of my first house in Alabama.

You can see what's coming by now, I'm sure. But maybe not. Before it had a chance to become a problem, the startup dotcom I'd quit my stable-but-soul-destroying job in Alabama for decided that it could not sustain the number of developers it was paying for a product that was too expensive for people to actually own. So it laid off 22 of us in one, fell swoop. They fired me over the phone while I was moving from my apartment into the house I'd closed on just days before. I had to leave moving to drive in and collect all my belongings.

I kept working out--it was one of the few constants I had--for about two months, when it became apparent that I was not going to just bounce back and get a job immediately. I called LA Fitness and Body of Change and told them the situation. I was told to send in a letter of cancellation and LA Fitness would cancel me, no problems. However, Body of Change would not. I had signed a contract, they insisted, and that contract said I owed them a certain amount of money each month for 12 months, and if I didn't pay up, they'd take legal action.

I begged and wheedled, cajoled, yelled, and threatened legal action myself. None of it did any good until I went to a different gym, explained my situation to the management there, and had them call in and intervene on my behalf. My "regular" gym? Told me to get lost, basically. My "trainer" was nowhere to be found. He wouldn't return my calls.

Body of Change "graciously" "let" me out of my contract, but only at the cost of paying half of it as a penalty. I vowed never to darken the door of LA Fitness again after the way their lapdogs Body of Change had treated me.

So now we come to the present. I'm 280 lbs. That's over 100 lbs overweight. Morbidly obese doesn't even begin to cover it. The weight is causing health problems that are getting worse and worse. It's time to do something about it. Again. I'm sick of diets. I want to just eat what I want, but in reasonable amounts. I mean, the minute you tell me "You can't have," whatever it is you've told me I can't have is all I want to eat. Atkins would never work for me, now, nor would The Zone or even PWL. I don't want to buy supplements or pre-prepared food, so it finally lit a fire under me.

I started looking at local gyms. I found one that sounded great, but the cost is prohibitive. They had a pool, which would allow me to swim again, but is a pool really worth $60/month and a $200 fee to join? Not really. LA Fitness is close by, but...never. Never, ever again. But they're the cheapest alternative around, unfortunately, and they're also the only ones my company has any sort of deal with. And have you ever visited a gym? The salesmen there rival car salesmen for sliminess and weaselhood. Several gyms I visited actually turned me away because of the hard-sell bullshit they tried to pull on that initial visit.

But then I saw an ad for Fitness 19. A new, small gym that opened just three weeks ago about a mile and a half from my door. Closer than the other two. $20/month, no contract, no joining fee (a special because they just opened), and a one-time processing fee of $30. So for something like $68, I got membership in Fitness 19, and they'll charge me $20/month until they receive 60 days notice to stop. The woman who was there when I visited that first night greeted me warmly, showed me around the place, and wasn't the least bit slimy. So when she said, "Does this sound like something you'd want to do?" I said, "Sure. Why not?"

They're a small place. It's one large room packed with some of the nicest-looking equipment I've seen. There's no pool, or steam room, or sauna, or even locker rooms. It's two small, unisex changing rooms, bathrooms, and a big room full of weight and cardio equipment. There's no towel service, no trainers, and they aren't selling high-priced supplements or water at every turn. I love it. :)

I've been once, and I'm going again today. For the first time in a very long time, I feel like I've made a decision I can feel good about considering my health. It's going to take a while. But considering that I can go to this gym for five years on the same amount of money Body of Change/LA Fitness made me pay them to break my contract, I think it's one I can afford even if it does go bust or something.

So I'm at the dawn of what I hope is a new day. My doctors, my mother, my friends, and even a co-worker or two has expressed concern about my weight. So even if it takes me a year to drop 50 lbs, I think this is a good thing. I can feel the commitment, but I needed something more. I don't like to announce things to the general public, but I know only one or two people read this, so this is a good place to mention it and still have that...accountability. To at least one friend and maybe two. The commitment to take charge and do something about my weight rather than allowing myself to get unhealthier and unhealthier and become one of those statistics you read about. A man in his 40s who dies of a sudden heart attack or a stroke. "Fat bastard," people reading it in the paper would say. "Why didn't the guy just lose some weight? Drop the fucking doughnut and eat some broccoli? Do a few push-ups?"

The fact that my doctor has said I need to lose weight but has not made a single mention of any sort of "diet" was confusing, but I think maybe she figured out right away that I'm not a "diet" sort of guy. "You can't ever eat doughnuts again" is translated in my mind to an intense desire for doughnuts, even though I normally don't eat one but maybe once per week.

So, here's the thing. I'm going to get into a routine of working out. I haven't found an optimal time, yet (I've only been there twice, and one of those was to sign the agreement). But once I do and I'm in that routine, I will begin changing my diet a bit at a time. I've already started a little. I eat more vegetables, and instead of having breakfast, several days each week I drink an Ensure. I'm diabetic, and I do have to have some food to maintain my blood sugar, so fasting is out of the question. I stopped eating Mexican out because it encourages overeating by putting that huge basket of chips on the table. And because I simply no longer can handle it without acid reflux. I stopped eating Italian a while back for the same reason. I've been eating at Subway for lunch most days instead of whatever the cafeteria at work has, because it's usually something unbalanced and unhealthy, and at least with Subway, I know what's in it.

I keep a supply of really good chocolate here at the house and a supply of good cheese. And as long as I have the option of having some of either or both, I find that I don't crave it like I do when I don't have it around. I've had a block of Valrhona chocolate for over two months, and it's almost gone. I slice off a chunk about once or twice in a three-week period and eat it. I have a chunk of cheese and an apple instead of opening a bag of chips.

So I'm trying. I just...need to stick with it and not get discouraged if the results aren't instant. Which intellectually I know they won't be. But we all know how much the conscious intellect is really in control of the body. I'm also under no illusions. I'm 43. The days of my having a metabolism that would allow me to eat everything in sight and not gain much weight are gone. My chance of looking like any of those models in magazines is 0%. I will never have washboard abs. I don't want to be a hulking behemoth with muscles out to there. I just want to be healthier and look better. And at 43, that's a lot different than it would have been at 20. And I'm okay with that.

I didn't mention this on my "What I had for breakfast and pictures of my cats" journal because...there are too many people I know personally over there to be accountable to. Too many people who will pester me with questions like "How's the diet going?" or who will say insincere things like "You look like you've lost weight!" because even though they can't see any change, they think they should say something because they think it'll be encouraging. It isn't. Not for me. All it does is underscore any perceived failure. I didn't go to the gym last night because I was tired, and now here's this asshole asking me how it's going. Guilt is the last thing I want. I want this to be positive. I want....

What do I want to get out of all this?

• I want to feel better about myself.


• I want to wear smaller clothes.


• I want to fit in an airline seat.


• I want to go into a restaurant and not have to say "I prefer a table instead of a booth, please."


• I want to walk into a decent clothing store and not have the staff look at me pityingly and try to find a less obnoxious way of saying "We don't sell clothes your size."


• I want to not get acid reflux (although this may not be weight-related).


• I want to stop taking some of my medication.


• I want to feel confident enough about my body to go swimming in public, again.


• I want to stop snoring (again, this may not be entirely weight-related).


• I want to wake up in the morning without pains (although this may be age- instead of weight-related).


• I want to be able to walk up a flight of stairs without having to rest at the top.


• I want to be able to go with friends to someplace like Six Flags or the Zoo or walk around doing touristy things without holding them back because I'm so fat I can't keep up.


• I want to be able to shave off my beard. I'm told if I did I'd look younger, but if I do, my face is so round, I don't have a jawline. I look ridiculous. So...I keep the gray beard even though it makes me look at least 10 years older than I am.


• I want to be able to clean my house without it taking two days.

I just want to feel like me again, and not some fat slob.

So...we'll see. I've told "the world" (all both of you) and...now I'm committed.

So...we'll see. :)