Greta Christina's Blog

Brief Blog Break, Self-Promotion Op, and Atheist Conference!

Ingrid and I are off to the Atheist Alliance International conference today, so I may not be blogging much for a few days. In the meantime, let's call this a shameless self-promotion opportunity! If you have a blog you want to flog, a particular blog post you're particularly proud of, a project you want to brag on -- speak up about it in the comments here. No commercial promotions, as always they'll be deleted the moment I see them... but plugs for your personal or political projects are welcomed.

And if you're going to be at the conference, come find us and say hi!

The Fat-Positive Skeptic (Part 2 of 2)

So how do you be a fat-positive skeptic?

Yesterday, I wrote about being a fat-positive feminist who's losing weight. Today, I'm finishing up with a look at one of the trickiest and most loaded balancing acts in this struggle: being both fat-positive and a skeptic.

See, here's the thing. As you may or may not know, there is something of a pitched battle between feminist fat- positive advocates, and advocates of a skeptical, science- based view that fatness is medically harmful. (I'm not sure what to call the anti-fat-positives. Fat-negatives?) The fat-positives think the fat-negatives are hysterics who exaggerate the health risks of being fat; the fat-negatives think the fat-positives are denialists who dismiss those risks too easily. The fat-negatives point out the well- documented connection between being fat and a whole host of health problems; the fat-positives point out that many of these health risks significantly diminish with a healthy diet and regular exercise... even for people who don't lose weight.

Now, I don't generally cotton to the "golden mean" fallacy: the misguided notion that in any dispute between two opposing sides, the truth will probably fall in the middle. But in this case, I genuinely do think that both sides have some valuable ideas... and that both sides are missing some seriously important truths.

I completely agree that the fat-positive movement does often trivialize the very serious, extensively documented, no-joke health risks of being fat. I think they focus on their political ideology about bodies and feminism, at the expense of the actual scientific facts on the ground. I think they're often guilty of wishful thinking: of acting as if the mere act of saying "Fat is as healthy as not-fat" over and over again will somehow make it true, regardless of the medical evidence. And I think they dismiss the fact that, while it's fairly easy to be a healthy, active fat person in your youth, it gets increasingly harder as you get older.

I also think that when the fat-positive movement keeps repeating the "Dieting doesn't work" mantra, they support this view by stubbornly focusing on the stupidest, most extreme diets out there. It's certainly fair to point out that a lot of popular diets are essentially semi- starvation, guaranteed to make you crazy and miserable and ultimately guaranteed to fail. But it's also fair to point out that not all weight-loss programs are that dumb. (Of course, this is also true for fat-negative skeptics, who focus on the stupidest, most extreme forms of fat-positivism while largely ignoring the more moderate, pro- exercise- and- eating- right, "be as healthy as you can at the weight that you are" folks...)

And when the fat-positive movement insists that weight loss doesn't work, they're ignoring the fact that we now know a whole lot more about weight loss than we used to. Good, careful studies have been done, looking not at the details of specific weight loss plans, but instead at the 10% of people who do lose weight and keep it off, and what they have in common. And apparently, it doesn't matter so much what kind of diet or exercise plan they're on: low-carb, high-protein, low-fat, high-vodka, whatever. What matters is that they're counting calories, keeping food journals, weighing themselves regularly, getting lots of exercise, losing the weight slowly (no more than two pounds a week on average)... and seeing all these things as a permanent lifestyle change instead of a one-time thing.

(Of course, that does beg the question: Why are some people able to sustain behavior changes like these, and others aren't? Diets generally don't work partly because many diets are stupid and unsustainable... but it's also partly because people don't stick with weight loss plans even when they are reasonable. But why is that? There's a whole science about behavior change and why it's so hard... and we need to not frame it as a moral judgement about weak character. It's common across humanity. As a society, it's been like pulling teeth to get people to quit smoking and wear seatbelts. If we're serious about addressing the American obesity epidemic, we need to be looking at major social and political change about how we deliver food and design our cities... not just haranguing people about how fat they are.)

The fat positive movement also often claims that being fat is purely genetic, not behavioral... a claim that ultimately isn't supportable. Yes, there's clearly a genetic component: in a perfect world where everyone ate a perfect diet and got loads of exercise, people would still come in different sizes, and one of those sizes would be fat. Besides, it's not so easy to draw a bright line between "genetic" and "behavioral." Appetite triggers, for instance, may be genetic, some people may be born being more easily triggered by external food cues than others... but the triggers shape our behavior, and we can make choices to deflect those triggers, or alter them, or avoid them. But if it were true that fatness is purely genetic, then why are Americans -- and non-Americans who eat an American diet -- so much fatter than the rest of the world? And why are Americans so much fatter now than we were 50 years ago, or even 20? If size were purely genetic and eating and exercise behavior had nothing to do with it, none of that would be true. Evolution doesn't work that fast.

So yes, I think the fat-positive movement has been missing the boat. A lot of boats.

But I think the hard-line fat-negative skeptics are overlooking some important truths as well.

I think they often overlook the degree to which American obesity is not a personal problem, but a political one. I think they often overlook the ways that American obesity is created and exacerbated by deeply-laid social and economic structures: city planning based around cars instead of walking or biking; an economy in which people are overworked at sedentary jobs and don't have time for exercise; the phenomenon of food deserts (large urban areas with no access to healthy, unprocessed food); the multitudinous evils of the American food industry, with its emphasis on shelf life over nutrition and profit over absolutely everything. I think they overlook the ways in which weight loss is a privilege, far easier for people in progressive cities with ready access to healthy food... and for financially comfortable people who can afford trainers and gym memberships. (Both categories that I freely acknowledge I belong to.)

I definitely think the fat-negative skeptics can be dismissive of just how difficult and complicated this issue is, and how loaded it is -- emotionally, psychologically, indeed politically. Especially for women. (The practical mechanics of how I'm losing weight are insanely simple: counting calories, keeping a food journal, regular exercise, patience. The emotional and psychological and political mechanics are a minefield. Did I mention the endless processing, the obsessive planning, the hysterical crying fits in grocery store parking lots?) I think the skeptics often ignore our culture's obsession with an unattainable ideal of physical perfection -- especially for women -- and the effect this has on people who are never, ever going to even come close to that ideal, no matter how healthy they become. And I think the skeptics can be oblivious to the effect their words have on people: how, for a fat person, especially for a fat person who's tried more than once to lose weight, hearing something like, "Weight loss is simple, it just takes will power, just eat less and exercise more" basically translates as, "And if you don't, it's your fault, you're weak and lazy and you deserve to get sick and die."

I also think that fat-negative skeptics tend to overlook -- or are maybe just ignorant of -- the venomous contempt and hostile bigotry that gets aimed at fat people in our culture on a regular basis. I'm not just talking about third-graders who get teased at school, or the scores of personal ads seeking partners who are "fit and trim" (or, more bluntly, "No fatties"). I'm not even just talking about endless, degrading fat jokes in the media... and the way said jokes are a normal, unquestioned part of the media landscape. I'm talking about things like actual, well- documented job discrimination, and medical discrimination in areas that have nothing to do with weight. We need some sort of pride, some sort of positivity, just to keep from collapsing into depression and self-loathing.

And for all their passion about being reality- based and sciencey, the fat-negatives have a serious blind spot when it comes to one very important, extensively- documented fact about weight loss:

It rarely works.

Consistently, across the board, about 90% of people who try to lose weight either fail, or gain it back within a year. To my knowledge, every single method of weight loss that has ever been rigorously tested has a failure rate of roughly 90%. (Interesting tangent: If you join Weight Watchers, and you lose and re-gain the same 20 pounds three times? They don't count that as a failure. They count it as three separate successes.)

10% success. That's not a very good rate. And it's something that fat-negative advocates need to deal with. I mean, what the hell is the point of raising the Dire Warning Alert System and telling everybody, "Being fat is horrible for you, being fat will ruin your health, being fat can kill you" -- if, once you've successfully freaked everybody out, you don't have anything constructive to offer about what they can do about it?

Now, as Ingrid often points out: Quitting alcoholism or other drug addiction also has about a 90% failure rate, and you'd still advise addicts to kick if they can. The fact that weight loss is difficult and rare doesn't mean it's not worth trying. (And we are learning more about weight loss, and are beginning to get a good, science-based, reality- based picture about what works and what doesn't. Again: counting calories, keeping a food journal, regular exercise, regular weigh-ins, patience.)

But given that this 90% failure rate is true, and until it is no longer true, then at least some of the visions and goals of the fat-positive movement are still pertinent. The idea that it's useful to eat a healthy diet and get regular vigorous exercise -- even if you don't lose weight? As long as weight loss efforts fail about 90% of the time, that's a pretty damn important message to get across.

And here's a freakish irony: The ideas and ideals I learned from fat-positivism? They've been incomparably useful to me in my efforts to lose weight.

Here's what I mean. The degree to which I've had to alter my life in order to lose weight has been pretty dramatic. If I'd had to do it all at once, I probably wouldn't have done it at all.

But I already had a head start. I was already exercising regularly: not as much as I needed to for weight loss, but more than probably 90% of Americans, and enough to improve my mood and my energy, my sleeping and my libido, my joint problems and my mental health. And I was already eating a healthy diet: not low-cal enough for weight loss, but better than probably 90% of Americans, and mostly consisting of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lowfat proteins. So shifting gears from "generally healthy lifestyle" into "weight loss," while it was hard, was not nearly as hard as I'd thought it would be. I was already more than halfway there.

And a huge part of why I was more than halfway there was my fat-positivism, and the ideals I learned from that movement. I was flipping the bird at the corporate mainstream media industry that wanted me to look like Paris Hilton... but I was also flipping the bird at the corporate mainstream food industry that wanted me to eat a steady diet of Cheetos and Hot Pockets and Stuffed Crust Pizza. I was committed to being as healthy as I could be at the weight that I was... and that involved eating well and getting regular exercise. Goals that the fat-positive movement actively and passionately encourages. (The fat-positive activists I was reading, anyway.)

Plus, the fat-positive movement gave me the tools I've needed to frame my weight loss primarily as a health issue and not as a cosmetic issue: to pursue it, not to fit some mold of ideal womanhood, but for myself, for my health and the enjoyment of my life. If my efforts to eat better and get exercise had been entirely focused on the goal of looking better, I might well have given up long ago. After all, no matter what I do, I am never, ever going to look like Paris Hilton. Or even Heather Graham. I'm short, I have a square, stocky frame, and I'm 47. It's not gonna happen. But because of the fat- positive movement, I was already thinking of how I eat and exercise, not in terms of what society expected of me, but in terms of my own pleasure and health. So paradoxically, once my weight started being a serious impediment to my pleasure and health, it didn't take much to shift gears.

Yet at the same time, I'm ticked off at the fat-positive movement as well. I do think that I put this off for a lot longer than I should have, at least partly, because I drank the Kool-Aid. I bought the idea that I could be every bit as healthy at 200 pounds as I would be at 140. I pored over the handful of studies saying that weight loss was no big deal, and ignored the mountain of studies saying, "Is Too." I ignored the fact that my bad knee was getting worse, until it got almost too bad to do anything about it.

And the skeptical movement has also given me tools that I need to do this. Being part of the skeptical movement inspires me on a daily basis to face reality, no matter how difficult or emotionally loaded it might be. It inspires me to base my decisions, not on wishful thinking, but on the best hard evidence currently available. It's gotten me thinking more clearly about the evolutionary aspects of food and appetite and weight loss... and has thus given me some seriously useful practical strategies to bypass the triggers that evolved on the African savannah 100,000 years ago.

So I'm not sure what to do here. I'm ticked off at both sides. I'm grateful to both sides. I see truth and value, and stubborn obliviousness, on both sides. In my personal life, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing: taking what I need from wherever I can get it, doing whatever works for me to be as healthy and sane as I can. But as a writer, and as a member of two conflicting social and political movements, I'm not sure how to handle this.

Thoughts?

Fast Food wasteland photo by Apathetic duck.

The Fat-Positive Diet

How do you be a fat-positive feminist who's losing weight?

Don't worry. This isn't going to turn into a diet blog. I'd rather hit myself on the hand with hammers. But this thing has been happening with me: it's kind of a big effing deal for me, and I think it may be of interest to my readers. So although I'm finding myself with an uncharacteristic reluctance to talk about something this personal, I've decided to take the plunge.

I am, as anyone who knows me or has seen photos of me knows, fat. I have been fat for a long time, and have been more or less okay with it for a long time. My attitude towards my fatness has largely been shaped by the feminist fat-positive movement: I wasn't going to make myself miserable trying to force my body into the mainstream image of ideal female beauty, and I was instead going to work on being as healthy as I could be -- eating well, exercising, reducing stress, etc. -- at the weight that I already was.

But a few months ago, my bad knee started getting worse. I've had a bad knee for a long time (I blew it out doing the polka and it's never been the same since); but as bad knees go, it wasn't that bad. I had to be careful getting in and out of cars; I had bad days when I had to rest it; I had to quit doing the polka. No big deal. I can live a rich, full life being careful getting in and out of cars and not doing the polka.

But a few months ago, it started getting worse. Like, having trouble climbing hills and stairs worse.

That was not okay. I live in San Francisco. I need to be able to climb hills and stairs. And I know about knees. They don't get better. I could see the writing on the wall: I knew that if I didn't take action, my mobility would just get worse and worse with time. I could easily lose more than just stairs and hills. I could lose dancing. Fucking. Long walks. Walking at all.

Short of surgery, there's really only one thing you can do for a bad knee that I wasn't already doing.

And that's to lose weight.

How do you be a fat-positive feminist who's losing weight?

It's really hard not to feel like a traitor about this. When I reach a benchmark in my weight loss and get all excited and proud, or when someone compliments me on how good I look now and I get a little self-esteem-boosting thrill, it's hard not to feel like a traitor to my feminist roots, and to the fat women who fought so hard to liberate me from the rigid and narrow social constructs of female beauty.

And even apart from feeling like a traitor, there are about eighty million emotional traps along the way: traps that threaten to upend years of hard mental health work spent learning to love myself the way I am.

For starters: I know that weight loss typically fails about 90% of the time. So far this weight loss thing is working; but I've only been at it for a couple of months, and I know that in the long run, it could easily fail. And if this fails, then I get to feel like... well, like a failure. I get to be back at Square One, with my bad knee and everything -- but without the emotional supports I built up during my "Fuck You, Body Fascists" anti- dieting years.

But if I'm one of the 10% that succeeds... well, then I feel like an idiot for having whined about it for so long, and for not having done this sooner. (I'm already feeling like that now. In a purely practical sense, this has been easier than I'd thought it would be, and so now I'm feeling like a jackass for having insisted all these years that it was all but impossible.)

And if I am successful, the last thing in the world I want to do is get all smug and judgmental about how easy it was and how if I can do it, anyone can. If there's anything I hate, it's when people who've lost weight (or never gained it) get smug and judgmental about how if they can do it, anyone can. (I'm looking at you, Dan Savage.) That is a huge, ugly trap, and it's one I'm desperate to avoid.

Plus, it's so hard to let go of thinking that food and the appetite for it should be "natural." I mean, it's food. It's one of the oldest, deepest instincts we have. (Reproducing and escaping from predators also leap to mind.) The fact that I can't just "eat naturally," the fact that I have to pay careful, conscious attention to everything I eat and when... it's hard not to see that as a failure of character.

And as much as I want my weight loss to purely be about my health, the reality is that, now that I'm in the process, it's become more about my appearance than I'd like. I really don't want that: I find it politically troubling and emotionally toxic, and I think in the long run it'll undermine what I'm trying to do. But it's hard. As much as I like to think of myself as a free-spirited, convention- defying rebel, the reality is that I'm a social animal, and social animals care about what other animals think of them. And since I'm non-monogamous, I have to be aware of the realities of the sexual economy... and the reality of the sexual economy is that I'll almost certainly get more action and attention as I lose weight. I dearly wish I didn't care about that, but I do.

In case you're curious: So far, I've been successful. As of this writing, I've lost 20 pounds in two and a half months. And in case you're curious, I don't have any great secret to my so-far success. Counting calories; keeping a food diary; regular exercise; patience. Absurdly simple in theory. In practice, it's been a fucking minefield, especially at the beginning: crying fits in grocery store parking lots, heavy conversations with family and friends, planning that at times borders on obsessive compulsive, a painful and complicated emotional dance every time I have dinner with friends or eat out, and way more processing with Ingrid than I ever wanted to have to go through. (And I don't even get to call this a success yet. 90% of people who lose weight gain it back within a year; so until I've lost all the weight I want and have kept it off for a year, I don't get to relax and think of this as a win. And to some extent, I'll never get to completely relax: I'll probably have to do some form of calorie- counting and weight management for the rest of my life.)

But it is getting easier with time, as I get more and more used to my new eating habits. It's getting physically easier: for the first week or two, 1800 calories a day just didn't make me feel full, and I was cranky on good days and despairing on bad ones. Now 1800 calories feels like plenty, as my body has adjusted its sense of how much food is enough. And it's gotten easier mentally as well, as I've found some strategies -- emotional, psychological, practical strategies -- that so far have helped.

It's helped to remember that my appetites and instincts about food evolved about 100,000 years ago on the African savannah, in an environment of scarcity. The taste for sweets and fats; the tendency to gorge when I'm hungry; the impulse to keep on eating even after I've had enough; the triggers that make me hungry when I see or smell food... that's not weakness or moral failure. That's millions of years of evolution at work: evolution that hasn't had time to catch up with the modern American food landscape. And as a rationalist and a skeptic, in the same way that I'm not going to let myself believe in deities just because evolution has wired my brain to see patterns and intentions even where none exist, I'm not going to let myself eat three brownies at a party just because evolution has wired my brain to think I might starve to death if I don't.

It's helped for me to think of this as a political issue. It helps to remember that the multinational food corporations have spent decades carefully studying the abovementioned evolutionary food triggers, so they can manipulate me into buying and eating way more food than is good for me. It helps to think of weight loss, not as giving in to the mainstream cultural standards of female beauty, but as sending a big "Fuck You" to the purveyors of quadruple- patty hamburgers and Chocolate Chip Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick.

It's helped for me to remember that my other "natural" impulses aren't so natural, either. It's worked for me to remember that as a non-monogamist, I have to think carefully about who to have sex with and when; that as a city dweller, I have to think consciously about whether I'm genuinely in danger or am just being paranoid (or conversely, whether I'm genuinely safe or am just being oblivious). Food is no different. It's "natural" for humans to be rational animals, and to think about our choices instead of just reacting.

Doing this with Ingrid has been a huge help. Being able to support each other, encourage each other, plan meals together, share strategies, vent... it's been invaluable. I don't know if the people studying weight loss have looked at whether it's more effective to do it with a partner or friend... but it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Keeping a food diary has helped enormously. It helps in the obvious way: that's how I keep track of my calories. But more than that, it helps me be more mindful and present about how I eat. I'm a lot less likely to run to the corner and get a Snickers bar if I know I have to write it in my journal. (If you have an iPhone, btw, there's a wicked cool calorie- counting app called LoseIt. I can't tell you how much easier it's made this process. If you don't, though, not to worry: the Interweb has made calorie- counting a relative breeze.)

It helps to think of this as a permanent lifestyle change. It's hard, but it helps. If I think of this as something I'll just have to do once and will then be finished with... well, that wouldn't just make this harder to sustain in the long run. It'd also make it harder in the short run: easier to blow it off for a day, and then another day, since all I'd be doing is postponing my "final" goal by a day or two. Thinking of this as "This is just how I eat now" makes it easier to keep it up.

It helped a lot to get a sane calorie count from my medical provider that took into account how much exercise I get. (As much as I love my little LoseIt iPhone app, if I'd have gotten my daily calorie count from that, it would have been way too low... since the gizmo apparently assumes that anyone using their program is about as active as a recently- fed boa constrictor.)

It helps to avoid using moral language about weight loss: to avoid thinking of "cheating" on my diet, "forbidden" foods, etc. It's hard enough to not eat the things I'm trying not to eat, without making them seem more attractive because they're naughty and wicked.

It helps to eat real food... and to avoid "diet" food like the plague. No diet shakes, no power bars, no lowfat cardboard cookies from the industrialized food industry. Fruit, vegetables, bread, meat, rice, beans... that sort of thing. I don't even eat lowfat cheese. I'd rather just eat regular cheese, and eat less of it.

It helps to eat slowly. Partly because it gives the "fullness" trigger in my brain time to catch up with my stomach... but partly because I get more pleasure from my food, and don't feel deprived. And it helps to eat smaller meals more frequently: since I never get all that hungry, I can make smarter and more conscious choices about what to eat.

It helps to measure my food, as much as I can. For calorie counting, it's pretty much essential. My instincts about what constituted a cup of soup or a teaspoon of butter were way, way off. I don't whip out the cup measure when I eat out, obviously... but I almost always do it at home, and since I've been doing it, my estimates on portion size when I do eat out have gotten a lot better.

It's helped to break down my ultimate long-term goal into smaller, more manageable goals. When my health care provider told me I should lose 60 pounds to be at my maximum good health, I just about gave up in despair right then. Instead, I decided to fuck that noise, I was simply going to lose 20 pounds... and then I'd see how I felt, and how hard it was, and whether I wanted to continue or stay put. I am now shooting for another 20 pounds... and when that's gone, I'll once again re-evaluate and decide whether or not I want to keep going, and how far.

It's helped to make incremental, non-drastic changes in my eating and my exercise. I think this is what trips up a lot of people who are trying to lose weight: they want to become health- obsessed gym bunnies overnight, and when that's too hard, they give up. It helped instead to add one workout a week to what I was already doing... and then, when I got used to that, to add one more.

And on a related topic: It's helped to be aware that weight loss can happen in fits and starts: there are natural fluctuations, with some weeks where I lose a lot and others where I don't or even gain a little. One of my big hysterical grocery-store crying fits came early on in my program, during a week where I gained weight... and it took Ingrid forever to convince me that this didn't necessarily mean I was doing something wrong, or that I had to make an already difficult weight-loss program even more strenuous. But she was right. It makes much more sense to keep my focus on the big picture, the overall arc. If I gain half a pound a week three weeks in a row, then I might decide that I need to step things up. But if I gain half a pound one week, I'm not going to decide that what I'm doing isn't working. I'm just going to stick with it.

It's helped for me to find exercise that I love doing. I am now doing bicep curls with 20 lb. dumbbells. I feel like a fucking Amazon goddess. Weightlifting rules.

It's helped for me to do some sort of exercise almost every day. It's not just that I burn more calories that way. It's that it makes exercise into a normal part of my daily life: not a special thing I do a couple times a week and can blow off if I'm not in the mood, but an everyday routine like brushing my teeth.

When I'm not in the mood to exercise, it helps to remember that I never, ever, ever have been sorry that I worked out. Ever. No matter how crummy I felt when I started, I have always felt better afterwards.

Going to the gym helps. It's not absolutely necessary; if you can't afford a gym membership, you can get good exercise without one. But for me, the gym has been a lifesaver. The thing about the gym is it takes minimal willpower. All I need is the willpower to get in the car and get my ass to the gym. Once I'm there, of course I'm going to work out. I mean, what else am I going to do?

But it's also helped to have some exercise equipment at home. Nothing fancy or expensive: some dumbbells, a stability ball, a resistance band, a mat. Having exercise equipment at home means I can easily do at least a little exercise every day, even if I can't get to the gym. And that's helped turn it into a regular part of my daily life, like brushing my teeth.

It's helped to get a trainer. (Hi, Marta! We love you.)

It's helped for me to to find healthy foods that I love. (Summer fruit season has made this so much easier: I can eat peaches and cherries and strawberries for months and never get tired of them.)

And it's helped to not be a purist: to eat the occasional cheeseburger, the occasional barbecued ribs, the occasional donut. I have to budget my day's calories for it (or else budget for the occasional day when I don't worry about it). But thinking, "I can never have another donut again as long as I live" would make this intolerable. Thinking, "I can have a donut today if I have a light dinner" makes this do-able. An entertaining challenge, even. Like my food for the day is a puzzle, and I'm trying to get all the pieces to fit together.

Finally, more than anything else, it helps me to remember my knee. It helps to notice how much better my knee already feels now that I've lost the 20 pounds: to notice that I'm climbing stairs and hills again, with little or no problem. It helps to think of how much better my knee will feel when I lose another 20, and then another. It helps to pick up the 20 lb. dumbbells at the gym and think about how rough it would be on my knees to walk around carrying them all day... and how much better it would feel to set them down. It helps to think that I might even be able to do the polka again someday. And when I start thinking that this weight loss thing isn't that big a deal and I can have that ice cream if I want it, it helps to imagine my old age, and to think about whether I want to be spending it dancing, walking in the woods, exploring new cities, on my knees committing unspeakable sexual acts... or sitting on a sofa watching TV and waiting to die.

There's something Ingrid has said about this, something that's really stuck with me. She's pointed out that if I were diabetic or something, and I was told I had to change my eating habits in order to stay alive... I'd do it. I might gripe about it, but I'd manage, and I'd even find a way to enjoy it if I could.

Well, the reality isn't that far off. I have a choice between a good shot at a healthy, active, pleasurable middle and old age... and a long, steady decline into a vicious circle of inactivity and ill health. I am, as the old '80s T-shirts used to say, choosing life.

So that's what's working for me. If you're doing this as well: What's working for you?

Important note: I am most emphatically NOT looking for diet tips. Anyone who offers diet tips will be banned from this blog. I am only partially kidding. I already know the mechanics of what I need to do: count calories, keep a food journal, exercise regularly, be patient. Rocket science.

What I'm looking for is psychological tips. Ways of walking through the emotional minefield. Ways of framing this that make it more sustainable. Ways of answering the question:

How do you be a fat-positive feminist who's losing weight?

And for that matter, how do you be a fat-positive skeptic?

(To be completed in tomorrow's post.)

In Praise of Routine

No, really. I'm serious.

There's this very prevalent alternative-culture meme about how routine kills life and joy: how doing more or less the same things every day makes you less present and mindful in your life; how spontaneity is the key to a life fully lived.

So today -- just for a change -- I want to be an ornery cuss, and buck this trend.

I want to speak in praise of routine.

Ingrid and I just got back from a vacation in which, for complicated reasons that I won't bore you with, we stayed in five different rooms, in three different homes and hotels. All throughout that trip -- and for several days after getting back home from it -- my daily routine was seriously disrupted.

And this put rather a crimp in my life. The vacation was great, for all the reasons that vacations are great. But it was also disruptive: even more so than a regular vacation where you stay in one or two places. And in the week or so that I've been back at home trying to get back into my groove, my style has been rather cramped. The loss of my routine has made my life less lively, less joyful, less present and mindful. Finally settling back into that routine has been a relief... and it's enabled me to live my life more fully.

See, here's the thing. When I'm not in a routine, I have to put a disproportionate amount of time and mental energy into thinking about things that are... well, routine. Where is my toothbrush? Where is my underwear? Where is the colander in this kitchen? Where are the 15 pound dumbbells at this gym? The smallest aspects of my life are a struggle just to make happen.

And I screw things up. I forget to bring my lunch to work. I leave my wallet on the sofa. I lose my workout notebook. All of which takes even more time and mental energy to deal with.

That's time and mental energy that I don't have to spend on things like, say, writing. Talking with friends. Pondering the nature of existence. Looking at trees.

Plus it's an irritant. And getting irritated every half an hour because you lost your workout notebook and can't find your underwear is probably not the best state of mind for a present, mindful, fully-lived life.

But when I'm in my routine, I can spend less time and energy struggling just to make my life happen... and can spend more time and energy actually experiencing it. And I can experience it in a calmer, more peaceful state of mind. When I'm getting dressed, I can be more present in my body and the way I express myself through style if I'm not tearing apart my suitcase trying to find my underwear; when I'm working out, I can focus more intently on the signals my body is giving me when I'm not wondering where the damn 15-pound dumbbells are.

(Side note: I think it's funny that many of the people who deride routine are the same people who praise ritual, and bemoan the lack of it in our rushed modern society. If I call brushing my teeth and journaling my workouts a ritual instead of a routine, can I get my alt-culture cred back?)

I agree that there's a happy medium here. I agree that there's a balance between rigidity and chaos; a place where we can feel both peaceful and free, where we have room for surprises and change, but don't have to spend every moment working out the smallest details of everyday existence. And I think this happy medium is different for different people. Some people flourish on wearing the same outfit and having the same thing for breakfast every day; for others, as long as they brush their teeth every morning and every night, that's all the routine they need. For some people, the level of routine that I have in my life would be mind- numbingly repetitive; for others, it would be alarmingly chaotic.

But... well, actually, I think that's my point. I don't think it's up to us to judge other people for having a happy balance point between rigidity and chaos that's different from ours.

Yes, too much routine -- whatever "too much" means for you -- can be tedious and stultifying. Yes, doing the same things day in and day out can lead you to space out from your life instead of engaging you with it. Yes, we need to be willing to try new things, and to make room in our lives for surprises. Yes, we need to not be so attached to our routine that we're afraid to ever let go of it.

But I have a limited amount of time on this earth. I would really rather not spend it figuring out where I put my underwear.

Strange Religious Signs in the Midwest

When I went on this trip, I'd been planning to do a Midwestern follow-up to my Strange Religious Imagery in my Neighborhood piece. But alas, Midwesterners don't go much for floridly weird religious imagery. (At least, not in the part of the Midwest where we were.)

They do, however, go for some interesting religious language. So I thought I'd share with you my twisted version of vacation snaps: Strange Religious Signs in the Midwest. (We actually had a genuinely good time on our trip: my family is cool and fun as well as godless, and there's much about the Midwest that is deeply peaceful and beautiful. I do in fact love it, and get mad when people dismiss it as "flyover country." But this is what I was doing with my camera instead of shooting pretty trees and houses. There's something deeply wrong with me, I know.)

"God Has Blessed America Let America Bless God!" (Galva Assembly of God, Galva, IL)

One in a long series of "America is God's special country" theocracy signs. We were traveling on the Fourth of July weekend, so this theme was all over the church signs like a cheap suit. I didn't even bother to photograph most of them.

"May the Fourth Be With You" (St. John Roman Catholic Church; not sure what town, somewhere near Galesburg if not in it)

Yet another in the "patriotic Christianity" series. With an "out of date pop- culture pun to inject some humor and please the kids" thrown in for good measure.

"Have I Got Your Attention? -- Good! Now Give Me Your Heart -God" (First Church of the Open Bible, Galesburg, IL)

Not a particularly unusual sentiment, I know. What struck all of us about this one was the arrogance of presuming to speak for God. What exactly does a pastor think when he puts up a sign like this... and signs it, "God"?

"A Family Altar Can Alter A Family" (Colonial Baptist Church, Galesburg, IL)

What is is with church signs and bad puns?

"The Presence of Christ Puts Pain In Perspective" (Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church, Galesburg, IL)

I'm not quite sure what the point here is. It could be, "Your divine buddy Christ is here with you and will get you into Heaven forever, therefore your pain is no big deal." But it could also be, "Christ's suffering on the cross was more horrific and ghastly than you could imagine, so quit whining about your own petty pain, and have some gratitude for his sacrifice. If it's the former, then my reaction is pretty much, "Screw you for trivializing my pain." If it's the latter... then ditto. With an added helping of, "If I hit myself on the hand with a hammer enough times, does that give me moral authority over you? I didn't ask Christ to hang himself on a cross for three days, so screw him for using it to try to guilt trip me into obedience." And with just a dash of, "Ew."

"Do You Truly Know God?" (Galva Assembly of God again; return trip)

At last -- a church sign with a clear question that I can answer. My reply to that would be have a big, fat, unequivocal, "No." Glad we could get that one settled. (I am curious about this one. Is the point that we don't truly know God but the church does... or that none of us truly knows God and it's arrogant to think that we do? I like to think that it's the latter. Although given the blind certainty of the church's previous "God Has Blessed America Let America Bless God!" message, I'm not so sure.)

"We See God Every Day. Do You Recognize Him?" (Open Arms Community Church, Kewanee, IL)

Providing a charmingly arrogant contrast to the delicate philosophical questing of "Do You Truly Know God?" I mean, isn't pride one of the seven deadly sins? I've never understood why thinking that you know better than others what God thinks and wants and looks like doesn't qualify.

Brief tangent: This one is even funnier in the context of the church's "1960s drive-in" architecture. While I didn't take pictures of many churches themselves, I had to make an exception for this one.

We see God every day. And he looks like a
roller- skating carhop from "American Graffiti."

"Welcome Worship 9:00 AM Stop In We Dont Bite Much" (St. John Lutheran, Princeton, IL)

We don't bite much. Wow. Do I ever feel welcome here. Especially with the barbed wire. And double especially with the other side of the same sign:

"Hell Is Hotter Probably Windier Too." (ditto)

I think they were probably trying to be funny. With both sides of the sign. But something about this one told us, "Get the picture fast, and then get the frack out of there." I am kind of entertained, though, by a church sign that warns you against the torments of hell by essentially saying, "The weather is even worse than it is in the Midwest!"

And finally:

"God Is Perfect Only Man Makes Misteaks" (First Congregational Church, Peru, IL)

Another in the "labored comedy" series. Rather more comical than most. Of course this one immediately makes me want to ask, "If God is perfect, then why did he make his most magnificent creation such bad spellers?"

A specially blessed country; bad puns; out- of- date pop culture references; the trivialization of human suffering; the presumption that believers recognize God and speak for him; jokey threats; labored humor; and weird logic. Let's hear it for Christianity in America!

I'm Back!

I'm back from my vacation. I decided, for some freakish reason, to make this an actual vacation and not a semi- vacation; so I mostly stayed away from computers and electronic media, and instead took long walks and watched fireflies. Hence the no blogging. Had a good time, but am very glad to be back. I'll be blogging again in a day or two. See y'all soon!

Speaking Ill of the Dead

For what are probably obvious reasons, I have been thinking about the strong social taboo against speaking ill of the dead.

And I'm trying to figure out if I think it's an irrational superstition, or a reasonable gesture of respect to people who are in mourning... or some combination of the two.

In the case of private individuals, it makes perfect sense. When people are mourning their Uncle Larry, they don't want to hear about what an insufferable jerk he was. It would be trivializing their feelings of loss and grief.

But with public figures... it seems like the rules should be different. And yet, they're clearly not. If we don't personally know the person, and don't even know anyone who knew the person... we still feel the taboo against speaking ill of them. Even if we found them repulsive at best and morally reprehensible at worst; even if we think it's very likely that they were guilty of one of the worst crimes imaginable; even if, cutting them the greatest possible slack and taking them entirely at their own word about their actions, we still find those actions to be grossly inappropriate and unethical... even then, when a person has recently died, we tend to either say something nice, or not say anything at all. (That's right... I'm talking about Richard Nixon.)

The only exception I can remember seeing is Spiro Agnew, who the press was merciless about when he died. I'm sure there have been others -- I'm sure that when Stalin died, nobody outside the Soviet Union was writing gushing eulogies -- but they are wildly few and far between. (And I strongly suspect that Agnew got slammed, not because he'd been so much more evil than any other dead person, but because he'd been such an insulting schmuck toward the press.)

And I'm trying to figure out if this taboo is reasonable.

I do get that people feel personally attached to public figures, even when they never met them. A little while back, I saw a blog headline that made me think, just for a few seconds, that Richard Dawkins had died. That he'd been murdered, actually. I was filled with shock and grief; despite the fact that I'd never met the man, I felt a deep sense of loss of someone very important to me who'd made a big impact in my life. And complicating my emotions was that fact that one of the people around at the time (we were travelling, and had some people around us we didn't know very well) was a hard-core Christian who'd been making no bones about shoving her beliefs down everybody's throat. The thought of having to go through my grief around this person who I didn't trust to respect it made a terrible situation (or what would have been a terrible situation) much worse.

So there's a part of me that really does get it.

But there's also a part of me that thinks this is dishonest. And while I don't actually treasure honesty as the single greatest virtue we have, while I do understand the social and even moral value of keeping your mouth shut from time to time... in this situation, there's a part of me that's greatly troubled by it.

If it's a public figure who I just didn't care for or find interesting, that's one thing. I'm happy to keep my mouth shut. But if it's a public figure who did serious and lasting harm to people -- again, think Richard Nixon -- it seems that lavishing unfiltered praise on them upon their death is insulting to the people they harmed. I get that we don't want to be trivializing or callous about people's grief when someone they care about dies. But I also don't want to trivialize the damage done by said person... and I don't want to be callous about the impotent outrage their victims must be feeling when they see the person who harmed them lavishly eulogized all over the world.

So I can't figure this one out.

Thoughts?

A Hedonistic View of Physical Health

Overheard this weekend (can't remember where):

"Eat healthy; exercise regularly; die anyway."

It's a sentiment I've heard many times before. You're going to die anyway -- so why bother living healthy? Why not just enjoy life? Sure, eating well and getting regular exercise might lengthen your life a little... but is it really that important to have a longer life? Isn't it more important to have a satisfying one?

So today, I want to evangelize a little for the cause of eating well and getting regular vigorous exercise.

And I want to do it, not in opposition to hedonism, but in passionate support of it.

If the only reason I worked out was to extend my life, I might well not do it. I certainly wouldn't do it as much. After all, what's the point of having more time if you're just spending that extra time walking on a treadmill?

So I don't work out so I'll live longer.

I work out so I have more energy. So I sleep better, and am not tired all day. So I'm less likely to suffer from depression. So my joints don't hurt when I dance, or walk, or indeed when I try to fall asleep. So I'm better able to focus and stay alert and present. So I have a higher libido. So I feel more at home in my body.

And ditto all that with eating a healthy diet.

In other words:

Eating well and exercising aren't obstacles to an enjoyable life.

They're what make it possible.

Sure, when I was in my twenties, I could live a happily sybaritic life and still eat junk and never work out. I could dance 'til three, stay up all night playing cards, do drugs, chase women, march in the streets -- all the things that made my twenty- something life worth living -- with practically no effort.

But I'm 47 now. If I eat crap, I feel like crap. If I don't work out, I get logy, irritable, depressed, easily bored, easily distracted, and physically uncomfortable. (The effect isn't subtle, either: if I have to skip the gym for even just a couple weeks due to illness or travel or something, I start to feel achy and crabby very, very fast.)

But if I eat well and get regular vigorous exercise, I have the energy, and the focus, and the mood, to engage in the things that make my life meaningful and fun. I can put in a full day at the office, and still go out dancing, or spend an hour cooking a meal, or work on my book proposal, or write my congressperson. I can take a two- mile walk showing friends and family the wonderful neighborhood I live in. I can spend a day running around doing errands and still go out to a party at ten at night. I can dance all night, fuck all night, stay up all night talking with friends, stay up all night blogging. (Well, maybe not all night -- but fairly late.)

And so I say again: Eating well and exercising aren't obstacles to enjoying my life. They're what make it possible.

I thoroughly agree that living this life to its fullest is crucial. (And no, that doesn't mean being thoroughly selfish or self-indulgent; in fact, I strongly think that "living life to its fullest" includes empathy and social responsibility and staying connected with the world around us.) I think this life is the only one we have, and that not experiencing it with as much richness as we can is a tragic waste.

But if this life -- and this body -- is the only one we have, then don't we want it in good working order? If you had a car that you knew for a fact was the only one you were ever going to have for the rest of your life, wouldn't you give it regular tune-ups and oil changes? Like, to a psychotically obsessive degree? Not just so it ran long, but so it ran well, and could reliably get you where you wanted to go?

And assuming the answer is yes... why should you treat your body any differently?

I don't think being healthy means constant self-deprivation. The occasional donut, the occasional Manhattan or three, the occasional day spent in bed or on the sofa... these have an important place in a healthy life. As Dr. Hibbert said on The Simpsons, "I feel a balanced diet can include the occasional eating contest."

But these bodies are the only ones we're ever going to have. In fact, I'll go further than that. We don't have our bodies. We are our bodies. The best evidence we have is that our consciousness, our ability to choose, everything we think of as our selves... all of that comes from our brains, and from our brains' interactions with the rest of our bodies and with the rest of the world. And our brains are one of the main body parts we have that functions and feels better with a healthy diet and regular vigorous exercise.

And since we are our bodies, making our bodies happy is how we make ourselves happy.

I get that it's hard. Boy howdy, do I get it. Especially at first. It does get easier with time, as your habits change: as you find healthy food that you think is delicious, as you find types of exercise you think are fun, as you learn to connect your moods and energy levels with how you're eating and moving. But I won't deny that it can be hard. (I recommend incremental change: adding one or two workouts a week, changing two or three meals a week from junk to actual food... and when you're adjusted to that, adding one or two more.)

But my point is this: I think it's a mistake to look at eating well and exercising as punishment, or as deprivation, or as virtuous but purgatorial and boring. I think it makes much more sense -- and is much more sustainable -- to look at eating well and exercising as a gateway to a delightfully hedonistic, richly satisfying, vigorously pleasurable life. I say one more time: Taking care of our bodies is not an obstacle to enjoying life. It is what makes enjoying life possible.

Other posts in this series:
The Eroticism of Exercise

A Skeptic's View of Love

What does it mean to have a skeptical view of love?

I don't mean having a cynical attitude about love. (Funny how the words "skepticism" and "cynicism" get conflated.) I mean taking a skeptical, materialist, entirely non-woo view of life -- and applying it to how we think about love.

The other day, Ingrid showed me this video by Tim Minchin, famed atheist and skeptical singer/ songwriter/ poet/ performance artist/ comedian. (For boring technical reasons, I'll embed it at the end of the post instead of here.) The gist of the song, sung for and about his wife (spoiler alert!): "If I didn't have you, I probably would have somebody else."

At first, Ingrid was worried that I'd be hurt by her showing me the video. But like her, I found it hilarious -- and in a freaky way, I found it one of the most romantic and loving things I've seen in a while. ("You fall within a bell curve" has now become one of our endearments.)

And it's gotten me thinking about the whole idea of soul-mates, and romantic destiny, and there being one perfect love for you in the whole world. All of which I think is a load of dingo's kidneys.

And I don't think I'm being unromantic.

First, obviously, I think the whole "soul-mate/ romantic destiny" thing is just wrong. Mistaken. Not true. I don't think we have souls, much less mates for them; I don't think there's an invisible hand pushing people together (and if there were, it'd have a seriously sadistic sense of humor, what with putting people's true destined loves on opposite sides of the country and whatnot).

But maybe more to the point:

The "soul-mate/ romantic destiny" vision of love puts the focus on love as something you feel -- rather than something you do.

It puts the focus on love as something that happens to you -- rather than something that you choose.

And I find it much more romantic, and much more loving, to see love as something we do, and something we choose.

When we see love solely as something that we feel... then what happens when those feelings change? As they inevitably do.

And when we see love solely as something that happens to us... then what happens when the going gets tough, and we have to make hard choices about the relationship? For that matter, what happens when something else happens to us -- something that conflicts with the love? What happens when we get job offers in other cities... or when other romantic prospects appear on the horizon?

Of course a huge part of love is the way we feel about our beloved. The feelings of tenderness and passion that well up in me when I look at Ingrid, the feelings of anxious excitement that I had when we were first starting out...that's an enormous part of what we have between us. And of course a huge part of love is the feeling that something has hit you out of the clear blue sky. When Ingrid and I were first going out, I used to say that I felt like I'd been conked on the head with a giant vaudeville rubber mallet. If love didn't have the power to knock us out of our tracks and into a whole new life, it wouldn't be what it is.

But I don't think that's enough. It's enough to get love started -- but it's not enough to sustain it.

I think what sustains love is doing the dishes when you promised to. Remembering the book they said they wanted, and getting it for their birthday. Skipping the movie you wanted to see, to go with them to a party of their friends who you don't know very well. Remembering which kind of seltzer water they like when you go shopping; remembering how they like their burgers cooked when you're making dinner. Sitting with them when they're grieving... and restraining your impulse to always try to fix things and give advice and make things better, and instead being willing to just sit still and be with them in their pain. Asking if there's anything they need from the kitchen while you're up. Wearing the stupid sticky breathing strip on your nose at night so your snoring doesn't keep them awake. Bringing them endless cups of tea when they're sick. Keeping your temper in an argument, and remembering that as angry as you might be right now, you love this person and don't want to hurt them. Saying, "I love you." Saying, "You're beautiful" -- not just when they're dolled up for a night on the town, but when they come home from work and you notice that they look particularly fetching. Noticing when they come home from work looking particularly fetching. Going to their readings, their dance performances, their office parties. Going to their family gatherings, and treating their family as your family, too. Going to the vet together. Trying out music they like, books they like, recipes they like, hobbies they like, kinds of sex they like, even if you don't think it's your thing: not just because you want to make them happy, but because it's part of who they are, and you want to find out more about them, and share the things that matter to them.

In the inimitable words of Tim Minchin, "Love is nothing to do with destined perfection/ The connection is strengthened; the affection simply grows over time... And love is made more powerful by the ongoing drama of shared experience and synergy/ And symbiotic empathy or something like that... " Sure, the feelings I have for Ingrid have a lot to do with the giant vaudeville rubber mallet I got conked on the head with when we fell in love. But they have more to do with the eleven plus years we've spent together: the meals we've eaten, the parties we've thrown, the vacations we've taken, the arguments we've had, the sex we've had, the griefs we've borne, the thousands of nights we've spent sleeping in the same bed, the long conversations we've had about politics, about religion, about books, about our friends, about our cats, about bad reality television.

And none of that has anything to do with fate.

Like Tim Minchin, I'm intensely aware of the massive role that pure chance plays in our lives. Not fate, not destiny, but pure dumb random roll- of- the- dice luck. As passionately as I love San Francisco, I realize that I could have landed in a dozen other cities -- New York, Portland, London, Seattle, Minneapolis -- and settled happily there instead. I often think about the people in those cities who would have been my friends if I lived there instead of San Francisco; I sometimes even feel a loss, a yearning, for the people I've never met who could have been my best friends.

And I realize that if I'd wound up in one of those cities instead of San Francisco, I would never have met Ingrid, and we both would likely have met and fallen in love with other people instead. While there's a pragmatic sense in which I suppose Ingrid and I were destined to meet -- we both lived in San Francisco, we were interested in many of the same things, we knew many of the same people, it's not actually that big of a city -- any one of a thousand small choices and pieces of random chance could have resulted in our paths not crossing. Or not crossing at the right time.

What makes Ingrid uniquely special to me isn't that she's my soul-mate, my destiny, the one person in billions I could have loved and been happy with. What makes Ingrid uniquely special to me is the years we have behind us: the meals and parties and sex and conversations and trips to the vet and everything else. It's the things we do, and have done, and will do for many years to come; it's the choices we make, and have made, and will make in the years we have left.

Of the people in the world I might have been happy with? She falls within a bell curve. Of the people in the world I now want to be with? She is entirely and 100% unique. Not because a divine hand made us uniquely suited to be together... but because we have chosen to make each other unique.

Oh, yeah. The Tim Minchin video is below the jump, since when I put videos above the jump it screws up my archives.

Land of the Lotus Eaters, Part 2

This is the second half of this piece. It won't make much sense unless you read Part One.

Land of the Lotus Eaters, Part 2

In general, I suppose San Franciscans are bored with boring things fairly easily. We're certainly willing to go to great and ridiculous lengths to avoid the experience. I often think of San Francisco as the city where people do pointless things for no reason; where, indeed, the pointlessness of an activity is often a strong point in its favor. "Well, that was random," we say appreciatively, when we see the street fair with the motorized sofas, or the abandoned building with the furniture carefully suspended out of the windows, or the crazy man on the street with the sign that reads "Impeach Coolidge." I remember the day that I spent with a group of friends building Rome in a day (an afternoon, really), mostly out of cereal boxes and toilet paper rolls, and then taking it all down to the beach, setting fire to it, and fiddling while it burned. I remember bringing my friend Chip to the annual St. Stupid's Day Parade on April 1st, where he offered to exchange his garish thrift-store tie with every carefully-suited Financial District guy he encountered -- many of whom seriously considered the offer, and the tie, before regretfully rejecting it. It's a Stone Soup culture, a city full of people who know there won't be any party if they don't bring their share of it. And it's a city full of people making beautiful ephemeral things for no reason. Not for our careers, not for our places in history, but simply to add to the sum of beauty in the world, or maybe just to show off. There's a living-in-the-moment quality to life here that is both profound and frivolous, like a 20's flapper who's discovered Zen. We are a city that cherishes its grasshoppers and looks somewhat suspiciously at its ants, griping under our breath about how their diligent work habits are driving up the housing market. We are a city of people who would love nothing more than to sing all summer and dance all winter.

But I don't mean to say that the San Francisco ethic is purely hedonistic. I can see how someone might think that; it's easy to confuse hedonism with trying to create a world you'd like to live in, and there certainly is a hefty dose of pure pleasure-seeking here. But there's a political passion here as well, an almost painfully sincere idealism, a willingness and even eagerness to work long hours for no pay for some almost-certainly out-of-reach political goal. And while that may seem bizarrely out of synch with the make-a-circus play-acting I've been describing, I think it's actually very much in keeping with it. The passion to create a world you'd want to live in isn't limited to creating a world in which you personally are having a good time. It can also mean a world in which the police are not brutal, virgin forests aren't being logged, innocent people aren't being bombed, the U.S. is out of Iraq, and people with AIDS are not dying in the streets.

And in much the same way that twitching lunacy often lies beneath the surface of American normality, there's a core of sanity resting calmly and firmly beneath much of this city's out-of-control silliness, supporting it and nurturing it and making it possible, like a grant from the Therapy Foundation. The Northern California leanings toward self-esteem boostering, endless therapy, and seemingly-endless processing are wildly mocked the world over, and with good reason; said leanings are often silly and excessive, and silly excessive things should be mocked, and the most processed and therapized San Franciscans are often the most enthusiastic mockers. Myself among them. And yet I became sane here, became sane against any reasonable expectation I might have had for doing so. I often have a hearty giggle at the city's fondness for amateur analysis; and I also have hours-long talks with friends, awkward, intimate, absurdly personal, impossibly useful talks that, at least sometimes, have an actual effect on how we think and act. I happily poke fun at the local addiction to The Processing That Wouldn't Die; and I'm also strongly influenced by the prevailing local ethos that tells me to, for fuck's sake, actually tell people when I'm upset with them, instead of stewing about it silently and with rather bad grace. I cheerfully mock the San Francisco indulgence in protracted therapy, even aiming a few breezy gibes at my own off-and-on years in it. And yet I see my life cleanly divided by a wide stripe between pre-therapy and post-therapy, and I look at the furious, guilt-saturated, nearly paralyzed girl on the other side, and I stare at her with pity and bewilderment -- and a barely-articulate gratitude to the man whose job it was to help me set fire to her so I could crawl out of her ashes.

It's hard to explain what exactly all that has to do with San Francisco. I know there are honest, kind people outside San Francisco. I even know that there are therapists outside San Francisco. There are probably even queer-positive, kink-positive, non-monogamy-positive therapists outside San Francisco (although this city does seem to spout a perpetual fountain of them, like an endless procession of MFCC-trained Athenas springing from Zeus's head). But there's something different here, something about the stargazing and the storytelling and the amateur theatricals, that can give your mental health some room to breathe and grow. The local ethos of making up your party as you go along isn't just about turning yourself into a sex goddess or a Regency dandy or Lydia the tattooed lady. It's about turning yourself into a person who isn't crippled by their traumatic past. It's about recognizing when you're about to do the same stupid, self-defeating thing you've done a hundred times before, and deciding that this time, you'd like to try doing something else for a change. This is a city that actively encourages people to try doing something else for a change. This is a city that thinks people should, in fact, learn to love and esteem themselves, and that doesn't see what's so all-fired ridiculous about that idea. And this is the city where I learned to stop loving fucked-up drug addicts and made myself capable of loving someone who, in addition to the more usual virtues of being thoughtful and decent, honest and brave, smart and funny and so fucking sexy I could plotz, is also, far above all else, wonder of wonders and miracle of miracles, more or less mentally healthy herself. I might well have met Ingrid someplace other than San Francisco (well, apart from the obvious fact that she lives here), but I don't think I could have gotten myself in shape to love her in any place other than here.

God knows there's an annoying side to all this as well. The city's processing and its playfulness, the dreaminess and the earnestness, the living in the moment and the acceptance of other points of view, all of it does sometimes fuse into a vague, spacey, irresponsible, indecisive, childish, self-absorbed mush. And if you have an ounce of rationality or even just common sense, it's like having your soul scraped on a cheese grater. I remember a particularly cheese-grating event, the time that the longsword dance team I'm with was asked to perform at a pagan rave (we were supposed to represent the element of air -- don't ask). I remember showing up at a warehouse space in the heart of the third-string dot-com district to find that the rave organizers (a) hadn't organized any actual plans for us to dance, and (b) were so committed to the consensus process that none of them could make any actual plans for us to dance without consulting the rest of their group -- thus leaving the sword team with no-one who could tell us when we were supposed to perform, or where, or what the plan was for clearing the stoned-out-of-their-minds-on-Ecstasy crowd so we could get to the place we were supposed to perform, wherever that turned out to be. I remember my friend and fellow dancer Marian steeling herself to make a few decisions with the organizers and reporting back to the team, simultaneously enraged and in stitches, with the information that one of them had actually told another, "I'm not saying that I agree with what you said, I'm just validating that you said it." And I remember being in the crowd of ravers shortly before the sword team was about to dance, while a very sincere guy in a white dashiki instructed us all to visualize a powerful cone of healing white light rising up to the ceiling and spilling out over the city -- failing to inform us which direction the cone was supposed to be pointing. (Pointy-side up or pointy-side down? It turned out later that the team had all been puzzled by this question, and that in fact half of us had visualized it pointing one way and half of us the other, thus raising to the ceiling a somewhat-less-powerful cylinder of healing white light.)

But it was a good gig for all that. The lights were all down except for the ones trained on the disco ball, and we danced in the dark with just a few sprinkles of disco-ball light flashing on the upraised swords, and our entourage told us later that the swords looked like they were moving and weaving on their own, held up and wielded by shadows. And the audience was adoringly enthusiastic (although they were, I feel compelled to remind you, stoned out of their minds on Ecstasy, some of them too stoned to understand that if a sword was suddenly thrust in their direction they should probably get out of the way, and they might well have been adoringly enthusiastic if we'd bashed our heads with our swords while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance). And the crowd made an amazing noise when we raised the cone/cylinder of light, starting with a low humming that gradually rose in pitch to a high cry, cacophonous and beautiful, sounding for all the world like the black monolith in "2001." And even at the time, even during the worst of the waffling and the dithering and the piss-poor consensus process, I remember thinking, "This is ridiculous. This is so San Francisco. This is going to make a great story."

I look at everything I've written here, and I see that it's all a generalization. I know that it's my perception, my experience, based on my life and the lives of my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances and colleagues and fuckbuddies. I do understand that the entire city is not made up of queers, perverts, sex workers, folk dancers, artists, activists, pagans, food fanatics, body modifiers, and historical re-creation societies. I'm sure there are people living here for whom little or none of what I've written is true; gay Republicans, dot-com has-beens, upscale workaholic strivers, teenage runaway junkies, the appallingly immense homeless population.

And yet the very words "I know this is just my experience" are, in my mind, San Francisco words. It was here I learned that my experience was not the same thing as the objective truth. It was here I learned that other people could have wildly differing preferences and opinions from me, and that this difference didn't necessarily negate or discredit either of our experiences. It was here I learned that aesthetic taste was not a moral or character issue. It was here I learned, not that I should never make moral judgements about other people, but that I should be very careful, very selective, about the moral judgements I do make. It was here that I saw the graffito on the bus shelter, a rant about how AIDS drugs were a poisonous corporate/ government conspiracy to murder the gay community... followed by the words, "I think." I almost busted a gut laughing when I saw that. Only in San Francisco, I thought, would even the most deranged political extremists phrase their rants in "I" statements.

The phrase "Only in San Francisco" gets used here a lot. It's used both sheepishly and boastfully, with rolled eyes and indulgent smiles and smug self-satisfaction, often all at once. Only in San Francisco, we say, would the second-largest annual public event be the S/M street fair (the first being the gay pride parade, duh). Only in San Francisco would the mayor invite the news media to watch him take a shower with two disc jockeys. Only in San Francisco would the peep show dancers organize a labor union (successfully, too, with a contract and everything), and then buy the place out and turn it into a worker-owned co-operative. Only in San Francisco would the holiday event calendar include, not just a Sing-Along Messiah, but a Dance-Along Nutcracker. Only in San Francisco would candidates for sheriff and district attorney campaign in leather bars. It all adds to the self-made mythic quality, this vast and absurd and no doubt wildly inaccurate list of things we do that we'd like to think no-one else does. The only phrase that gets used more is "It's not like it used to be." Only in San Francisco, we say; and yet San Francisco isn't what it was, in the '50s in beatnik North Beach, or the '60s in the Haight-Ashbury, or the '80s at the peak of the queer street-activist movement, or in any decade at all before the dot-com boom drove housing prices through the roof. And yet people come here, and people stay, and ten or twenty years from now people will be griping about how the city isn't what it used to be, isn't what it was in its heyday, right around the turn of the millennium. And it all adds to the mythology somehow, tingeing it with self-indulgent longing, making the place feel even more like Camelot.

Calvin Trillin, a very silly writer whom I greatly admire and respect, once wrote that anyone who doesn't think the best hamburger in the world is made in his hometown is a sissy. I happen to know for a fact that the best hamburger in the world is made in San Francisco. The Burger Joint in the Mission, if you want to know. Serving organic hamburgers made from happy free-range Niman Ranch cows. And I think that this says, not that I am a sissy, but that my hometown is not the place where I grew up.

Land of the Lotus Eaters

I wrote this piece a few years ago, and consider it one of the best things I've written. I've never been able to get it published, though, and I've finally decided that, fuck it, blogging counts as publishing. So I'm publishing it here. Enjoy!

Land of the Lotus Eaters

It's January, and I am on the beach near the old Doggie Diner with a crowd of about four hundred, watching a twenty-foot-wide pile of Christmas trees go up in flames. The Cacophony Society is here, and a bunch of Burning Man people, and the usual gang of easily-entertained freelance thrill-seekers. There are old hippies and young hipsters and a multitude of late-thirties Generation W's like me. There are people dressed in practical warm clothing, and people dressed in red leather bell bottoms, and people dressed in strings of Christmas lights. People have brought boom boxes and musical instruments, and flame-throwers and fireworks, and weird gadgety toys they made themselves. Some of the Christmas trees have been treated with fire-retardent chemicals, and these let off huge, billowing clouds of beautiful toxic smoke when they burn. Some of the trees still have plastic stands attached to their trunks, and we admire the cool melting-plastic formations, oohing and aahing like ten-year-olds, or perhaps more like Beavis and Butt-Head. Whenever the fire starts to die down and we think it's all about to be over soon, another group drives up with another Christmas tree, or two, or six, and tosses it/them onto the bonfire, to wild cheering and uninvited commentary on their tree-tossing technique.

My friend Nicola and I begin to feel bad that we didn't bring anything, not even a tree to burn, so we start thinking of songs to sing that have something to do with fire; but we're giddy from the heat and the wind and the brandy her friends Julian and Anna have brought, and all we can think of is "London's Burning," which for some reason just seems silly. I wonder aloud what would happen if you tossed glass into the fire, and Anna immediately begins to scheme for next year, making elaborate plans to lay down a pattern of colored glass bottles under the trees before they get set on fire. We run into my friend Marian, who has brought a flask of vodka-and-olive-juice martinis to share, and she and I reminisce about the first Christmas Tree Burn we went to, when the tide came in and swept a chunk of still-burning Christmas tree out to sea.

A rangy woman with a waist-length braid begins firedancing in the receding tide, swinging lighted torches on long chains in complicated loops and ellipses around her body; we gape at her in silent, open-mouthed admiration, speaking only to warn her when a wave is coming, and to whisper to each other that if you watch the torches and then shut your eyes real quick, you can see trails. I glance down the beach and see a line of four or five more firedancers, stretched out along the coastline like a string of Japanese lanterns. My skin is glowing from the bonfire and tingling from the January chill, and it now begins to glow and tingle with the rare and familiar feeling of epiphany. I am physically bursting with the joy of being exactly where I am, overflowing with the sense that this is why I am here, here in this particular place as well as just here, alive, in general. I say to Marian, "You know, San Franciscans waste time better than anyone else in the world."

It feels like the inside of a pearl, this city. There is a vagueness to it, an unreal quality, or perhaps just an unlikely one. It feels like one of Italo Calvino's invisible cities, somehow all the more fantastical for being real. I would say that it feels like a city made of dreams, except that would be a trite and awful thing to say; and besides, it isn't only my own dreams I'm living in. It's a group dream, a dream of the collective unconscious, as if all the urban-utopian imaginings of all the people who live here were laid on top of one another like transparencies, and the resulting image were somehow made flesh. It is a city of transplants, made up by people who came for something -- Paradise, the Golden Land, Queer Mecca -- and, not finding it, decided to invent it, or work towards it, or perhaps just act as if it were already here. It is a city of people who genuinely think that they want to be, can be, and indeed should be, what they wanted to be when they grew up.

An artist friend who lives in New York City wants very much to move to San Francisco, but fears it would hurt his career. I asked him once if this was because there were more galleries in New York, more dealers, more of an art scene in general, and he brushed my question off; yes, yes, he said, of course that's true, but it's not what he meant at all. What he meant was that life in San Francisco was too pleasant. He feared he would be drawn into it, the life of doing what you like and what you think might be fun and what seems important to you at the moment, and he feared that his art would suffer as a result. I knew immediately what he meant. It's true, I told him; it's so easy in San Francisco to forget about goals and ambitions and just eat the lotus. Only now I think about that conversation, and I have a hard time remembering exactly why a lifetime spent eating the lotus is supposed to be a bad thing.

I've heard a joke about this: that New York is where people go if they have talent and ambition, Los Angeles is where they go if they just have ambition, and San Francisco is where they go if they just have talent. I laughed like a harpy when I first heard the joke, and I still remember it, even though I don't think it's strictly true. I think San Franciscans do have ambition. I think San Franciscans' ambition is to be happy. And I think we're willing to devote a great deal of hard work and sacrifice to realize this ambition. San Francisco may be one of the last places left where people still believe in the perfectibility of the human soul.

I am deeply and passionately in love with this city, in love with it in a way that, until a few years ago, I had never quite been in love with another human being. I feel about it very much the way people feel about their beloveds; magnifying its virtues, excusing its faults, imagining our future together, defending it from critics even when they're right, feeling hurt and bewildered all out of proportion over its betrayals, and missing it like a major organ when I'm away for too long. My partner once suggested that someday, in the unspecified distant future many decades from now, she might possibly want to live someplace other than San Francisco, and I immediately felt a deep cold lurch in the pit of my stomach at the thought of having to choose between my two lovers. When people I know talk about leaving the city for someplace greener and quieter, they usually mean Vermont or Oregon, Montana or Minnesota. When I imagine leaving the city for someplace greener and quieter, I'm usually thinking of Berkeley.

This is definitely a sexual passion as well as a romantic one. Living in San Francisco is like having an adventurous, curious, wildly kinky, constantly horny lover, with an unlimited imagination, a passion for the extreme, and a near-complete willingness to try anything at least once. There's a flirtatious quality to the life here, an erotic energy diffused throughout the city like pepper in soup. It's not just the sex parties and the strip clubs and the clean, well-lighted places for sex toys (although God knows those don't hurt). It's the cheerful nonchalance, the playfulness, the casually prurient interest in other people's sex lives... casual prurience being about the only kind of interest in other people's sex lives we accept here, apart from academic research and plain old nosy curiosity.

It's just different here, is all. The assumptions about sex, the standards, the very definitions of the words; it's all shifted, off to one side, away from what in most places is seen as the center. San Francisco is the city where you have to explain exactly what you mean if you say you're monogamous, since that means such different things to different people. San Francisco is the city where a friend once explained that she and her boyfriend weren't kinky, they were just into nipple clamps and cross-dressing. San Francisco is the city where I begin sentences by saying, "I ran into so-and-so at a sex party last weekend," and the person I'm talking to nods politely and waits for me to get to the point of the story. San Francisco is the city where a high-profile local political consultant was given a 50th birthday bash featuring performance artists buggering each other with liquor bottles and cutting pentagrams into each other and pissing on the open wounds -- and the local news coverage over the next few days focused largely, not on whether this had been shocking or immoral, but on whether it had been politically prudent. "Was this entirely wise?" pondered the columnists. "Could this hurt his political career?" The most commonly-voiced piece of actual criticism dismissed the event as tacky and in poor taste; and the most strongly-worded criticism I heard derided it for being hopelessly out of date. "Oh, please," I heard. "Pentagrams? That is so heavy-metal. That is so Church of Satan wanna-be. That is so five minutes ago." There was a startling shortage of moralizing; it was clear that everyone at the party had been a consenting adult, and this is a city that gets the concept of consenting adults, down to the nuclei of the cells of the marrow of its bones.

Which is one of the main reasons I moved here, and probably the single most important reason I stay. Sexual tolerance can be dangerously habit-forming; I've grown accustomed to being able to tell almost anyone I meet that I'm bisexual, or non-monogamous, or a former stripper, or a sadomasochist, and reasonably expecting a fair degree of acceptance. And I don't know if I could ever again live in a place where I didn't have that expectation. I'm familiar with the assumption that this tolerance, this "no big deal" attitude towards other people's sex lives, means that San Franciscans are jaded, blasé, that we've lost the capacity to be excited and surprised and moved by sex. But being relaxed doesn't mean being blasé, and acceptance is not the same as a jaded palate, and it is entirely possible to remain un-shocked by sex and still get pretty darned excited by it. I worked for many years as the toy and video buyer for a small mail-order sex products catalog, and sometimes I was asked if being exposed to smut and sex toys all day ever made me bored or numb. The best answer I could give is that no, watching as much porn as I have hasn't made me bored with smut. It's made me bored with bad smut. Good smut still has the power to move me to tears. And I see that attitude a lot in this city. San Franciscans aren't bored with sex; if anything, San Franciscans are obsessed with sex. We're just bored with...well, with boring sex.

(End of Part 1. The second half will appear tomorrow.)

Doggie Diner photo by Atlant.

Against Nostalgia, or, I'm In Love with the Modern World: On Not Being a Crank, Part 2

I keep thinking about this question of how to get older without turning into a crank. And today, I want to talk about one of the methods I've long used in my attempts to avoid crankery. It's a fairly simple one, at least in theory:

Listen to music that's being made now.

My rule is this: I don't let myself just listen to music that was recorded when I was in college and my early twenties (or earlier). I make a conscious effort to listen to at least some music that's being made now, by musicians and bands who are still alive and still working. (And no, reunion tours don't count.)

But for some reason, that can be a hard thing for people to do.

I was just reading the comic collection R. Crumb Draws the Blues. (Conflict of interest alert: it's published by the company I work for.) In a couple of pieces, Crumb was waxing nostalgic about how great old folk and old blues and old jazz and old country music was -- all well and good, I heartily support those sentiments. He was ranting about how music has become professionalized, something an audience listens to rather than something a culture engages in -- again, sentiments I largely share. In fact, one of the big reasons I'm a folk nerd is how strongly I feel about people making their own music and other art as a way of resisting homogenized corporate culture.

But he was also ranting about how universally horrible modern music was. And that, I have no truck with. I love R. Crumb, I like this book, and I certainly respect the guy's cred on the topic of old- time music. But I think he completely missed the boat here.

And I want to talk about what that boat is, and why it's important.

The Crumb piece reminded me of a comment Dave Barry once made. I forget now what the piece was about... but the comment was something along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing here), "Music made in the '70s is all crap. The music I listened to in the '60s... now, that was great music. But '70s music, it's just this bland, banal junk."

And I was gobsmacked by how ignorant and out- of- touch this was. Yes, the '70s were the decade of Bread and America and Hall & Oates. But some amazing music was made in the '70s. I mean, the '70s was when punk happened. The Clash, the Boomtown Rats, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Stranglers... all '70s bands. And not just punk. David Bowie, Neil Young, Talking Heads... '70s. Some of these folks got their start in the '60s, and some had careers that extended into the '80s... but they were making some of their best music right in the heart of the supposedly banal '70s.

And some seriously crap music was being made in the '60s. Sure, you can wax nostalgic about the brilliant cutting- edge music made in 1967. You wanna know what the Number One hit song of 1967 was? "To Sir With Love."

Which brings me to my first major point. I think there are two things that make it easy to think everything was better in the good old days. There's Sturgeon's Law -- and there's the filtering process of time.

Sturgeon's Law states, quite simply, that 90% of everything is crap. Romantic comedies, symphonies, science fiction novels, porn videos, dress designs, epic poems, comic books, popular music... 90% of all of it is crap.

But time has a tendency to filter out the crap. We don't listen to the mediocre 18th century operas; we don't read the mediocre 19th century novels; we don't watch the mediocre silent movies. We listen to Mozart, read Jane Austen, watch Buster Keaton. We listen to Janis Joplin and The Who. "To Sir With Love"? Not so much.

It's not a perfect filtering process. Some good stuff gets filtered out; some mediocre crap gets through the screen. But on the whole, we let the crap get swallowed into the maw of history, and hang onto the good stuff. Which makes it very, very easy to mistakenly think that the operas and novels and movies and popular songs of the old days were so much better than any of the crap they're making today.

And we tend to hang on to the good stuff in our memories as well. If we have fond memories of our youths or our college days or whatever, we tend to remember the good music and so on from those days... and conveniently forget how much dreck was around back then. And since it takes a certain amount of effort, and you need to sort through a fair amount of dreck, to find good music or whatever being made now, it's way too easy to just keep listening to the stuff that we know is good and that we know we like.

Which brings me to my next point.

There's a Jonathan Richman song, "Summer Feeling," that captures almost perfectly what I'm getting at. The song is about the giddy, exuberant, irresponsible- in- the- best- sense- of- the- word freedom of youth: childhood, or college, or whatever youth you had that you loved. And it's about how important it is to hang on to some of that feeling and to re-create it here and now... and how poisonous and sad it is to just let yourself be haunted by memories and lost opportunities. (For the usually chipper Jonathan Richman, the song is kind of a downer.)

And there's a verse that goes like this:

When even fourth grade starts looking good
Which you hated
And first grade's looking good too
Overrated
And you boys long for some little girl that you dated
Do you long for her or for the way you were?

Do you long for her, or for the way you were?

Do you long for the music... or do you long for who you were when you were first listening to the music?

And when you long for that feeling, do you try to find something happening here and now that makes you feel that way? Or do you just listen to the music that used to make you feel that way?

Which brings me -- somewhat harshly, I'll admit -- to my real point.

I think nostalgia is the easy way out.

I think it's way too easy to just reflexively say, "Music/ life/ whatever was so much better back in the old days... but those days can never be recaptured, they're gone for good. So instead of trying to find music or movies or whatever stuff is good now, I'm just going to keep listening to stuff from the old days that I know I like. And I'm going to gradually sink into old crankhood, and gripe about the world instead of taking part in it or trying to understand it."

It's a cop-out. It's a way of evading responsibility for participating in your life, and in the world -- here, and now. It's an excuse for avoiding the risks and the emotional rollercoaster of engaging with the world around you. It's an excuse for sitting on the sidelines and watching the world go by. This modern world sucks -- so why bother?

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here: This modern world does not suck. Like Jonathan Richman from another song, I'm in love with the modern world. I love literary graphic novels, and slow-core, and feminism, and the atheist blogosphere, and queer contra dancing, and readily available legal pornography, and organic produce delivered to my door, and same-sex marriage, and email, and "The Office," and being openly bisexual without fear. Of course there are disappointments and horrors in the modern world. You don't have to tell me that. Some are the same old disappointments and horrors we've had since the dawn of humanity; some are brand new to our time. But there are joys in the modern world as well: some are the same old joys we've had since the dawn of humanity, and some are brand new to our time.

And the modern world has one enormous advantage over the old days: It's the world I live in. It's the world I can take part in, now, today. The old days had their plusses and minuses (and of course I'll enjoy their plusses if I can); the modern world has its plusses and minuses. But the modern world is a parade I can march in. Nothing beats that.

You know what? If what you truly love is old- time bluegrass or '60s psychedelia? That's cool. It might behoove you to check out some modern music anyway -- there are contemporary musicians doing some interesting interpretations of bluegrass and psychedelia -- but life is too short to listen to music that you hate. There are wonderful things from the past, and by all means, we should be enjoying them and preserving them and keeping them alive.

But we shouldn't treat our aesthetic preferences as a moral imperative. We shouldn't pretend that it's a serious life philosophy to gripe about kids these days and their crazy fashions. We shouldn't act as if shutting out the modern world somehow makes us discerning and superior.

And if we catch ourselves reflexively saying, "(X) was so much better in the old days, they just don't make (X) like they used to," I think it's worth making an effort to remember all the generic, banal crap that was being cranked out in the old days... and to pay attention to the good stuff being made right now.


P.S. Right now, my favorite band is Low, this gorgeous slow-core band with harmonies that send literal physical chills through my body. I'm also listening to Varttina, a band from Finland that marries eerie Eastern European folk harmonies with a peppy pop sensibility; and the Mountain Goats, a "guy with a guitar" project that's somehow both lush and spare; and Nick Cave, who feeds my inner morbid brooder; and Joanna Newsom, with her profoundly strange voice that on first hearing sounds like a cat wailing and on second hearing sounds like an avant- garde angel; and Radiohead, who walk that beautiful thin line between accessible straight-up rock and edgy industrial unlistenability. Just for starters. What music being made today are you listening to, and what do you like about it? And on the larger question -- what specific techniques have you developed for avoiding crankhood and staying in touch with the world as you get older?

Also in this series:
On Not Being a Crank

Trying To Get People To Think

If you've been on the Internets for more than ten seconds, you've probably heard someone in a discussion or debate say this:

"I'm just trying to get people to think."

It's such an innocuous- sounding phrase. I mean, if you're in a discussion or debate, presumably you're there because you want to think. You want to be intellectually stimulated. You don't want to just hold your ideas in your own private bubble: you want them to be questioned and challenged, strengthened and clarified if they're solid, modified or demolished if they're weak. Sure, you're there to persuade other people that you're right... but in theory at least, you're open to being persuaded that you're wrong.

And yet, the "I'm just trying to get people to think" trope drives me up a tree. It drives almost everyone I know up a similar tree. I'm trying to figure out why.

Partly, I think, the trope drives people up a tree because it's almost always used to defend positions that are outrageous, insulting, or just flat-out stupid and wrong. But I think there's more to it than that. So I've been thinking about this trope, and trying to nail down what exactly is so messed- up about it.

First: There's enough genuine conflict in the world, without manufactured conflict being thrown into the mix.

See, here's the thing. People who are sincerely explaining and defending positions that they sincerely hold... those aren't the ones who say, "I'm just trying to get people to think." "I'm just trying to get people to think" is something people say when they either:

a) sincerely hold a position, but aren't willing to be held accountable for it;

b) have been cornered on the indefensibility of their position, but aren't willing to admit they were wrong;

c) don't know what they think, but aren't willing to acknowledge that;

and/or d) are just trying to get people worked up for their own entertainment.

And there's enough conflict in the world between people who disagree on positions they sincerely hold, without adding in manufactured conflict from people defending positions they don't sincerely hold... or that they do sincerely hold but aren't willing to take a stand for.

Now, it's certainly true that rhetorical questions, and thought experiments, and the playing of devil's advocate, are important and time- honored parts of the thought and debate process. But when people are asking rhetorical questions/ positing thought experiments/ playing devil's advocate, they generally announce that that's what they're doing. It's one thing to say, "Okay, I'm playing devil's advocate here... but isn't it theoretically possible that men and women have different intellectual capabilities? How certain are we that this isn't true? Is this hypothesis consistent with the evidence? If not, why not?" It's another to say, "Men and women have different intellectual capabilities" ... and then watch people react angrily, to both your initial statement and your subsequent arguments for it... and then try to weasel out of it by saying, "I'm just trying to get people to think."

People often don't do our best thinking when we're angry. Sometimes anger can't be avoided -- in disagreements on important topics that we have strong feelings about and that have serious impact on our lives, it's almost guaranteed. Sometimes anger is useful and valuable: it can convince people that an issue is important, or motivate people to take action. But even people like me who see the value in anger still understand that it can interfere with clear thinking. And there's enough serious crap and real conflict already in this world for people to be angry about. There's no need to insincerely and manipulatively make people angrier than they have to be... in the name of "getting people to think."

You know what gets people to think? Considering genuine, sincere alternatives to their ideas, offered by smart people who disagree with them. Being poked with a stick doesn't get people to think. It just gets people to react.

Which brings me to my next problem:

Second: It's a violation of the conversational contract.

I've been reading Steven Pinker's latest book on language, The Stuff of Thought. (Good book, btw: somewhat tough sledding in the first half, but it gets a lot more fun and engaging in the second half, and even the tough- sledding stuff is interesting and worthwhile.)

And one of the things he talks about is the linguistic theory that, when people talk, we make a set of assumptions about the intentions of the person we're talking with. The conversational version of the social contract, if you will. We assume, for instance, that people aren't saying much more than they need to, or much less. We assume that what people are saying is relevant to what's being discussed. And we assume that people are sincere: that even if they're mistaken, they sincerely mean what they're saying, and believe it to be correct. According to this theory, these assumptions aren't just social niceties: they are essential for language to function. They are deeply woven into the way that language works. Without them, communication breaks down.

Now, these assumptions are often honored in spirit, even when they're not honored in the letter. When we use irony or sarcasm, or conspicuously leave out information we'd normally include, or exaggerate for comic effect, we break the letter of these communication rules -- but we do it to communicate something else, something that isn't being spoken directly. (Example: When somebody asks how your blind date went, and you reply, "He had very nice posture," the fact that you're focusing on irrelevant trivia while omitting the most obviously pertinent information is actually speaking volumes.)

But when people break these rules without the intent of communicating something else -- when they break them for no reason other than to gain personal advantage -- we get angry. We feel betrayed. Lying for personal gain is the obvious example... but even if we haven't been overtly lied to, when people break these communication contracts, we still pretty much feel lied to.

And I would argue that "I'm just trying to get you to think" breaks the sincerity clause of the communication contract.

When you take a position in a debate -- especially when you take a provocative position that is likely to upset people -- people assume that you sincerely hold that position. When it turns out that you don't -- or that you do, but lack the courage to either defend your position or admit that you're wrong -- people don't feel like they've been inspired to think. They feel like their chain has been yanked.

And they're right. It has been. That is one yanked chain.

Which brings me to my third, and final, and most important problem with the "I'm just trying to get you to think" trope:

Three: It is so totally fucking arrogant.

Conversations and debates are generally assumed to be a two- way street. There are obvious exceptions, of course -- when your teacher gives you information, when your boss gives you an instruction, when a cop gives you an order. But in online forums and blog comment threads and whatnot, the assumption is that we're all in this together; that we're all trying to think our ideas through and reach the truth; that we're all on the same level. (A blog or forum host gets a small degree of privilege in our own spaces -- we get to set the topics, and through comment policies and such we get to set the tone -- but when it comes to the actual discussion and debate, we're down there wrestling in the mud with everyone else. Which is exactly as it should be.) Regardless of whether a conversation is cooperative or adversarial -- regardless of whether we're pals trying to think something through together, or opponents fighting fiercely to change each others' minds -- the assumption is that we're all more or less equals, playing by the same rules on the same muddy playing field.

The "I'm just trying to get you to think" trope assumes nothing of the kind. It assumes superiority. It assumes that the person saying it is speaking from a position of superior wisdom and intelligence. It is an attempt to place the speaker in the position of a teacher or a guru; the one person in the group who is responsible for getting everyone else to clarify their thinking.

And they're placing themselves in that position without having earned it... and without it being consented to.

In a free and equal society, we sometimes consent to give other people some kind of authority. We consent, within reason, to let a teacher impart one-way information to us and to guide our thinking... on the theory that they have specialized knowledge and training. We consent, within reason, to let cops enforce our laws... on the theory that laws are meaningless without enforcement. We consent, within reason, to let a boss tell us what to do... on the theory that the company will fall apart if nobody's running the show. (Or, if we don't consent to that, we join a collective or start our own business.)

But in a group discussion or debate, the person who's "just trying to get people to think" has essentially taken that authority upon themselves. They have set themselves above the rest of the group; appointed themselves teacher and guru, the leader of other people's thinking. And they have done so without the consent of the group that they're participating in... and without doing any of the hard work that earns someone a position of genuine intellectual authority.

No wonder they piss people off.

Home Carbonation, and Contrary Human Nature

Have you ever wanted to do something that you basically couldn't care less about, just because someone told you that you couldn't?

Ingrid and I just signed up for this Soda Club thing: a "make your own sparkling water" gizmo with replaceable CO2 cartridges. A keen idea, and one we're very excited about: we drink a ton of fizz water, and we've been going through a ton of plastic fizz water bottles every week. (Yes, we recycle them; but with plastic especially, it's much better if you can just avoid buying the stuff in the first place.) This gizmo will cut our plastic consumption by a considerable amount. Plus, we can have as much fizz water as we want, whenever we want it, without suffering the miserable indignity of going to the store or waiting for our next grocery delivery.

But here's the thing. One of the instructions on the Soda Club soda maker says that you should not carbonate anything other than plain water.

And the moment I read that, I was immediately filled with a powerful desire to carbonate things that I shouldn't.

I now want to carbonate everything. Coffee. Soy milk. Orange juice. Bourbon. Absinthe. I want to go through our entire liquor cabinet and carbonate everything in it. I want to make my own sparkling wine, just by taking regular sparkling wine and carbonating it. I want to go to the supermarket and find a bunch of weird beverages, just so I can carbonate them. I want to buy a second carbonating gizmo, just so I can try to carbonate weird stuff without mucking up the one we use for water.

Now, it's important to understand: Before we got this gizmo and read this warning, the thought that it might be fun to carbonate coffee or bourbon had never, ever occurred to me. Not once. If you had asked me, "Would you like to carbonate some coffee?", or, "On your list of things you would like to do before you die, where does 'carbonate coffee' fit?", I would have looked at you like you were nuts.

But now I'm the one who's nuts. This is driving me mildly batty. I really want to know what carbonated coffee would taste like. I'm sure I'll forget about this in a week or two (or I would have if I hadn't blogged about it). But for now, the desire for forbidden carbonation is raging hot in my blood.

What the heck is this about?

I have a strong fondness for this part of me that wants to rebel against everything. It's a big part of what makes me who I am, and especially who I am as a writer: the part that looks at the ideas and rules that most people accept without question, and asks, "Is there really a good reason for that?" That's an important and valuable human activity. Fun, too.

But at times, it's a bit silly, and even counter- productive. As I've written before: To reflexively rebel against the mainstream means you're just as controlled by that mainstream as you would be if you reflexively conformed to it.

And some rules are rules for a reason. According to the company's FAQ (no, I'm not the first person to ask this question), if you carbonate things other than water with ther gizmo, "you risk damaging your drinks maker, not to mention making a big fizzy mess!" (Exclamation point theirs.) I don't know why this is -- I don't know if there's some weird chemical process that happens when you try to carbonate soy milk -- but I doubt that they'd make up a rule like that for no reason. If they say it makes a big fizzy mess, it probably makes a big fizzy mess.

I'm reminded of an interview I once read with the actor Klaus Kinski. He was raging against the intolerable strictures of our conformist society, and he said (I'm paraphrasing here), "I'll be driving along, and I'll see a sign that says 'Right Lane Must Turn Right,' and I think to myself, 'MUST turn right? MUST?!? FUCK YOU!'"

That line made me laugh for weeks afterwards, and it was a catch- phrase among my circle of friends for a long time. It was such a blatantly absurd example of pointless rebellion. Traffic laws are the perfect example of laws that are there for very good reasons indeed... and in any case, it seemed just a teensy bit out of proportion, a case of choosing one's battles somewhat poorly. There are far more intolerable strictures of our conformist society than the right turn only lane.

And yet, it's kind of how I feel now about the home carbonator.

"MUST not carbonate anything other than water? MUST not?!? FUCK YOU!"

On Happiness, or, Positive Atheist Philosophy #4,626

So what does it mean to be happy?

There's been an interesting discussion over at Daylight Atheism. A thought- experiment, posing the question: If you could hook yourself up to a happiness machine, would you do it?

On the surface, if there's no God to please and all we have is this life, it seems like there should be no reason not to. If there's no ultimate exterior meaning, and we create our own meaning for our own lives, then why shouldn't that meaning be "hooking myself up to a happiness machine until I die"?

And yet most people in the conversation wanted nothing to do with that hypothetical machine. (Or, at most, they could see using it only rarely, or only under extreme circumstances such as debilitating terminal illness.)

I was going to comment; but my comment kept going and going, and got too long for a comment on somebody else's blog, and eventually morphed into... well, into this piece.

So. On the topic of a happiness machine.

I want to talk about my experiences with heroin.

I've never been a heroin addict, or anything even close to a heroin addict. But I have taken it, more than once. In my early twenties, I took heroin about six or eight times, over the course of about three years.

And the experience was about as close to a pleasure machine as I can imagine. It was more than just the complete absence of pain and unpleasantness... although it certainly was that. It was more than just a total sense of relaxation and peace... although it certainly was that. It was more than just the dissolving into a misty darkness of all problems and worries... although it certainly was that. It felt like everything was okay, like everything was right with my life and the world. There was one point during one of my experiences when I got nauseated and threw up... and throwing up was perfectly okay. Sure, on the whole I would have preferred to be doing something other than throwing up... but throwing up was okay, too. Everything was okay. Everything was more than okay. Everything was right.

It seems like it should have felt fake or plastic -- it was a drug, after all -- but it didn't. At the time, at least, it felt richly, deeply satisfying. It felt like I was melting into the universe, like I was profoundly connected with the very essence of goodness. It felt like the way you feel after you've had unbelievably amazing sex for hours. Filled with pleasure in every pore of your body, and without any need or desire for anything more. It felt like this was how life should be, for everyone, all the time.

It was as close to a pleasure machine as I can imagine.

And I was extremely wary of it.

I was careful not to take the drug very often. Not just "never twice in the same week," but "never twice in the same month," and never more than two or three times a year. I was careful not to seek it out, but only to take it when the opportunity fell into my lap by chance.

And even so, it scared me. I loved it, but it scared the crap out of me. I knew it was a pleasure I had to treat with extreme caution; that if I let it become even remotely a regular part of my life, I could be in big trouble.

I had one particular experience, in which I'd felt amazing the day that I took the drug... and really, really shitty the day after. Not physically shitty -- I wasn't going through withdrawal or anything -- but emotionally shitty. I was going through a difficult time in my life, and the loss of that "everything is right and okay" feeling felt unbearable. Heroin felt right; not being on heroin felt wrong. And thank Loki in Valhalla, that spooked the hell out of me. I was able to recognize that as The Obviously Wrong Way To Look At Things. I never took the drug again after that.

I had access to a pleasure machine. And I didn't want it. I wanted it at most maybe two or three times a year; and ultimately, I didn't want it at all.

So this, I think, is my point:

Pleasure is not the same thing as happiness.

I can't remember now where I read this, but I've seen studies showing that, while people often think that what makes us happy is lying on a beach with a drink in our hand doing absolutely nothing (or something along those lines), that isn't in fact what makes us happy. That's nice for a little while, but it gets boring fast. What actually makes us most happy is working on something that engages us. An activity that's difficult and challenging, but within our capabilities. An activity that we care about, and that we can lose ourselves in. What makes us happiest is engaging in an activity that shuts up our chattering, nattering, critical inner voice, and lets us just do, and just be.

It doesn't have to be a work activity necessarily. It can be, of course -- I get it sometimes with writing, when it's going really well, when I lose all track of time, when the pipeline between the dark pond of my brain and the bright world of words on a screen is flowing like blood through a healthy artery -- but it doesn't have to be. It can be dancing. Reading. Sex. Good conversation. Playing music. Listening to music: not passively and in the background, but really listening. Rock climbing (or so I've heard). Whatever. If we care about it and find it totally engaging of our consciousness, then that's what makes us happy.

I think about the peak experiences I've had in my life: the non- heroin ones, the moments of blissful, ecstatic atheist transcendence and peace. And while, on a purely visceral level, heroin may have been more pleasurable, the other experiences were far more satisfying. I felt replenished afterwards, not drained. I felt strengthened for the difficult and tedious tasks ahead of me, not saddened and burdened by them. I felt like something had been added to me, like I had become larger and richer and more complex; not like something had passed through me and then disappeared, leaving nothing behind but a memory and a longing for more.

Heroin gave me pleasure. These other experiences made me happy. And I'd rather be happy.

Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against pleasure. Pleasure is important, too. Pleasure can also connect us with our deeper selves and the world around us. (And for the record, I'm not anti-drug, either. While I do think drugs should be approached with caution and good information -- and while I think heroin in particular is a serious minefield -- I don't think there's anything wrong with taking the occasional vacation from your usual state of consciousness.)

And I'm not saying that I've found the secret key to happiness, which I'm revealing in this 1,417- word blog post. I haven't.

I'm saying this: I think that a happiness machine, pretty much by definition, wouldn't make us happy. Not for long. Not unless it magically replicated the experience of engaging with a meaningful and challenging activity in the world around us. The experience would begin to pall. The human brain being what it is, we'd either become addicted to it -- which isn't any fun -- or the experience would lose its charm. Happiness isn't about capturing a frozen moment of perfect time. Happiness, by definition, is about moving forward through time, and through the world.

And more to the point, I'm saying this:

One of the most common critiques of atheism is that, if there's no God and no external meaning to our lives, then we have no reason to do anything other than selfishly pursue our own happiness. So I'm saying this: The pursuit of happiness is not selfish. Happiness is not about sucking up as much pleasure as you can. Happiness is about engaging with the world, and being intimately connected with it. The things that make us genuinely happy -- work, hobbies, family and friends -- are, on the whole, the things that make us good. They are the things that make life richer and better: not just for ourselves, but for the world that we're connected with.

Brief Blog Break, Plus Shameless Self- Promotion Op, a Fun Game, and Blog Carnivals

I'm going to be out of town for a few days, officiating at the wedding of my friends Chip and Hayley. I'm bringing my computer and will check in on the blog now and then, but it's unlikely that I'll have time to post anything new until after I get back. Don't expect anything new here until Monday or Tuesday.

In the meantime, why don't y'all use this post for some shameless self- promotion. If you want to plug your blog -- either a particular post or just your blog in general -- here and now is the place and time to do it. Or if you have a project you're working on that you want to tell the other readers here about -- or there's a post on another blog that you think is keen and want to plug -- you can do that as well.

There's also a fun contest over at Friendly Atheist that you might want to check out. The rules: Replace any word from the title of, or a line from, a book about atheism... with the word "Pants." (Example from one of my own submissions: "Pants: The Failed Hypothesis.") Winners will get a nifty Friendly Atheist bracelet. And just reading the submissions so far is about twenty five hoots.

Finally -- blog carnivals!

Humanist Symposium #32 at A Superfluous Ramble.

Carnival of the Godless #110 at The Greenbelt.

Carnival of the Liberals #84, at Submitted to a Candid World.

And Skeptic's Circle #105, at It's the Thought that Counts.

That ought to keep you busy while I'm gone. Have fun, and I'll see you soon!

Ninth and Bryant Parking Garage: A Review

I'm a little slammed with deadlines right now, so I'm re-running an old piece from back when my blog was smaller, one that a lot of you may not have read. This is one of my very favorite pieces -- I hope you enjoy it, too.

Ninth and Bryant Parking Garage: A Review
by Greta Christina

A Dadaist masterpiece.

This brilliant, unsettling work of contemporary installation art sets itself firmly within the Dadaist and neo-Dadaist tradition. With its blind alleys, impossible turns, and trajectories that lead nowhere, it echoes the functionless functionality of Meret Oppenheim's "Fur-Lined Teacup," Marcel Duchamp's "Impossible Bed," and, more recently, Jacques Carelman's "Coffeepot for Masochists." The influence of M.C. Escher on the piece is undeniable as well. Traffic patterns mysteriously blend from opposite directions; narrow passages twist in on themselves; and the piece as a whole seems to contain and entrap itself in a way that appears to be physically impossible.

Yet while "Ninth and Bryant Parking Garage" makes no attempt to conceal these classic influences, it nevertheless escapes being derivative. Both the gargantuan scale of the installation and its interactive nature give it a forcefully penetrative quality that differs significantly from smaller works of Dadaist and neo-Dadaist sculpture (which one can, after all, turn one's back on). Once engaged with this unique work, it becomes virtually impossible to distance one's self from it emotionally, or even physically. This quality is experienced in the details of the piece as well as in its massive scale. We particularly see it in the confusing and labyrinthine "exits" -- indistinguishable from the "entrances" and even co-existent with them -- compelling the participant's awareness, not merely of the impossibility of escape, but of the absurdity of even contemplating it.

More significantly, the fact that the piece functions -- although barely -- as an actual parking garage merely serves to highlight the more disturbing aspects of the work. Poised on the liminal region between function and non-function, it forges a connection between creator and audience that is interactive and yet singularly hostile. Unlike typical artwork which attempts to create a bond of understanding and insight between artist and viewer, "Ninth and Bryant Parking Garage" seeks to entice and enfold the audience members, only to frustrate and alienate them. It is a self-contained paradox, a connection which seeks only to sever itself.

The location of the installation in a literal urban shopping center brilliantly underscores this contradiction. The dreamlike -- or rather, nightmarish -- qualities of the work are thrown into sharp relief when one contemplates this juxtaposition. One wishes to accomplish simple tasks of survival or comfort: buying towels, or a coffee maker, or even merely bread and milk. And yet the "parking garage," a construct ostensibly designed to facilitate these tasks, instead thwarts the participant at every turn, and tasks which should connect one with the warp and weft of one's life instead become distancing and enervating. The audience participates in the work, even becomes one with it, and yet is entirely at its mercy. It is a vivid, haunting metaphor for modern civilization and its self-negating contradictions.

"Ninth and Bryant Parking Garage" is located off of Ninth Street between Bryant and Brannan, adjacent to Trader Joe's and Bed Bath and Beyond, in San Francisco. The installation is scheduled for an indefinite run.

Happy Birthday To Me!

Happy birthday to me!

Last year, when I turned 46, I wrote a silly little non-rhyming birthday song inspired by evolution and loosely based on the children's classic ("Happy birthday to you/ You live in the zoo/ You look like a monkey/ And you smell like one, too"). It went:

Happy birthday to me
I don't live in a tree
But I look like a primate
Because I am one.

Today I'm turning 47. (A fact that I'm ever so slightly freaked out about, as it means I am now officially in my late 40s). So I've decided to keep this tradition going, and have written another evolution- themed self- aggrandizing birthday song. And this one even rhymes! It goes like this:

Happy birthday to me
I evolved from the sea
I'm a cousin to plankton
And the rat and the bee.

So happy birthday to me... and Happy New Year to all of you!

The True Meaning of Christmas

So what does Christmas really mean?

Among all the traditions of the holiday season, one that's becoming increasingly familiar is the War on the Supposed War On Christmas. In this tradition -- one that dates back to the sweet olden days of overt anti-Semitism -- the Christian Right foams at the mouth about the fact that not everyone has the same meaning of Christmas that they do, and works themselves into a dither about things like store clerks politely recognizing that not everyone is a Christian by saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." Because in the mind of the Christian Right, it somehow disrespects their faith and impinges on their religious freedom to share a country with people who feel and act differently than they do.

Okay. Insert rant here about how the Christian Right isn't actually interested in religious freedom and respect for their faith. They're trying to establish a theocracy. They don't care about religious and cultural plurality. They don't care about the fact that winter holidays mean different things to different people, and that different people celebrate different ones and in different ways. They don't care about the fact that not everyone in the country is Christian, and that lots of people who do call themselves Christian are actually pretty secular in both their everyday life and their celebration of the winter holidays.

No, scratch that. They do care about it. They think it's bad.

But that's not actually what I want to talk about today.

In the face of Bill O'Reilly and company screaming hatefully about the true meaning of Christmas, I want to talk -- in true grade-school essay form -- about what Christmas means to me.

Because I actually like Christmas.

Christmas; Solstice; Hanukkah; Kwanzaa; Festivus; "the holidays"; whatever. I don't have a strong attachment to any particular name or date or occasion. Any mid-winter holiday around the end of December will do. Lately I've been calling it either "the holidays" or "Santamas" (in honor of what Bart Simpson has described as the true meaning of the holiday: the birth of Santa). I was brought up culturally Christian, though, with Christmas trees and Santa and all that, and I do tend to refer to it as Christmas at least some of the time.

And I love it. I always have. I know it's fashionable to hate it, and I get why people get annoyed by it -- but I don't. I love it. It's one of my favorite times of the year.

And here's what it means to me.

I think that holidays tend to rise up naturally out of the rhythms and seasons of a particular geographical area. And in parts of the world where winter is a big nasty deal, I think it's almost inevitable that a winter holiday, at right around the darkest, shortest day of the year, is going to become the biggest holiday in the culture.

It's been noted many times, for instance, that Hanukkah is far from the most important holiday in the Jewish religious calendar. What's less well known is that Christmas isn't the most important holiday in the Christian calendar, either. Christmas is pretty much a pagan midwinter holiday shoehorned into the Christian religious calendar for convenience. From a strictly religious standpoint, Easter is a much bigger ticket. (Getting born? Big whoop. Everybody gets born. Dying on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins, and getting resurrected three days later because he's God? Now that's what they're talking about.)

And yet -- in parts of the world where winter is a big nasty deal -- Christmas has almost entirely eclipsed Easter, for all but the most devout. Christmas gets an entire month of frenzied eating and drinking and shopping and traveling and party-going and family drama. Easter gets -- maybe -- a nice dinner or brunch, plus for kids it acts as a sort of secondary candy- frenzy holiday to Halloween. If the holidays were really about Jesus, we'd be having a nice quiet dinner with friends and family in late December, maybe with a hunt for hidden chocolate Santas for the kiddies... and a massive social and economic whirl in March or April. As it's commonly celebrated -- at least in the U.S. -- the meaning of Christmas is only partly about the Christian religion. And a pretty minimal part at that.

So what is the meaning of Christmas? Solstice? Santamas? The holidays? Etc.?

It's cold. It's dark. The days are short, and the nights are long. Life is harder than usual right now, and we're cooped up in close quarters more than any other time of the year.

So let's celebrate.

Let's sing. Let's decorate. Let's eat and drink. Let's light candles and put up electric lights. Let's have parties. Let's visit our families and our friends. Let's give each other presents. Let's spend time together that's specifically devoted to enjoying each other's company, and take part in activities -- like gift- giving and parties and big group dinners -- that strengthen social bonds.

Let's remind ourselves that life is worth living, and that the cold and dark won't be here forever. Let's remind ourselves that we care about each other, and remind ourselves of why.

That's what this holiday means to me.

Happy holidays, everybody!

The Great Gruesome Christmas Carols

And now for something completely different.

I'm one of those freakish people who actually likes Christmas carols. Not the gloppy, cutesy, "Suzy Snowflake" modern variety so much (although I do have a soft spot for "Silver Bells"), but the soaring, haunting, gorgeous classic ones. "Angels We Have Heard On High," "The Holly and the Ivy," "The Angel Gabriel," that sort of thing.

And one of the things I like about them is how totally freaky some of them are.

There's this annual Christmas party I go to every year (although I had to miss it this year, damn and blast), at which the singing of Christmas carols and other seasonal and not- so- seasonal music is a centerpiece. A few years back, I went on the Internet and pulled together a lyric sheet, so we could actually sing all the songs all the way through instead of tapering off pathetically after the first verse.

And you know what I found? Some Christmas carols are truly gruesome. Startlingly gruesome. Freakishly and hilariously gruesome.

So I thought I should share with the rest of the class.

We start with a classic: the fourth verse of "We Three Kings of Orient Are."

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone cold tomb.

I love that one. It rings out so lustily -- especially when a room full of eggnog- tiddly heathens is belting it out.

Then we have this gem: two little lines from the 1865 "Greensleeves" parody rewrite, "What Child Is This":

Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me, for you.

Well, it definitely reminds you of the reason for the season. You can't deny that.

Then we have the lesser- known, but haunting and really quite lovely "Coventry Carol" (here's the tune, in case you don't know it). With this charming third verse:

Herod the king in his raging,
Charged he hath this day,
His men of night, in his own sight,
All children young to stay.

The fourth verse is a charmer, too, although somewhat lacking in the vivid "dead children" imagery:

Then woe is me, poor child, for thee,
And ever mourn and say,
For thy parting not say, nor sing,
By, by, lullay, lullay.

But the best -- the very, very best, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords of gruesome Christmas carols -- has got to be the "Corpus Christi Carol," a.k.a. "Down In Yon Forest." There are different versions of it, but the one I found when I was putting together the songbook goes like this:

Down in yon forest there stands a hall
(The bells of paradise I heard them ring)
It's covered all over with purple and pall
(And I love my Lord Jesus above anything)

In that hall there stands a bed
It's covered all over with scarlet so red

Under the bed there runs a flood
One half runs water, the other runs blood

On the bed there lies a knight
Whose wounds do drip down both by day and by night

By the bed there lies a hound
Who laps at the blood as it daily drips down

At the bed's foot there grows a thorn
Which ever so blossomed since Jesus was born

(Here's a nifty folk-Goth version of it by my friend Tim Walters and his occasional project Conjure Wife; here's a YouTube video with a more conventional rendition, although for some reason it's lacking the verse about the vampire dog.)

So Merry Christmas, everybody! And in the midst of this terrible, disrespectful, heathenistic War on Christmas, let's all remember the reason for the season: a life of gathering gloom, flesh pierced through with nails and a spear, children slaughtered by a raging king, and -- merriest of all -- a half-blood, half-water river, blood dripping from a wounded knight, and a dog licking up the blood. Let me know if there's any I've forgotten, or any I haven't heard of yet. It's the most wonderful time of the year!

The Sorrowful Mystery of Preacher Jenkins Part 1

My brother is (a) wildly talented, and (b) a strange, strange person. Which is good, since otherwise he wouldn't fit in very well at family gatherings. (On both counts.)

He's lately taken up filmmaking as a serious hobby, and has put a series of his short films onto YouTube. I like all of them... but this, I think, is his masterwork so far. Unsettling, beautiful, irreverent about religion and yet fascinated by it... you can see why I like it. (And it has his Blasphemy Challenge shoehorned into it, which Blasphemy Challenge fans should find interesting.) He films under the name PreacherJenkins, but he's not a preacher -- that's just a nom de camera.

It's The Sorrowful Mystery of Preacher Jenkins, Part 1. Video below the fold (since putting videos above the fold mucks up my archives). Or you can watch it directly on YouTube.

A Patchwork of Income: Making a Living as an Artist

I had this revelation recently about making a living as a writer. It came to me kind of absurdly late in my career, given how obvious it's now seeming. And it's occurred to me that, if it took me almost twenty years to figure this revelation out, there might be some other struggling writers and artists who haven't figured it out yet, either.

So I'm going to share the wealth. If you're a writer -- or any kind of artist -- trying to make a living at it, here's the advice I wish I'd gotten ten or fifteen years ago.


For years, I've been thinking about making a living as a writer in terms of the One Big Score. The major- publisher book deal. The regular gig for the big-name magazine. That sort of thing.

And as a consequence, I've had a tendency to think of littler scores -- moderate bits of income from smaller publishers -- as a low priority. I've always been happy to get them, of course; but I've tended to look at the littler scores as stepping stones, ways to get my name more widely recognized, so I could make bigger and bigger scores... which would also be stepping stones, on my way to the One Big Score.

(I should know better. I've seen enough crime/ adventure movies to know how dumb it is to stake your life and career on One Big Score...)

But I realized recently -- somewhat to my surprise -- that I'm actually making a fair living as a writer. I'm not yet working full- time at it, or making my full living off of it. But I am making something that vaguely resembles real money -- a substantial portion of my income, money that I use to pay actual bills and stuff -- from my writing.

And it's coming from lots of small and moderate -sized payments, from lots of small and moderate -sized publishers and sources.

In no particular order, it's coming from:

Advertising income from my blog
Donations and subscriptions to my blog (thanks, everybody!)
Regular columns for online periodicals
One-time projects for anthologies or other publications
Royalties from book sales

(And I'm not counting the fact that about 75% of what I do in my day job is copywriting and book editing.)

No one piece of this is hugely substantial. But it all adds up: not quite to an income, not yet anyway, but to a genuine part-time job. (And a nice side benefit of a patchwork income is that, if one piece of it falls through, it's not a disaster. It's a temporary annoyance.)

Oh. One more essential thing. (She said sneakily, saving the zinger for last.)

Many of these little pieces?

I wouldn't have them if it weren't for the blog.

And not just the obvious pieces, either: the ads, the donations. Both of my current regular gigs for online publications -- the Blowfish Blog gig and the FriendFinder/ Alt.com gig -- I got, at least in part, because publishers or friends of publishers knew about my blog. Some of my anthology pieces and other one-time paid gigs are reprints of blog posts... and that's becoming increasingly true as I build a larger body of work here. And the blog -- and the fact that I can do ad trades with other blogs -- is becoming one of the primary ways that I promote my books.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: If you're writing, you have to blog. You just do. I -- don't look at me that way. Point that gun somewhere else. Get off the window ledge. I know that blogging is a time suck. I know that it feels like you're giving away for free what you're trying to make a living at. I know that a blog takes a lot of work to do right... and an insane amount of patience to stick with for long enough to get any kind of traffic and traction out of it.

But here's what I've said before, and will say again: If you're a writer in the early 21st century, and you don't blog? It's like being a pop musician in the mid 20th century, and refusing to let your songs be played on the radio. You're denying yourself what is probably the single most powerful outlet currently available for publicizing your work.

That's all something of a side point, though. It's an important side point, and one I'll continue to evangelize about; but it is a side point. So let me get back to the main point.

Which is this:

Building a writing career, or any sort of artistic career, is very rarely about getting the One Big Break, scoring the One Big Score. It's more like sewing a patchwork quilt. No one piece of a patchwork quilt is going to keep you warm... but all of them sewn together can do a pretty decent job of it.

By all means, keep trying for the Big Score. But don't neglect the little scores while you're at it. If you can get enough of them, the little scores can add up to a genuine career.

Things I Like: Santa Fe

In the interest of fending off incipient crankhood and occasionally writing something positive and not critical, I am hereby inaugurating the "Things I Like" series. Ingrid and I were in Santa Fe recently for a family gathering: I was very struck by the city, which I'd never seen before, so I'm going to start there.

Santa Fe completely surprised me. In the course of about three days, it went from a city that I had almost no feelings or opinions about whatsoever, to one of my very favorite cities and a place I'm dying to go back to. Mostly because (a) it's extremely beautiful, and (b) it's extremely beautiful in a way that I'm not at all familiar with.

Most beautiful cities I know are beautiful in a pretty similar way: sparkly lights, magnificent towering architecture, gingerbready Edwardian/ Victorian/ Georgian houses with lots of fiddly little details. Santa Fe is beautiful in a completely different way from that. The architecture is simple, yet striking and distinctive: all smooth surfaces and rounded corners, with a style that seems both space-agey and incredibly ancient.

And it's uniquely harmonious with its natural surroundings. I've never in my life seen a city that seemed so much like a natural outgrowth of the land: like a geological formation, or an odd form of plant life.

Plus it's lousy with museums, and the food kicks ass.

A few high points:

The Museum of International Folk Art. The main gallery of this place is simply astonishing. It's an immense, insane, exuberant jumble of brilliantly colorful folk art from every part of the world. The displays are set up less like standard museum displays and more like dioramas, giving them a look that's alive and welcoming. Many of the displays aren't even organized by country, but by theme -- toy trains from around the world, or fake food, or angels and devils -- again, giving it a feel that's less like a museum and more like a visual version of a mix tape.

And just when you think you're done, you look up, and you see more art hanging over your head.

It's a subsuming, overwhelming experience, one that completely envelops you in astonishing, hilarious, wildly inventive, brilliant beauty. It made me want to laugh out loud the second I walked in, and made me want to applaud when I left.

Kakawa Chocolate House. This is the chocolate shop that makes me want to spit on all other chocolate. It's almost more like a living museum of chocolate history, recreating hot chocolate drinks from both European and Aztec history. You have to be adventurous -- the flavors are spicy and strong and often quite unusual, with flavorings like chili, agave, pepper, rose, orange blossom, and cardamom. Ditto the truffles. Let me put it this way: our favorite truffle was the rosemary.

It may sound weird. But it completely works. The chocolate -- both in hot chocolate and truffle form -- is intense and vivid, yet delicately balanced. It's chocolate that makes you sit up and pay attention, chocolate that makes you savor it, chocolate that reminds you that you're alive. It was chocolate with the power to astonish and delight. It was a completely unique experience.

Ghost Ranch. Not so much the center itself, which was closed the day we were there. But the landscape in the area was a revelation. Like the city of Santa Fe, it was not only beautiful -- it was beautiful in a wonderfully unfamiliar way. It wasn't the beauty of lushness, of green forests and mountains and oceans. It was starker, and stranger, almost like another planet. I could see why so many artists get so ga-ga about the place. It looked like it had been sculpted and painted. It was magnificent.

Four stars. Greta-Bob says check it out.

On Not Being a Crank

How do you be a critic without turning into a crank?

Any kind of critic. Social, political, cultural, whatever.

When George Carlin died, HBO ran a marathon of all the stand-up specials he'd done for them, from the late '70s until shortly before he died. We didn't watch all of them, but we tuned in and out throughout the day, getting sort of a smorgasbord of his career over the decades. And I noticed a pattern.

In his later years, Carlin had improved his craft by leaps and bounds. His mastery of language, his perceptiveness about society, the cleverness of his barbs... all had sharpened to a razor-like edge over the years. (Not that they sucked in his earlier days...)

And yet, his later performances were not nearly as much of a pleasure to watch. The content had become increasingly negative, to the point where the shows got overtaken by jeremiads... not just against great social ills and hypocrisies, but against anybody who didn't do things the way Carlin did, or who cared about things other than what he cared about. He'd turned from a fiery, uncompromising social critic using his extraordinary skill with language and humor to chip away at the greed and lies of the power structure, into an old man railing about modern technology and how nobody does things right anymore, and yelling at kids to get off his lawn. (Doing it exquisitely, I hasten to add.)

He'd become a crank.

A brilliant crank, but a crank nonetheless.

And I want to know: How do you avoid that?

I'm beginning to see crank tendencies in my own self. And I don't like it. I'm finding myself more and more likely to see, and think about, and talk about, flaws. In everything. Movies, music, food, books, bourbons, blogs, decaf lattes, ideas, people. Even things that I like, I'm finding myself critical of: not entirely negative, necessarily, but hyper-aware of their imperfections... and hyper-willing to talk about them.

And I'm doing it in situations where it's not always appropriate. Increasingly, I'm having to remind myself that I am not being asked for a thorough, unblinking, rigorously honest analysis of pluses and minuses when I'm asked a question like, "How do you like the soup?"

And I'm wondering: Is this a natural result of the work that I do? Is one of the job hazards of being a professional critic that you start turning into a personal one? Or a permanent one?

The way of crankery can be very tempting. For one thing, it makes life as a writer so much easier. Any writer worth their salt can write about things they don't like, in a way that's entertaining and funny. Witness the success of the Roger Ebert books, "I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie" and "Your Movie Sucks". (Both of which have pride of place in our home, on the shelf in front of the toilet.) The hard job is writing enthusiastically about things that you do like without just stringing together a list of superlatives and sounding like a sap. (And the insanely hard job is writing about things that are mediocre. How many ways are there in this world to write "Formulaic but passably pleasant" without wanting to shoot yourself?)

And some of it is that being critical is a quick 'n' easy way to feel smart and superior. Especially if you have any sort of connection to hipster culture, which defines itself by what it doesn't like almost as much as by what it does. (If not more so.)

And, of course, it could just be that I'm getting older. And for reasons I don't at all understand, an awful lot of people get crankier as they get older.

And then, some of it may just be that I'm having a very, very, very long year, the sort of year that I hope I'll be able to look back on one day and laugh grimly about, and my natural perky "glass half full" realistic- optimism has been getting just a tad irritable.

But I think that a lot of it is just habit.

I'm a critic. Professionally, I mean. It's my job to, you know, criticize: to look at pros and cons, plusses and minuses, goals met and unmet, goals worth and not worth reaching in the first place. And I'm writing a lot on a topic about which I am very critical indeed -- namely, religion.

All of which I'm basically fine with. I'm definitely not of the "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" school. I think many not-nice things are important and need to be said.

But I feel like I need to watch this trend. I need to watch the degree to which it affects my personal life. And I don't want it taking over my professional life completely. Thirty years from now, I don't want people reading my blog (assuming that I have a blog in thirty years) and thinking, "Wow, she sure is a good writer -- but she sure does complain a lot."

Any thoughts?

The best idea I've come up with about this is to make an effort -- a conscious, disciplined effort -- to at least sometimes write about things that I like. I've even thought about turning it into a series: the "Things I Like" series. That's sort of what I was doing with my recent Olympics piece. I could easily have written a piece of that length -- hell, longer -- about all the things I don't like about the Olympics and the media coverage thereof. It would have been interesting, and it would have been valid. But it wouldn't have been all that original -- my critiques have all been made before, many times and by many others. And mostly, I just didn't feel like going there. I was already starting to think about this crank issue (I've been thinking about it for a while now); and since I was, in fact, having a good time watching the Olympics, I decided that this time, I wanted to go to my happy place.

But I'm looking for other strategies for crankery avoidance, other than just Occasionally Write About Stuff I Like. And I'm wondering how other incipient cranks deal with this. Writers especially, but really anybody. How do you stay critical of society as the years go by without turning into a curmudgeon? How do you stay realistic about the half-empty part of the glass without getting absorbed into it?

What are your thoughts? What are your strategies?

And while I'm thinking of it: Would you, in fact, like to see a "Things I Like" series in this blog?

I'd love to know. It would take me to my happy place. Thanks!

Good news about Violet

Hi, all. I wanted to update you on the situation with our cat, Violet. Regular readers of this blog will know that we've been having a very scary veterinary situation, with Violet needing to be rushed to the vet emergency hospital last week with what turned out to be bleeding ulcers. We've been having a "bad news/ good news/ bad news/ good news" rollercoaster sort of week with it, but we have some solid information now, and I wanted to let you all know about it.

The bad news is that the ulcers didn't come from nowhere. Violet has inflammatory bowel disease, and the very early stages of cancer.

The good news is that both the cancer and the IBD are very treatable, and we caught the cancer very, very early -- early enough that she'll probably have a normal lifespan. (She's recovering really well from the surgery, btw, and seems more like herself every day.)

And the treatment isn't even all that invasive: no surgery, no radiation, nothing like that. She will be on chemo for a while, but that's just going to involve giving her medicine at home. We're going to have a few weeks/months of a somewhat intensive cat pilling regimen (and boy, is that going to be fun); but it doesn't seem like it'll be hard for her to tolerate.

There are no guarantees with cancer, of course. There are no guarantees with anything. But given what we've been going through for the past week, this is an incredibly good outcome. Our lives will be a disrupted for a little while, but we are breathing huge sighs of relief, and are preparing to get back to what passes for normal in our lives. Thanks to all of you for your kind words and support, and I'll be blogging at you soon!

Oh -- and Violet sends her love.

A Parade of Weird Little Worlds: Why I Like The Olympics

Ingrid and I are not, generally speaking, sports fans. To put it mildly. (I had a brief stretch of fairly serious baseball fandom in the late '80s and early '90s, but I fell out of the habit in the strike of '94, and never got back into it.)

And yet, we are getting completely sucked into the Olympics.

I've been thinking about why.

Yes, we're watching the gymnastics and a couple of the other big-ticket events (diving is always a good time). And yes, I'm watching women's wrestling, for reasons that should be obvious. But mostly I'm being a big old dilettante, and am watching bits and pieces of the largely unsung sports.

Archery. Fencing. Badminton. Table tennis. Synchronized swimming and trampoline are coming up later this week, and I can't wait.

I'm having a ball with this.

Some of it is that it's always a good time to watch people doing something -- anything at all -- really, really well. The look of pure concentration on a person's face when they're deeply immersed in something they passionately love and are extraordinarily good at... it's one of the most beautiful sights there is.

And, of course, some of it is the two-week parade of beautiful athletic bodies in tight, skimpy outfits. My libidinal interest varies from sport to sport (sky-high for divers and female wrestlers, almost nil for weightlifters and female gymnasts), but I can't be the only erotic connoisseur/ drooling pervert who's getting off on this.

But most of it is this:

One of the things I love best about human beings is the way we create these weird little worlds for ourselves. The world of competitive ballroom dancing. Of model train building. Of comic book enthusiasts. Show dog owners. Historical recreation societies. Contra dancing. Atheist blogging. These worlds always call to mind for me a line from Dave Barry: "There's a fine line between a hobby and mental illness." Yet at the same time, they call to mind that line from the teenage kid from "Trekkies": "People tell me to get a life. Well, I have a life. This is a hobby. And having hobbies is part of having a life."

There are anthropologists and neurologists and evolutionary biologists who think that the human brain evolved to deal with about 100 or 150 other people, tops, and I'm convinced that the forming of these weird little worlds is a way of narrowing down the dauntingly enormous and increasingly interconnected global village into something a bit more manageable.

I love that each of these weird little worlds has not just its own skills and trends and passions, but its own gossip, its own politics, its own scandals and controversies. I love how immersed people get in our weird little worlds: how the issues of historically accurate shoes at Civil War re-enactments, or gender- balancing at contra dances, can seem like life or death. I love how much time and care and passion people put into these endeavors that will never make them famous or rich or remembered in the larger world, the world outside of a handful of equally demented enthusiasts.

And I love that these worlds have stars and celebrities that nobody on the outside has ever, ever heard of. If you don't do English country dancing, you've almost certainly never heard of Bare Necessities: and yet they are a band with a rabidly devoted following, across the country and around the world. And when Ingrid and I met PZ Myers on a recent visit he made to the Bay Area, we told all our friends about it with bubbly excitement... to be met with almost universal blank stares. (Stares that got even blanker when we explained that he was "a famous biologist and atheist blogger.")

As thousands of pundits have noted before me, the world is becoming ickily homogenous, filled with depressingly interchangeable supermarkets and strip malls, processed foods and chain restaurants. But the weird little worlds of hobbyists and enthusiasts are a bulwark against that tendency. Whenever I despair over humanity losing its quirkiness, all I have to do is read the Carnival of the Godless, or go queer contra dancing, or turn on "Project Runway" and watch the contestants pissing themselves with excitement over some fashion designer I've never heard of.

And what I love about the Olympics is that, for two weeks every four years, I get a peek inside a dozen or so of these worlds.

I love finding out what the strategy is in weightlifting (yes, there's strategy -- I know, it was news to me as well), and that it's forbidden in Olympic weightlifting to lubricate your thighs. I love learning that a round of play in archery is called an "end." I love discovering the existence of a triathlon-style sport that combines running, swimming, fencing, shooting, and equestrian... and learning that it was invented as a narrative of a soldier ordered to deliver a message on horseback.

And I love how intensely immersed the athletes are in their worlds, how hard they work to become so superbly good in them with so little in the way of obvious payoff.

I mean, it's easy to understand why you'd want to be a famous gymnast or a multi- medal- winning swimmer. If you succeed, you actually get a fair degree of fame and fortune in the larger world. But if you sacrifice years of your life to become the absolute top of your game in archery or fencing or badminton, nobody is ever going to know about it but your immediate circle of family and friends, a handful of other archers and fencers and badmintonites... and every four years, some weirdos like me, who could care less about Michael Phelps's eight gold medals but get intensely sucked into the women's saber competition for about fifteen minutes.

I love that they do it anyway.


(P.S. Tivo helps with this a lot, btw. I can't believe I ever watched the Olympics without it. Tivo lets you watch all the weird events you want to watch... and skip the ones you think are boring.)

Ballroom dance photo by Petr Novak, Wikipedia.

Update

Hi, all. I just wanted to give you an update on why I haven't been blogging in the last couple of days. Ingrid and I are currently dealing with a veterinary emergency. We had to take our cat Violet to the emergency vet on Tuesday morning, and she had surgery today. They found two bleeding ulcers, which they removed.

The good news is that the surgery went well, and she's currently stable. We visited her tonight after the surgery: she was doped up, but she definitely recognized us and was happy to see us and be petted by us. They don't know for sure when she can come home, but they said "soon." We're hoping that means tomorrow, but don't know for sure.

The bad news is that we are not out of the woods yet. They don't yet know why she got the ulcers, and that's kind of a big question. Cats apparently don't get ulcers very often (it's not like they have a lot of stress at the office), and when they do it can be a sign of something bad. The vet did a zillion biopsies and other tests, and will have results for us in about 3-5 days. So while she seems to be out of immediate danger right now, we won't know for a few days whether we're looking at a larger problem or just at a basic recovery from surgery. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I may not be blogging much in the next couple/few days. I'll try to put some stuff up from my archives or do a repost or two, but this is taking a lot of time and attention as well as emotional energy, and not yet knowing what we're dealing with is very difficult. It may be a few days before I'm back to my usual bloggy self. In the meantime, give your pets and other loved ones a hug. I'll talk to you soon.

Living Each Day As If It Were Your Last

There's an episode of the Simpsons -- I can't remember which one right now -- where Homer is reading some book on how to be a successful go-getter, and he sees this piece of advice: "Live each day as if it were your last." And in the next scene, he's sitting on the curb, sobbing heartbrokenly, and crying out, "I don't want to die."

I'm sure you've all heard this at some point. "Live each day as if it were your last." It's the sort of folk wisdom that it's easy to nod along with sagely, without really thinking about it.

And it's the sort of folk wisdom that, once you start thinking about it, doesn't actually make any sense at all.

Back in the early '90s, when the AIDS cocktail first came out and people with AIDS suddenly started having a decent life expectancy, a lot of those people were suddenly stuck with a happy but not inconsiderable problem: They had run up enormous credit card debt. In some cases, they had even quit their jobs. They had been living on the assumption that they weren't going to live more than a few months or a year... and if you're not going to live for more than a few months or a year, then why the hell not run up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card bills? So when it turned out that this wasn't the case, and that they were probably going to live for a while, they were kind of screwed.

They had been living each day as if it were their last. And while that made a certain amount of sense when they only had a few months to live, once they had a reasonable life expectancy, it turned out to be a really bad idea.

I guess the idea behind this bit of folk wisdom is that you're supposed to do the things that matter to you now, and not wait until it's too late. Okay. Fine. Except -- what if the things that matter to you are things that take time and patience and discipline to accomplish? What if the things that matter to you are getting a book contract, or a nursing degree? Making sure your kids can go to college? Deciphering the genome of the coelacanth? Winning a gold medal in badminton? Building a scale model of the Battleship Potemkin in your garage?

Let me put it this way. If I were to live each day as if it were my last, I wouldn't have spent three hours this weekend cleaning the house. I wouldn't have gotten up at 8 a.m. on Saturday to take the cat to the vet. I wouldn't try to get book contracts, or drum up publicity for the books I've already written. I sure as well wouldn't go to work: I like my job reasonably well, but not enough to spend the last day of my life there.

And yet, doing these things is what makes the things that matter to me possible. I love having a home with Ingrid, a home that's a welcoming place to share with each other and with our friends and family. I love our cats. I love writing, and getting my writing out into the world to be read. And I love having food and clothes and a roof over my head... and I'm grateful that I can do it by working with a bunch of hippie punk rock anarchist book freaks.

The ability to make plans and sacrifices, to set aside what we want right this second in order to get something we want even more later on, is crucial to human happiness. People who can't do it tend not to be very happy.

You might think that, as an atheist, the "live every day as if it were your last" philosophy would be appealing. After all, in the atheist/ humanist world view, this is our only life. There's no pie in the sky when we die -- so why not just live for the moment?

But that's not how I see it at all. And I don't know any other atheists or humanists who see it that way, either. In a humanist philosophy, this life is the only life we have -- so we have to make the most of it. All of it. Not just this day, but all the days we have. Life is short and limited, and we should make the most of it... but that doesn't mean getting twelve credits cards and running off to Amsterdam. It means doing the things that give our lives the most meaning, the things that connect us with the world and make our mark on it. Some of which involve patience, and sacrifice, and deferred gratification.

Besides, being a humanist means being a realist. And unless you're very old or very sick or happen to be hanging off a cliff by your fingertips right at this very moment (in which case, what are you doing surfing the Internet?), the reality is that you probably have a little while yet to live. Yes, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow and die, and that's a reality too. But living as if that were true, instead of just a slim possibility, is out of touch with reality.

Now, if you're talking about life being precious and not wasting it on trivia, then I'm with you. It's something I pay more and more attention to as I get older. Life is short, and I could get hit by a bus tomorrow: do I really want to spend today watching "Law & Order" reruns?

And if you're talking about living in the moment, as opposed to living for the moment, then I'm totally with you. It's one of the great challenges of my life, actually: learning to get the hell out of my head and actually experience my life, instead of analyzing it to death all the time.

But I don't think that's about cashing in your life savings and buying a hot air balloon, or whatever. In fact, I think it's a much more interesting challenge to be in the moment and fully experience your life, not when you're going up in a hot air balloon for the first time, but when you're making dinner, or walking to work, or rubbing the cat's belly. Being fully present in the ordinary dailiness of your life -- the things that ultimately give it meaning even though they're not that special or exciting -- that's the cool stuff.

Yes, I want this day to be a day that matters, a day that I've lived fully. But chances are I'm going to be alive in a couple years. And I want that day two years from now to be a day that I live fully as well.

I don't want to live this day as if it were my last.

I want to live this life as if it were my last.

Who Marriage is For: A Tale of Two Weddings

Who is marriage for now?

And what is it, anyway?

I want to tell a story. Two stories, I guess, about two weddings, that show how radically the answer to that question has changed in just the past few years.

The first time Ingrid and I got married at City Hall, the whole thing had a very different feel. Mayor Gavin Newsom's decision in 2004 to authorize same-sex marriages in San Francisco came totally out of left field, and everyone knew that it would probably be overturned by the courts. (Which, of course, it was.) So underlying the exuberant joy was a feeling of urgency: a knowledge that there was an axe hanging over our heads that could drop any time, and an almost panicky feeling of needing to get your joy in under the wire.

There were huge lines out City Hall doors. Dozens of ad-hoc officiants who had been specially deputized to perform weddings. A dozen or more weddings happening all over City Hall at any given time, all day, every day. It was a lean, mean, fast-moving wedding machine. We couldn't even get very dressed up, because we didn't know if we'd have to wait in line in the rain all day (we got very lucky and got a dry day for our wedding); we signed our papers on the steps of City Hall.

And, of course, the overwhelming majority of those weddings were same-sex. If you were a straight couple wanting to get married at City Hall that first week, and you hadn't already made an appointment, you were out of luck. It was a happy, joyful mob scene... and it was all about the queers.

So the whole thing was less like being welcomed into society as first-class citizens, and more like a massive act of queer civil disobedience. (Improbably led by the Mayor of the city.)

Last month's wedding, the second time Ingrid and I got married at City Hall, was different.

There was no mob scene, no line out the door. There is a possible deadline -- the court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in California could be overturned by a ballot initiative in November -- but November is a ways away, and nobody was feeling that if they didn't get married that day they might never get the chance.

There were certainly a whole lot more weddings happening than there would normally be on a Thursday at City Hall, with extra officiants on hand and a host of volunteers there to shepherd everyone through the process. But it was much calmer, much more business as usual, than the weddings in 2004. It still felt like history in the making, and everyone there was aware of it... but it was a much more peaceful joy, a gentle folding of a new flavor into the batter.

And here's the thing, the point I want to make:

It wasn't just same-sex couples getting married that day.

There were plenty of opposite-sex couples getting married at City Hall the day we were there. In fact, when we signed in for our appointment to get our license and have our ceremony, the schedule listed the couples as "Same sex" or "Opposite sex." And just from a quick glance, it looked like it was running about half and half.

So there we were in City Hall: a City Hall dotted with women marrying women, and men marrying men, and women marrying men.

And it struck me:

This is huge.

This is the change: the change we've been working and fighting for.

This is exactly the way it should be.

In California at least, marriage has changed. It's not longer a relationship and contract between a man and a woman. It's a relationship and contract between two people. Any two people.

In California at least (and Massachusetts, and Canada, and Spain, and a few other places around the world), marriage is no longer about maleness and femaleness; the man's role and the woman's role in the family; the husband and the wife. It's about two people. Spouse 1 and Spouse 2, as they put it on the forms we filled out.

Ingrid is my wife, and I am hers. And that means essentially the same thing as the fact that our friends Tim and Josie are husband and wife.

I think this is what I was getting at when I wrote How Gay Marriage Is Destroying Normal Marriage -- No, Really. Same sex marriage is changing what marriage is -- for everybody. For the men and women getting married in City Hall the day Ingrid and I got married, marriage won't be the same. The fact that Ingrid and I were getting married the same day that they were means that their marriages won't be the same. They won't mean the same thing.

The 2004 weddings were about the queers. June's weddings were about everybody.


Important note: The deadline is a few months off, but there is a deadline. In November, there will be an initiative on the California ballot, asking voters to amend the state Constitution and ban same-sex marriage. If you think this issue and this movement are important, please consider supporting Equality California. If you donate through their Love Stories program by July 31, your donation will be part of a matching program which will make your donation even more valuable.

Oh, and to any polyamorists reading this: Yes, I think it should be available to more than two people. Hopefully that change will come someday as well.

Anonymity, Manners, and the Weakness and Power of the Internet

Do you think the anonymity of the Internet is a problem?

I was talking with a friend recently, and she was mentioning a rule she uses in her online discourses: Never say anything to someone online that you wouldn't say to their face.

It's an idea I've seen a lot in discussions of online society: Online interactions tend to be ruder and more cruel than in- person ones. Without the physical presence of the other person, people feel somewhat released from normal social inhibitions -- inhibitions like civility, and empathy, and kindness. Without the presence of the other person, people tend to forget that they're interacting with an actual human being, and not just a set of ideas and beliefs.

There is some truth to this. People do say things online that they wouldn't say in person. And some of those things really shouldn't be said: from personal insults to bigoted diatribes to death threats. Even interactions that fall short of these extremes can be, shall we say regrettable. I've had more than one painful lesson with friends and family, teaching me never to process serious emotional issues online. It's too easy to try to marshall your arguments into an unstoppable steamroller, and too easy to forget that you actually care about the person you're talking to, and don't want to hurt them if you can avoid it.

So yes. There's some truth to this.

But ultimately, I don't agree with my friend.

See, here's the thing. Yes, some of the things people say online are terrible and hurtful and never should be said. But here are some of the other things people say online that they don't feel they can say in person:

"I really don't agree with you."

"I think your ideas are mistaken, and here -- exactly -- is why."

"I'm gay." (Or bisexual. Sadomasochistic. Polyamorous. A sex worker. A foot fetishist. A furry. Almost any sexual minority you can think of.)

"I think your most deeply held beliefs are irrational, unsupported by the evidence, and almost certainly incorrect."

"I am an atheist."

And these are important things to say. They're things that should be said, things I want to be said.

The fact that people feel less bound by social convention online than they do in person doesn't just give them license to be rude where they would otherwise feel pressured to be polite. It also gives them license to tell the truth as they see it, where they would otherwise feel pressured to go along with socially acceptable lies -- or stay silent in the face of them.

And that, I think, is a good thing.

I've felt this pressure myself. In person, I've definitely backed down from arguments -- dropped the subject, changed the subject, agreed to disagree, whatever -- to keep the social engine running smoothly. And I haven't always felt proud of myself for doing so. I've compromised my honesty and my beliefs, let stupid and terrible and patently false ideas slide unchallenged, in order to defuse conflict and awkwardness in social situations. And I think most of us have.

It's a hard situation. I like the fact that I'm empathetic and diplomatic, able to see things from other people's perspectives and reluctant to hurt their feelings. And it's not like I think that contradicting wrongness or proving my point is always the highest priority, or that I want every party to turn into a debate. But like a lot of people, I have a reflexive anxiety in the face of conflict, a reflexive tendency in social situations to prioritize social grace over other considerations. And I don't like it.

So I love the fact that the blogosphere releases me from some of that concern. I love that there's a social arena where the convention is that it's okay to disagree: okay not just to argue, but to stubbornly stick with an argument and see it through to its end instead of just saying, "Well, you may have a point, let me think about that, hey how about them Yankees?" I love that there's a social arena where it's okay to point out that the other person has flawed reasoning, unreasonable assumptions, incorrect facts.

I don't just love it so I can hammer on other people's ideas, either. I love it so other people can hammer on mine. I feel like the blogosphere is a crucible, a whetstone, where my good ideas get clarified and my fuzzy ideas get sharpened and my bad ideas get burned away. I want other people to feel as free to criticize my ideas as I do to criticize theirs. Otherwise, what the heck's the point? And I think that's true for a lot of people. Having a place where you can test your ideas against another smart, thoughtful, stubborn person who's just as willing to go the full fifteen rounds as you are? I can't be the only person who thinks that's the neatest thing since buttered popcorn.

And for people who don't live in Sodom by the Bay, all of this isn't just important. It's vital.

For people who live in suburbs and small towns, places that are even more strongly ruled by social convention than the big impersonal cities, the online world is a godsend. (Tangent: What's a secular word for "godsend"? I couldn't think of one.) There are thousands -- millions -- of people for whom the online world is the only place where they can speak their truth, and explore the questions and details and complexities of their truth, without fear of reprisal. Not just fear of social disapproval, either, but fear of actual, practical, losing- your- job type reprisal. There are thousands, millions, of people who have no place other than the 'Net where they can safely say, "I'm queer," "I'm an atheist," "I think the way I was brought up is stupid and evil." For them, the fact that there's a social arena where it's okay to disagree and argue and not fret too much about what other people think or whether your opinions are hurting their feelings... it's not just a relief. It's a sanity- saver.

Let me put it this way. If everyone followed the "Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person" rule, the atheosphere probably wouldn't exist.

And I want the atheosphere to exist.

I'm not saying that people should relinquish all social inhibitions in online interactions. Far from it. Even when I'm locked in a hardcore online battle of wits and wills, I try to remember that there's an actual other person on the other end of the ethernet cable. And I try to remember to criticize ideas and beliefs and behaviors, rather than personally insult people.

Plus, for every well-mannered person who finds a good balance of honesty and kindness on the Internet, there's an inept, inconsiderate, socially tone-deaf moron who needs more social inhibition, not less.

So I'm not saying that the Internet's tendency to loosen the bonds of social good grace is an unmixed blessing.

I'm just saying that it is a blessing. A mixed one, but a blessing nonetheless. I'm saying that this weakness of the Internet is also one of its greatest strengths. As annoying and off-putting and fucked-up as it often is, I'm glad that there's a place in the world where I can say things to people that I wouldn't say to their face.

And where they can say them to me.

"Ya Gotta Reach For Your Dreams": An Optimistic Realist Perspective

Should we, in fact, always reach for our dreams?

I know. That sounds like an almost stupidly obvious question. But stay with me. I'm going someplace with this.

You've seen the movies, the TV shows; you've read the inspiring books. Scrappy underdog with a dream struggles against all odds -- conformist friends, an implacable authority structure, traditionalist parents who are scared of change -- to astonish everyone with their awe- inspiring talent and win the big game at the end.

It's the Flashdance/ Bend It Like Beckham/ Strictly Ballroom/ Mighty Ducks trope. And it's very deeply embedded in our culture. You can do anything you want, as long as you set your mind to it. Take your passion, and make it happen. Do, or do not -- there is no "try."

In my ongoing attempt to be both an optimist and a realist, I've been thinking about this trope. And I want to take it on.

Yes, I think we should, most of the time, reach for our dreams. But I also think this is a screwed-up trope that does a fair amount of damage. It undercuts a realistic view of the world... and in a weird way, it undercuts optimism as well.

Here's the thing. The trope offers false optimism. It strongly implies -- and sometimes promises outright -- that if you try hard enough, you'll succeed.

But if you look at the world around you for ten minutes, you'll see that this is patently untrue. Not everyone succeeds in their dreams. The world is full of singers who never get on the radio; ball players who never make it past college or high school ball; students who flunk out of med school; writers who never write a bestseller, or indeed never get anything published at all. (I always have to remind myself of this when I'm feeling cranky about my struggles in my writing career: no, I'm not as successful as I'd like to be, but the overwhelming majority of writers don't even reach the modest level of success that I have.)

It isn't always for lack of trying, either. Sometimes, for instance, it's for lack of talent. The American Idol tryout shows are Exhibit A: a pathetic parade of self-delusion, a nearly endless caravan of dreadful, dreadful singers who saw Flashdance and The Mighty Ducks and think this is their big shot, that if they work hard and stay true to their dream they'll someday be a star. The line between confidence and delusion is a fine one indeed, and sometimes very difficult to detect.

And sometimes it's simply for lack of luck. As any successful person who isn't totally arrogant will tell you, luck plays a huge role in success. Especially in difficult and highly competitive fields, like ballet dancing and hockey. You have to be talented, you have to be ambitious, you have to work hard... and you have to get the breaks. (Even if it's the often- overlooked breaks of birth and upbringing.) If the difference between confidence and delusion is simply in the outcome, then sometimes that difference is drawn by a roll of the dice.

Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success. And one of the hardest lessons to learn, one of the hardest balances to strike, one of the hardest choices to make in life, is figuring out when you should keep trying and when you should let go and move on. Which setbacks are just temporary obstacles on your path to glory, and which ones are the universe telling you, "Forget it, kid, it ain't gonna happen." (It's not just about careers, either. I've definitely hung onto relationships that were dead and rotting because I had "If we try hard enough we can make this work" damage.)

These are some of the hardest, most wrenching decisions we have to make. And I think the "Stick to your dreams and you'll win in the end" trope can cloud these decisions and make them even harder. It can turn confidence into delusion, way past the line where it's difficult to see the difference. It can make people think that their big break is just around the corner, they can't give up now, if they just stick with it long enough it's bound to happen.

And it makes people feel even worse if they don't succeed. This is what I mean about the trope undercutting optimism. You're already feeling bad about failing, and then on top of that you feel like a double failure because you gave up. If you'd really wanted it badly enough, if you'd worked harder or had more confidence or just stuck with it a little longer, you'd be on your way to Dreamtown. How much harder is it going to be the next time you pursue a dream, if you start out feeling like your last failure is proof of a character flaw?

So here's what I think.

You shouldn't reach for your dreams because if you stick with them with enough confidence and determination, eventually you'll succeed.

You should reach for your dreams because you may or may not succeed if you try -- but you sure as hell won't succeed if you don't.

You should reach for your dreams because the reaching itself can be satisfying and valuable.

You should reach for your dreams because the reaching itself can get you to places that are interesting and worthwhile, even if they're not where you'd originally set out to go.

You should reach for your dreams because you'll regret it forever if you don't.

And you should reach for your dreams because... well, what the hell else are you going to do?

You have one life. (No, I'm not going to debate that point.) Are you going to spend it trying to do what matters to you? Or are you going to spend it wondering what would have happened if you'd given your big dream a shot?

When you're near the end of your life, would you rather look back and say, "Boy, I wish I'd tried to be a tree surgeon. I bet I would have been really good at it. I guess now I'll never know." Or would you rather look back and say, "What a life I've had. Look at all the crazy things I did. Remember that time I tried to be a tree surgeon? Boy, did that ever not work out -- but it sure was interesting to try."

Also in the Optimistic Realist Series:
The Harm Reduction Model of Life
Is Altruism Real?

For No Good Reason: Atheist Transcendence at the Black and White Tour

I know. Most people don't connect Morris dancing with transcendence, atheist or otherwise. Most people who have seen Morris dancing connect it with cacophony, silly outfits, and beer. But I had a moment of atheist transcendence at the Black And White Morris Tour a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to talk about it.

A quick bit of background. Morris dancing is a more or less harmless addiction that takes the form of dressing in colorful outfits, strapping bells to your legs, and dancing in smallish groups (usually six or eight people), clashing sticks together and/or waving hankies about. It's an English folk tradition, and while many Morris dancers will tell you entertaining lies about how incredibly ANCIENT the tradition is and how there was probably Morris dancing at Stonehenge, it's actually about 500 years old or so. My darling Ingrid is deeply involved with it, but I love her anyway.

Now. Typically, a Morris outing involves one or more teams each dressing in their own distinctive team outfits, each team performing their own dances. But the Black and White Tour is different. Everyone just dresses in whatever combination of black and white strikes their fancy. And the dances are common ones that many dancers know: so pretty much everyone on every team can dance just about every dance, all together.

And this year, it was magnificent.

I don't dance the Morris myself anymore. High impact, bad knee. I was just there to watch and hoot. And this year, I was gobsmacked. I've seen a lot of Morris dancing in my life -- Ingrid's done it for years, and I did it for years before she did -- and while I enjoy it, I've also seen enough of it to last me several lifetimes, and am not easily impressed. But this time, I was more than impressed. I had my breath taken away. It was one of the most beautiful and memorable things I've seen in my life.

And it was all for no good reason.

Which brings me back to atheism, and the atheist transcendence.

It's hard to describe what exactly made this day so breathtaking. Part of it was that it was such a beautiful blend of individual expression and group coherence. So much of life stresses one at the expense of the other: the individual submerges their own expression to go along with the group, or the individual says, "Screw you, Jack, I've got mine," and does what they want regardless of the effect on society. The Black and White tour somehow managed to hit that rare, perfect, synergistic balance between the two: the joy of working together, and the joy of being yourself.

The exuberantly imaginative interpretations of the "black and white" theme are a perfect example. It was a specific enough vision to give the group a coherent look, while at the same time allowing a tremendous amount of room for personal expression. The fact that it was an inter-team event helped as well: instead of one or maybe two sets dancing at a time, there were often four or five sets of six or eight dancers all dancing in a row, turning an already flamboyant dance form into a lavish, extravagant spectacle. And the fact that the performances were mostly by mish-moshes of people who had rarely, if ever, danced together before somehow added to the goofy, boisterous glee of it. It wasn't about precision or team pride. It was about joy.

And partly, it was just beautiful: the black and white of the dancers capering in the sunlight, against the Victorian white and glass of the Conservatory of Flowers and the green, green grass of Golden Gate Park. It looked like some wild, arty circus had come to town.

But much of what made it so magnificent was the sheer, beautiful absurdity of it all.

There is no good reason on this earth to do Morris dancing. It is an utterly pointless activity. Okay, you get some exercise and social contact... but really. You can get social contact anywhere, and you can get better exercise at the gym. And you don't have to strap bells to your legs and wave handkerchiefs around like an idiot to do it. It isn't constructive, it isn't important, it doesn't produce anything. All it produces is joy.

Which, if you're an atheist, is kind of what life is like.

There's no purpose or meaning to it, other than the purpose and meaning we create. In a few decades, we're all going to be gone, dust in the ground or ashes in the wind. In a few million years, the earth and everything on it will be gone, boiled away into the Sun. And if the physicists and astronomers are right, in a few billion years the Universe will essentially be gone, dissipated into a thin scattering of atoms dotted throughout vast stretches of empty space. There's no light at the end of the tunnel, no prize in the CrackerJacks, no final chapter that ties up all the loose ends. And there's no big daddy in the sky to shake your hand at the end of it and say, "You done good, kid. Here's your blue ribbon."

And yet, here we are. We were, against wildly astronomical odds, born. The chances against any one of us having been born are so high as to be laughable; the chances against there having been life on this planet at all defy description. No, there's no purpose to it, if by "purpose" you mean "being a cog in someone else's machine." There's no reason for it to have happened, except that it did. And the meaning of it is whatever meaning we create. The meaning of it is to diminish suffering and create joy and connection, for ourselves and for each other, for as long as we're here.

We can do that in our work. We can do it in our art. We can do it in our friendships, our relationships, our families. We can do it in politics, charities, community involvement. We can do it with cooking. We can do it with fashion. We can do it with sex.

And we can do it by dressing in ridiculous outfits, strapping bells to our legs, and dancing in the park like fools.

For no good reason.

Other pieces in this series:
Dancing Molecules: An Atheist Moment of Transcendence

Photos copyright 2008 by Tiffany Barnes, of White Rats Morris team in San Francisco. You can click on any of the photos to enlarge, or you can see the whole slideshow if you like. I'm a little sorry they're all by Tiffany, actually: they're gorgeous pictures, but it means there aren't any of her, and she had one of the best outfits of anybody.

What's Your Story?

So what's your story?

Whenever I read about psychology or the structure of the brain and mind, this theme keeps coming up. Human beings seem to have a deeply-rooted need for narrative: a need to structure our experiences as stories. It seems to be hard-wired into the way our brains and minds work. (I remember once overhearing a very pompous filmmaker explaining to his crew, "I don't want to give my audience the bourgeois comfort of a narrative structure." As if narrative structure were a stuffy, outmoded invention of the Victorian middle class. I fell into gales of laughter and immediately told an artist friend about it, who went into an aw-shucks routine about, "Heck, naw, the missus and me don't need no narrative structure. Nope, the avant-garde was good enough for my Pappy, and it's darn well good enough fer me.")

Anyway. I've been thinking a lot about what my stories are. Because our stories are important. Our stories shape how we experience our lives. Certain narrative themes seem to come up over and over again in our lives -- different ones for different people, of course -- and those themes affect how we feel about the things that happen to us. It's commonly understood that the same event can be experienced by different people in radically different ways. And I don't mean that in a Rashomon way. I mean that the exact same event can be experienced as positive or negative; exciting or frightening; supportive or critical; affirming or alienating... depending on the stories we tell ourselves about them. And of course, our stories affect how we behave, the choices we make and the ways we respond to our experiences.

Or, as Joan Didion so famously and succinctly put it, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

So I've been thinking about my stories... and I've been getting curious about everyone else's.

One of my main stories is, "Plucky in the face of adversity." And it's not a bad story, as stories go. It sure beats, "Falling apart in the face of adversity," or, "Totally negative and pessimistic in the face of adversity." Its plusses are so obvious that I won't bother to enumerate them.

But it has its downsides as well. For one thing, if a central narrative theme of your life is, "Plucky in the face of adversity," it doesn't give you a lot to work with when there's no adversity and your life is going smoothly and well. "Plucky in the face of adversity" has an unfortunate tendency to turn into "Restless and bored and looking for a fight in the face of calm good luck." It can make you feel aimless and vaguely dissatisfied during peaceful stretches of your life, and can even give you a tendency to create adversity where none exists. And I have had a problem with this in my life. I've definitely created drama where no drama was called for; and I've definitely been drawn to people who created a lot of drama in their lives, just so I could experience it vicariously. It's a tendency I've had to pay careful, conscious attention to.

In fact, even though my life for several years now has been largely happy and stable with really not that much adversity, I think I'm still very much governed by this narrative. I've just transformed my definition of "adversity," to mean "creative challenges" rather than "pointless interpersonal drama." Trying to get a book contract; battling with editors; trying to write something interesting in my blog four or five times a week... this is the adversity that I'm plucky in the face of now.

Another narrative of mine is "Wise, emotionally intelligent woman with a unique and worthwhile perspective on life." Again, not a bad story: a bit cocky and full of itself, perhaps, but it's given me the self-confidence I've needed to pursue my writing. Any artistic career needs a fair amount of arrogance -- the arrogance of believing that anyone outside your immediate circle of family and friends would be even remotely interested in what you have to say. And again, as stories go, "Wise and emotionally intelligent" sure beats "Lost in her own little world" or "Never does anything right."

But again, this story has a downside. And not just the obvious one of occasional self-delusion, being prone to believing that you're being wise and perceptive when you're actually being an idiot. It's also a story that can easily turn into, "Person who gives a lot of unsolicited advice and likes to tell people how to run their life when they really just wanted a sympathetic ear." I have to watch this tendency very carefully, and I fall into it a whole lot more than I'd like.

And then, you have your standard, embarrassingly self-serving narratives, the source material for your most ridiculous fantasies, the stories that make you cringe when you catch yourself at them. "Nobody understands my unique genius." "I'm the only honest one -- everyone feels the way I do, if only they'd admit it." "Who is that striking, strangely compelling woman over there in the corner?" "They'll all be sorry someday, but then it'll be too late." But I think you get my point.

So what's your story? What are the narrative themes that shape your life? How do they work for you; how do they screw you up; how have they changed as your life has changed? One of my other stories is, "Curious and interested in the lives of others and the workings of the human mind" -- it makes a great cover story for "nosy" -- and I want to know how this works for people other than me.

The Harm Reduction Model of Life

Due to both chance and temperament, I have a lot of friends who work (or have worked) in public health. (Including, of course, my darling wife.) As a result, I hear a lot about the concept of harm reduction. And once I started learning about harm reduction, I found that it isn't just a useful model for public health and public policy. It's an unbelievably useful model for life in general.

It's a concept that I think a lot of people would be interested in. Humanists especially, but not just them. So I thought I'd take a moment and gas on about it for a bit.

Let's talk about public health for a moment first. For those who aren't familiar, here's the basic idea. When dealing with a public health problem, the harm reduction model says that you don't necessarily have to completely solve or eliminate the problem in order to make important improvements. It's a worthwhile goal to simply reduce the degree of the problem, reduce the harm done by the problem, and improve the quality of life for people experiencing the problem.

In fact, harm reduction proponents often don't see "problems" the way society as a whole typically does. Rather than making moral judgments about drugs or sex or whatever, the harm reduction model accepts these things as basic human behaviors that have been part of life for as long as we've been around. It doesn't see these things as problems per se, but as elements of human life that can sometimes cause problems. And rather than passing judgement on where people need to be in their lives before they can use or deserve help, it aims to "meet people where they are" -- whether that's regarding drug use, sex, or whatever -- and to give everyone who wants them the tools they need to reduce harm in their lives.

(It's essentially the opposite of a "zero tolerance" or "abstinence-based" model. If you're curious, the Harm Reduction Coalition has a more detailed explanation -- as it relates to drug use, which is where the concept originated, but the principles can be applied to many other public health and public policy issues.)

In other words, you don't have to make problems disappear. You just have to make them better. (And in some cases, trying to make problems disappear can actually do more harm than good.)

The classic example of harm reduction is needle exchange. Needle exchange programs are a response to the high rate of HIV transmission among injection drug users: they give clean needles to users in exchange for used ones, so users aren't sharing dirty needles. Now, a "zero tolerance" policy would say that illegal drugs are, well, illegal, and bad, harmful to the users and to society, and society can't condone their use in any way -- including giving clean needles to users.

Harm reduction, on the other hand, says that:

a) it's good to reduce HIV transmission in injection drug users, since that will reduce HIV transmission in the general population;

b) it's good to reduce HIV transmission in injection drug users, so that more of them can have healthy lives when and if they do get sober ("you can't get clean if you're dead" is a classic needle-exchange saying);

c) it's good to reduce HIV transmission in injection drug users, because they're, you know, human beings. Their lives have value. The fact that they're injection drug users doesn't change that. It is worth helping them stay alive and stay as healthy and happy as possible... as much as it is for anybody.

Another example is sex education. Zero tolerance says that underaged sex is an unequivocal evil that cannot be tolerated by society, and the only appropriate response is to try to stop it entirely. The harm reduction model says that, even if you don't love the fact that minors are having sex, you not loving it is not going to stop it from happening... and we therefore need to find the most effective ways to stop its harmful effects, such as teenage pregnancy and STIs. (Abstinence- only sex education is a zero- tolerance approach... and it's a classic example of zero-tolerance not only being ineffective but actually doing harm.)

Take a wild guess which model I support.

Okay. Enough with the public health. What do I mean by the harm reduction model of life in general?

What I mean is this: Even if you can't completely solve a problem or make it go away, it is still worthwhile to work on making it better. Sometimes better is enough.

Voting, I think, is a good example. And the coming Presidential election is an excellent one. We don't have to elect a perfect candidate, or even one we're wildly enthusiastic about. We just have to elect a President who's a whole lot better than the current one. It won't make things perfect... but it'll make things better.

And the harm reduction model can be applied to all sorts of political and social problems. Can you personally solve the global warming crisis? No -- but you can help reduce its effects (driving less, buying energy-efficient appliances, voting for candidates who support strong environmental policies, etc.). Can you personally stop the waste and poor health caused by industrialized food production? No -- but you can buy more of your food from local sources, and push for the same in your schools and restaurants. Can you personally eradicate racism, sexism, homophobia? No -- but you can try to be conscious of it in your own life, and speak out against it when you see it, and pay attention to it when you vote. Can you personally halt the spread of obscene American consumerism? No -- but you can cut back on the amount of pointless crap you buy. Etc., etc., etc.

And if enough people take enough of these steps, it'll make these problems better. It won't eliminate them, but it'll reduce their harmful effects. And it may even help change the culture that cultivates them. Especially if you apply the harm reduction model, not just in your personal life, but in political and cultural action.

But the harm reduction model doesn't just apply to politics and social change. It can be applied to almost any area of life.

Diet, for instance. I have long ago given up on trying to have a perfect diet, or to lose a significant amount of weight. Instead, I'm focusing on having a better diet, a good enough diet, a diet that most of the time consists of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat proteins with minimal animal products. I'm trying to have a diet that keeps me reasonably healthy and still lets me relax and enjoy life. And instead of trying to lose weight, I am instead trying to not gain weight... and to stay as healthy as I can at the weight that I am.

Ditto exercise. I don't need to get the ideal recommended amount of exercise in order to feel obvious improvements in my life and health. I just need to get more exercise than I'd been getting before I started working out.

Or take housecleaning. Savings and money management. Not reading enough. Watching too much TV. If there's an area of your life that you're not happy with, you don't necessarily need to completely re-structure your life so that you can perform the task in question to your complete satisfaction. You just need to moderately re-structure it, so you can do more of what you like and think is important, and less of what you don't.

So that's the idea.

And here's the thing I really like about the harm reduction model of life, the thing that transforms it from a helpful hint into a defining philosophy:

It lets you be both an optimist and a realist.

I hate the idea that optimism is somehow a form of delusion, and that pessimism and cynicism are somehow equivalent to realism. And I don't just hate it because I enjoy being an optimist. I hate it because I think it's bullshit. I think pessimism and cynicism are often just a weak-ass rationalization for being lazy or cowardly, irresponsible or selfish. Realism doesn't just mean being aware of problems and limitations and obstacles. It also means being aware of what can and cannot be done about problems and limitations and obstacles.

And that's where the harm reduction model of life comes in. It gives us room to be positive about life and hopeful about the future, without being deluded or willfully ignorant about limitations and harsh realities. It transforms the Sisyphian experiences of life, the rocks that get constantly pushed up the hill only to roll back down again: it keeps them from feeling frustrating and pointless, and instead lets us see them as positive accomplishments. It doesn't let us off the hook about doing what we can for ourselves and for others -- IMO, it does the exact opposite -- but it lets us feel okay about not doing it perfectly.

Realism doesn't give us an excuse for irresponsibility and inaction. It gives us the moral obligation to be responsible, and to take whatever action is possible. And the harm reduction model gives us a model for doing exactly that. It gives us a framework for dealing with problems that seem appalling, enormous, and fundamentally unsolvable... without succumbing to apathy, cynicism, or despair.

Now, the big downside of the harm reduction model of life is that it can easily become an excuse for doing a half-assed job. It can act as a justification for doing the least you can do; for taking only those actions that don't inconvenience you; for making token gestures towards personal improvement or social responsibility while still being fundamentally lazy and selfish. "Hey, I changed all my lightbulbs to fluorescents -- I don't have to get rid of my SUV!"

And believe me, I speak from personal experience here. I've spent fifteen minutes picking up the tornado of books scattered all over our living room and piling them into neat little piles, as a "half-assed harm- reduction" form of housecleaning. I've given twenty bucks to political causes or candidates as a "half-assed harm- reduction" form of political action, when I was too busy or lazy to write letters and make phone calls and go to demonstrations. And more seriously, I've used the fact that I recycle and use fluorescent lightbulbs as a "half-assed harm- reduction" rationalization for the fact that I don't really do that much about global warming, even though I think it's by far the single most pressing problem facing our generation.

But as my friend Laura Upstairs (one of my many friends in public health and public policy) pointed out, one of the whole points of the harm reduction model is that a half-assed job is often better than none. Piling the books into neat squares isn't a very good form of housekeeping... but it's better than leaving them lying around everywhere. Donating twenty bucks to candidates or causes isn't the most powerful form of political activism in the world... but it's better than taking no action at all. Using fluorescent lightbulbs isn't really a sufficient response to global warming... but it's a better response than not using them.

And in my experience at least, a half-assed job is often a step towards a more completely-assed job. It can get you started with good habits -- habits of thinking, as well as habits of action -- that can eventually get you doing more than you'd ever imagined.

Here's what I mean. Going to the gym once a week may not improve your health that much... but it can get you into the habit of paying attention to exercise and health, and can be a step on the way to eating better, and being more active in your everyday life, and eventually going to the gym two or three times a week. Recycling may not make a huge dent in our planet's diminishing resources... but it can get you into the habit of thinking about waste and conservation and what the planet can and can't sustain, and thus inspire you to drive less, and not buy as much disposable crap, and vote for funding for solar power and public transportation. Etc., etc., etc. Yes, a harm reduction approach to life can get you feeling complacent and smug when you're not actually doing very much... but it can also nudge you in the direction of doing more.

The harm reduction model isn't always appropriate. There are, for instance, times when perfectionism is exactly what you want. I don't want a brain surgeon who thinks, "Oh, we got most of the tumor, I'm sure that's good enough." I don't want an air traffic controller who thinks, "Well, one crash a week is better than five crashes a week." And when it comes to major public issues like global warming, it is well worth asking whether moderate harm-reduction steps are actually going to make a significant dent: whether they actually will reduce harm enough to keep disaster at bay, or are really just a way of making ourselves feel useful while we collectively walk off a cliff.

So the harm reduction model of life isn't a cure-all. But I've found it to be a singularly useful philosophy. It's given me a way to reconcile my native optimism with my native hard-assed realism, without sending me into a cognitive- dissonance headspin. It lets me be optimistic without being deluded; it lets me be realistic without being a buzz-kill. And it's given me a way to not feel overwhelmed by enormous, seemingly impossible tasks, both personal and political. It lets me do the small amount that I can do in this world, without feeling like it's pointless.

And that rocks.

(Thanks to Ingrid and to Laura Upstairs, for their help with the explanation of the public health stuff. If I made any mistakes, it's my fault, not theirs.)

Healthy! Plus Blog Carnivals

Some of you very kindly have been asking after my health in the last few weeks. I'm pleased to let you know that, as of today, I am declaring myself officially recovered from this damn illness.

I've been tentatively going back to the gym for a couple of weeks, doing very short, gentle little strolls on the treadmill, gradually building up to get my strength and stamina back without triggering a respiratory freakout. But yesterday, for the first time since I got sick, I was able to do a complete workout, treadmill and weights both, for a full session. With happy lungs all the way. Yay, happy lungs! Just thought y'all might like to know.

And now, blog carnivals!

Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy #2 at Labyrinth Walk.

Skeptic's Circle #84 at Archeoporn.

Carnival of the Godless #90 at No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Carnival of the Liberals #63 at Vagabond Scholar.

Carnival of Feminists #58 at Be a Good Human.

My Trip to the Circus: Albert Hofmann and LSD

Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, has died at the ripe old age of 102. So in honor of him, now seems like a good time to talk about my experiences with the drug he created.

I took LSD a lot in college, and for a year or two after. Quite a lot. For a while, I was taking it almost every week; and for most of my college years, I was taking it about once a month or so. And after I'd been taking it for a while, I was taking moderately hefty doses. You don't get a physical tolerance to LSD -- but you can get a sort of psychological tolerance to it. After I'd been taking it for a while, a hit or two would give me a light, fun trip -- but if I wanted the experience of taking my mind into a radically unfamiliar place, I'd take five, seven, even ten hits.

And for the most part, it was a great experience. Kind of an important experience, too. I had a couple of bad trips (especially early on, before I'd figured out the "don't take seriously the crazy shit your mind comes up with when it's tripping" principle)... but on the whole, LSD was a positive, happy part of my life that shaped me in ways I feel good about. Partly it was just fun and entertaining, like fascinating and hilarious movies in my brain. But I actually got some important insights out of it as well: insights that have stayed with me long after I stopped taking the drug.

I could gas on about this subject for hours. But I realize that there's little in this life more tedious than listening to other people describe their drug experiences. So the main thing I want to say is this: Taking LSD is what gave me the awareness -- not just the intellectual concept, but the immediate, visceral experience -- of just how much of my perception and intuition was about how my brain worked, and how little of it was about how the world worked. There is nothing quite so humbling as putting a chemical into your body -- a chemical measured in millionths of a gram -- and having everything you see and feel and know be radically altered, to the point of being unrecognizable.

So in a lot of ways, taking LSD was the beginning of my skepticism. It was the beginning of my awareness that my brain could fool me, that my brain had its own agenda, and I couldn't automatically trust what it was saying.

Now, the downside is that, in a lot of other ways, it was the total opposite. Many of my stupider woo beliefs came directly out of "insights" I had when I was on LSD or other hallucinogens. The idea that mystical forces were guiding the Tarot cards when I shuffled them. The idea that subatomic particles must have free will, since their behavior isn't predictable. The idea that every person on Earth was in exactly the right place, doing exactly what they were intended to be doing by the great World-Soul. (A pretty Calvinist idea when you think about it, although at the time I would have rejected that suggestion hotly.) I had drug hallucinations that I took very, very seriously, and believed to be accurate perceptions even after the drug faded. (I was, for instance, convinced for an embarrassingly long time that, when I was under the influence of LSD, I could make rosebuds bloom into roses, simply through the force of my concentrated drug-enhanced will. Loki, have mercy.)

So while I'm overall positive about my LSD experiences, I feel that I should acknowledge this side of them as well. I am strongly of the opinion that a lot of the more fuzzy, uncritical, poorly- thought- out ideas of the hippie and post-hippie movement (New Age woo and otherwise) were the result of an entire generation being unclear on the "don't take seriously the crazy shit your mind comes up with when it's tripping" concept.

But you know? All that stuff eventually faded. And what I was left with -- along with a lot of warm, happy, hilarious memories of profound and wildly entertaining times shared with friends -- was the deeply- ingrained, vividly- understood awareness that my perception and intuition did not necessarily represent reality. It was the beginning of my skepticism. And it was the beginning of the end of my solipsism. In a lot of ways, it was the beginning of my adult compassion: my relativism, my understanding that other people saw reality differently than I did and that this didn't automatically mean that they were stupid and wrong. It was the beginning of my borderline- obsessive, sometimes irritating dedication to seeing things, as much as possible, from other people's points of view.

And for that, I'm grateful.

Thanks, Albert.

(Tip of the hat to Susie Bright, both for the news and for the "everyone tell your LSD experiences" meme. Also for this unbelievably hilarious video. Video below the fold.)

Photo of Albert Hofmann by Stefan Pangritz, copyright CC-BY-SA.

Atheism, Bad Luck, and the Comfort of Reason

Warning: The first bit of this piece contains a hearty gripe. Stick with me: except for occasional outbursts, the kvetching doesn't last past the first couple of paragraphs, and there really is a point.

As people who are close to me know (and as people who follow the blog closely may have guessed), the last month or two has been among the lousiest times of my life. I've had worse months -- months of death, of divorce, of serious family illness. But in terms of the sheer stupid dogpiling of badness upon badness, I'm hard-pressed to think of another that's sucked more. It's not just been the pneumonia and my cat dying; I've been dealing with other health problems (mostly behind me now, but it wasn't fun); a trip to the emergency room for Ingrid (she's totally fine now, but it was a scary few hours); a small but painful second- degree burn; missing the queer contra dance camp because I was sick; and my hard drive crashing. (Yes, I've been doing backups; no, I haven't been doing them often enough, and I lost some work that I really did not want to lose.)

It's getting to the point where it's almost comical, except that I lost my sense of humor about a week and a half ago. Along with my patience. But of course, you can lose your patience all you want to with bad things in your life, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference -- you still have to endure them.

I don't bring all this up to cadge sympathy, or to dump on you. I bring it up because of this: This has been the kind of month (two-month? fortmonth? bimonth?) that would make believers in God wonder what they were being punished for. It's the kind of bimonth that, back in my woo days when I believed that everything happened for a reason, would have made me rack my brains trying to figure out what the fuck it was that the universe was trying to teach me. (Amazing, isn't it: the arrogance of thinking that the universe arranges itself around you in order to personally teach you a lesson.)

But I don't think that. Any of it. And I'm so glad that I don't think any of it, I can't even tell you.

I know that religion is repeatedly defended as a source of comfort in difficult times. But this has been one of the more difficult times in my life... and I've been finding that my atheistic, skeptical, rational view of my difficulties is more comforting than any religious belief I've ever held, or could ever imagine holding.

So here is my atheist, skeptical, rational look at why runs of bad luck happen.

1. Just plain luck. Anyone who studies statistics will tell you that, in any random sequence that's long enough, mini-sequences will show up that look like patterns. Pseudopatterns, they're called. You roll a pair of dice for long enough, chances are that at some point you're going to get snake-eyes ten times in a row. And that's some of what this run of bad luck is about. A good example is my cat dying and my hard drive crashing. Nothing to do with each other, as far as I can tell. They just happened to happen in roughly the same time frame. When a lot of it happens in a row, it can feel like a pattern, with intention behind it... but that doesn't mean it is.

2. Bad things can cause other bad things to happen. If you're tired, stressed, distracted, sleep- deprived, etc. from a bad thing happening, you're more likely to make serious mistakes, get into accidents, and/or get sick. Ingrid and I are convinced that this is why she had her trip to the emergency room: it happened in the middle of Catfish's final illness, and Ingrid was upset and distracted and not looking where she was going. And I think it's very likely that the dogpile of stress was a big factor in my getting pneumonia. (At the doctor's visit when the pneumonia was diagnosed, my blood pressure, normally in the very healthy vicinity of 120/70, was 144/87.)

3. Bad things make you less able to cope with other bad things... thus making them feel worse than they otherwise would. I don't think pneumonia is ever a picnic... but I think I'd be handling it with a lot more patience and good humor if it hadn't come at the tail end (what I hope is the tail end, what bloody well better be the tail end) of this ridiculous run of shitty luck.

4. Big bad things make you more conscious of, and more sensitive to, little bad things. This, I think, is a big one. Normally, I pride myself on my ability to take the ordinary bumps of life in my stride, even to have a sense of humor about them, to make them part of the overall optimistic pattern of my life. But in the last month, every little inconvenience and annoyance has been magnified by stress. Ingrid getting a cold, a stain on our nice bedspread, the store being out of the kind of tea that I like... all of it gets magnified into One More Fucking Thing I Have To Deal With This Month. All of it seems like part of the pattern. The non-existent pseudopattern.

Or, to sum it all up in a couple of words: Shit Happens.

So where's the comfort in all this?

Here is the comfort:

I know what's happening.

I understand what's happening.

So I'm not afraid of it.

And I don't have to feel guilty about it.

I don't have to add guilt to the dogpile. I don't have to add the shameful and frightened feeling that the dogpile is a punishment for some unknown sin. I don't have to add sleepless nights trying to figure out what I've done wrong, what I've done to deserve this, what lesson is being taught me that I'm too dense to learn. I don't have to feel like it's my fault. (Okay, not backing up my data often enough was my fault... but other than that.) I don't have to take it personally.

Now, I understand that "not taking it personally" is itself hard for many people. If shit happens simply because shit happens, and not to teach you a lesson, then the shit can seem both meaningless and out of control. Believing that runs of bad luck are punishment for some sin is a way to give your suffering meaning... and it's a way to convince yourself that you have it in your power to prevent it from happening again.

But given a choice between thinking that the meaning of my suffering is "Shit happens," and that the meaning of my suffering is "You're a bad person," I'll take "Shit happens" any day. And given a choice between spending my life in a desperate, futile attempt to figure out which set of rituals and sacrifices I need to make to appease my god and prevent the shit from happening again -- and instead having some sort of reasonable expectations and wisdom about what in my life I can and cannot change -- I'll take the latter in a heartbeat.

Memories of a Good Science Education... and Worries About Bad Ones

I didn't see the point at the time.

When I was a kid, I always got annoyed by the lab portion of my science classes. I guess I've always been more of a theory person than a research person (hence my career as an essayist instead of a journalist). Rolling balls down inclines and measuring the speed; putting nails in different liquids and seeing how fast they rusted; cutting up fetal pigs... it always seemed like a waste of time.

I mean, I never had any problem understanding the theories being taught by the books and the teachers. And I was perfectly happy to believe the books and the teachers. After all, it's not like my measurements of gravity or magnetism or whatever were going to be written up in the science journals. Even at the time, I knew perfectly well that if my numbers didn't come out the way the theory said they should, the discrepancy would, without a doubt, turn out to be caused by my experimental methodology... not the theory.

And it's not like the theories we were learning in second -grade or sixth-grade or tenth-grade science class were on the cutting edge of new scientific thinking. Again, even at the time, I knew that the stuff we were learning was well-established, and had been experimentally verified thousands upon thousands of times... by researchers who were a whole lot more careful than my sixth-grade science class. I knew we weren't really verifying the theories. The theories had been verified, many times over. We were just seeing how they worked for ourselves.

Which I didn't think I needed. I got it. The books and teachers and theories made sense. I didn't need to roll the damn ball down the damn incline to see it for myself.

So it seemed like a waste of time.

But now that I'm an adult, I see the value in it much more clearly. And especially now that I'm so engaged in the skeptical/ rational thinking/ science groupie blogosphere (what I've seen referred to as "the reality-based community"), I value it even more.

I see the value because I think there's an enormous difference between learning something purely by authority -- "it's true because I say it's true, and you can trust me" -- and learning something by seeing it for yourself. And the latter is the core of the skeptical, rational, reality-based approach to life that I think is so very valuable.

Let me give you an example. We'd learned very early on, of course, that the earth was round. But in a high school science class (freshman year, if I remember correctly), we learned how, exactly, the ancient Greeks determined that the earth was round. It had to do with comparing shadows: you measure the shadows of two poles of equal height set, say, a mile apart. You do it at noon, and again an hour later. And you do the math. The difference in the length of the two shadows will be different on a curved surface -- i.e., the earth -- than they would be on a flat surface. You can even figure out, within a crude approximation, how large the curved surface is.

So we learned how exactly this information was acquired. And then we went outside and acquired it ourselves. We did it with sticks set a few feet apart, so of course our measurements weren't super-accurate -- but we got measurable results that weren't that far off the mark.

And so now I know. I know that the earth is round, not because I read it in a book or was taught it by a teacher, but because I measured it myself. And now when I'm in a debate with some theist who says that science is just another religion and my belief that the earth is round is no different from their belief in God, I can say, "Yes, it is different. I know that the earth is round -- because I measured it myself."

Of course, in practical terms, most of what I know about science -- or what any other layperson knows about science -- is learned from authority. I haven't personally done experiments to see the effectiveness of antibiotics in treating pneumonia; I haven't personally dug up any of the millions upon millions of fossils supporting the theory of evolution. Had I but world enough and time... but I don't, so I'm not going to.

But the difference is that I could. Any smart, dedicated person with access to education can get into epidemiology or paleontology, and find out for themselves whether or not the stuff that the books say about antibiotics or fossils is true.

We can do this because scientific knowledge is transparent, and it's replicable. When researchers publish their findings, they publish not only what their results were, but how exactly they obtained them. They don't keep it an arcane secret, accessible only to those who have achieved the 34th Level of Poobahhood; they don't tell overly- inquisitive students to stop asking so many questions and just accept their teachings on faith. They say, "Here's what we think, and here's why, and here's what we did to find it out, and here's the kind of evidence that would prove us wrong, and here's exactly what you need to do to see it for yourself."

There were other good things about my grade- school and high- school science education. We learned a lot about the scientific method -- even as early as third grade, we were learning about the difference between observation and inference (illustrated with cartoons about wet tricycles on lawns -- the observation is that the tricycle is wet, the inference is that it rained... or that someone turned on the sprinkler). And we started learning very early on about the importance of careful measurements -- we were measuring liquids by reading the meniscus as early as third or fourth grade, and I remember a stern lecture from a science teacher about how screaming and cheering at the hamster running the maze would probably have a negative impact on his learning curve.

But of all the good things in my science education, I think the "see it for yourself" labs were probably the best. As annoying as I found them at the time, I now think that they were some of the most important and influential experiences in all of my early education. Because it taught me not to believe what the teacher told me, just because they were telling me. It taught me that I had the power to find things out for myself.

And it's one of the main reasons I get so upset when I read about the "No Child Left Behind," teaching- to- the- test style education that American public school kids are getting. Science education -- and indeed, all education -- needs to be about more than learning enough facts to let you pass standardized tests. Science education -- and indeed, all education -- needs to teach kids how to learn. It needs to teach kids how to think critically; how to ask questions; how to look things up. And it needs to teach kids that they don't have to believe everything they're told, just because they're told it. It needs to teach kids that they have the power to find things out for themselves.

Blood and Suffering: A Seriously Pissed-Off Rant About Alternative Medicine

Readers, be warned: This is not one of my more diplomatic pieces. I'm angry, and while I'm trying to be fair here, I'm not trying to be nice. If you don't want to read that, please don't. (It was also written under the influence of an entertaining assortment of prescription drugs; so if I'm more meandering than usual, please forgive me. Hey, what a pretty tree!)

As regular readers of this blog know, I've been home sick for several days with pneumonia. The experience hasn't been a picnic: as anyone who's had pneumonia knows, even a relatively moderate case that you don't have to be hospitalized for will totally kick your ass. I've been exhausted; I've been uncomfortable and at times in actual pain; and since all I could do for days was sit on the sofa breathing steam and watching TV, I've been bored out of my mind. (It's only been in the last couple of days that I've been alert enough, or able to stop hovering over the steamer for long enough, to do any writing.)

But the experience has given me a renewed respect for conventional medicine. And it's given me a renewed rage at the alternative medicine practitioners and proponents who are undermining it.

Here's the thing. As soon as I started suspecting that my bad cold was something more than a bad cold, I hightailed it over to Kaiser. And within two hours, I had a diagnosis, medicines in my hand, and a treatment plan. In case you're curious, here's what I'm on:

Antibiotics. Penicillin, quaintly enough. Obvious purpose -- to kill the infection in my lungs.

Cough medicine. Purpose: to quiet my cough, which had been doing this nasty self-perpetuating loop -- the cough was making my lungs irritated, which was making me cough even more. (This also reduces my pain and discomfort and lets me rest, since I got the good stuff with codeine.) Also -- not to be too gross about it -- it loosens the gunk in my lungs, so when I do cough it does some good.

Bronchiodilators. Purpose: to ease the constriction in my lungs. Thus helping me breathe, as well as helping me sleep.

Decongestants. Purpose: at the risk of thoroughly grossing you all out, to stop post-nasal drip from dripping into my lungs and gunking up the works even further. (The gross-out portion of this blog post is now complete. My apologies.)

All of which -- how exactly shall I put this? -- works. It does what it sets out to do. All of it was carefully, rigorously tested, with placebo controls and double-blinding and peer review and replicability and all that good stuff... and all of it has been shown to work. It's going to be a little while before I'm back to normal -- pneumonia is no joke -- but I started writing this three days after I started the treatment, and I'm already significantly and measurably better.

And contrary to one of the more popular misconceptions about conventional medicine, the doctor didn't just send me home with a bag of drugs. She also sent me home with instructions to breathe steam; drink enormous amounts of fluids (especially tea); stay warm; not talk too much; and rest as much as I possibly could. Plus she asked me about fifty times if I smoked. Contrary to the accusation leveled in a comment in this blog that "anything that isn't designed by a human in a lab isn't considered 'real medicine,'" a large part of my treatment plan had nothing to with anything designed in a lab or cooked up by a pharmaceutical company. And the non-drug part of the treatment didn't make anybody rich... except perhaps the Celestial Seasonings tea company. (Even the drugs in a bag weren't making anyone terribly rich; they're mostly old-school drugs that moved into generics long ago.)

Now, I haven't been tremendously happy these past few days. I've been exhausted, cranky, woozy, uncomfortable, and bored out of my mind. And let me tell you, the combination of codeine and Sudafed is one weird-ass speedball. I don't recommend it.

But here's what I haven't been:

Dead.

Or dying.

Or even suffering all that much.

The history of pneumonia before antibiotics is not pretty. Until the 20th century, treatment was pretty much non-existent. You either got better on your own, or you died. Mostly, you died. Pneumonia killed a ton of people, and it was known and feared for its special ability to kill young, healthy people in the prime of their life. And death from pneumonia is no fun at all. (I'll spare you the details, since I promised earlier to stop grossing you out.) There was some treatment beginning to be available in the early 20th century -- but antibiotics completely changed the picture.

Pneumonia still kills people today. Mostly the very young, the very old, the immune-suppressed, and people who don't get medical care in time. But thanks to conventional medicine and Big Pharma, I am rotting on the sofa for a week, feeling sorry for myself and watching all of "Firefly" on DVD... not rotting in a grave. And so are thousands of other people who got pneumonia this week. (Well, they're probably not all watching "Firefly"...)

Okay. All very good reasons for me to be happy about conventional medicine. So why is this experience making me angry about alternative medicine? Not just annoyed, not just amused, but deeply, seriously, lividly angry?

I'm angry because I think alternative medicine undermines conventional medicine.

I'm angry because so many alt medicine practitioners convince sick people to treat their illnesses, not with treatments that have been rigorously tested and shown to be effective, but with whatever powders and potions and procedures the practitioner's fancy happened to light upon, backed up at best with carelessly-done testing, and at worst with nothing but an interesting philosophy. With the best result being a placebo effect, and the worst being actual harm being done, either from neglect of the medical condition or from the sometimes harmful treatments themselves.

I'm angry because so many alt medicine practitioners promise "alternatives" that are easier, more pleasant, and more palatable than conventional treatments... along with promises of more complete and dramatic cures. I'm angry that they encourage people to pursue preventions and treatments based not on thorough testing of what does and does not work, but on what they find emotionally and psychologically and culturally appealing. I'm angry that they encourage people to abandon conventional medicine, which is often unpleasant and sometimes only partially effective, by offering appealing promises that they can't back up.

I'm angry because so many alt medicine practitioners and proponents convince people that conventional medicine only cares about symptoms and acute conditions and ignores prevention and overall health... when the reality is that doctors and nurses and public health officials around the world are desperately trying to get people to exercise, eat better, reduce their stress, and quit smoking.

Along that line, I'm angry because so many alt medicine proponents and practitioners convince people that "doctors don't know anything, and all they care about is making Big Pharma rich." (As if alt medicine practitioners were all-knowing, and nobody in the world were getting rich off of it.) I'm angry at the ways that alt medicine encourages the anti-intellectual strain so prevalent in American culture; the all- too- common attitude of, "What does that hi-falutin' doctor know anyway, with their book larnin' and their fancy degrees? Us simple folk know more about (X) than Dr. Fancy-Pants, with their years of specialized training and experience."

And I don't mean that altie practitioners and proponents encourage people to question doctors; to have a healthy skepticism about them; to treat them as fallible human beings who aren't God. I encourage people to do that. Hell, most doctors and nurses I know encourage people to do that. I mean that they encourage people, not to question doctors, but to disregard them at their whim.

Now, a lot of people will argue that many alt medicine practitioners don't do any such thing. They'll argue that many altie practitioners see alt medicine as a supplement to conventional medicine, not a replacement for it. That's why it's often called complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM -- because it complements conventional medicine, rather than supplanting it.

Okay. Fair enough. So look at it this way. If I had gone to an alt medicine practitioner with my pneumonia symptoms, one of two things would have happened.

Option A: They would have tried to treat my pneumonia with their dilutions, their energy fields, their sacred herbs, whatever. Seriously. Here are some of the gems that my Google search on "pneumonia" + "alternative medicine" turned up. We have this site, recommending that pneumonia be treated with diet, bowel and dental cleansing, and -- believe it or not -- exercise. (Exercise being absolutely the last fucking thing in the world you ought to be doing if you have pneumonia -- except maybe for smoking.) No mention of antibiotics. We have this site, which mentions antibiotics but says they're problematic, and suggests as alternatives cayenne pepper, manuka honey, and hydrogen peroxide. And then we have Holisticonline.com, which recommends that pneumonia be treated with chiropractic care, pleurisy root, and the color red.

In which case they would, in my opinion, be guilty of reckless endangerment of human life. If anyone anywhere in the world has died, or even suffered needlessly, because they acted on the advice of an alt medicine practitioner and treated their pneumonia with exercise, cayenne pepper, or the color red, then that is blood and suffering on the hands of alternative medicine.

Don't believe me? Don't think that CAM practitioners prescribe CAM treatments for serious, life-threatening illnesses -- in the place of conventional medicine? Here's a nice little story from the BBC about homeopathists in Britain telling people that they didn't need to take anti-malarial drugs when visiting Africa or other high- malaria- risk parts of the world -- they just needed to take the homeopathic remedies. Read it and seethe. And there is no reason to think they did this for malaria only and not for any other life-threatening illnesses. Even a cursory Google search will turn up alt medicine treatments for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, AIDS, and more. And check out these "what's the harm?" sites for more stories of people suffering or dying because their serious illnesses got alt medicine instead of conventional medical treatment.

So that's one option. The reckless endangerment option. But the other option is B: They would have recognized that I had a serious medical condition that they couldn't treat, hustled me out the door, and sent me scurrying to a conventional doctor. (When I Googled "pneumonia" + "alternative medicine," this is what a number of the sites I found essentially did.)

In which case, what the hell is the point? If the only thing alt medicine is good for is mild health problems that quickly go away on their own, then why bother? What on earth is the point of a multi-billion dollar alternative medicine industry if it exists solely to make people feel slightly better when they have sniffles or sore muscles or tummy aches? (If it even does that, in any way other than as a placebo.)

Conventional medicine is far from perfect. Insert a standard "I know conventional medicine is flawed" disclaimer here; I've written them before, and I don't feel up to writing another one now. But it's the best game in town. It is, pretty much by definition, medicine that has been rigorously tested using the scientific method, with placebo controls and double-blinding and replicability and peer review and all that other difficult, expensive, time-consuming stuff that alt medicine doesn't bother with.

And the chances are excellent that you -- personally -- are alive today because of it. Whether it's the polio you didn't get because you got vaccinated, the smallpox you didn't get because it's been eradicated, the heart attack you didn't have because your high blood pressure is being treated, the pneumonia you didn't die of because it got cured... I could go on and on and on. And on. The benefits of conventional medicine are often invisible, an invisibility that's enhanced by short memories and insufficient history lessons. But the fact is that we easily prevent and treat diseases and conditions that used to routinely kill thousands and millions of people.

Medicine is about the prevention of death and the relief of suffering. And conventional medicine is, by definition, medicine that has been rigorously tested and shown to prevent death and relieve suffering. Alternative medicine, on the other hand, is, by definition, medicine that is outside that rigorous testing system. It is medicine that promises to prevent death and relieve suffering, but is unwilling to spend the time and work and money making damn well sure that it can back up that promise. It is medicine that shares every single one of the flaws of conventional medicine, from greed to arrogance to cultural blindness, without offering any real benefit that conventional medicine doesn't.

And it is medicine that undermines conventional medicine; medicine that draws people away from conventional medicine by making enticing promises that it can't deliver.

So it is therefore medicine with blood and suffering on its hands.

Brief Blog Break

Hi, all. Greta here. I wanted to let you all know: I went into Kaiser today about the bad cold/ asthma attack I got this weekend, and it turns out to be pneumonia. Not to worry or freak out -- it's not a terribly bad case, and with antibiotics and other nice modern medicines I should be okay in a week or two. But I'm going to be home and out of it for several days, sucking down cough syrup with codeine and breathing steam nonstop. So the blogging will probably be minimal to none for the next few days. (Also, while the Best Sex Writing event at the Center for Sex and Culture on Thursday is still happening, it's extremely unlikely that I'll be there.)

And yes, the timing on this is so spectacularly bad as to be comical. This is definitely going to go down as one of the five worst months of my entire life. Hopefully I'll be able to look back on it someday and laugh grimly. Anyway, just wanted to let you all know. Take care, and I'll talk to you soon.

Love,
Greta

Catfish, 1991-2008

I wanted to let you all know that Catfish, my beloved cat, died today at about 4pm, at the age of almost seventeen years. She was diagnosed with cancer two weeks ago; we gave her some treatment, appropriate to her age and her prognosis, but she faded very quickly and was obviously suffering, and we had her euthanized at home this afternoon.

I am, of course, extremely sad and grieving about this. Catfish was a good friend and a dear companion for close to half my life, and letting her go is extremely hard. But I also know that I -- and for the last few years, Ingrid and I -- gave her a good, long, happy life. And I am very glad that we were able to give her a good death, safe and comfortable and peaceful with us at home.

If I haven't been my usual cheerful and prolific bloggy self for the last couple weeks, and have been focusing on death and grief in my writing to an unusual degree -- and if I'm not my usual cheerful and prolific bloggy self for the coming days and weeks, and focus on death and grief in my writing to an unusual degree -- this is why. In addition to all the other reasons this is hard, this was the first death of someone I was very close to since I became an atheist and let go of any belief or hope in an afterlife. But I want to thank all my friends, family, colleagues, and increasingly beloved total strangers, for being part of the meaning of my life and reminding me every day that life is no less precious and amazing for being temporary. I'll talk to you all again soon.

Love,
Greta

"Things to be angry about": Google Poetry

Saw this at An Apostate's Chapel, and I loved it, so I'm doing my own version. The concept: Compose a poem, a more or less coherent one, using search terms that people used to arrive at your blog. It's an entertainingly eerie exercise, and while I am generally a suck poet, I think that mine freakishly captures the essence, both of my blog and of my current mental and emotional state.

I did mine as a set of quasi-haikus. And yes, the title is also a search term that was used to find my blog. (No images for this one, btw; I want the images of the poem to speak for themselves, or some such poetry blather.) Enjoy -- and if you're inspired to do your own, please feel free to post the link in the comments!

things to be angry about
by Greta Christina

prayer of looking after someone
pray for someone with terminal illness
now with 40% more design

galileo nonconformist
letters of comfort in terminal sickness
slut

weird photos of naked girls
let's see some women with nice asses that like sex
girls fuck with fruits

Harry potter porn for adults
flintstones having sex
simpsons make sex look like church

marriage no sex
sex fun
deliberately fucking with me weird shit coincidence

has barack obama voted for same sex marriage
Why does Barack Obama feel wrong to me?
if it's different it's wrong

perfect porn
spanking her on her bare bottom
he spanked her and then started to lick her pussy

blue eyed cats
55th Academy Awards Ceremony
keep fresh bread fresh

attempting Reason
strange and terrible earthly coincidences
you have the right to your own truth

agnostic grace
atheist rant
i just became an atheist

list of reasons why parents argue with their children
children thinking thoughts of death
the meaning of death

i have weird thoughts about death
fear of being dead forever
FEAR OF DEATH

On Illness, Bodies, and This Weird Free Will Thing

So for the last week or so, I've been dealing with some health issues. Nothing serious, and I'm dealing with it, so don't anybody worry. That's not why I'm telling you this.

Here's why I'm telling you this. I spent much of last week pretty well flattened: in serious discomfort, occasionally verging into real pain. And I was struck -- as I always am when I'm sick or injured -- by how fragile I am.

I don't just mean my body. I mean my... well, me. My selfhood, my identity. What I would call my soul, if I believed in that.

This is what I mean. So many of the things that are central to my identity, things I pride myself on and think of as central to my self -- my optimism, my cheerful disposition, my compassion, my ability to cut people slack, my energy, my libido, my hard-workingness, my consciousness of others -- all of these were shot to hell last week. I was irritable, I was lethargic, I was self-absorbed, I was whiny. I was everything I don't like.

All because of pain.

Worse -- for me, at least -- I got almost no writing done. Partly because I was having abdominal pain and had a hard time sitting up, but largely because I just didn't want to. I didn't even want to read. I simply didn't have it in me. I didn't have it in me to do anything except lie flat on the sofa with a hot water bottle and watch TV.

And I started thinking: What if this were chronic?

What if I felt like this all the time?

Who would I be?

I have a tendency to be a bit smug and self-righteous about my optimism and cheerfulness and whatnot. I have a tendency to see having a good nature as something you can choose. Because most of the time, that's how it is for me. I see a situation, and I see in front of me the way of looking at it that's suspicious and gloomy and pessimistic, and I see the way of looking at it that's generous and hopeful... and when it's reasonable and not obviously deluded to do so, I opt for the latter. I see optimism as a choice, a conscious way of framing your life and the world that not only makes you feel better in the short run but makes actual external things in your life better in the long run. And I get truly baffled by people who can't or won't do it.

But when I'm sick or injured, I get a lot more humble about it. I realize that a huge amount of my ability to choose optimism is balanced on some very precarious teeter-totters: good physical health and financial stability being the most obvious. (It doesn't help that I'm reading the new Oliver Sacks book, "Musicophilia," and thus am reading all this stuff about the freaky ways that brain injuries can radically change the things most central to a person's self and the things that connect them with the world. Eep.)

I just kept thinking last week, as I got up to refill the hot water bottle for the twentieth time: If the pain I'm in became chronic, would I adjust and find a way back to my native optimism and energy, sucking up and dealing with the pain the way I suck up and deal with the other things in my life that are crummy? I'd like to think so; but I really don't know. I know some people can. I honestly don't know if I'm one of them. (Ingrid says there's a large body of research on chronic pain and its effect on people's selves and lives and freedom; and not surprisingly, that effect is Not Good.)

And would I even have developed my native optimism in the first place if I hadn't spent most of my life in pretty good physical health? Again, I'd like to think so; but I really don't know.

I think this is important stuff for atheists and humanists and naturalists. This is the thing that was really striking me when I was on the sofa with the hot water bottle. If there is no God and no soul, and everything we are is comprised of physical things and the relationships between physical things... then when you change those physical things, the self changes as well. Our selves are not in our own hands nearly as much as we like to think.

I'm not saying that we don't have any responsibility for ourselves and the choices we make. I think we do. I'm not quite sure what, if anything, this weird free will stuff is -- I don't think anyone does at this point -- but I do think that we have something resembling free will and moral accountability. And unless a preponderance of evidence piles up showing that human beings really are just elaborate stimulus-response machines, I'm going to go on holding myself and others morally accountable for our choices. If I'm not responsible for how I manage my pain, then nobody is responsible for anything they do... and in the absence of a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, I'm just not willing to accept that.

What I am saying is this: Whatever free will is, it seems to not be a simple matter of either/or, a light switch that's either on or off. (See the excellent On the Possibility of Perfect Humanity at Daylight Atheism for more on this.) Things happen in our lives that can limit or expand our freedom, that can broaden or diminish the choices that are available to us. Some of these are things that we can do something about; some of them really, really aren't. And I think those of us who have a lot of choices need to remember to have compassion for people who don't have as many.

Look, Ma, I'm On An Internet Poll!

C.L. Hanson of Letters from a Broad is doing a poll asking who the sexiest atheist blogger is... and I'm one of the seven choices.

Nifty, huh? I feel like I should change my home photo for the duration of the poll. Maybe to one of the corset photos... or maybe to my sexy, sexy Simpsons avatar.

Vote for me, don't vote for me... but for the love of Loki, vote. It is your solemn duty as a citizen of the blogosphere. If you don't vote for sexiest atheist blogger, the theocrats win.

Is Altruism Real?

There's been a discussion -- okay, a tangent that Ive gotten sucked into -- over at Daylight Atheism. It's about whether altruism is real... and since I've had rather a lot to say about it over there, I thought I should come say it back here as well.

I've always been bugged by people who insist that there's no such thing as altruism; that everyone is basically selfish, and only they themselves are honest enough to admit it. The core of the argument seems to be that even the most altruistic acts -- running into a burning building to save people, devoting your entire life to medical research or social justice, driving to shithole towns twice a month to take care of prisoners with HIV, etc. -- are done for reasons of one's own. They're done to make yourself feel good, to make people like you, etc. Therefore, the acts are selfish -- and therefore, there is no difference between the selfishness of, say, an Albert Schweitzer and that of a Donald Trump.

So here's my problem.

If you're going to define the word "selfish" as any and all behavior that benefits you even in the slightest -- even if that gain is only that you get a marginal increase in social status, or that you get to privately feel like a good person -- then that makes the word "selfish" pretty much meaningless. It's basically re-defining the word "selfish" as "voluntary." (Tip o' the hat to Tim Walters for this catchy phrasing.)

Let's take a look at the definition of the word "selfish," shall we? According to Merriam Webster Online, "selfish" means:

1: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself: seeking or concentrating on one's own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others

2: arising from concern with one's own welfare or advantage in disregard of others (a selfish act)

Please note that the definition doesn't say "concerned with oneself; seeking or concentrating on one's own advantage, pleasure, or well-being; arising from concern with one's own welfare or advantage." Doing those things does not make you selfish. Doing those things makes you sane. The key words are "excessively or exclusively," "without regard for others," "in disregard of others." That's what defines "selfish."

This is a useful word. It's a useful idea, a useful distinction to make. And it draws a clear distinction between the "you're just doing that to feel good about yourself" kind of selfishness, and the kind of selfishness that's what most of people mean when they use the word. Between, if you will, Albert Schweitzer selfishness and Donald Trump selfishness. These are different concepts. They're different experiences. The experience of, "It makes me feel ecstatic and connected to make a contribution to humanity" is significantly different from the experience of, "Screw you, Jack, I've got mine." It's absurd to try to call them by the same name.

But there are other issues here, and they're more than just semantics.

I am troubled by the idea that human beings are "really" any one thing. Human feelings, human motives, human nature itself, are all a big, complex, self-contradictory mess, and I find it very troubling when people insist on denying one part of human nature simply because we have another part that contradicts it. In particular, I'm troubled by the idea that, because our motivations are often a mixture of selfishness and altruism, and because altruism has a selfish component to it, this somehow negates the altruism, and only the selfishness is real. (And I find it interesting that the people arguing this don't consider the possibility that this conflict negates the selfishness, and only the altruism is real.)

And perhaps most importantly:

Arguing that altruism isn't real isn't just unethical. It's also factually inaccurate.

There is, in fact, increasing evidence that altruism is an essential part of human nature. Literally. It seems to be hard-wired into us genetically. As it is in other social species. (As is selfishness, of course. Both qualities exist, in pretty much everyone.) Denying its existence is like denying the existence of social hierarchies or sexual desire.

I never cease to be amazed by people who insist that everyone else really experiences life exactly the way they do, if only they'd be honest and admit it. And in particular, I never cease to be amazed by selfish people who insist that everyone else is fundamentally selfish, too, and just won't admit it. It's so obviously self-serving that it's laughable.

No, there's probably no such thing as "pure altruism." Any completely self-sacrificing tendency would have been selected out by evolution in a hurry. But the fact that it isn't pure doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

If people want to behave selfishly -- i.e., concerned excessively or exclusively with themselves without regard for others -- I doubt that I can argue them out of it. I just wish they'd stop fooling themselves into believing that everyone else is really just like them and simply won't admit it. If you genuinely lack altruistic feelings... well, everyone else is not just like you. There are people in the world who care about other people, who have empathy for them, who want to make the world better for everyone and not just for themselves. And the world is a better place because of it.

Yes, the care for other people is mixed with self-care. But that doesn't negate it. The fact that you are missing out on a fundamental human experience is no reason to deny that experience's very existence.

It Isn't Like That

Ingrid and I are going away for our 10th anniversary. (No, we're not going to the French Laundry -- we decided on the Madonna Inn, where we had our fifth anniversary, and where we got engaged.) I won't be back on the blog until Tuesday.

While I'm gone, I wanted to leave you with this. I wrote this piece about ten days after my first date with Ingrid... and I'm astonished at how true it still is, ten years later. I still can't get over how lucky I am.

It Isn't Like That
by Greta Christina

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun..."
-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130

She is not the sun and the moon and the stars, and she is definitely not my sole reason for living. I wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night for many reasons, of which her existence is only one. She is not all I can think about; I spend time thinking about work, and friends, and what to have for dinner, without too terribly much trouble. I don't feel the earth move or the sky fall, although I do feel a bit like I've been conked on the head by a giant vaudeville rubber mallet. I can talk to other people when she's around, and I can keep my hands off her if I have to. I don't feel that every minute spent without her is wasted, and there is at least some sunshine when she's gone. I do not believe we were destined to meet, or that my life would be empty, or hollow, or even incomplete, without her. And her eyes, while large and lovely and the color of the ocean on a dark day, are, in fact, nothing like the sun, except in that they are big and round and bright. It isn't like that.

It's just that I grin and giggle and blush when I think of her, and sulk when she's far away. It's just that I feel a cold terrified rage at the thought that anyone, myself included, might hurt her. It's just that I feel brave when I'm with her; not brave enough to slay dragons, but brave enough to feel what I feel and say what's on my mind, which for me is plenty brave. It's just that she knows what I mean, and I know what she means; not always, not as if we were soul-sisters or psychically linked, but enough, and much more than enough. It's just that so many of the things that are good about her are things that are good about myself, things I would be happy to have grow stronger from being in her presence. It's just that there isn't anyone else, not even gorgeous movie stars, that I'd rather have in my bed. It's just that a part of me that is hard and cool and distant, a part I rely on but don't much care for, turns into oatmeal when I think about her. It's just that I feel that my life is not entirely in my own hands, and, rather uncharacteristically, am not feeling that this is a problem. It's just that she's smart and funny and sane and thoughtful and cheerful and playful and good and sexy and beautiful, and it feels like a miracle -- not a huge miracle, just a small one -- that she seems to see me the same way.

I like it this way better. Much.

Rain and Feet

I don't plug consumer products very often in my blog (unless you count books and dirty videos as consumer products). But the rainy season has started with a vengeance here in the Bay Area, and just about everybody I've mentioned these to has gone, "Oo! Oo! Oo!" So I thought I'd spread the word a little wider:

Crocs makes rain boots.

You know Crocs, right? Those ridiculously comfortable, kind of silly-looking plastic shoes with the holes in them? The ones that come in eight million clown-shoe colors?

The people who make them make rain boots. Totally comfy (although not quite as comfortable as the regular Crocs). Keep my feet totally dry, even when it's pouring buckets. And the black ones are actually pretty stylin', if you like that "big stompy boots" thing, which I do. (Ingrid tried to convince me to get them in red, but big red rain boots with my bright yellow rain slicker would have made me look like Christopher Robin: a look you can pull off when you're twenty, but not when you're 46.)

Anyway. Crocs rain boots. If you're searching for them, they're called Crocs Georgies. (FYI, I did have to search for mine, since the Crocs store was out of the size and color I wanted.) And no, I'm not getting any kickbacks from the Crocs company. I just think they're cool.

The Meaning of Death, Part 2 of Many: Motivation and Mid-Life Crises

Part 2 of an ongoing series on the meaning of death in a godless world. The basic idea: In a world with no God and no afterlife, death -- like life -- doesn't have any purpose or meaning except the meaning we create. So what meaning can we create for it?

When I was forty, I went through a classic mid-life crisis. No, I didn't buy a sports car or have an affair with a much younger woman. Instead, I quit a high-ranking position in a lucrative career that demanded an enormous amount of my time and energy... and took a lower-paying job, with less stress and shorter, more flexible hours, so I could concentrate on my writing.

The only thing that wasn't classic about my midlife crisis (apart from the lack of sports cars and younger women) was how conscious it was. I wasn't deluded about it; I wasn't trying to fool myself into thinking it wasn't happening. I knew exactly what was happening. In fact, I ran with it.

What happened was that I hit 40 -- and realized that I didn't have an infinite amount of time to get my writing career off the ground. Of course I’d known before this that I was going to die -- I'm not an idiot -- but there's a difference between knowing something intellectually and feeling it viscerally, having it shoved in your face. I hit 40, and I became aware -- vividly, unignorably aware -- that I was going to die someday... and that I didn't want to be on my deathbed at 70 or 80, wondering if I could have had a serious writing career, and regretting that I'd never really tried to make it happen.

I've been doing professional freelance writing, mostly as a sideline, since I was in my twenties. I've known for a long time that writing was what I wanted to do with my life. But it wasn't until I turned 40 that I got serious about making it a priority. Not just in theory; not just the kind of "making it a priority" that involves telling everyone you know what a high priority something is for you. It became an actual priority.

It became the kind of priority that involves making sacrifices. The kind of priority that means missing parties and movies and concerts because you have to spend that time working. The kind of priority that involves staying up until four in the morning to meet your deadlines, sometimes for several days in a row. The kind of priority that involves taking a job for less than half your previous pay... with all the sacrifices of comfort and pleasure and security that go along with that.

And I never would have done it if I hadn't had my mid-life crisis wake-up call. I never would have done it if I hadn't started to get panicked about how little time I had left to do it in.

In other words, I never would have done it without death.

I'd love to think that I'm the kind of person who would spend immortality doing marvelous things: writing novels and learning Latin, working in soup kitchens and becoming a championship ballroom dancer, reading all of Dickens and traveling to Madagascar. But I know that's bullshit. I'm the kind of person who would spend immortality sitting on the sofa eating chocolate chips and watching "Project Runway" marathons.

Heck, I'm immortal. I've got all the time in the world. I can do all that Dickens and Madagascar stuff next week. Next year. Next decade.

I'm a very deadline-driven person. And death is a deadline.

I won't lie. If I could magically be given immortality, I'd take it. I'd know without a doubt that it would be a terrible, unwise decision... and I'd take it anyway. The instinct to survive is too strong, too deeply-ingrained, for me to pretend otherwise. So I'm not saying that, given a choice, I'd choose death.

What I'm saying is this: Given that I don't have a choice, given that death is an unavoidable and final reality, I'm finding ways, not just to accept it, but to use it to give my life meaning. The finality of death is giving my life motivation and focus. It's driving me to accomplish things that I'd put off indefinitely without it. Death has turned me from a happy-go-lucky slacker chick with some vague creative goals but no real plans for reaching them, into an ambitious, determined woman with a clear sense of what she wants to do with her life and what she needs to do to make it happen.

And for that, I'm grateful.

Happy Birthday To Me

Happy birthday to me
I don't live in a tree
But I look like a primate
Because I am one.

Happy birthday to me... and happy New Year to all y'all!

"Let Them Make Up Their Own Minds": Bringing Up Kids Without God

This one's for everybody. But it's especially for (a) godless parents, and (b) people who were brought up by godless parents.

It has to do with how to teach children about godlessness.

My parents were both agnostics. (A fact for which I am more grateful every week... whenever I read the sad and awful stories in the atheosphere about fights and rifts between atheists and their religious families. Both my blood relatives and my in-laws are non-religious, and while of course we have our conflicts, the fact that I'm a loud, outspoken atheist blogger isn't one of them -- in fact, it's a source of family pride.)

But back to my parents. My dad actually became an atheist years before I did, my mom's been dead for a long time so I don't know what she'd be now -- but when I was growing up, they were agnostics. And when it came to bringing us up, they were very much of the "let the kids make up their own minds about religion" camp. They were pretty clear about their own lack of belief -- but they didn't teach their non-belief to us in a dogmatic way; they exposed us to a certain amount of religion (occasional church with grandparents, mostly); and they made it clear that religion was something that was up to us to decide for ourselves.

All of which I'm grateful for.

But they also did something that I now think was a mistake. I'm sure it was well-intentioned, I can understand why they probably did it; but I do think it was a mistake.

They never explained to us why they didn't believe in God.

We barely discussed religion at all when I was growing up. (It's not like it was a taboo topic or anything; it just rarely came up.) So I never really found out why my parents didn't believe in God; what they had been taught as children, and why they left it behind. I knew they didn't believe in God (they called themselves agnostic, but it was clearly the "you can't be 100% sure of anything" version of agnosticism) -- but I didn't know why they didn't. They never taught us that.

And I think that left me vulnerable to woo.

I'd picked up a natural resistance to conventional religion from my parents. But I didn't have any natural resistance to Tarot cards, to reincarnation, to synchronicity, to trickster spirits, to the idea that the Universe arranged itself to teach me lessons about life.

Because while I wasn't taught religious or spiritual beliefs, I also wasn't taught critical thinking about religious or spiritual beliefs. I wasn't taught about confirmation bias; about assuming the thing you're trying to prove; about contorted apologetics and the human ability to rationalize just about any belief; about our tendency to see what we want/ hope/ expect to see; about our tendency to see patterns and intentions regardless of whether they're there; about the problem with ideas that not only haven't been tested but can't be.

And so while I didn't grow up believing in God, I also didn't grow up understanding why belief in God -- or Tarot, or astrology, or free will in subatomic particles, or whatever -- was problematic. It took me years -- many, many years -- to figure out that, "God/ the soul/ etc. can't be definitively disproven" didn't mean, "It's okay to believe anything I want."

Years wasted believing an embarrassing assortment of stupid woo bullshit.

Alas, I can't ask my parents now what they were thinking back then, or why they did things the way they did. My mom has been dead for many years, and my dad's stroke has left him pretty much incommunicado. But my guess would be that they didn't want their godlessness to be dogmatic. They didn't want us to be godless just because it was what they taught us. They wanted us to decide for ourselves.

All of which is admirable. All of which I get. I don't think atheism should be taught to kids as if it were a fact they shouldn't question, another true thing that your parents know and that you just have to trust. I think my parents were totally right about that.

But I also think that if you want kids to decide for themselves, you need to do more than just throw them in the deep end of the religion pool. I think that if you want kids to decide for themselves, you need to give them tools for critical thinking. I think it's not enough to let kids make up their own minds about religion.

I think you have to teach them how to do that.

But maybe there's a fine line here. Maybe there's no way to teach kids to think critically about religion without teaching them to be non-religious. Maybe there's no way to teach kids, "It's not okay to believe an idea that can never be tested" without teaching them, "It's not okay to believe in religion." And if you believe in letting kids make up their own minds about religion, I could see not wanting to do that.

So I'm curious. If you're a godless parent, how do you handle it? If you were brought up by godless parents, how did they handle it -- and how do you feel about it now? This is on my mind; I don’t have kids and don't plan to, but I have kids in my life now, and I'm starting to think about it.