Time to Be a Solid Citizen

I just had an enlightening telephone conversation with my dad. It’s Father’s Day for him, and in a way it is for me too as an expectant dad, and it was an apt time to reflect upon where we are in our lives, how we got here, and where we’re going.

I lamented my sense of entrenched aimlessness — an oxymoron, I know, but it suits my situation; unsure of what I’m doing, but having no choice but to do it. Dad gave this state of being a name, which sometimes helps to make something feel less overwhelming.

I am someone who might rather be engaging in purely creative pursuits, who is alien to the world of professionals and networking and strategy, who would prefer to do what I want to do — when I get around to it, and I am not now in my native state. But I have a wonderful wife and a good home and a baby on the way, all of whom need my attention to duty to keep us fed, housed, and comfortable. This state of being Dad calls “Solid Citizen.” Dad is himself — perhaps more than I am — a creative type with no inclinations to be part of the real, grownup world. But he, too, had to make the best of things when he and Mom had two young boys to look after. Instead of being the wandering troubadour, he had to make being a good dad work. He did, and he converted to Solid Citizen mode.

In Solid Citizen mode, it’s not okay to forego air conditioning, even though you remember living without it in your early twenties. The Solid Citizen can’t merely take a crummy day job, get fired after a few weeks, and collect unemployment. No, he must get a dependable job (perhaps even a career) that includes health insurance. Oh, and you can’t go without health insurance as a Solid Citizen, though you were fine spending hours waiting at the health clinic when you got sick, yes, in your early twenties.

The implication of this being a “mode,” however, is that it might once again change. Perhaps lightning will metaphorically strike, and I will be able to provide the comforts of solid citizenship through more creative and happy efforts, on my own terms. Perhaps it will be twenty years from now when the baby-to-be is away at college, and all financial obligations are met. However it happens I hope that one day I can go back to being more of a Gelatinous Citizen, comfortable in my uncontainable ooziness, content that the solid parts were all taken care of.

Oy

If you are a subscriber to this blog’s feed, you may have just gotten hit with a ton of material from other blogs. This was an accident of my experiments with merging my blogging projects into one, which, of course, was bound to get screwed up at some point. Those posts should be gone (I hope), and my apologies for the influx of irrelevant material.

The Clothes Unmake the Man

Like Halloween, only miserable.

I am naturally shy. Let me rephrase. I am unnaturally shy. The very notion of socialization with people I am not already entirely comfortable with makes me physically ill. The areas of my brain responsible for creativity, logic, and motor functions all go utterly haywire when circumstances demand I “mix.” The anxiety that “networking” and small-talking and shit-shooting cause me is simply ridiculous. It would be hilarious if it didn’t suck so much.

Having said that, there’s a particular set of ingredients that amplify this effect: shirts and ties.

I’m not one of those folks who balks at the idea of dressing semi-professionally. Truly, I think I often prefer it to the office environment in which anything goes. It gives one a sense of purpose, promotes the idea that while we’re all here, we’re going to do something that takes effort and concentration, and so we don the uniform.

But then I put on a button-down shirt. I put on a tie. I wear something like khakis instead of jeans. I wear “shoes” instead of “decaying, filthy sneakers.” I don’t even have to be jacketed or be-suited. These elements in place of my usual clothes, I think, make me even more insecure, more unsure of myself.

Not that it’s any more or less uncomfortable than anything else. And it’s not that I disdain the aesthetic. What is it, then?

I have a hypothesis. I imagine myself suddenly thrown into the military, everyone around me in their uniforms, while I am trying to pass as one of them, only I am wearing camouflage pajamas. Or I am mistakenly placed on a baseball team, and as players warm up their swings with Louisville Sluggers, I have a big red Nerf bat.

I think the problem is that I feel like I am pretending to be one of the be-suited, one of the tie-wearers, but knowing that I’m not one of them. Sure, I technically have the correct gear (which could come in the form of clothes, but it can also be a job title or a degree), but everyone sees through it: I’m wearing a costume.

So the issue isn’t the clothes, of course. The clothes are just a part of the costume. It’s the pretending that seems so untenable. When I am going about my business as a reasonably-competent human being in a world of informed, confident, driven professionals, I intuit that I am alien, poorly disguised. Once I open my mouth, or I am noticed even in the slightest, my ruse will be discovered.

I’m not really sure what would be so bad about that. But that lack of surety is enough.

A Book That is Also about Dragons in the Military

Consider this a little experiment. Following the fine example of Kenzoid, I am trying to write at least semi-substantive reviews of the books I read and posting them at Goodreads. It only made sense to take the next step and add those to this blog, when appropriate (and really, only reviews of books related to godless heathenism will wind up at one of my other locations instead). Goodreads offers its own little formatting code to plop into one’s blog, so I’m adding some more content, and giving this a try. I commit to nothing.

His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yes, I loved this book, and the irony is that had it not been offered free for the Kindle, I never would have read it. Let me be more blunt, actually. Not only would I not have read it, but I would have scoffed at it.

“His Majesty’s Dragon”?? Come on. At best I would have read the title aloud in a mocking tone and escaped the fantasy/sci-fi section with all due haste. See the cover art? Just like every other magic-y, Lord-of-the-Rings-y, fantasy book you see piling up in bookstores. What’s to differentiate one from another? They all blend together into a haze of something that might as well be labeled “for those who wish be looked at askance only.”

But it was free for the Kindle. So I took a look. I checked up on some reviews, and the Washington Post was very favorable. What the hell, I need metro train reading, let’s try the first few pages.

Hooked. Schooled.

It’s smart, it’s charming, it’s subtle. It respects the reader, the characters are fully realized, complete with quirks that are just visible enough to fool you into thinking these people (and dragons) are real. For example, the main character, Captain Laurence, is almost laughably obsessed with codes of behavior. In almost every scene of the book — a book about dragons being enlisted into the military powers of the world, mind you — Laurence finds himself taken aback by some character’s breach of propriety in how they address him, how they treat a dragon, how a woman dresses, who starts conversation at a dinner table, etc.

Yes, it’s the 18th century. But Laurence is hung up on these behavioral minutiae to such a degree that can only be described as genuinely human. Here is a man ripped from his vaunted station in the navy, stuck raising a super-powered dragon to be a friend and fighting force, and trying to save England from Napoleon. But he’s really skeeved that he heard someone refer to someone else by their first name. It’s very amusing, and shows an attention to the characters’ humanity beyond the wonder of the fantasy backdrop.

But back to the “free” part of this experience. Obviously, a smart business model. I’ll be buying all the rest in the series forthwith. Stupid-sounding titles or no.

Oh, and having read the book, the title’s not actually stupid. Hmph.

View all my reviews.

Feed Me All Night Long

I’m considering eviscerating my RSS reader.

During the presidential campaign, it was apparently essential that I be subscribed to every major and semi-major political blog so that I could be informed, second by second, of every twist and turn. Then, I got on this whole godless kick and I am now subscribed a mountain of atheist blogs. Of course, I’m a Mac nut and an appreciator of new technology and gadgets, so there’s another truckload of titles adding to the pile. Then there are the funny feeds, the music feeds, stuff about jobs, and myriad other things I’ve picked up on the way.

My Google Reader hasn’t dropped the “1000+” number in ages.

Perhaps it’s time to trim. I open my reader, and I feel like I have work to do. Wouldn’t one or two political blogs do it? Perhaps tack on Slate or some such to get some extra cultural context? What about news; do I just browse the front pages of the various papers’ websites, or do I pick one or two to feed?

I am myself one of those atheist bloggers, so don’t I need to keep up with all of the others in the community? Am I even capable of that? How is it that Hemant Mehta seems to be aware of everything going on in nonbelief news and bloggery? How does he stay on top of it all??

And my precious Apple news. How do I choose which rumor sites to axe? Which tip sites?

Oh, and let’s not forget all my news alerts for the subjects I write about!

And! And! Andrew Sullivan! He posts like four thousand times a day! Come on!

So what to get rid of? I’ll tell you what I’m not touching: I’ve gotten really into book/writing/publishing news — and not so much who’s writing what, but as in the future of “the book” or of “the newspaper,” etc. So Text Patterns, A Working Library, TeleRead, they stay. Until I lose interest.

But I don’t want my RSS reader to be like work anymore. But I also don’t want to miss anything. This is going to be hard. Like work.

I Won’t Have Missed Much

I am the first person to roll my eyes when another deep thinker releases some op-ed or magazine article expounding upon the virtues of disconnection from the modern world, how true happiness cannot be found until we burn our cellphones and use our laptops as clay pidgeons. Technology is killing personal interaction, Google is making us stupid, and your face is going to freeze that way, mister. 700-word luddite screeds, I have no use for.

But a piece from yesterday’s New York Times somewhat in that vein took a less, shall I say, insistent approach, and actually managed to catch me with one particular passage. Pico Iyer, an author who has eschewed most mass media and telecommunications, living ‘monastically’ outside of Kyoto, writes:

And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started.

As someone whose RSS reader is full of Google news alerts, whose day job is scouring the news for electoral hooks, whose intellectual passion is parsing the news for perspectives on atheism, and who lives and dies during election years by the second-by-second blips of the new media, this hit home.

I like my technology. I love my Mac, my iPhone, my Kindle, but I often love them as much for how they can take me away from the media bustle as connect me to it. This little bit of text (found using this very technology) made it somehow feel okay to walk away sometimes, if just for a while.

The Perfect Animal Kingdom Metaphor for the GOP

I am very much enjoying Natalie Angier’s witty science primer, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. Little did I know that it would give me a brilliant insight into the decidedly nonscientific world of politics.

Witness page 173, where she describes the curious behavior of one particular creature:

. . . the tunicate, or sea squirt, is a mobile hunter in its larval stage and thus has a little brain to help it find prey. But on reaching maturity and attaching itself permanently to a safe niche from which it can filter-feed on whatever passes by, the sea squirt jettisons the brain it no longer requires. “Brains are great consumers of energy,” writes Peter Atkins, a profssor of chemistry at Oxford University, “and it is a good idea to get rid of your brain when you discover you have no further need of it.”

Now, am I crazy, or is this not the the perfect analogy for the modern Republican Party? After many painful years of having to “justify” “beliefs” and “policies” with “reasons” and “evidence” — all of which requires energy-consuming thought — now they have Fox News to tell them to have teabag protests for no discernible reason. The point was to be angry, not thinky.

Unfair? Okay, well, you can’t possibly argue with the sea squirt as analogous to the Bush presidency. Prizing the informational processing power of his “gut” over his brain, relying on instinct and faith over data and reflection. Bush (I assume) never physically ejected his gray matter onto the Oval Office carpet, but he might as well have. For a guy who slept as much as he did, you can bet he was looking for ways to conserve energy. What better way than to shut down a major organ he wasn’t using anyway?

There’s something sublime about this sea quirt metaphor. The GOP’s wholesale rejection of the intellect, their disdain for the educated, their anxiety over science, none of it because they are bad, per se, but because they have adapted to the environment in which they live. Finding that their brains were doing them no good whatsoever, that thoughtful, intellectual discourse was getting them nowhere, they hit the eject button and got Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, and Glenn Beck. Now they need waste no more precious energy on building neurons and firing synapses. They are a miracle of evolution.

Update: Apparently, Arlen Specter agrees with my take, and has opted for continued use of his neocortex.

We’re Just Not Up To It

I’m just about ready to give up.

So we’ve been torturing people. Oh, and it was a lot worse than even the craziest left-wing conspiracy theories. But, almost laughable in their predictability, Republicans come marching to the cameras to hedge and spin and justify. Obama is the villain because he released the memos. Morale could be damaged, don’t you see. Let’s not play the Blame Game ™. Look at this douchetruck from Texas on Hardball. Chris Matthews is no hyper-genius, but even his basic understanding of morality and common sense can’t puncture this apologist’s force field of stupid.

The thing is, while we were trying to decide how best to look-forward-and-not-backward in regards the prison rape of our notions of what it is to be a human being, we forgot that being a human being was going to get a lot tougher once the planet is set to “broil.” I don’t know if you remember anything about this, but because of all the poison and garbage we’ve belched into the air since the Industrial Revolution, the Sun’s heat is being trapped within Earth’s atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise, bringing about something we call…what’s it again…”spherical defrosting” or something. This guy who won a presidential election but wasn’t allowed to take office has been making a fuss about it because he’s all worked up about the existential threat posed to humanity by the warming of the Earth.

So this guy goes to Capitol Hill again to talk to all the friendly folks in the Democratic Congress, and Republicans and Democrats hem and haw about taxes and discomfort. And just to be fair, Newt Gingrich, a guy who really cares about other humans, is brought in to counter Gore’s testimony. You know, because when we learned about gravity in school, we had another teacher come in to say that, actually, things fall down because God pushes them.

And then this happens.

What’s my point? I’m about ready to give up on homo sapiens. Millions of Americans threw their hearts into Change in the last election; a young, idealistic president and a friendly Democratic Congress! We will save the world! Instead, we get free passes for torturers and more bullshit excuses for not saving our habitat and civilization from our own idiocy.

It seems we’re just not up to this. We can’t see evil anymore, or we just don’t care. We’re not concerned enough about our species’ prospects to even discuss making the slightest changes. And in the mean time, here come anti-blasphemy laws, children-as-property amendments dressed up as “parental rights” legislation, the guys who brought us Al Qaeda having a controlling stake in a nuclear state, and a class of people responsible for destroying the world economy continuing to slurp at the trough without an ounce of regret. And everyone knows, and nothing changes.

So, humans, I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. But it’s coming to an end. We don’t have the will, the wisdom, or the patience to even justify our existence, let alone maintain it.

Let’s hope the dolphins do a better job than we did. Here’s the keys, Flipper. She’s all yours.

Pomp and Something-or-other

I now officially have my master’s degree. Since I’m not graduating in the more traditional time, this was my graduation ceremony.

Moving, no? Now if only I had a job to go with it.

Well I Guess They Are Kind of Dirty…

So here’s me, your mild-mannered, pajama’d blogger, doing my usual scouring of the World Wide Intertubes for material and news, when I come upon yet another wingnut commentary about atheists ruining America.

Wait, you say, don’t you already have a blog for this kind of thing?

For atheism and politics, yes. But this is not about that. This is about ads.

The article in question appears on Townhall.com, which competes with WorldNetDaily as the most evil website on the planet. Scanning the piece, I could not help but notice the ads on the page, and it made me think about the target audience and the motives for the companies paying for pixelated real estate.

So let’s review the ads on this one page, shall we?

First, an ad for a postage machine.

No shocks there, Townhall is for conservatives, conservatives like to send mail, ergo, postage machine. Fine.

Just after the first paragraph, no surprise, we have a little cross-promotion with Ann Coulter:

Coulter has apparently written another book. I haven’t read it, but I have an unsubstantiated theory that she just randomizes the words from the previous books, and churns them out as new ones every year or so. I have no basis at all for this theory, but I will, Comfort-like, stick to it no matter the evidence.

Okay, a little further down we come to a very common ad on these ultraconservative sites; the Cute White Chick Wearing a Ronald Reagan T-Shirt ad.

Usually, this is an expressly hot chick staring naughtily at the camera, but this time, since we’re jamming on the hope meme, I think they wanted to go more whitebread. That’s fine.

Scrolling along, an ad just for Townhall itself, and wait, what’s that say?

Fred Thompson exclusive commentary??? Pardon me while I subscribe. I have been having trouble getting to sleep lately, and this could be just the ticket.

Okay, just below that we get the standard Google ads. The links here are some of the same that come up on my other blog, so we shouldn’t look to hard at that.

But ease that browser down just a bit more, and what is the big, dominant ad on the page?

That’s right, soap.

Not just soap, though, soap being enjoyed by a minority. And even better than that, it’s Dove soap–a dove as opposed to, say, a hawk. It’s peacenik soap for black people! On Townhall.com!

Now that I’ve exposed this, I’m sure that the neanderthals there will lose their very small minds and pull the ad. But what was Dove thinking? I’m going to guess they weren’t out to antagonize the conservatives, so they must have thought that this was the place to sell their product. Those dirty, dirty, theocratic, self-loathing pinheads must feel that they are soiled to their very souls when they write their mind-numbing ignorance and divisive screeds. The same for those who delight in the reading of their claptrap. Surely, they must feel the need to cleanse.

Or perhaps it’s there for me. Knowing I had visited more or less accidentally, they knew I’d feel the need for a hot shower (and perhaps many, many drinks). If that’s true, then they are marketing geniuses.