Waiting for Rain

Cat inna box

2008-12-07T18:04:00.000-08:00

She doesn't seem to realize that she doesn't fit.

A dose of Christmas cheer

2008-12-06T13:20:00.000-08:00

I ought to be studying for my final on Monday, but I thought I'd write a little bit about the atheist sign that was stolen from the Capitol building in Olympia this week. The Seattle Times has been covering the story, important point of which have been missed by all the blog analyses I've read. First, the atheist group that put up the sign was not the first to cause a commotion about Christmas displays at the Capitol. The past couple of years have seen several similar disagreements in WA, involving Christmas trees, menorahs, nativity scenes and all the permits required to put these things on public property. The state government tried to limit decorations on public property to "winter themed" decorations like evergreen trees, wreaths and fake snow (this is western Washington, we don't get real snow that often!), but there was a lawsuit, and now the state allows any viewpoint at all to put up a display in a designated area.

The governor's statement, "The U.S. Supreme Court has been consistent and clear that, under the Constitution's First Amendment, once government admits one religious display or viewpoint onto public property, it may not discriminate against the content of other displays, including the viewpoints of nonbelievers" seems pretty reasonable to me. Really, the state had no other legal option.

This year, there were two original requests for permits: for a nativity, and for the atheist sign. The atheist group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation also recently put up a billboard in Olympia, and had reason to believe that their sign at the Christmas display would be tolerated. Even the guy who sued for the right to put up a Nativity scene, who also sponsored the Nativity this year, Ron Wesselius, said "I think they're being a little divisive there in their saying. But they have freedom of speech and equal access."

This bears out my experiences in this area: most people in Washington are tolerant of atheism. I've seen quoted that 25% of the state doesn't identify with a religion, and although I don't know if that's true or not, it doesn't sound that far fetched to me. So the FFRF wasn't actually being that radical, and I believe them when they say they didn't expect anyone to vandalize their sign (especially considering it was on the third floor of the Capitol building, where they have guards and cameras and locked doors at night).

However, the sign was stolen, and now the entire country has an opinion on the matter. Even more amusing,

The Rev. Ken Hutcherson of Redmond's Antioch Bible Church put up his own sign at the Capitol on Friday that says, in part: "There is one God. ... Atheism is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

There are requests for other displays as well. Someone applied to put up a "Festivus" pole in honor of the invented holiday featured in the 1990s sitcom "Seinfeld." Another person wants to create a religious-themed "balloon display."

And a demonstration against the atheists' sign is planned for 2 p.m. Sunday on the Capitol steps.

I guess once the sign was stolen and accusations began flying, a little bit of circus was inevitable. What surprises me is that there are people I've always considered liberal and progressive who think that we atheists should shut up, and specifically in this case that we should allow a public, government sponsored space, one set aside for expressions of all kind, to be dominated by symbols of religion. I find myself quite taken aback that someone at Shakesville would be less tolerant of atheism than Mr. Wesselius and his Nativity scene. I guess its no different, really, than an atheist saying feminism or disability rights are silly, pointless movements- and I have heard that, although not often at a blog I choose to read regularly. I just wish we could all be true to our progressive principles even when they apply in unexpected situations, and even when a little imagination and the effort to see things from someone else's point of view are required.

And I need more grace than I thought

2008-11-27T18:09:00.001-08:00

Sometimes the wheels of my mind turn exceedingly slowly. I'm sitting here listening to The Congos- Heart of the Congos and Tan Dun's Water Passion after Saint Matthew and thinking about Geds' post, This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours. Do I agree that "by allowing and even celebrating the gates around Christian culture we have diminished ourselves"?

Knowledge of the history of the Christian religion is certainly essential to any attempt at genuine understanding of the world as it is today. I couldn't truly understand The Congos if I didn't understand both the religious and political influences on their music, and the Water Passion would probably be unlistenable if I didn't appreciate the story behind it- I try to be open-minded, but opera is really not my thing. A great deal of art in the modern world draws on a history rich in Christian themes; perhaps all art does these days. Even bands like Modest Mouse, as cynical and atheistic as they come, play songs like Bukowski, songs that would be meaningless in a world without Christ.

So while I agree with Geds that evangelical culture has drawn a wall around itself, the non-evangelical world doesn't seem to be affected. These gates are one-way, I guess.

There are Christians who ignore the gates, too. I recently read The Irresistable Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, by Shane Claiborne, a young evangelical who lives in a commune in Philadelphia. My brother aspires to living in a similar house in Seattle; he and my sister, who recently applied for Mission Year, take the failure of Christian pop culture very seriously. There is a small but genuine evangelical youth movement that is tending toward hippie issues like pacifism, poverty, racism and social justice instead of focusing on banning gay marriage, and there is a part of me that thinks this is great. Religion doesn't have to be about othering people who believe differently and condemning harmless behavior. It could be a force for goodness in the world, even if the motivation is love for a God who doesn't exist.

I'm not convinced, though, that a civilized Christianity is more true to the core beliefs of the historical church. The Christians I know are convinced that their religion is all about beauty and truth, love and sweetness and light, but the core truths of Christianity don't lead to happiness. The idea that morality comes from a central authority, the idea that people are innately evil, the idea that blood is the only adequate payment for sin, and so many other doctrines have caused so much misery in the past two thousand years. Christianity divides the world into sinners and saved, and if heaven and hell are all that matters, any cruelty in the name of saving souls is justifiable. The history of Christianity bears this out. A truly moral religion would be forced to apologize not only for the Crusades, the subjugation of women, the justifications for slavery, and the genocide of the natives in the Americas, but also for the doctrine that led to these horrible events.

A truly moral Christianity would require repudiation of much of what is Christian. Of course I would prefer people to choose what is right over what their religion tells them, and as an atheist I believe that they can, but unfortunately I don't think it likely that most believers would be willing to make that choice. I think that many Christians, if forced to choose between what is right and historical church doctrine, would choose doctrine. They might do so apologetically; I've heard it before, "well of course I believe that women should be respected and treated well, but 1 Timothy 2: 11-15 says 'A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety' so I'm sorry but women can't lead men, that's just what the Bible says so it must be right."

To me the epitome of a mainstream music worthy Christian band is mewithoutYou. They're really good musically, and their lyrics aren't even that pretentious. I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear them on the local alternative rock radio station, and their band members are even cool and indie and run their tour bus on vegetable oil. The thing is, though, they're still a Christian band. Their sweet indie music is full of the effacement of self in favor of loving God that amounts to living suicide. The problem is not how Christian doctrine is being sold; they're doing that very well. The problem is the doctrine itself.

Maybe what Christianity really needs is a break from the past, a willingness to forget how things are supposed to be according to church tradition. The benefit of remembering the past is supposed to be that you learn from it and don't repeat mistakes in the future, but when it comes to religion, you're not always allowed to learn and change. When doctrine forbids deliberate change, maybe it's better to just forget.

Rain, rain, go away

2008-11-12T22:31:00.001-08:00

I love autumn in western Washington so very very much, what with the pretty colors and the crisp days and the sunshine in cool blue skies. Its just fabulous. [/sarcasm]

These floods aren't anywhere near where I live, don't worry, and anyway they happen every year and don't usually cause too much damage.

The cat, unlike the weather, is pretty adorable, even when she's going insane with boredom because the rain keeps her inside and she's forced to rely on pouncing on people's feet for entertainment. You can't really tell from the picture, but this is her wiggling her butt in preparation for a pounce.

I have a sort of bleg: I have been feeling quite under the weather lately, so I've decided to do something out of the ordinary to make my life more interesting. I do this every so often; sometimes I just read a book about something I know nothing about, but previous attempts at excitement have led me to learn to knit and take a pottery class. This time, I am endeavoring to educate myself about rap music. I have very eclectic musical tastes, and mostly listen to indie rock bands with cult followings (think Modest Mouse, Joanna Newsome, Belle and Sebastian), but I think I would like rap too. The problem is, the most accessible rap, on radio stations and the like, has about as much appeal to me as, well, the kind of rock you find on radio stations. I know there's neat stuff out there, though, and I've decided to go out and find it. I've ordered quite a few CDs from the library, but if you have any ideas for artists to check out, I'd love to hear them. I'm looking for anything in the hip-hop or rap categories that you might call thoughtful, philosophical, political, or odd.

update

2008-11-05T10:31:00.000-08:00

Man, yesterday was torturous. The internet at our house dropped out at about 2pm and didn't come back until 11pm, so I missed the entire election. On top of that, I had an exam this morning, so I had to study at home instead of going out somewhere. I can watch everything today I guess, but it won't be the same...

I'm starting to think I've found the point where I've taken on not quite too many activities. What with taking a class every day and trying to get to the necessary appointments in Seattle so I can continue my education, I've had very little time for anything else, including blogging. I hate to think that I'll have to take a hiatus until things settle down, but then it's not like I have time to think of things to write.

The desire for an easy life is almost overpowering sometimes.

I can't believe the news today

2008-10-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

My life has been abnormally busy lately, and my writing energies have been focused elsewhere, but I hope to soon return to blogging on a more regular basis. For now, here is a picture of the pumpkin I carved today, inspired by PZ Myers and his obsession with squid. Also, a link to the place my writing energy has ended up: Crow Woman House, a blog about the end of the world. I'm having fun writing melodramatic fiction.

washed the dirt off our intentions

2008-10-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

Some days I think the only thing keeping me from selling my soul for half an hour of physical comfort- rested, warm, free of pain- is that the devil isn't interested in buying. I start to wish I could remember what it's like to not be in pain, and I get to feeling sorry for myself, and tell myself stories about how brave and determined I am just because I make an effort to stay alive.

Days like this, I don't get a lot of writing, or thinking, done. Obviously. But I have been reading books by Terry Pratchett (Hogfather most recently) and its possible that someday I may be out of this funk.

Yesterday I got a postcard from Elizabeth, which brightened my day. I also had an appointment with VA Voc Rehab in Seattle to see if they'll agree that being able to work ten hours a week as a tutor or something is a goal worth paying my college tuition to achieve, and they didn't say no outright. Which is sort of good, although it means I have to go in for another appointment next week after gathering information on certifications and employment prospects, which, quite frankly, sounds exhausting enough that I almost want to cry. Driving into Seattle for any reason is a horrible horrible task. But hey, its still a good thing, and maybe I'll take the bus.

I just wish I wasn't so tired.

WA for Obama

2008-10-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a volunteer training meeting run by the local WA for Obama office. There were a ridiculous number of people there- the room could have held 40 comfortably, and there were at least 100 people packed in there, spilling out the door onto the sidewalk. It was crazy, but in a good way. I volunteered to phone bank and/or canvas for a few hours every Wednesday evening from now until the election, and I'm thinking I may volunteer on election day also. Although, I guess Washington is changing from polls to mail-in ballots, so everyone has the option to do either and the guy at the training said estimates are that 75% of people will vote by mail. So maybe election day doesn't matter that much.

One thing that I'm hoping to get involved with is get out the vote efforts at college campuses, my own campus in particular. College students are more liberal and aware of current events than most people, but have trouble getting to the polls when they need to, so I would be excited to help with that. Especially since I get the impression that GOTV events on campus might involve sitting behind a table, not walking around neighborhoods, so anything that means less pain for me would be nice.

I'm also considering writing a letter or email or something that I could send out to people to let them know some of the issues that I think are really in Obama's favor, like his suggestion to sponsor a federal study to investigate the problems people with disabilities have finishing school and finding jobs and possible solutions, his proposals to support new combat vets coming home with brain injuries and PTSD, and his suggestion to start a federal program like the Peace Corp that employs young people in jobs that improve their community in exchange for college scholarships. Maybe it would be a bit snobby, but so many people I know just don't know the details of the issues that this election will decide. A lot of this stuff is very detailed and most people don't have the time to find out what their candidates really propose... but maybe I would come off as an elitist know-it-all. I dunno.

Three Beautiful Things

2008-10-05T16:05:00.000-07:00

2008-10-04T17:43:00.000-07:00

My sister's cat, Annie, having valiantly fought and subdued this gardening glove, carried its corpse to the back door as a gift to her favorite humans.

class notes

2008-10-01T19:07:00.000-07:00

I am genuinely amazed that someone employed in teaching science is as bad at science as my geology teacher. Interesting science-y tidbits I have caught her mangling in class this week:

Silicon is a metal, which is why we use it for electronics.

This isn't true, silicon is not a metal. It is one of the most common elements on earth, and is found in a multitude of minerals and mineraloids, including sand and glass. Silicate elements are used in many applications, from computing to soap to non-stick cookware.

Electrons don't have any mass because they move at the speed of light.

This also isn't true. Electrons are subatomic particles with a mass of 1/1836 of a proton; they are very light, obviously, but they do have mass and are matter, not energy. Additionally, the speed at which electrons travel can approach the speed of light in a vacuum but never reach it. Electrons are considered to be fundamental particles with no substructure, and have an electric charge that is negative and equally strong as the positive charge in protons, which is key for electromagnetism. Many other exciting facts about electrons can be found at wikipedia.org!

It's amazing how useful the Internet is. What did people with shitty teachers do before it was possible to Google things that sound wrong?

Like a vagabond with a fishing pole

2008-09-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

Last week was the first week of class, and I'm wiped out. I'm taking one (1) class, a freshman geology course that has me in class a grand total of 7 hours a week and is an easy A, and I'm completely wiped out. I feel like I have the flu.

Its almost hard to believe that I'm seriously considering several years of this. Who voluntarily puts themselves through this much pain? I must be crazy.

My teacher is also crazy, and one of the worst things about the class is that she stands in the front spouting insane, impossible shit and I can't rebut and save the minds of the rest of the class from debilitating ignorance.

I know I have a tendency to exaggerate drama, but I'm really not kidding here. An example:

She is convinced that global warming isn't caused by human influence. Now, a lot of people believe this because they have a vested interest in doing whatever the fuck they want to the environment and their beliefs follow their interests, and she used to work for an oil company, so maybe that's all there is to it. However, the alternate explanation for global warming is so off the wall that her acceptance of it makes me wonder why she's a science teacher.

The cause of global warming, she says, is solar wind. Not directly, though- nothing as simple as solar winds heating the atmosphere and causing climate change. No, you see, solar winds have been less strong in the last 30-50 years than they were before that, which is a problem because solar winds exert pressure on the Earth's atmosphere, so when the solar winds are less strong, less pressure on the Earth's atmosphere means the atmosphere expands. When the atmosphere expands, the lowered air pressure allows the tectonic plates (and I guess the whole Earth) to expand, widening the space between plates and allowing magma to push up from the core into the plate boundaries under the oceans at the poles, causing an increase in undersea volcanoes which heat up the ocean water. The heated ocean water causes the sea ice to melt and affects the weather.

At least its a novel and exciting theory, right? Even if it does rely on a complete misunderstanding of gravity.

I guess in one sense, its encouraging that someone like this can get a job as a science teacher. It means I have a chance of finding employment, which is a thought that is at least partially appealing. I really hate doing things that make me feel this ill, but I also hate living in the room behind my parents' house. Enduring pain and fatigue and idiocy like this are all part of the plan to get me a crappy studio apartment of my very own.

My dedication to this plan gets more and more tenuous the more I think about it, so I've been not thinking about it. I've been knitting, and I read Kit Whitfield's Benighted yesterday, it's really quite good. I also started up a short story set in the Left Behind universe. Slacktivist finished LB Fridays, or at least finished the analysis of the first book, and I figure if there's any time to write a foefic for Right Behind, now is it. Although the story is looking a bit long and not showing any signs of ending, so it might be too long to post on Right Behind. We'll see.

A wicked wind will blow

2008-09-19T17:45:00.000-07:00

There are spiders everywhere, and its cold and gloomy. I hate the weather in this state.

cross your fingers, hold your toes

2008-09-17T16:54:00.001-07:00

I complain a lot about my family and how they're a bunch of wacky religious fundamentalists, but really they're great people to hang out with. Yesterday I went out with my two little sisters and my mother and my sisters' friend to the Puyallup Fair, which is the biggest fair in Washington state and is apparently an annual outing for my family. Its a sign of how far away from them I've been the last several years that I didn't even know that my mother takes my siblings to the fair every year. Anyway, we went, and now I'm totally exhausted from walking around for five hours and eating too much cotton candy. I got some neat pictures.

There were cows

and goats

and more goats

and cuddly piglets

and gnomes

and I got a cane that folds out into a chair, about which I am very excited, and which is the reason I am able to function today and am not stuck in bed writhing about in pain.

This is my sister modeling the cane. She has homeschooled her entire life, is pro-life and goes to church a couple times a week. She is brilliant: she's 17, and will be getting her AA degree from the local community college in two quarters. Once she does that, she wants to go on a Mission Year, because she believes in service. As you can see, she has dreadlocks and a snappy attitude. What you can't see is that she plays the piano and the harp, paints and tutors a kid in math three times a week, reads science fiction and listens to obscure folk music while she bakes cookies just because she wants to. She really is one of my favorite people.

I forget, sometimes, that the people with whom I find myself disagreeing, on issues as important as the definition of truth, are real people. They are complex, with motivations I may not currently understand but would probably find sympathetic. They create beautiful things and mean well for the world and love and are loved. They may be ordinary, or be extraordinarily talented and brilliant and wrong about some things but not about everything.

Its easier to oppose caricatures, or at least, its easier to be angry with an enemy that is mad, unreasonable, greedy and evil. In a country as big as the US, it gets much easier to keep these caricatures close to our hearts, because with so many people around there is always a way to find the people who think like you do and shut out those who disagree. This is a false way of seeing the world, though. No one is actually a caricature, and in the long run holding on to an untruthful vision of the enemy contributes as much to the divisions between people as the actual differences of opinion do. I know my own enlightenment in this respect isn't going to change the state of society- I wonder if anything can change things, when a society is this big- but I try to remember it anyway.

The Devil in Dover

2008-09-14T22:23:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading The Devil in Dover, by Lauri Lebo, which I know I saw mentioned somewhere on a blog that I read recently, but now I can't for the life of me remember where I saw it. Its a great book, not just for the fascinating portrait of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial but also for Lebo's reflections on the nature of faith and truth.

I have been thinking about truth, and Truth, myself lately. The school year started a few days ago, so I have overheard my religious mother reading aloud to the kids she homeschools about how everything they think ought to be guided by a religious perspective. Slactivist's post on "biblical worldview" brought up all kinds of memories of my own religious indoctrination, both ancient and as recent as this morning.

For a certain kind of religious fundamentalist, mostly the kind that uses the same keywords Slacktivist notices, nothing is more important than Truth. See for example Focus on the Family's "The Truth Project," a small group study which advertises with the question "Do you really believe that what you believe is really real?" and which aims to tutor average Christians in fundamentalist apologetics, transforming them into bigoted footsoldiers ready to fight for FotF's pet causes. The thing is, Truth and truth are not the same thing. FotF et al only advocate "truth" when they're able to change the definition of the word to something no regular person would call true.

From FotF's thetruthproject.org:

The Truth Project begins by defining truth as “that which conforms to reality.” But it’s much deeper than that. It’s about one’s personal worldview, which we define as “the set of individual truth claims which I embrace so deeply that I believe they reflect what is really real – and therefore they drive what I think, how I act, and what I feel.”
Many people today – unfortunately, most people – don’t seem to think that there is any universal standard of absolute truth. But we believe differently. The purpose of The Truth Project is to develop a biblical worldview: “A formal worldview based ultimately upon that nature, character, and being of God as it is expressed in His infallible Word [the Bible] and His creation. It becomes the foundation for a life system that governs every area of existence.”
For us, the “truth” is God’s truth, as set forth supremely and most definitively in the Bible – and we regard this truth to be absolute in the sense that it cannot be compromised and is not open to purely subjective interpretation. Ultimately, we cannot dissect the truth; we can only proclaim it.

Truth in their hands has nothing to do with observation of reality, and everything to do with parroting a line received from religious elders. If their religious doctrine explicitly and provably contradicts real events, well, reality has to bend. Truth, after all, is the infallible Word of God Himself and is not open to interpretation by reality or any other damn thing.

Lebo came up against people with this way of thinking during the Dover trial. The devout Christians who tried to adopt a school policy teaching intelligent design alongside evolution lied repeatedly under oath, but seemed not to even be aware that they were lying. I have no trouble believing that they didn't recognize what they were doing as lying. If "trying to advance the kingdom of God" and "telling the truth" are synonymous, then as long as a person is convinced that what they're doing is right, what they say is true. The videotape proving that their statements are not true has nothing to do with anything; only God's will is relevant.

Truth- real truth, facts and proof and, you know, reality- is important to civil society. I may be one of the godless heathens the Truth Project accuses of "reject[ing] the value of rational thought, deny[ing] the existence of moral and spiritual absolutes, and affirm[ing] the right and power of the individual to invent his or her own reality," but I know that human interaction is predicated on a certain amount of trust. Yes, people lie and manipulate all the time, but when they deny the reality they're interacting in, communication is impossible. Efforts to indoctrinate people in denying reality, redefining truth as blind adherence to dogma, are efforts to destroy the fabric of interaction that makes society possible.

I know I don't know how to communicate with people who are sunk deep into this fundamentalism, and it troubles me. I have been driven all the way back to my roots these past couple of months and I find, like Lebo, that my home is full of lies, and the only way to cope with this pernicious worldview is to just not talk about it at all. Its very isolating.

Freedom Isn't Free!

2008-09-09T12:13:00.000-07:00

At the RNC last week Mike Huckabee made a speech about how great veterans (and therefore John McCain) are (/is). He told a story about a teacher who taught her students that their education had been earned by veterans who fought for the country. Here's the YouTube video. Its a standard sort of story to tell about veterans, and I must admit, there's a part of me that appreciates this sort of unthinking hero worship, both purely for the social approval and also because I suspect that, the more widespread this sort of emotional reaction to the concept of fighting for one's country is, the more likely I am to wrench a disability stipend large enough to live off out of the VA. However, as selfish as I feel about the topic, there is something very wrong about framing military service this way.

First of all, its just not accurate to say that all the good things in our lives, our freedoms and privileges and so on, are due to the heroic efforts of American soldiers. Most countries in the world have schools with desks in them. When I was fourteen, I went with a group of teenagers to Kenya for the summer to build an addition to a school building way out in the bush, and even there, in a place where some families had to walk hours each way to bring drinking water back to their homes and plenty of families had to choose one of several children to send to school because they couldn't afford the $1-2 for uniforms and books for every child, once the kids got into school they had desks.

Even when you look at things less easy to identify than school desks, things like freedom and prosperity and other abstract nouns, its hard to imagine an alternate history that would have resulted in a nation that was completely unrecognizable. If, for example, the colonies had lost the Revolutionary War, there would never have been a United States, or a US Army, but there would still be people living here where we are now, and are Canada and Australia so alien and oppressed? Or maybe if we had never entered World War II- Europe would be a somewhat different place, and so would Southeast Asia, but does anyone seriously think that the North American continent would have been invaded with any success? Or if we had declined to fight the Cold War, does anyone really think that people in Kansas would be speaking Russian now, let alone learning Russian without the benefit of a school desk? There are a multitude of factors that contribute to a nation's identity. Military action is only one, and probably not even the most important when considered against things like basic geography. Attributing everything great about America to our military is just incorrect, and that irritates me.

However, there is a result of this attitude that is even worse than being factually wrong. When people believe that our comfortable American lives are directly due only to the action of our military, it is too easy to slip into thinking that any action our military takes benefits our comfortable American lives. Saying it like that makes it seem like a ridiculous belief, but people hold onto it. For some, it is even an essential part of patriotism. Freedom isn't free, you know, so if we're spending trillions of dollars and unmeasurable human agony in a foreign country, we must be paying for freedom. The military takes action to protect us from threats to our way of life, so if the military is taking action there must be a threat to our way of life. Fight them over there because the fight is all that stands between us and Iraqi tanks rolling down the streets of Wichita and Seattle and Houston.

Of course this is logically ridiculous. The only direct relationship between the occupation of Iraq and school desks in Tennessee is the lack of funding for school desks due to the cost of body armor. John McCain served honorably at great personal cost, but the war in Vietnam, like the war in Iraq, was not in any sense necessary to the survival of the United States and had nothing to do with the opportunity to attend middle school in homey, small town America. Anyone with a grasp of the most basic details of history should be able to see that. This particular brand of fuzzy thinking is so prevalent, though, that Huckabee gave his silly speech and got all kinds of applause for it.

Liberals, at least of this generation, tend to feel just as obliged to engage in this silly soldier worship as conservatives. This last Sunday afternoon I attended a meeting at the local library of a group of anti-war activists, and when they found out I was a veteran they all made a point of thanking me for my service. I really wouldn't prefer to be spat on and called a baby killer, but there must be a middle way. Deifying soldiers is barely a step away from mythologizing war, which is a direct cause of violent atrocities orders of magnitude worse than being insulted by some random jerk, and until these attitudes change I can't help but think that an anti-war group isn't going to be successful at all.

a tiny prayer to father time

2008-09-06T14:09:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a bit of a rant about the framing of Gov Palin's decision not to abort her youngest son, who has Down's Syndrome, but this post at Shakesville pretty much says it better than I was going to.

Instead of my fascinating thoughts on politics, then, here are some pictures of my latest project, Lion Brand's #1100. The yarn is so thick that it only took me a few days to knit it, even though my first version ended up too big and I redid the front and back pieces. The sweater is still pretty bulky, but its oh so warm, and it suits me.

Now that that sweater is done, I'm starting on another one, for my little brother. My grandmother used to knit quite a bit, and when she died my mother inherited a half-finished sweater, which has been sitting in the closet for at least fifteen years. My mother never did anything with it, because there isn't enough yarn to finish the original sweater, but I have a new pattern (Durrow) and I'm excited to start working on it. The cables on this pattern are much more difficult than anything I've done before and the yarn is antique and if I keep this up I may one day produce a sweater that's actually stylish.

I am becoming quite the knitting geek. I have an account on Ravelry (my username there is Tayi also) and the last few books I got from the library are books on tape so I can listen to them and knit at the same time. I wonder if this is some flaw inherent in my personality, that I am apparently unable to do anything part-time, even knitting.

well everything is eclipsed

2008-09-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

So Elizabeth challenged her readers to do two things over the holiday weekend: go outside and have some fun, and give someone something. I'm still working on the second part (I need to go to a yarn store, but that means getting gas and driving and finding my way around an unfamiliar part of town and I just haven't done it yet), but yesterday I went up the mountains with my dad and my little brother to pick out a truck full of rocks with flat surfaces so my dad can pave a walkway in his back yard. As you can imagine, I wasn't much help with picking up the rocks and carrying them to the truck, but I spotted some good ones, carried a few little ones, and stood around taking pictures.

The pictures are really the exciting part. We drove several miles up an old logging road to a spot where a rock slide came down almost to the road. There are quite a few slides on top of these mountains; whether they're from clear-cut logging or occur naturally I'm not sure, but they're all over the place, even in spots where the old clear-cuts have grown in over twenty-five years or so. The rocks here are mostly granite, with some kind of shale in spots, and there is at least one gravel quarry across the mountain from where we were.

Anyway, the view from the rock slide was really great. There were no trees in the way, so we could see down into the valley for miles. It was freezing, and for a while we were inside a cloud, but these pictures are worth it.

When we got home, we went over to a neighbor's yard and picked plums off their plum tree, and today we're canning and drying peaches and plums. So maybe, if helping with a project counts as a gift, I've got that covered too.

In my head there's a greyhound station

2008-08-31T09:20:00.000-07:00

I went to a party on Wednesday night, a going-away party for an old friend of mine who is moving a few states away. It was an odd experience. I didn't know most of the people there, just my little brother's band, who played for about half an hour, and a few people from my old youth group.

Church used to be the source of community in my life, and for the rest of my family it still is. I never liked it that life worked that way. The constant watchfulness and self-editing to ensure that no unacceptable ideas are even implied by what I say stresses me out even now, and it was much worse when I was struggling to find what I believed without causing a major shitstorm that would have cut off my carefully planned avenue of escape from this town. As beseiged as I felt, and as different from the church norm as I was, I never made many friends at church, but there was a group of people who tolerated me, and several of these people were at this party.

It was surreal, seeing these people again. I was afraid that it might give me flashbacks to the way my life was when I was a kid, but instead it just reinforced how much I've changed, and how impossible it would be to try to fit into that world again. I can't keep my mouth shut like I used to do. I can be civil and refrain from giving my opinions on the church when the conversation is about something else, but I can't listen to treacly comments about how valuable small group prayer sessions are without making snide comments. Well, technically I'm able to just shut up. But the knowledge that somewhere listening might be another kid like me keeps me from staying silent. I managed to escape this particular party with only one outburst at someone who told me I was going to hell, but there's no way I could do that on a regular basis.

Which has led me to ask myself where exactly I think I'm going to find a community. I'm not good at making friends at the best of times, being sick and tired all the time certainly doesn't help, and I don't really know where to start. I've got a book group and a knitting group that I go to once a month each, but they both tend toward late middle aged women who are almost as socially conservative as the members of my parents' church. I've enrolled for one class at the local community college, and will probably go on to finish my BA at the University of Washington, if I can scrape up the money, energy, and sheer physical courage for it, so I guess I could join some kind of club or something at school.

Its just... I'm really bad at connecting with people. I always have been. Even online, where people pour their hearts out to random strangers all the time, there are people who I find fascinating, but I'm never quite sure if we're friends or not. Maybe I'm just too picky, or too weird, or too awkward. I wish there were classes on how to meet people you like and become friends with them. People like me could really benefit.

Made with glue and a glove and some pliers

2008-08-23T18:40:00.000-07:00

My last few posts have been rather grim, so here are some pictures of my new walking stick. It is entirely homemade, from a piece of wood salvaged from the forest floor on a hiking trail near here (which is not completely ecologically sound, I know, but hey, its a good cause). My brother helped me cut the ragged ends off it, then I stripped the bark off and sanded it, and my dad varnished it and scrounged around for a bit of rubber to stick to the bottom so it doesn't slide on smooth floors.

I'm really quite pleased with the result, which doesn't quite come through in these photos. I'm not very good at close-up shots, but the color here at least is accurate. And you can't see it, but there are neat looking insect burrow trails on the surface of the bottom half. So far I've gotten compliments on it from four or five random strangers, all at the VA, oddly enough. Or maybe its not so odd that vets would be walking stick connoisseurs; the US doesn't take such good care of vets that we're entitled to crazy things like houses, John McCain notwithstanding, but most vets here can at least get a cane!

To offset my bitterness about John McCain and his ridiculous wealth- and I really am trying not to rant about him so much, I feel like I have spent too much time being angry with his ignorant entitled attitude- here's a gratuitously beautiful picture. Its been raining loads, but my neighbor has these gorgeous lilies that seem to get brighter the darker the sky gets.

Writing Prompt #3

2008-08-20T21:16:00.000-07:00

Write a letter of advice to a child thinking about running away from home.

Forget the letter- I'm not one to ask if you ought to run away from home. I'd say yes. What you really want is someone to talk you down, tell you not to be silly, tell you to be wise and forgiving and patient. I'd tell you to split as soon as you have a plan to keep you safe and warm at night.

The year that I was in fifth grade was a bad year for me. I was ten or eleven, I guess, I don't remember. I only know that it was my fifth grade year because that was the year I stayed home. Previously I had attended a small private school full of kids who didn't like me, possibly because I was a snotty little aspie know-it-all, and for whatever reason my parents though it would be better for me to study at home.

I don't fit in at my parents' house. They're good people, and they do love me, but I don't fit, and it was worse then than it is now. Everything I was supposed to be to fit into their world- submissive, peaceful, respectful- was the opposite of what I am, and at that age, I didn't know how to deal with all that weight of tradition telling me that who I was wasn't Right. I felt confined, and crushed, and I retreated into stories about other times and places. The books weren't enough, though, and I went for long walks and bicycle rides, trying to think of someplace else I could reasonably expect to be. Sometimes I would sneak out at night at and jog around the neighborhood by moonlight, just to get away, to be part of a world where there was no one else, none of these expectations that, I now know, are perfectly crazy.

There are a set of old train cars on a track near the road in the town next to the one where I grew up. They're relics of a time when the train was the main connection our valley had to the rest of civilization, but now we have I-90 and the trains sit by the side of the road, windows boarded up with slimy plywood, rusting. Here's a picture someone else took of them:

Every time I passed these trains, I would wonder how difficult it would be to break into one, and if they would keep the rain out, and if anyone would notice if there was a ten year old child living in one. I had several hundred dollars I had saved, and I thought about what I would pack when I left and how to keep people from knowing where I had gone.

In the end, I didn't go, not to the trains anyway. I decided that I wasn't willing to drop out of school in order to get away -I knew this would only land me in an even more crushing situation in the long run- so once I started high school I researched my options and decided to homeschool again. This time, I was in charge of the classes I took, something I got away with because I elected to take as many classes as I could fit into my day. I finished high school five months after I turned sixteen, and moved out of my parents' house and into a dorm room at university.

There were a number of consequences of this decision that weren't what I wanted when I made it, and sometimes I wonder what my life would be like now if I had gone instead to a public school and goofed off and smoked pot and convinced myself that it didn't matter that I didn't fit. Sometimes I get to feeling sorry for myself, but every time I pass those trains I remember what it was like when I was ten and I felt like running was the only way I could survive intact, and I know that as much as it doesn't seem that way sometimes, I made the right decision. I am as intact as can be expected, because I knew when to run.

It all seemed perfect

2008-08-17T10:55:00.001-07:00

I don't have much breakup music on my computer. I have a hard time believing this: 8.6 GB of music and not one breakup song? But it seems to be true.

When I dropped out of college I was convinced that I had reached a nadir of personal failure. I- the perfectionist academic overachiever- was crushed. I curled up on the cold tile of the bathroom floor and cried myself into a headache, sure that I could never hate myself more than I did at that moment, sure that the 'me' I wanted to be was forever dead.

Life continually amazes me, the way the most solid of things crumble through my fingers. It seems absurd that I could look back over the past six years of my life and see only mistakes, ill luck, foolishness and disaster. I mean, really- who is this bad at life?

Me, I guess.

So I'm breaking up. We are breaking up, technically, except I don't even know what state he's in at the moment, and there's no pressing reason to call him, so the 'we' at this point is purely theoretical. Here I am: 23 years old, broken, sick and as much a failure at marriage as everything else.

I guess I like melodrama more than is strictly dignified; its odd how I'm so tired of the whole situation that the thought of changing my name again- signing paperwork, waiting in line at the DMV, spending hours on hold with the VA and Social Security- is more distressing than anything else. A little melodrama would be refreshing. If there were only small breakable objects I could hurl at the wall, obscenities to scream so loudly the neighbors could hear, sickening amounts of alcohol to drink and then vomit in the humid garden next to the rhododendrons.

I wish I could believe in the rage, the drama, the anger at him and the world, but it seems too thin next to the cold stone of reality. See, angry as I am, this is my fault. I am the one who flinches in pain at the lightest touch, I'm the one who wasn't brave enough, or wise enough, or patient enough, or honest enough.

And I start to wonder if that's just the way things are going to be. Maybe life is never easy. Maybe, as cynical, tired and pain-ridden as I am, I should just stop expecting things to be different. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; and why am I surprised?

Fingerless Gloves with Easy Cable

2008-08-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

Just to prove I'm a big dork, here's a pattern for fingerless gloves with a cable on the back that I wrote up yesterday. Its a pretty simple pattern, but its the first one I've written all by myself. The more I knit, the more I realize how valuable knitting has become to me as a coping mechanism. To be able to create something beautiful that I can hold in my hand and then give away to someone who actually wants to have it is a good thing for my soul.

Materials
Fingering or worsted weight yarn, I'm not sure how much exactly but not much. I made these from an unused remaining skein that my mother had left over in her closet, so I'm not sure even what kind of yarn it is, probably some kind of wool blend that was thin-ish.
size 9 US needles

Sizing
These fit me, and my hands are 7 1/4 in around the palm. Add stitches in multiples of four to make them bigger, I guess.

Right Hand
Cast on 32 sts
Knit in k2, p2 rib for two inches or preferred length of cuff.
Next row: p3, k2, p6, k2, p to end
Row 2: k3, p2, k6, p2, k to end
Row 3: p3, k2, p6, k2, p to end
Row 4: k3, p2, sl next three sts on cable needle and hold at back, k3, then k3 from cable needle, p2, k to end
Row 5 an 7: as rows 1 and 3
Rows 6 and 8: as row 2

Repeat rows 1-8 three times, binding off on last row 8
Sew seam, leaving space for thumb and sewing bridge between first and second fingers.

The left hand is just a mirror image of the right hand, so the cable ends up on the back of the hand.
Cast on 32 sts
Knit 2 inches of k2, p2 rib
Next row: p19, k2, p6, k2, p3
Row 2: k19, p2, k6, p2, k3
Row 3: p19, k2, p6, k2, p3
Row 4: k19, p2, sl next 3 sts on cable needle and hold at back, k3, then k3 from cable needle, p2, k3
Rows 5 and 7: as rows 1 and 3
Rows 6 and 8: as row 2

Repeat rows 1-8 three times, binding off on last row 8
Sew seam, leaving space for thumb and sewing bridge between first and second fingers.

to see in all directions at the same time

2008-08-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

I know I talk about this a lot, but seriously, as a veteran in this country, you just can't win.

I've mentioned before how I'm not eligible for the GI Bill because I had the lack of foresight to get hurt too soon into my enlistment, and I'm not eligible for Vocational Rehabilitation's help with education expenses because I'm too injured to be a productive member of society worth investing in, and now, today, I learned that I am also not eligible for a waiver for residency requirements in the state I grew up in. I was away for too long after I enlisted, and they only take pity on veterans of the Korean War, not any conflict more recent.

Korean War vets are all what, 70 years old or so now? Totally the people who habitually enroll at a community college.

And now the news is full of how smart McCain is to say that the US needs to threaten and/or attack Russia because the president of Georgia is a moron and started a war. OK, maybe that's not the best analysis of the situation (ObWi has much better). But still. The longer I identify as a veteran, the more I think that this disconnect between the realities of military experience and the ideals that run our foreign policy is the sickness that will bring down the American empire. That anyone who refuses to admit our military's limitations isn't laughed off the national stage- that this is instead seen as proof that he is a foreign policy heavyweight- astounds me.

Sometimes I wonder if it might not be better for our country to experience disaster and defeat. Not that I want tragedy, not the human cost of it. But we have been so successful in recent history (Iraq notwithstanding) that too large a number of our political philosophers no longer have any basis in reality, and that is incredibly dangerous, not only for us, but for the rest of the world.

And this urge to pretend that our military is always strong and gleaming and made up of invincible cartoon commandos, really sucks for veterans. I am so so sick of this constant battle for benefits.

Seas would rise when I gave the word

2008-08-10T13:43:00.000-07:00

I was watching the first DVD from Biology: The Science of Life this morning, struggling to pay attention enough to understand and remember what was going on, when I happened upon what I think is a key insight into why people think liberals in general, and I in particular, are arrogant jerks. I am on a quest- to put it a wee bit melodramatically- to continually improve myself, because I'm not satisfied with my current state. I put effort into educating myself because I think that I am uneducated. From my point of view, this mostly manifests as continual disappointment when I fail to reach my own high standards, but I think from the outside the most noticeable thing is the high standards, and my apparent belief that I can reach them, which seems hubristic.

Of course, it doesn't help when every so often my effort to learn things pays off, and I end up busting out in the middle of a conversation with random facts that no one else knows. For example, I went to a book group on Tuesday at the local library that discussed Straight Man, by Richard Russo, which I had not read. But apparently the book repeatedly brings up Occam's Razor. There was a nice, friendly, nonthreatening conversation about what, exactly, Occam's Razor was- no one really knew for sure but they were tossing around the phrase "simplest solutions are always right"- and I piped up with "actually, it doesn't mean that simplest solutions are always right, just that out of a given set of solutions to a problem, the simplest solution is more likely to be correct-simpler explanations should be preferred." Which, of course, stopped the conversation completely even though I tried to soften it with some trash about how its a computer programming maxim and so of course a lot of people don't know it.

I tend not to associate my knowledge of correct facts with being correct myself; it is the fact, something independent of me, which is correct, and my knowledge of it is more or less an accident. Other people don't see things that way, though, I'm afraid.

Anyway, I don't really see what I can do about this state of things, other than keep my mouth shut I suppose. The chances of me becoming a different kind of person are very low. My next self-improvement project will focus on writing, I think. I have the impression that my writing from the period after I got hurt is much worse than the writing from before I got hurt. I used to write poetry and shit, and although it was pretty emo, it was also pretty good on a technical level. Since I feel like I could do better than I do currently, I am getting a book of writing prompts (thank God-or rather, thank our government which has not yet been taken over by libertarians- for libraries) and I intend to write mini-essays from writing prompts every day for a month.

Or until I get bored, whichever comes first.

I could learn to swim

2008-08-05T20:40:00.000-07:00

This picture is kind of dark, but its the best one I have of my recently finished laptop sized over the shoulder bag. I've been doing a lot of knitting, finishing up some small projects and such, but this is my real accomplishment from the past couple weeks. I'm quite proud of this bag since it seems so useful. It even has a side pocket for a waterbottle, although it doesn't show well in this photo.

I also made five cat toys, one for each kitten, but I didn't take pictures of them before and now I can't because the kittens have all been given to new homes. Its heartbreaking. I honestly believe that the past month or so would have been hard for me to get through without these kittens cheering up my life. Even when every other aspect of life sucks, kittens make everything better.

While I knit, I like to watch TV, but since I hate commercials and I'm picky about the shows I like I usually get shows from the library, or occasionally I watch illegal copies online. However, since I've been living with my parents, its a bit awkward to watch TV shows that make them uncomfortable with sex and violence and such- and they're such nice people that most TV shows do. The solution is to watch documentaries. In the past couple weeks, I've watched documentaries on deep sea volcanoes, autism, the atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and two BBC videos from the Walking With Dinosaurs series, Walking with Monsters, which is a kind of prequel, and Allosaurus.

Documentaries are interesting, but since they're produced for a general audience, you don't usually get the kind of details that are really fascinating. Allosaurus was neat, because it got into the forensic work behind the knowledge scientists have about dinosaurs, but I would love to get a similar DVD collection that really aimed to teach methods and detailed facts. I've ordered a lecture series from the library on biology, The Science of Life, from the Teaching Company, and I have high hopes.

My father pointed out to me the other day that since I was previously enrolled at the University of Washington, I could re-enroll with minimal effort and start taking classes again, one at a time maybe. The idea of going back to school intrigues me. I'm still resisting settling down in my parents' house for any long period of time, but if I did, I could go to school. Its an attractive idea.

A Coyote Story

2008-08-03T21:44:00.000-07:00

So I'm writing a story that might someday far in the future be a novel, and in this story there is a need for a story explaining a drought to a small child. I wrote this Coyote story without much reference to actual Coyote stories beyond a quick search on the Internet, and I'm not totally sure I like it. I may keep it or not; opinions on the matter are welcome.

---

This is the story of Coyote and the Daughter of the Sky, as told by Old Man Gaagyeh to the Old Storyteller Woman, who told it to my mother, who told it to me when I was small like you are. A long time ago, Coyote was walking about in the House of the Gods. As you know, Coyote can wear the skin of any animal, and on that day he was wearing the skin of a handsome young man. So he wandered around the Gods’ House, very bored and looking for trouble, until he came into the garden, which was like a lakeshore after it rains, covered in bright orange flowers and the noisy frogs that wake up when the rain comes. In this garden was a young woman who was very beautiful, with long black hair and delicate gentle fingers and deep black eyes, and in her eyes were every one of the stars, for she was the Sky‘s Daughter. And as soon as he saw her, Coyote fell in love.

In fact he fell in love so much that he forgot everything he knew about the Sky and her daughter, and instead of being humble, he went up to the woman and said to her with a foolish swagger, “Oh beautiful, I know you have been waiting for me to take you away from your mother’s house to be my wife. Come along!”

Now the Sky‘s Daughter saw that he was a handsome young man, but he was so arrogant that she didn‘t like him at all, and besides she was busy naming all the new stars he mother had placed in the night, so she laughed at him and told him to go away. Coyote was used to getting what he wanted by honest ways or by trickery, and he didn’t realize his foolishness but went away to think of a trick to get this young woman to be his wife whether she liked him or not.

First, he came to her in the skin of a brightly colored frog, thinking that she would be pleased at his beauty. But she had many frogs in her garden, and she turned him away.

Then he came to her as a cactus flower to put in her hair, but she had so many flowers already that she didn’t even notice him.

Then he came to her as a kitten, to curl up in her lap and please her with his purrs, but she already had a cat who sat on her lap, and she sent him away because everyone knows two cats won’t live in the same house.

Now Coyote was very angry, and he decided that if the Sky’s Daughter wouldn’t go with him voluntarily, he would steal her away. So here is what he did: he went down to the Big North Lake and he drank and drank and drank until he was so full of water he could barely stand up. And then he puffed himself up bigger and bigger and bigger until- poof!- he was a cloud. Then he floated up to the House of the Gods, and he settled around the top of the house and the garden just like a real cloud might.

Coyote waited all night and all day and all night again for the Sky’s Daughter to come out to her garden, until he was almost ready to give up. But on the third day she came out into her garden even though it was damp and cloudy, and when he saw her, Coyote swooped down on her, wrapped his arms around her tightly and quickly flew far, far away.

When the Sky heard that a cloud had stolen her daughter, she was furious. She called all her cousins: the Sun and the Moon, the North Wind and the East Wind, Thunder, the Big North Lake who is the Sky‘s lover, and even the tiny Desert Wren who flies to and fro. And the whole family went out and searched for the Sky’s Daughter. Every time they came across a cloud, they captured it and locked it away, but Coyote was very clever, and hid himself and the Sky’s Daughter under the ground where the Sky couldn’t see them, and the Sky’s Daughter became his wife.

So Coyote was foolish and got himself a wife who didn’t like him, and later she poisoned him and ran away- but that is another story. This is why the Sky and all her cousins still catch the clouds whenever they see them and lock them away so the rain cannot fall.

Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers

2008-07-27T14:09:00.000-07:00


That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps

Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace,

Gently and slowly washing life away.

Its raining, and I am in pain. My brain is a bit switched off, so here are some photos of my father's garden.

What I Know, Part 2

2008-07-25T13:10:00.000-07:00

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all round the sun
What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me...

And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see...

Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all

Everyone tells stories about themselves and why they exist. Some of these are true: “I am a mother and these are my children.” Some of these aren’t: “I’m going to strike it rich next time I play the lottery, and then I’ll be happy.” Some people insist on a story of the world that places them at the center of all of everything that has ever been: “God made the Earth for the sole purpose of harboring the human race, all of human history has converged on this generation, which is the Last Days, and I am among God’s spiritual elite!”

These stories are where people find this nebulous thing we call “meaning,” which is why some people will insist that it is impossible to have meaning without religion, i.e. their preferred story. However, people derive meaning from their own personal stories about their place among the people closest to them even if they have no religious narrative, and even among the religious there are often stories that are more significant, for example parenthood. Some people care quite a bit about whether or not their stories are true; others believe what they do because it fills a certain place in their lives. I am one of the former: taught from an early age that the Truth (that is, my parents’ religion) was to be the central point of my life, I find that I cannot believe something if I have no reason to think it is true. At the same time, although my relationships are important to me, I have never considered my role in life to be primarily relational, so while it is true that I am a daughter, a sister, a friend, I need a different story to find meaning.

This, then, is the story I tell myself.

The universe is a place much bigger than I am, but I am a part of it. The elements that make up my body existed before my brain organized into a machine capable of thought, and they will exist after I am dead. I used to feel like I needed to Make a Difference in order for life to be worth living. And I still do, to a certain extent; I wish I could be famous and important and significant to other people as much as anyone. But even if I were to die tomorrow without any great achievements to my name, my life wouldn't be worthless, because I am part of the world, and its a beautiful world. And the atoms of my body, which used to be part of stars and dinosaurs and trees, will move on to be parts of other things.

There is no Fate driving events; my existence is contingent on more factors than I can count, none of which had to turn out the way they did. My birth was a zillion-to-one chance, and my existence here today, as myself, is a great stroke of luck. This doesn’t mean that I should settle for mere subsistence as my highest goal, but that I temper my pessimism and grimness with an acknowledgement that it is a joy to be alive. No matter what horrible things are done on earth the stars are still beautiful, and no matter what pain and ugly death I might have to look forward to, the world is still a breathtakingly beautiful place and I am lucky to be a part of this incredibly improbable symphony of life.

I am not a scientist, so I cannot personally prove that this story is true. But this story is falsifiable; I don’t take it on faith, I tell it because it is consistent with all of my knowledge of the world. In my limited experience with life, I have found that the most important thing I can do to make my life better is to face the world exactly as it is. No comforting stories, no inflated sense of self, no groundless hopes OR groundless fears. This is what’s real, and it is enough.

What I Know, Part 1

2008-07-17T16:08:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth asked her readers a while ago to share what they know about the world. I’ve been turning this idea over in my head, asking myself if what I know about the world is true and worth sharing. I’m not afraid to argue politics or religion, but writing responses to other people’s ideas is much easier than forming my own ideas out of thin air. I am vain; I worry that what I‘m writing here isn‘t any good. Nevertheless, here I go.

When I turned 18, I went out and got a tattoo that I had been planning for a long while, that I had drawn myself. The tattoo was a picture of a dragon, something like the sketch at the top of the post, and the primary inspiration for it was the book The Hero and the Crown. The relevant part of the story goes like this: Aerin kills dragons, which are small, mean vermin. It is nasty work, not fit for a lady like Aerin, but she does it so that she has something that she is the best at, to earn a place in her father‘s house. She is the only one who kills dragons, so when the dragon Maur comes down out of the mountains, big as the sky and capable of swallowing a man whole, she is the only one there is. So she goes out, though she thinks she cannot win, because she must. And she kills him, but he burns her in the process, leaving her grievously injured so that she and everyone else think she will die.

The story gets less grim as it goes on, but the grim part was the most formative for me. Sometimes, see, when you ride out all proud with your head held high, the dragon kills you. Sometimes the hero dies. Even when you succeed, sometimes success and failure look a lot alike. Life is brutal and ugly and exhilarating and beautiful in equal measure, and you can’t separate these qualities from each other. All you can do is face life with courage and endure the pain for the sake of the beauty.

I took this knowledge in two ways. First, looking to the future: I got this tattoo to remind myself not to shrink from something because it looked difficult or unpleasant or impossible. If success and failure look alike, then the thing that looks like it will be your greatest defeat may turn into your greatest victory. It is impossible to tell the future, so you ought always to advance in all things with your head up, eyes forward, taking your fear in your hands and refusing to be mastered by it.

Second, looking back to my past, my dragon tattoo was a reminder that although the world around me might not notice, I have faced and overcome things that could have killed me. See, I used to self-harm. I had a chunky red pocket knife I used to slice my arms and legs open, I had a set of candles I would light and use to heat up little bits of metal or wood to burn little circles into my skin. I remember one night in particular. I was twelve, and I stayed up past midnight so I could use the bathroom while my family was asleep, because I had to clean up blood I had dripped all over my bedroom floor and find some way to close the gaping hole I had put in my shoulder. I still have the scar: its about an inch long and a quarter inch wide, although I‘m sure it would have healed thinner if I had gotten stitches. Getting into all the reasons why I used self-injuring as a coping mechanism is complicated; I could write a book on it without making my motivations clear, I think, but the point is that it was something I used to help myself cope with various pressures on my sense of self.

I don’t remember when I started self-harming, but I remember when I stopped. I came to a point where I realized that although self-harm may be a coping mechanism, its not a very good one. I wasn’t happy with the situation, so I just… stopped. Cold turkey. The short-term consequence was a dramatic downward spiral into, as the shrinks say, suicidal ideation, and then a much slower trip back up as I deliberately learned other ways to cope with the pressures I couldn’t change, and learned to change the things I had power over. It was messy and amateurish, sometimes silly, sometimes pathetic, and perhaps not as wholly successful as I wanted, but here I am. And the dragon is dead.

pull the tricks out of our sleeves

2008-07-15T14:27:00.000-07:00

For various boring personal reasons, I'm looking into creative ways to live under a roof with an income of about $750/month. So far I've come up with:

Working as a nanny for a family with one or two quiet school age kids in exchange for room and board. This plan hinges on the kids being extremely easy to take care of and no one needing me to clean or cook anything on a regular basis, but I think if there was a family out there who understood chronic pain... so basically its a very long shot.
Living in the projects. Specifically these projects. The major drawback to this plan is the huge waiting list for spaces. That, and the fact that making my way through government paperwork gives me a blinding headache just thinking about it.
Buy some cheap rural land and live in my car while slowly building a tiny house like this one from the Tumbleweed Tiny House Co. Making this affordable might be impossible, and living in my car would be uncomfortable, but this is the solution I like best in the long term. My dad has done a lot of renovations on his house, and I know he and my brothers would help me were I to try to build a house like this, so building it might not actually be that hard. Just the money would be the issue, really, and the VA does cheap-ish home loans... but this one is a bit far-fetched.
Living with my parents while I fight the VA for the full benefits to which I am entitled. This is what my parents want me to do, but I have to say, I'm not enthusiastic.

My other real option is to forget about the roof over my head, take off in my car and live in a Walmart parking lot somewhere. It would be an interesting life experience, I'm sure, but I think it would freak out my parents a little bit, and I'm actually afraid that if I do the homeless thing I'll get too separated from normalcy and I might have some trouble getting back to normal if the situation ever improved. Also, being homeless is quite dangerous for women, or so I hear.

If anyone has any ideas to add to the list, feel free to share.

painting in a cave

2008-07-12T18:55:00.000-07:00

My family has fundamentalist tendencies, although they've gotten better in the years since I moved out. My parents are very active in their Assembly of God church; my dad is a deacon, my mum teaches Sunday School and they're usually at church more than once a week. They also used to be pretty right-wing, although they're not so much anymore. When I was sixteen, my parents regularly gave money to, and got junk mail from, crazy rightwing organizations like Concerned Women for America and whatever organization Pat Robertson runs, but these days, although they still get some of that stuff along with pleas for money from the local Republicans, they also get junk mail from Planned Parenthood, and I think most of their charity money goes to overseas missions work that focuses on relief stuff like building up communities heavily impacted by AIDS. And my dad told me the other day that he is definitely thinking about voting for Barack Obama because, although he doesn't feel Obama's position on abortion is moral, on almost every other issue he thinks Obama is better. So basically my parents are extraordinary evidence that fundamentalists can also be good people.

Anyway, the point of this is that I have a younger sister, J., who is in high school (she may have two or possibly three years left, I kind of forget), and she's homeschooled. Contrary to stereotype, although she is very bright, J. has little interest in academics and would rather be hanging out with her friends or practicing dance- she's taken ballet for maybe six years- than studying. My mother is a brilliant woman and a great teacher, but she isn't fond of battles of will, so she has suggested that next school year I ought to tutor J. in at least writing. The writing I produce isn't particularly impressive, but I remember high school English as being ridiculously easy, so even if my brain is a bit unreliable these days, its not a crazy idea. I do know good writing when I see it, and I have a decent grasp of things like grammar and spelling, so I'm thinking about taking her up on it.

Before I commit to what is essentially teaching a high school level English course, I feel like I ought to have some idea of what I would be doing, so I'm developing ideas about how to teach J. what she needs to know, which is primarily essay writing and probably some basics of writing a research paper. She really loves ballet- she's actually at a month-long ballet camp right now- and so I'm thinking I could do something with a list of blogs that write on dance. I don't really read dance blogs, but I know they're out there, and if Wheelchair Dancer is any indication, there is a lot of cultural analysis available in the field of dance. I think I could probably teach J. a basic five paragraph essay format and then get her to explore the way people actually write essays. A quick search around shows that there are also a host of controversial-ish dance topics to make her write persuasive essays on, like this for example.

Maybe I'll even make her start her own blog, and have her post her essays there. It would allow me to easily review her work from anywhere in the world, which may be useful if I end up someplace warm for the winter. I wouldn't be surprised if being involved with an online community of dancers, or whatever topic she likes, was a good motivator for writing, too.

---
Obligatory kitten picture!

everything and nothing at the same time

2008-07-09T20:36:00.000-07:00

Ok, so when I said regular posting might resume soon, maybe I meant a rather cosmic value of soon. My life is in a bit of a weird place at the moment, and my parents' living room isn't the best place for revealing my most dearly held beliefs OR for cursing at politics, which is about 95% of my blog, really. That and pictures of flowers or kittens. If this state of affairs continues I may need to acquire a laptop computer instead of this huge desktop. However, my parents are going out of town for a week and I may soon have the opportunity to blog like I'm a real adult with my own place to live.

In the meantime, I thought I would point out a couple things I've been reading. There are stories that are just a joy to read because of the way they're told, and there are ideas that make you feel like before you heard them you never really understood the world, and today I've got a couple examples of such excellence.

First, The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer, which I discovered via comments at Slacktivist, although I now no longer remember who linked it. Anyway, its a fascinating look at what makes people tick. The entire thing is online, and free, and it's quite worth the read, especially if you ever have to interact with other humans.

Also sort of via Slacktivist, I've been reading Accidental Historian, the author of which comments at Slacktivist as Geds. This blog is yet another example of a writer who is orders of magnitude better at storytelling than I have ever been; its almost enough to make me despair of ever reaching the quality of writing to which I aspire. Although, honestly, it would take more than despair to make me shut up, so I guess I won't quit writing anytime soon.

Last but not least, there is Yarn Harlot. I kind of feel like I ought to have discovered this blog a long time ago. I guess I'm slow, and perhaps a bit in denial of the fact that I'm turning into a crafter exactly like my mum. I'm also afraid that if I start reading yarn blogs I'll end up with so many ideas for projects that I'll have my free time from now until I turn 80 scheduled out before I can stop the flow of ideas. Creating things with my hands is a great feeling, but I feel better when I have only one project at a time.

Speaking of which, my current project is nearing completion. I'm making a laptop sized messenger-type bag with a couple pockets. This photo of it is pretty current; it looks humongous because it is at the moment. The plan is to felt it, which will make it much smaller.

back in the world that moves

2008-07-07T22:51:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in several days due to preparation for/celebration of/recovery from the Fourth of July. Obviously, since you're reading this blog, you know this. I would like to write more often. My head is abuzz and I have several posts I would like to empty out of my tired brain, but I have been wasting time sitting on the floor of the laundry room petting kittens. So, in lieu of grand thoughts, here are some pictures of kittens. They're four weeks old and within the past couple of days transitioned into the phase where they attack their own shadows.

Regular posting may resume soon.

Just Peonies

2008-07-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

Cold Hard Reality

2008-06-28T16:26:00.000-07:00

In the past couple of days I've read Molly Ivins' Bill of Wrongs and John Grisham's The Innocent Man, and I think I've had my dose of cold hard reality for a little while. But before I retreat to my hammock to read pulp fantasy novels, I just have to comment on this post at Obsidian Wings, "Unless a Solder Has a Personal Fortune...". The post quotes an Army Times articles to emphasize how little disabled vets are left with after they're discharged; it amuses me that the article gets it so wrong, like while the writer wanted to bring some light to how vets are treated, she couldn't bear to actually admit just how bad it can be. Hence, this quote:

(I)njured service members are discharged on just a fraction of their salary and then forced to wait six to nine months, and sometimes even more than a year, before their full disability payments begin to flow. (...)

Most permanently disabled veterans qualify for payments from Social Security and the military or Veterans Affairs. Those sums can amount to about two-thirds of their active-duty pay. But until those checks show up, most disabled veterans draw a reduced Army paycheck.

It gives the impression that a disabled veteran, upon leaving her military base with discharge papers, receives a reduced paycheck until the VA and/or SSA get their shit together to evaluate that veteran. And once the VA does evaluate that vet, which happens within a year, she can expect to actually get two-thirds of her active duty pay. And this is supposed to be an example of the system failing- which I guess it is. It makes me wonder if the writer even realizes that this horrible scenario of hers is orders of magnitude better than what happens to many, many vets.

Just to be clear: I have never heard of a vet receiving a reduced Army paycheck after discharge. Maybe that happens if you get a certain disability rating from the Army on discharge; when I was discharged, I got a zero rating from the military board although I was only able to work part-time at a civilian desk job at the time, and I was told that the military board often gave soldiers zeros when they deserved much higher disability ratings. The policy was to give soldiers as little as possible from the Army and just let the VA deal with them. So maybe you get a bit of an Army paycheck if you're a combat amputee or something, but your average disabled vet doesn't.

So you get out of the Army with maybe some severance pay, a few thousand dollars or so, and it takes the VA 3-4 months to get you into the system so you can apply for disability benefits from the VA, and then the VA takes a year or so to decide your claim. But the VA also has a policy of minimizing payments for disability, and so its quite likely that if the VA even admits that your medical problems are service-connected, they'll minimize your symptoms, and therefore your payments, as much as possible-or more. (The most recent example of this in the news was the hearing on VA administrators directing their subordinates to find that vets with PTSD had "adjustment disorder" in order to save on compensation costs.)

So you've been out of the military for a year, not working because of your disability, and you get a disability rating of 30% or 40%. So you appeal, but appeals don't have a time limit at the VA- they have no incentive to process your claim, so it gets tossed on a pile, and maybe a couple years later someone looks at it. If you're lucky, that someone will take the facts into account and get you the compensation you need; if you're not lucky, they won't, so you appeal again and the wait starts all over- and you're still living on $512/mo.

This is what really happens, this is how vets are really treated. It destroys people's lives and is an absolute disgrace; it irritates me that all anyone talks about are best case scenarios.

Ice Cream!

2008-06-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

Many of my family members are allergic to milk. My dad is so allergic that he doesn't even eat milk chocolate, but most of the rest of us get at least a slight stomach ache from drinking milk or eating it on cereal or wev. For a long while, we used soy milk, but only my dad was willing to drink the stuff; it was horrible. And soy ice cream is just not worth eating. However, because of the recent mainstream interest in organic food and anything that can reasonably claim to be "all- natural," goat's milk is available even in the local mainstream grocery store. Goat's milk isn't exactly as tasty as cow's milk, but I like it much better than soy milk, and, most importantly, its creamy enough to make decent ice cream.

I made some vanilla-cherry ice cream first, but I don't have pictures from that batch. This is the peppermint ice cream that I made on Sunday. Once enough ice has been frozen to make another batch, I'm going to make some more, either mango or plain vanilla. The thought of making just plain vanilla ice cream is a bit sad, but my dad likes it so I'm considering it. He likes mango too, though, so we'll see how inclined I am to stand up and chop up mangoes into little pieces when it comes time to make the next batch.

I smashed up pieces of peppermint candy to toss into the ice cream.

My mum's ice cream machine is about 30 years old. It still works great, though.

I made a half batch so it wouldn't overflow the top before it was churned enough to be creamy. Even using whole goat's milk isn't quite as creamy as using heavy whipping cream (go figure), so the longer it churns, the better.

the liquid that we're all dissolved in

2008-06-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

AiG's Ken Ham on PZ Myers:

What’s he so worked up about anyway? If he’s right, God doesn’t exist—so prayer can’t do anything and, therefore, can’t harm anything. But, then, who cares about harm in a world without moral absolutes? It’s the survival of the fittest; so, evolution will inexorably eliminate these weak-minded “idiots” at the Pentagon. If they nuke some people along the way, so what? That’s just the death of the weakest in this purposeless accidental existence of ours; sooner or later the more fit will triumph, and the world will be more evolved. So, what’s Myers concerned about? This is all just time and chance and the laws of nature at work. What is, is. There are and can be no “oughts.”

This is a fairly common concept in American culture: those who reject God also necessarily reject all morality and concern for other people. I have heard people claim that atheists are unable to love their spouses, parents or children, and like Ham here suggests, atheists ought to have no problem with just killing people at random for no reason. In fact, evolution demands that anyone who admits that people evolved actively desire the murder of those "less fit" in order to continue the evolution of the race toward a better goal. Nevermind that this kind of teleological view of the world is a profound misunderstanding of what evolution is; the implication that I'm some kind of murderer just because I reject Jesus, well, it irritates me.

There is this concept in philosophy- I encountered it while studying linguistics- called Theory of Mind, which is essentially the ability to imagine that other people have minds much like one's own even though you can't directly experience another's mind. Without this, much of social interaction including things like language and commerce would be completely impossible; it is the basis for all of society, and all neurotypical (and at least almost all a-typical) humans have it. Empathy is a closely related ability.

Religions tend to disguise it, with ceremonial laws and proscriptions against things that are said to offend God although they hurt no one, but they can't disguise it completely: the theory of mind is the basis for morality. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and "Love your neighbor as yourself," are not concepts that must be revealed in a holy book, they are accessible to everyone with a human brain, simply because we are able to imagine what it might be like to be another person. Morality doesn't require divine intervention, or supernatural woo, or special revelation. Religion has added those trappings onto what everyone is able to know: if you want to know what is right, consider how your actions affect those around you, weighing the effects on others with the same seriousness as the effects on yourself.

Empathy is a scary thing; it is often painful and frustrating to put yourself in someone else's place, especially when you don't have the power to change the things that are causing that other person pain. It takes a great deal of effort to learn someone else's history, to understand all the forces at work in someone else's mind. And when your actions affect whole swathes of people, the determination of what is right is very complicated. Morality isn't easy or simple, but it doesn't require the supernatural.

Religious people who insist that divine revelation is the only source of morality either have such an atrophied sense of empathy that their understanding of morality has withered, or they are deceived and are trying to pass that deception on to others. Or both, I guess.

A short, ugly dose of political reality

2008-06-19T15:20:00.000-07:00

So the Supreme Court recently decided a case, Boumediene, regarding the rights non-citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay have to challenge their detainment in court. Pretty basic habeas corpus stuff, and I think the decision was made correctly: the Supreme Court ruled that in fact our government does not have the right to hold people indefinitely without charge. Western civilization has acknowledged this right for at least the past, what, 800 years? (Wikipedia says since the 12th century) and I'm glad we're not going to throw it out just yet.

Of course the neocons are freaking out. Glenn Greenwald has a nice bit on John Yoo's take on the case; the best quote is "It takes an indescribably authoritarian mind to believe that one's own Government should have the power to put people in cages for life without having to provide them any meaningful opportunity to prove that they did not do what they are accused of." Yoo, apparently, like the rest of the Bush administration, is just that kind of authoritarian mind.

McCain, too, disagrees with the Boumediene decision. Here's Time's reproduction of his campaign's official statement. The core of it is this quote: "The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."

John McCain's America is one where the government can put people in prison for life without any kind of trial or court action. His statement against Boumediene is a statement against the founding principles of the Constitution and is against everything our nation stands for. Maybe its hyperbole, but I'm strongly tempted to say that anyone who votes for this man is a traitor, and I find it greatly distressing that he is a major candidate for President.

J's cat's kittens

2008-06-18T18:57:00.000-07:00

They're almost two weeks old, most of their eyes are most of the way open, and they're starting to get feisty although of course they're not strong at all yet. When they're in their box they totter around on wobbly legs, crawling all over each other, but for some reason when you hold them up in the air to take their picture, they cry. They won't look at the camera any other way, though: they can't hold their heads up consistently yet. I'm sure it will only be a couple of days before they're out and about causing trouble, though. These kittens have been growing up awfully fast.

far away, the thudding of the guns

2008-06-15T22:18:00.000-07:00

I used to memorize poems sometimes, just because I wanted to know them. I think maybe I will see if I can memorize this poem I read today. Sassoon was never a favorite of mine, but this poem is quite striking.

The Death Bed, by Siegfried Sassoon

Some Pictures from the Trip

2008-06-14T12:13:00.000-07:00

Some people say South Dakota prairie is boring, but I have to disagree. The way the wind blows the grass makes it look like the ground itself is alive.

The hills in Wyoming reminded me of Brokeback Mountain, and I teared up, again. I'm such a sucker for sad stories.

Montana was a bit colder than I expected- that's snow on the hills there.

And even more snow!

I love the Decemberists, so when I saw Tarkio's namesake I had to stop.

Turns out Tarkio is on a river that is absolutely gorgeous.

I believe this may be the Columbia River. There was a turnout by the highway with this incredible vantage point. The eastern Washington desert is just brilliant.

You know you're home when the trees are bigger around than you are tall. Also when the temperature drops and everything becomes shrouded in mist. Western Washington's climate is a real downer, but it does produce some beautiful landscapes.

A Gorilla on the Road

2008-06-07T12:07:00.000-07:00

There was this post for BADD, by Mary at This Is My Blog, comparing having a disability with having a gorilla living in your house with you. I find it a very apt description of the process of "taming" your illnesses and injuries until you're able to cope with them in a practical way. Anyone interested in a vivid illustration of what it means to cope with a disability should read that post.

I think in the past year I've come along way in managing my life. It's helped that I haven't been putting pressure on myself to go out and get a regular job and fit into a regular life; in some ways getting the Voc Rehab people to admit that I'm not rehabable has improved the quality of my day-to-day life. I've been able to allow myself to slow down and take all the time I need to get places and do things, but more importantly, I've changed the things I try to do.

And now it's summertime, the time I feel the best, and I'm contemplating taking my new openness to life onto the next level. I've written here before about my desire to travel, and about my poverty due to the VA's denial of the reality of my condition, and now these two things have come together fortuitously. My husband and I will soon be out a place to live due to various factors, and my tentative plan is to start a grand journey, camping out of my car and exploring the world a little bit at a time. My gorilla and I are going on the road.

First stop will be my parents' house outside of Seattle, possibly for several weeks, and then I hope to head south. The trip from here to Washington will take me several days; its my trial run to make sure that I can actually handle sleeping in the back of my VW and driving around strange places without getting too stressed out. Maybe the trial run will fail and I'll be stuck living in my parents' attic or something, but I have high hopes, and faith in my hard-won coping skills.

I also hope that this may help my husband. Quite frankly, while I have made friends with the gorilla in our house, he hasn't. It would have never occurred to me, before, that the person with a seriously life-altering physical event could adapt to the changes in their life better than someone who just has to sit and watch the person affected. But a gorilla in the house fixated on your housemate is still a gorilla in your house, I guess, and he's had a hard time. I hope that giving him some time where I'm not sitting around being sick at him may help him out.

I realize that all my high hopes may be a little foolish, brought on by sunny days and a desire to choose to be optimistic, but even if things go horribly wrong, I'll still have a nice visit with my family and some neat photos to share when I get onto a computer again. My sister's cat had kittens like two days ago, so when I get there they'll be a week and a half-ish old. Honestly, I'm about as excited to see those kittens as I am to see the rest of my family, how sad is that?

Remembering Discrimination

2008-06-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

I have this theory about how people remember pain, and how those memories are recalled and used in daily life. I've written about it at length here, but basically the idea is this: pain is a traumatic experience that would harm the mind if it were remembered clearly, so the human brain regularly blurs the memory of pain so that it is more remote. Its easy to remember the fact that pain is unpleasant and distressing, but its not at all easy to remember the actual sensation. My evidence for this theory is both my own experience with chronic pain- which is difficult to remember even when I experience it every day- and also signs in the relatively healthy population that indicate that people don't remember the pains they've encountered in the past, things like drug laws that severely punish chronic pain sufferers, doctors who consider a set amount of daily pain to be perfectly acceptable and not worth treating, people who are otherwise compassionate who just assume that chronic pain sufferers choose not to engage in certain activities simply because they are lazy, and so on. People act like they have no idea what pain is, because they really don't remember it when they aren't experiencing it.

I have a more tentative corollary to this theory: discrimination is like pain in that it is a traumatic experience that is difficult to understand unless you are currently on the receiving end of it. I used to be pretty sure that this was true, but now I'm not as sure.

My evidence in favor of this theory was my experience with disability rights activism. As I've said before, my acceptance of my disability has transformed the way I see the world, my place in it, and the place of other people. I have a stronger sense of the goods of society, which includes a much better understanding of all the ways those in power discriminate against out groups on the basis of race, gender, religion, etc. I understand sexism and racism better because I understand disablism. Obviously there are differences between various outgroups, and there are a lot of ways in which being female, or being gay, or being Latino, or whatever, is not at all like being disabled. But I think that, for example, understanding the ways in which being seen as a "good" crip (that is, inspiring but not socially challenging, asexual and passive and dependent) is just as marginalizing as a negative stereotype, helps me understand how being seen as a "good" woman (that is, motherly and submissive, pretty and a good cook) can be just as marginalizing as negative stereotypes of women. And I think that knowing the cost of trying to "pass" for perfectly healthy helps me better understand what it must be like for a homosexual person to "pass" for straight: not only is there the cost in physical pain, but I have to avoid talking about most of what my life is like, hiding the things that are important to me for the sake of the social comfort of the person I'm talking to. Obviously it's not the same. But I think its similar, and while my understanding of discrimination in all it's forms certainly isn't perfect, its better than it used to be.

The thing is, though, that political events of the last few months have clearly proven to me that experiencing discrimination yourself doesn't necessarily bring understanding of the discrimination that anyone else experiences, even if you understand what is going on in your own situation. When the Democratic primary races started, I assumed that in general people who voted Democratic would think more or less along the same lines I do: people who experience discrimination on whatever basis have more in common with each other than with people who don't experience discrimination regularly. So white women are more likely to have philosophies and voting patterns in common with minorities than with white men. And as far as I know this has traditionally been the case (although its not like I'm an expert on election history). The Democratic party is the party of women and minorities and the poor and those marginalized on the basis of religion or gender or any damn thing, right?

But it seems like I was wrong. It seems like there are a lot of people out there who think that the best way to achieve power for their particular marginalized group is to crowd out anyone else. There is a particularly nasty video making the rounds of a Hillary supporter making racially based arguments against Obama, and the Hillary Sexism Watch at Shakesville is up to installment #104. All this infighting makes me think that I am entirely wrong about the instructive value of discrimination. Maybe its just that you have to chose to learn, and then you have to chose to generalize from your own experience to others' experiences. Maybe we're just not brave enough to empathize with others who are in pain.

I also don't think that this is likely to work, as a political tactic. I mean, as a chronic pain sufferer, if I want to accomplish a political goal like, say, increasing funding into research on pain and brain function, my best bet is to include everyone who suffers into the same coalition. When it comes to policy and social movements that benefit those with chronic pain, there is no difference between people with arthritis, people with migraines, people with phantom limb pain, people with fibromyalgia, or people with diabetic neuropathy. I believe it is the same for those who are trying to fight discrimination. We all have the same goals, and forcing divisions does no one any good.

dumbstruck with the sweetness of being

2008-05-30T05:13:00.000-07:00

My sleep is all messed up again, so this morning at about 5:45, as the sun was just starting to shine through the haze on the horizon, I took a walk around the block with my trusty camera. I took fewer pictures than I would have liked, since apparently civilized people get up and go to work as the sun rises, and I thought I might get caught examining someone's garden as they came outside, and I chickened out.

Here's a few of my favorites though. I really am fortunate to live in a place where people have space to grow gardens; well, I suppose I'm fortunate to live anywhere at all.

With all the poise of a cannonball

2008-05-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

I have been reading a book of short stories by James Tiptree, Jr., aka Alice Bradley Sheldon, science fiction author and gender-bender extraordinaire, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. Tiptree included gendered themes in most of her stories, and its got me thinking about this idea that women are innately less violent than men.

Also, it was just memorial day last Monday, and I have been watching the first couple seasons of Battle Star Galactica, which has introduced me to the indomitable Kara Thrace. I'm not sure I will be able to finish watching BSG, I'm that in love with Thrace, and the President, and all the other women in that show who love to fight. Seeing such a positive portrayal of war, and particularly female soldiers, just about breaks my heart with the desire to be a soldier.

Its crazy, I am aware of that. I hated the Army when I was enlisted, I hated being ordered about by incompetent people half as smart as I was, and even if I was completely physically fit there are a dozen other reasons why I could never join the military again, starting with my disgust for the war criminals at the top of the chain of command and working out from there. Nevertheless, there is this tug on my heart that is hard to explain. I want to fight.

The human urge to destroy is discouraged in women, we are supposed to be nurturers and care-givers and all that, but I don't believe that this is a biological fact. Were the social pressures reversed, I am convinced that women could be-and are- just as vicious and destructive and violent as men are supposed to be. No one human is immune from the desire to kill.

So, as compelling and interesting as Tiptree's stories are, the Memorial Day piece (or piece that I read on Memorial Day anyway) that made the biggest impression on me was this article from 2 Dinar, The Casualties of War:

In reality, I was, and remain, wracked with guilt and insecurity- different than survivor’s guilt and far less noble. This is the guilt of leaving to pursue another career when the Corps needed strong leaders like me. The guilt of not having gone all-in when gambling with my life; of not having been catastrophically injured. The guilt of not having killed and the guilt of not living with the timeless veteran’s regrets about his killings. The guilt of being indifferent to the hundreds of opportunities available to me because they all bored me and all I wanted to do was fight.

War is a powerful thing, sweet and compelling. I'm not sure why- I have a dozen theories, about population pressures and sin, ecological change that spurs migration and religious stereotyping- but the fact remains. In spite of everything I know about how life ought to be, sometimes what I really want is a situation where I can get away with starting a fight.

Count every beautiful thing we can see

2008-05-24T22:41:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth asked her readers- her friends- to go out this weekend and do something living. I scrounged up some batteries for my camera and went to the park. I got some really crappy pictures, and this one.

These plants are dry and brittle and brown. Dead.

When I uploaded this photo and saw it full size, I was reminded of this piece of art, a sculpture by Richard Johnson titled "Parasite (The Thing Within My Spine)." Wheelchair Dancer pointed me to this exhibit of artwork on pain, and I've been meaning to write about it in terms of the success of the representation of physical pain in art, but I've been putting it off because although most of the art in this exhibit is very good, only a couple pieces even come close to actually evoking physical pain. This sculpture is good- seriously, go look at it, read the artist's description- and I love that this photo resembles it, because in this photo Pain is Beauty.

I need that today. I guess this doesn't really fit the directive to go out and do something fun; this post is fundamentally depressing. But, my head feels like I've been run over by something larger than a golf cart but smaller than a semi-truck, my throat is on fire with heartburn and the antacids are doing nothing, my hands are bruised and aching, my neck is radiating pain down to my lower back, my hips are out because I walked around the park this morning, and like a goddamn idiot I went and got a massive sunburn on top of everything else. I am the incarnation of pain, I am panting with it, and in this picture pain is elegance, delicate and architectural.

Subodhani

2008-05-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

I've written a lot on here the past couple of months about religion, and my generally negative view of the whole deal, so I though I would mention something to balance that out a bit. Although I don't believe that religious stories about the world are true in some larger, factual sense, that doesn't mean I don't see any value in telling these stories. Religious ideas can motivate people to horrible cruelty, but they can also motivate kindness and wisdom. One of the more common instances of this is when people use religion to focus the impulse to help other people. Religious charity is sometimes an excuse to bribe or coerce people into accepting a religion, but not always.

One of the better examples of this is World Vision. They are explicitly Christian; you can donate money to them specifically for the purpose of distributing Bibles and so on, and their newsletters are chock full of Bible verses. But they also do things like distribute emergency food aid in disaster areas, and support long term development in impoverished areas worldwide by building schools, roads, medical clinics, water pumps, and giving out micro loans and small business training/advice to help people start businesses. There are secular charities that do these things, too. But I would hate to see the world deprived of even one organization that gives people practical help to improve their lives, and in this case religion is what drives this charity.

I sponsor a kid through World Vision. She turned four a few days ago, lives in a village in Sri Lanka, and is pretty much the most adorable thing in the world. Today I figured out how to get her picture online, hence this post!

Subodhani K.

Disability and Citizenship

2008-05-23T18:52:00.000-07:00

(This is sort of for BADD, except that was a month ago. Clearly, I'm much too slow for the internet.)

I am an anarchist at heart. It is an impulse that goes deeper than rational thought; I don't know how it got there, but it is definitely lodged somewhere deep in the back of my brain, this idea that the essence of government is coercion, which is immoral. Perhaps this is the result of my rejection of the paternal God of my childhood, perhaps I simply read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress at too impressionable an age, but whatever the reason I am an anarchist.

I am suspicious of government in all its forms. Even when I know, rationally, that governmental power is required to accomplish a good goal, the incarnation of government irritates me. Sweating pot-bellied men in orange vests on the freeway demanding that everyone drive 45 mph, incomprehensible instructions on tax forms that make my eyes blur painfully, impersonal and disinterested bureaucrats at the Social Security office or the DMV who make you sit in a hard plastic chair waiting for your number to be called while they go to lunch: I hate it all. This morning I read that the improved GI Bill had been passed in the Senate with a veto-proof margin, and even though I am strongly in favor of social support for veterans I still cringed when I saw that the bill passed because it was attached to all kinds of other government spending, because the fact is, you could show me that a spending bill was perfectly efficient and effective in funding only good programs, and I would still be uncomfortable with the amount of money and power that was being funneled through the government. I'm an anarchist, I can't help it.

I used to assume that my gut reaction to government was evidence that government was actually a bad thing. In my freshman year at college, I worked on a campaign for a Libertarian Party candidate for state Rep, and in 2000 and 2004, I voted for the Libertarian Party ticket from local city elections to President. Any agency monitoring my library records would have put me on a watchlist: I read things on tax protesting and survivalism, Ruby Ridge and basic bomb making (I was just curious, I swear), secession and how to obtain official citizenship from obscure countries in the South Pacific that will give you a free passport and let you do just about anything you want.

I still think a lot of this stuff is very interesting. A few months ago when there was news about parts of the Lakota Nation filing papers to revoke the treaty they signed with the US a hundred or so years ago and effectively secede, I was cheering them on. I'm pretty sure now, though, that whatever my gut feeling on the matter is, any kind of social structure requires a government with coercive power- a monopoly on violence as anarchists are so fond of saying- in order to remain stable. And although I still feel that coercion is wrong even if a majority approves it, I think in most cases coercion in the form of taxes, regulations, and government-provided services is actually a lesser evil than pure individualism.

The thing about anarchism is, to the extent that it is asocial, its very foolish. When you're young and healthy and idealistic, its possible to believe that you can transcend society. But you can't. Not even a pseudo-Aspie like me can ever really truly be alone; everyone relies on other people. As soon as you have two people in the same space, you have interactions between them, compromises and annoyances, all the things that make up a society.

Societies can't be avoided, so they must be managed. The anarchist says that societies don't need to be managed by any authority: they will organize themselves along natural (usually economic, either free-market or communist) laws. But people don't really work that way. When I was healthy I could believe that people would naturally help those around them if they saw that there was no other social safety net to help the helpless. I really believed that there would be enough people who cared on a personal level that no coercion would be necessary, that the impulse to charity, which is very real, would be enough to make society a friendly place.

Obviously I was naive. It took illness to teach me that without law, enforced literally if distantly with the barrel of a gun, society is more than happy to take from any productive person as long as she can work and then when she can't fit into a pre-formed space in the economic machine toss her out on her ear to die cold and alone. People do have good in them, but, as any starving child in Africa can testify, out of sight is out of mind and society works to maintain the comfort of the many by hiding the pain of the few. Before I got sick, I didn't understand the reality of living with illness, so I didn't understand the role society is able to play in making life accessible to the ill, and I didn't understand how difficult and necessary it is to channel the impulse to charity through society into actual physical benefits for those who are in need.

Anyway, this is really long and possible a bit incoherent. The point is, at heart I'm still an anarchist. My votes, though, go to Democrats, and although I may cringe at the veterans' benefits/spending bill that was passed the other day, I know intellectually that this bill is a good thing, because I am disabled, and being disabled has made me a better citizen.

Our Dear Leader

2008-05-15T09:43:00.001-07:00

I've seen this a lot of places on my reading list lately: Shakesville, ginmar, Sadly, No!, Obsidian Wings just off the top of my head- I guess it's a popular news item this week. I don't really have anything new to say about it that hasn't been said better by others, but I couldn't resist adding my voice to the chorus.

It amazes me that at this point anyone can sincerely think that President Bush deserves to finish his term in the White House instead of in a dank prison cell somewhere. Well, I guess you could make a decent argument for incarcerating him in a high-security mental ward, since there's evidence that the man is clinically insane.

Here's the quote, via Politico, the site that did the interview:

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.

“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It's just not worth it anymore to do.’"

He gave up golf. To "be in solidarity as best [he] can" with the families of soldiers who've died in the war he started for nothing, with the soldiers who will spend the rest of their lives dealing with prosthetic limbs and phantom pain and life-altering nightmares of death because of his ignorance and incompetence and vanity, he gave up golf.

Fuck.

You know these days no one's exploited

2008-05-13T18:43:00.000-07:00

I'm not a very good blogger; I missed Blogging Against Disablism Day, and now via Elizabeth I see I've missed Blogging for CFS/ME Day, which is too bad, as I swear I have intelligent things to say about disability and particularly about CFS.

I'm not going to talk about disability today, though. I'm going to talk about Lolita, and radical feminism, and what it's like to believe a certain idea is true.

I go to a book discussion group at my local library. We meet once a month, about four or five conservative, oldish women and me, excessively butch and progressive ; this month's book was Lolita, which of course is the story of a young girl and the pedophile who maneuvers himself into the role of her stepfather and then takes off across the country on a road trip designed to facilitate her repeated rape. And then he murders the guy who (sort of) helps her escape.

Its a horrible story, but the discussion was pretty interesting. Nabokov was a fabulous writer, so there's all kinds of literary allusions, metaphors and tricks to dissect, and the story of course raises all kinds of questions about the nature of insanity, evil, and sex. There are details throughout the book that hint at a story behind the story; I believe the literary device is called the 'unreliable narrator.' So the book group was a good time, but we didn't get into the aspect of the book that I thought was most interesting, which was the problem of consent to sex in a coercive, dependent relationship.

Although Nabokov doesn't necessarily accept it himself, he puts in the mouth of his protagonist the idea that the child Lolita, at age 12, seduces a grown man out of her own free will. This is what the term lolita has come to mean: a sexually cunning girl child who aims to seduce adult men.

Of course the legal standard is that it is impossible for a child of twelve to consent to sex, and I rather think that this is correct. However, when Lolita is only a bit older than the age at which she is said to have seduced Humbert, she runs away from him while on a trip. And I got to thinking, if I approve of a life-changing decision like choosing to run away from the only support you have, in a state you're unfamiliar with, without any money, what is the basis for my rejection of the idea that someone of that same age can consent to sex? Because if running away is an acceptable thing, the issue is clearly not one of mental competence or the ability to make wise decisions. So what is it about sex that makes me so sure that a twelve year old can't choose to do it?

I don't usually consider myself to be a radical feminist. I haven't even read a lot of the philosophy behind radical feminism, but my contemplation of this question makes me think that I probably ought to start reading Dworkin and whoever else wrote on this question back in the day, what I guess is called first-wave feminism. Because I suspect that the answer to why I think sex with children is unacceptable lies in the balance of power between adults and children. Children are dependent on their adult caretakers. No matter what permutation that relationship takes, a child can never be sure that she has power of any kind. A child's "no" is often meaningless, and I think this is the key to why I think a child cannot consent to sex. Of course, from what I know at least (my knowledge of Dworkin is heavily reliant on blogs like I Blame the Patriarchy, which isn't meant to be a course in philosophy, so what I know may not extend very far), one of the key tenets in the "sex-negative" school of feminist thought is that women can't consent to sex while a patriarchal society that denies women the ability to meaningfully refuse sex persists.

I'm not ready to subscribe to the idea that all heterosexual sex is rape- I think there has to be room somewhere for the unique dynamic between two people that may negate the effect that culture has- but I think I finally see where that idea comes from. Feminism is not something that comes naturally to me, not really. I don't really feel patriarchy in my gut. I believe that patriarchy exists because I've seen its effects often enough that I'm convinced that its a real phenomenon, but I don't really feel it on a close, personal level even when those effects are a part of my life. Its too easy for me to assume that the way both men and women interact with me is influenced by other things- my illness, my personality (which borders on Aspergian) - for me to automatically think that patriarchy in my life is really patriarchy. Reading Lolita has been like opening a window, and I think now I understand a little bit better what it means to be a woman in the twenty-first century.

By land, by sea, by dirigible

2008-05-12T20:04:00.000-07:00

I got my paraffin melter today, a nice young UPS man brought it to my door, but it was a bright and beautiful day even before that. In spite of everything, I'm so glad to be alive.

I am the stuff of happy endings

2008-05-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

Arches National Park, Utah

Goblin Valley State Park, Utah

Quite a few years ago, my family and I visited Moab, Utah. Possibly more than once, for probably more than a week- I don't remember exactly. I've been thinking, though, that it would be neat to go there again. The past couple of weeks we've been packing up stuff in this house so that we can have a giant garage sale, clearing things out so the house can be sold. Grandma is finally accepting that she needs to live in assisted living care, so the house is going to pay for that, which means Michael and I are out a place to live.

Things are kind of dissolving into chaos at the moment, but I'm oddly OK with it. Its occurred to me that not actually having a place to live might be just the excuse I need to take the roadtrip of all roadtrips. Not that gas prices this summer are conducive to roadtripping, but the idea of just taking off and seeing where I end up is incredibly enticing. And if I were to do this, I would go to Utah first I think. I could sleep in the back of my car, and spend days slowly creeping about these gorgeous canyons, maybe bring a sketchbook and work on pretending I'm an artist.

The practical, responsible me thinks that this is a very bad idea for any number of reasons, but on the other hand, it's not like I have a job or anything holding me to a specific place. I am interested in seeing the world, and although I am sick and poor these days, I don't have any particular reason to think that I will be less sick or poor five years from now, so if I'm going to travel anytime, why not now?

I wish it was the sixties

2008-04-23T13:50:00.000-07:00

Its one of those days where everything seems wrong, and since I can't do a thing about the real problems I have, I try to concentrate on the small, ordinary tasks in front of me. I find that the best therapy for helplessness is to reach out and touch something real: plants in the garden or dirty dishes or yarn on a needle. Physical objects are both more solid and more malleable than fears about the future, more solid than pain or fatigue or worries about money.

Whenever a doctor reads my medical records and sees that I've been diagnosed with depression, they try to refer me to counseling, and I have a hard time explaining why I have no desire to go. Talking about things does make you feel better, but it can only help so much when your problems are genuinely unchangeable. No one can take away the pain I feel, and no one can make the VA give me the benefits to which I'm entitled; talking about things won't change that a bit, but talking is all the help that doctors ever offer.

Completing tasks that decrease the amount of entropy in my immediate environment is my primary method of coping. What I mean is, I plant seeds and knit sweaters because changing some small thing so that its different than it was before is a way of affirming my connection to the world, to life, to happiness. I put my world in order to prove that some things are improvable. I hate to assume that anyone is reading this, but if you see this and have a particular coping mechanism that you've more or less invented on your own, it would be neat to hear about it.

I completed the finishing on two sweaters in the past couple of days, and filled the tires of my bicycle this morning. I'm going to teach myself a new knitting pattern here in a bit, and things are growing in my garden. For now, the sun is shining, and I took some pictures.

Living with Darwin

2008-04-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

Christian resistance to Darwin rests on the genuine insight that life without God, in the sense of a Darwinian account of the natural world, really does mean life without God in a far more literal and unnerving sense. Even those who understand, and contribute to, the enlightenment case can find the resultant picture of the world, and our place in it, unbearable.

...For many Americans, their churches, overwhelmingly supernaturalist, providentialist churches, not only provide a sense of hope, illusory to be sure, but also offer other mechanisms of comfort. They are places in which hearts can be opened, serious issues can be discussed, common ground with others can be explored, places in which there is real community, places in which people come to matter to one another- and thus come to matter to themselves. Without such places, what is left?

…There is truth in Marx's dictum that religion, more precisely supernaturalist and providentialist religion, is the opium of the people, but the consumption should be seen as medical rather than recreational. The most ardent apostles of science and reason recommend immediate withdrawal of the drug- but they do not acknowledge the pain that would be left unpaliated, pain too intense for their stark atheism to be a viable solution. Genuine medicine is needed, and the proper treatment consists of showing how lives can matter.

- Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith,
Philip Kitcher

Kitcher’s Living with Darwin is as elegant a defense of evolution against Intelligent Design as any I’ve read, and I recommend reading it if you’re interested in the subject. The part of the book that I most valued, however, was his conclusions about the place of religion in a society that accepts scientific reality. Kitcher describes two variations of religion; the first is “providentialist” religion, which is based on the idea “that the universe has been created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and who is especially concerned with humanity.” The second variation is what he calls “spiritual” religion, which doesn’t rely on any description of the supernatural, but is solely concerned with the state of one’s mind and one’s relationship with others.

Kitcher, who, by the way, is a professor of philosophy, makes a strong case for the incompatibility of providentialist religion and current scientific knowledge, but, unlike a lot of what I’ve been reading lately on the subject of science, he doesn’t take that to mean that people should resign themselves to being without the comfort of religion. His entire essay is a wonderful argument for reinventing religion as a primarily social phenomenon, concerned with the present, not stories about the past or future.

His final few paragraphs, about the idea that “religion is the opium of the people,” got me thinking. There is actually quite a bit of similarity between the way I face physical pain and the way I think about religion. A lot of people with chronic pain try to keep positive by telling stories about the possibility that in the future they will recover; doctors recommend techniques to distract the mind from focusing on pain. Avoidance is a common coping technique, and when it comes to pain, it’s a perfectly healthy one, but I find that it does nothing to make me feel better about being in pain.

The best way I’ve found to stay positive is actually to spend a little time focusing on the pain, feeling exactly how and where it hurts, falling into it to see if, this time, I will be overwhelmed. I do this, and I find that, as bad as it gets, I can endure it. I may moan and cry, but when it comes down to it, I am able to make the choice to live in pain, and I find that strength an incredibly positive thing.

I think this is very similar to the way I refuse stories about the world that offer a more comforting version of reality. I want the world as it is, no matter how much it hurts. And its kind of funny that I can see how odd I am when it comes to my pain coping techniques, but I’m inclined to expect that everyone will react the same way I do to the conflict between religion and science. Reading Kitcher makes me think that it may be more important to carve a place for the religious impulse in science than is obvious to me.

I'll be here quite a while

2008-04-18T20:10:00.001-07:00

Some days it just seems like everything I can think of to say has already been said better by someone else, and I find that it feels more rewarding to sit on my ass and watch bootlegged episodes of grim crime shows.

Some things that people have said about how stupid our political process is getting: the funny, by publius at Obsidian Wings, and the angry, by Brad at Sadly, No!

Suzie at Echidne of the Snakes proves that I'm actually a man, because I'm argumentative and I don't like shoes.

I'm kind of in love with Wheelchair Dancer. Also with Cuttlefish.

And in the best news I've had in a long time, my physical therapist today had me try a paraffin bath for my hands, because heat sometimes decreases the amount of pain I feel. These things are absolutely wonderful, and not only do I get to look forward to episodes of the absence of pain in my hands once a week when I go to physical therapy, but she may be able to help me get the VA to buy me my very own paraffin warmer, like this one. If all this positivity keeps up, I may have to abandon my belief that the VA is run by a demon overlord straight out of Buffy who feeds on human suffering.

Just a better way to fall

2008-04-12T07:45:00.000-07:00

So my brother wants to know why I’m an atheist.

Short answer is, I’m an atheist because I haven’t encountered a persuasive reason to believe that a God, or anything else supernatural, exists.

Long answer is, I was raised to believe that there is a God- the God of the Apostle’s Creed:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into hell.
The third day He arose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven
and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty,
whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.
Amen.

And I fell away from various aspects of this faith one at a time. The first to go was belief in ‘the holy catholic church' and 'the communion of saints.’ Frankly, Christians aren’t better people than anyone else, and their actions show it. There are good and bad Christians just like there are good and bad people of all faith; there is nothing about the church that is holy or even unusual in any way.

The second belief to go was the belief that Jesus is the son of God, and all that follows from that. C. S. Lewis wrote on various occasions versions of the idea that there are two options: either Jesus was who he said he was, i.e. God, or he was a madman; he can’t possibly have been just an above-average, wise man. I was raised in the middle of all kinds of “proof” that Jesus was God and that he really did rise from the dead, and my rejection of this belief didn’t actually deal with the factual veracity of any of these claims. What I realized was that Lewis’ imagination was too limited. There is in fact a third option: Jesus was an ordinary man, manipulated by God because God views human history as a work of art that is more interesting when covered in blood. History makes ever so much more sense if you don’t try to wedge it into a worldview that includes a good and loving God.

Along with the idea that Jesus is God, I abandoned the idea that there is a God who is interested in me personally. There have been times in my life where the smallest intervention would have made the difference between hope and despair; and I don’t mean “small” miracles, I mean the little coincidences that are so often used in churches to support the idea that God loves each of us personally. A smile, a kind word, a hopeful dream, the sort of thing that people often claim God does all the time. The year I was 17, I spent a lot of time praying for some small sign that there was a God who cared, but nothing ever came. When you go to church on a regular basis, you're told all the time that you have to pray and read your Bible consistently because you have to have a relationship with God and relationships take persistent work, but it was like trying to have a relationship with a rock… or an imaginary friend. Eventually I gave up.

I guess what it comes down to is that this is just the way my mind works. I am not capable of faith. I am not able to subscribe to an ideology that I know isn’t supported by any kind of evidence. Things have to make logical sense to me; I think things through and reject my emotional reactions in favor of ideas that I can support with evidence (not just in the religious arena, either: sometime I should write about my hopeless fondness for anarchist political philosophy). I’m not always right; my logical reasoning is sometimes flawed, but I still have to try. Its just the way I am.

And honestly, I think its a good way to be. Life doesn’t consist of the world the way we want it to be, it consists of the world as it is. Emotion is an important part of being human, and intuition and faith and all that are an important part of the way the human mind works, but in order to be a successful person, you have to be able to deal with the world as it is. That means dealing with facts, facing fear and pain, and, when you tell stories about the world to make it seem a more hospitable place, you have to understand what is story and what is real.

I think this also answers, at least partially, the question of what exactly I mean when I say I am an atheist. I believe that the world can be discovered. I believe in reason and science and a way of looking at the world that requires facts before conclusions. There really isn't an atheist orthodoxy that I follow, but a better writer than I put it this way:

An atheist's creed
I believe in time,
matter, and energy,
which make up the whole of the world.

I believe in reason, evidence and the human mind,
the only tools we have;
they are the product of natural forces
in a majestic but impersonal universe,
grander and richer than we can imagine,
a source of endless opportunities for discovery.

I believe in the power of doubt;
I do not seek out reassurances,
but embrace the question,
and strive to challenge my own beliefs.

I accept human mortality.

We have but one life,
brief and full of struggle,
leavened with love and community,
learning and exploration,
beauty and the creation of
new life, new art, and new ideas.

I rejoice in this life that I have,
and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me,
and an earth that will abide without me.

The days get longer and the nights smell green

2008-04-11T09:45:00.001-07:00

We're finally getting weather that is consistently warm enough to go out in, although we've also been getting a rather large amount of rain. Today the sky is clear, though, so I went out to the park.
The world is a beautiful place.

The Problem of Pain: The Celestial Abuser

2008-04-06T08:36:00.000-07:00

Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion.

If the first and lowest operation of pain shatters the illusion that all is well, the second shatters the illusion that what we have, whether good or bad in itself, is our own and enough for us. Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us. ... Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. ... The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it "unmindful of His glory's diminution". Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask. If God were Kantian, who would not have us until we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved? And this illusion of self-sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall.

-C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Everyone knows that God prefers the weak to the strong, the humble to the proud, the poor to the rich, the child to the philosopher. I was always under the impression that this was because God was egalitarian in a way that human society can never be, and judged people solely on their merits and not their social status, but C. S. Lewis would have his readers believe that this isn't the case. God loves broken people for the same reason that an abuser prefers to form relationships with people who have little education or life experience and don't have social support systems: they're easier to manipulate into a position of complete dependency.

When humans exhibit this kind of behavior, it is condemned as despicable and creepy and unhealthy; I'm not entirely sure why Lewis describes the same kind of behavior as one of the nobler characteristics of God. He goes on at length about how perfect God is, and how ugly and mean humans are, but even if you grant that humans benefit from a relationship with God no matter the circumstances of that relationship, I don't really see how it follows that we should accept that God causes us pain because he loves us. If there were a rich guy who took in poor kids, bought them clothes and tutors and vacations in Spain and improved their lives in a multitude of ways, but at the same time cut them off from their family so that they would be completely dependent on him, the good he did wouldn't outweigh the creepy abusiveness of demanding complete dependence.

Lewis is very clear that this suffering is sent by God with a purpose. Its not the direct result of sin, or the action of some other near-omnipotent godlike being like Satan or anything. This suffering is inflicted on good, "honest, kindly, and temperate people," so its not meant as punishment to direct people away from sinful ways. Lewis is clear that God's purpose in allowing suffering is to strip away every good thing in life so that people will have no sense of self-sufficiency, no sense of control, no sense that there is any hope of joy in anything but Him. I guess whether or not you see this as psychopathic behavior depends on whether or not you think that its true, that there is no hope of anything positive apart from God. Clearly Lewis thinks that this kind of behavior is admirable and holy. I can't help but think, though, that even if its true that there is an almighty God who knows that humans can only be happy when they're with him, that doesn't make manipulating people with all the horror the world holds into something pure and holy.

The Problem of Pain: The Goodness of God

2008-04-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

Previous posts on this topic here and here.

"Love and kindness are not coterminous... Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes."

"You asked for a loving God: you have one. ... not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself... persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes."

"It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative."

"When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted... whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. "

-C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

C. S. Lewis clearly was a product of some of the worst cultural prejudices of his time, and its difficult for me to type out these quotes without ranting about the years I spent convinced by my religion that my very nature was abhorrent. However, the damage this version of Christianity does to impressionable young girls is not the point today. The point is how Lewis defines the love and goodness of God in order to get around the problem of pain in a world ruled by a loving God. Like I said in the previous post, Lewis admits that if God is loving as we generally think of the term, then there is no way to reconcile the reality of suffering people experience with the power of God. He solves this problem by redefining "loving" as "abusive."

I realize this is a bold claim, so to illustrate my point, here's a picture:
This is an infant with smallpox. According to Wikipedia, during (the first 3/4s of) the 20th century between 300 and 500 million people died of smallpox; 80% of children infected with the virus that causes smallpox died. Smallpox is not caused by any kind of human sin. Its not even sexually transmitted- you can get it simply from breathing near someone who is infected. Or you could, anyway, until it was eradicated with the use of vaccinations in a worldwide effort.

Since we measly humans were able to erase smallpox from the face of the earth, I have to assume that even Lewis' not-quite-omnipotent God had the power to do something about it, but didn't; therefore, either smallpox was created for some purpose or God just didn't care. Its clear from the selections above that Lewis believes the same thing I was taught growing up: God cares, and does have a purpose: any misfortune that can't be prayed away is actually a lesson from God specially designed to make one a better, more holy person. Its all for the best, see. God hurts you because he loves you.

I think Lewis' upbringing and cultural blindness influenced his philosophy of love. Influenced really isn't a strong enough word. Dictated, maybe- although maybe I'm being harsh on his culture and the deviance here is all Lewis'. The "love" Lewis describes is the blindly jealous obsession of the stalker who would kill the object of his affection rather than see her love another, the stubborn stupid pride of the father who disowns his son for choosing a career of which he doesn't approve. People who love do beautiful things, and they do horrible things, but I think that most people at least wish that their love would produce only things that are beautiful, and not horrible. Lewis doesn't seem to agree. For him, the horrible things done in the name of love are a more true sign of love than anything else. He patterns his God after the most twisted and evil side of human nature, and calls Him good.

The Problem of Pain: Omnipotence

2008-04-01T18:22:00.001-07:00

Today C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain finally made it through the queue at the library. I've read the first few chapters and already have about a million things I want to say about it, which I guess is as good a criteria for a good book as any. This whole internal debate process started with a post I wrote a while back about creationism and the problem of pain, here.

Lewis defines the problem of pain like this: "If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both." I think that Lewis believed that he had a solution to this problem, but he admits further on in the same paragraph that "if the popular meanings attached to these words (speaking of 'good', 'almighty' and 'happy') are the best, or the only possible, meanings, then the argument is unanswerable." Normally an attempt to define away the terms of an argument as a means of defeating the argument would annoy the hell out of me, but the way Lewis defines things is interesting, so I'm going to write about it like this isn't a cheap and cowardly tactic.

The first term he addresses is 'almighty;' if I'm reading this right, what he's saying is that an almighty God can't in fact do anything he wishes, but instead has limits. He claims to believe in miracles- I guess he didn't particularly want to be a heretic- but maintains that a physical universe must have certain natural laws that produce a certain amount of suffering, and God is not able to create a universe that doesn't work this way.

"The inexorable "laws of Nature" which operate in defiance of human suffering or desert, which are not turned aside by prayer, seem, at first sight to furnish a strong argument against the goodness and power of God. I am going to submit that not even Omnipotence could create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and "inexorable" Nature."

The proof of this, I think, is supposed to be free will, which requires things to choose among, which requires a physical world, which requires laws of nature, which means the exact laws of nature which we have now and which cause so much suffering.

This approach is very interesting to me. I've heard a lot of people talk about the problem of pain from the angle of goodness, and from the angle of happiness, but I don't think I've ever actually encountered someone who seriously argued that part of the solution to the problem is the idea that God is not actually omnipotent as we understand the word, but rather is constrained by the laws of the universe (but can somehow do miracles anyway, as long as he limits them enough to not actually prove or disprove his existence). It makes sense, but it's not an argument I expect from a Christian, much less C. S. Lewis. If God is subject to scientific laws of nature, you'd expect science to be a big deal, but Lewis is much fonder of weird magical thinking, which he shows in his chapter on the Fall of Man, where he spins a tale that accepts evolution but posits a 'missing link' between pre-humans and modern humans that is essentially super-human: in control of every cell in the body, never dying or ill or in pain, fully one with God and the animals around him and at peace. Like I said, weird and fantastical.

Lewis makes it clear that he believes both that God is limited in power, and that God is something beyond human comprehension beside which humans are vermin. In his chapters on the goodness of God and the wickedness of men, he actually goes into quite a bit of detail about how horrible humans are and how unfortunate it is that modern culture doesn't condemn everything human as utterly worthless and disgusting. These two beliefs don't seem very compatible to me, and if you had asked me before I read this if claiming the omnipotence of God was limited was allowed in orthodox Christianity I would have said it absolutely was not. However, this book is supposed to be one of the best modern works on the problem of pain, so I guess I must be wrong about that. Anyway, Lewis' positions on omnipotence aren't nearly as interesting as his positions on goodness and love, but I think I'm going to write a separate post for that.

2008-03-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

I have this daydream. One day, when no one else is around, I stuff some clothes in a bag, grab CDs and toiletries and some empty notebooks, and just take off. Get in the car without a map and just drive south until I hit desert. Mexico maybe, someplace hot and dry and empty, where I can clear my head.

I feel like I'm swamped in stories that other people tell. My head is full of other people's words, other people's feelings, and I daydream about just leaving all this behind and setting off to try to find out what would be in my head if I didn't have my books and tv shows and blogs filling me up with the things other people think about.

Its not practical, I know that. I'm ill and broke, and living alone drives me completely around the bend. Living alone out of a car in a foreign country is a really bad idea. But I still find myself mentally assembling packing lists and contemplating brushing up on my Spanish. I'm starting some plants for a garden this summer, and when I was at the garden store a couple weekends ago, I contemplated getting some cacti for an indoor pot, but decided I couldn't. The more I contemplate being somewhere else, the more I feel trapped. I don't know what it is about the desert that makes me think its calling me, but something has to change or my heart is going to burst.

Pacifism and Genocide

2008-03-23T16:28:00.000-07:00

My sister and I have both been reading War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. I'm not done with it yet, and I'm not usually ready to write about a book before I've finished it, but I thought I would post this here, basically because I would put it on Facebook for my sister, but I talk way too much for that to be practical. Here's what my sister said that got me thinking about this:

S., Mom, and I actually had a little debate/discussion about war and pacifism the other night. S. is a straight up pacifist, because he doesn't think Jesus would ever have killed someone. Idealistically I would be a pacifist, but the world's not that perfect, you know? Sometimes you have to intervene, or choose a lesser evil, so to speak. In the book, and in some of my econ stuff this quarter, it talked about all the times peacekeeping troops could have intervened and didn't, and how they could have saved lives and all.

My view on the morality of war has changed a bit since I joined the Army. I used to think that fighting a war after another country attacks your country is fine; wars of aggression are generally immoral, but the one exception would be when you start a war in order to prevent a greater atrocity, for example if a country had intervened in early Nazi Germany, or Rwanda.

From a utilitarian moral viewpoint (which, while we might disagree on its applicability to ‘victimless’ crimes, I think is uncontroversial here), in a situation where war might break out, one ought to act in a way that will minimize human suffering. Generally this means doing what you can to see that a war isn’t begun, but if you know that the alternative to war will produce more suffering than the war would, then you ought to choose war as the most moral thing to do.

In theory I still agree with this view. War is a horrible thing, but it’s not the only horrible thing. However, one of the lessons I’ve learned from the fiasco in Iraq is that, as an outsider looking into a foreign situation, I know a great deal less about what’s going on than I think I do. A situation might look like the beginnings of a genocide, or like a mad dictator loose with nuclear weapons, or like the end of the world in fire, and then turn out to be something completely different. Even as an insider in a volatile situation, I don’t think it’s possible to have the kind of complete information that the utilitarian choice for war requires. No one can tell the future, or read the minds of the other people involved. Theoretically, I could see a situation where choosing to start a war, or intervene militarily in a conflict, would be the moral choice, but practically it’s wiser to just not start wars.

A good metaphor would be my view on capital punishment. I have no problem in theory with executing a murderer. I think there are crimes for which the only truly just punishment is death. However, I don’t have faith that our judicial system is able to determine guilt or innocence with perfect accuracy, so I think it’s wiser to only impose punishments that are more or less reversible. It’s a problem of information.

That doesn’t mean accepting no action at all in the face of genocide, though. If you take Rwanda as an example, one of the major factors that led to the genocide was the radio stations that broadcast racist programs urging people to kill their neighbors. The United States could have exerted political and economic pressure to shut down those radio stations, and replaced them with different programs. There are often political and economic steps that can be taken to improve a situation.

In Iraq, over the past couple of years, there has been a slow ethnic cleansing in some areas, so that neighborhoods that used to be mixed Sunni-Shi’a are now only Sunni or only Shi’a. The US military presence hasn’t been able to stop this. From what I know (although again, as an outsider looking in my knowledge is incomplete) it would probably be more effective if the US withdrew our military forces while at the same time offering refuge to anyone who would be the victim of ethnic cleansing or genocide. So if you’re wanting to prevent genocide, which is a good goal, military intervention may not even be the most effective way to do that.

I guess what I would advocate is practical pacifism, through the adoption of a different paradigm for international intervention. Here in the US, we tend to think of our options as either a) do nothing and pretend that everything is fine, or b) storm in with guns blazing. We see our role in the international community as that of a police officer. I think what we ought to do is acknowledge our inability to be effective police officers, and instead take on the role of the battered women's shelter: we can't arrest the abusers and put them in prison, we can't put them up against a wall and shoot them for their crimes, but we can shelter their victims and do our best to mitigate the damage that has been done. This is a lot more complicated, and time-consuming, and requires a greater commitment to long-term, practical action that isn't flashy and doesn't get the adrenaline pumping, but I think it's more moral.

Apology for Want

2008-03-20T09:17:00.000-07:00

I am an exceptionally negative person: misanthropic, the quintessential pessimist, I always expect the world to prove right my view that shit happens for no good reason and with no cure. I don't think this view of the world is unrealistic; actually, I think karmic, teleological views of the world are the epitome of magical thinking, which I detest.

However, there are days when the world surprises me with how sweet life is. Yesterday, I went to the library and while browsing the shelves stumbled on a thin book of poetry by someone I had never heard of. Here's one:

Apology for Want
by Mary Jo Bang

I've worried far too much about the eye
of the other: the shopkeeper and his lackey clerks
who think I steal.
I know I stand far too long, gazing

with wistful face at the muted tints of objects
on shelves. How smart we are all getting.
Soon we will understand everything:
why our first breath, when our last.

Why a rat, even though shocked
every time it eats, never stops knowing hunger.
How hollow-boned birds and gilled fish
estimate the size of a bounty, remember

where they stored food. There are few ways
to free the body from desire, all end in anarchy.
Tomorrow, I'll go back to the shop- the story
where it left off-

focus on those items that have bits of lavender
hidden within: gimmaled broccoli tips,
overwrought asparagus. Survival lies in resistance,
in the undersides of the leafed and delicate.

Among animals, we're the aberration:
want appropriates us,
sends us out dressed in ragged tulle, but won't tell
where it last buried the acorn or bone.

What the Water Gave Me

2008-03-19T15:20:00.001-07:00

Emotional pain is often the inspiration for great works of art, but physical pain doesn't act the same way on the mind. Physical pain does not inspire, it grinds. It pares the soul down to the barest essentials of survival, so that there is only a bright spark of self in a sea of agony. Pain is not in any way beautiful. It is shit and piss and vomit; it is mean and common, and most of all it is boring.

Frida Kahlo's art is not about pain, not directly. She painted the fear of pain, the love of death, political upset, tension between modern life and historical roots, the distress of being a woman. But she painted all this while in pain, and her work is subtly disturbing because of it. The amazing thing about her is that instead of allowing her pain to deaden what she felt and how she expressed herself, she somehow transmuted dust into gold.

the ghosts in the radio are singing along

2008-03-15T19:34:00.001-07:00

I was going through my old CDs today, and I realized something. I've been thinking lately that my tendency toward feminism is something newish; I don't remember thinking about feminism in much depth before I got ill and found myself with all this time to sit around and read. Logically I can deduce that I must have had opinions on the matter, what with me driving myself as hard as I used to, to be academically successful and hip and tough and all that, and then I did join the Army. But I don't remember what I thought. The past is a blur. I can reconstruct what must have happened from things I know about myself, but I have no real memory of a lot of it.

My old CDs, though, tell a different story. I never used to purchase music. When I lived in my parents' house, I wasn't allowed to listen to music that wasn't explicitly Christian, so in order to listen to the things I wanted to listen to, I had to obtain CDs either from friends or from the library, burn copies onto blank CDs and label them something misleading, and then never listen to them unless I was using headphones and no one else was around. Telling it like that makes it sound like I was horribly oppressed, but I ended up listening to exactly what I wanted anyway, so I guess it was alright. The point is that I never bought music.

Today I found three old CDs that I actually purchased: Le Tigre's self-titled album, and Pretty Girls Make Graves' "Good Health" and "The New Romance." Way back in the day, back when I had the energy to follow music and find things that were exciting and new, it was important to me to listen to feminist music, written and sung by women. I'm glad to know this about myself, and I'm glad to have this music again. I've been inspired, actually, and now I have six CDs on order at the library to expand my feminist playlist.

Not that I think it's important to inhabit a feminist ghetto, where all media I consume is appropriately female oriented; that would be too similar to the Christian bubble I was raised in, and I don't want to be the kind of person who shelters themselves from the world. But the music I listen to, which is mostly alternative/indie rock, is heavily male-dominated. Listening to an all male choir is valuable- many of these men are incredibly talented- but it feels incomplete.

Jericho's second season

2008-03-12T19:44:00.000-07:00

The first season of Jericho was OK. I sat down and watched it at one point a few months ago when I was bored and ill and up all night and it was the only TV show I could find that had a whole season's worth of episodes available online for free. I really liked some aspects of it, particularly the post-apocalyptic themes and the secret agent storyline, and I could listen to the guy who plays Hawkins talk all day and not get bored; he has the most wonderful voice. Other aspects were kind of annoying, like how none of the women were good for anything, and how the town kept "running out" of gasoline and then the next episode people were driving all over the place, and the resemblance some of the plot points had to a 9/11 Truther conspiracy theory.

The first few episodes of the second season have been pretty stellar, though. Apparently the show isn't that popular, but I think it's great. Popularity isn't necessarily the defining factor when you're telling a good story, and like Kung Fu Monkey says, this show has become radically subversive. I just watched Episode Five, and it reminded me of nothing so much as a composite of certain incidents from the Iraq war. The incident in Fallujah, before we burned it to the ground, where those contractors went into the city and were killed, and their bodies were mutilated and strung up by a mob. Numerous incidents of corruption during the reconstruction. Arbitrary imprisonment of occupied citizens without trial, and "misunderstandings" that resulted in the death of innocent children in their homes. The major difference is that the victims of corporate-government oppression here aren't Iraqis, they're Americans. The pretty little girl who gets shot is blond, and the men who string up the contractor are American farm boys, doing what anyone would do in their situation.

The most dangerous threat to the impulse to war is sympathizing with the enemy. Empathy, I am convinced, is the root of morality. If you can imagine yourself as the person you oppose, if you can feel what they feel , if you can truly know them, war becomes impossible. When it comes to people who live halfway across the world, who speak a different language and pray to a different God, empathy isn't that easy. Stories like this help bridge the gap, and we need more like it.

You can watch all of season two of Jericho here, on CBS' page, free and completely legit.

we shall all someday part the veil

2008-03-10T10:39:00.000-07:00

Some disconnected thoughts:

---

By Emily Dickinson:

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

---
Rodin's "The Fallen Caryatid"

---

I went for a walk today at the Catholic cemetery down the road. It's interesting to see the stories we tell, or fail to tell, about our dead. There's not a whole lot of room on a gravestone, even the extravagantly large ones, and most of the graves I saw today included name, dates, and one other piece of information, usually a family relationship: mother, daughter, wife. Some had military ranks, units and wars in which the deceased served, and a fair number had Masonic symbols. The most common, of course, was religious symbols: crosses, the gates of heaven, angels, references to passages in the Bible.

I don't really feel like I understand the attraction of most stories about death. Fear of death I get; every successful living creature must fear death, and humans are no exception. Intellectually, I understand that a way of coping with fear is inventing reasons to explain why the fear is unfounded, but emotionally it just doesn't connect with me. Once you admit that beliefs about an afterlife are impossible to verify in any way, that we have zero information about what death is like, it seems to me that the stories lose their comfort. I have this problem with religious faith as well, obviously: I am aware that choosing to believe would mean adopting an idea that I don't think is true in order to make myself feel better, and that very awareness means that adopting it wouldn't even make me feel better, because I know that I don't actually believe.

When I feel like flattering myself, I pretend that I think this way because I am unusually un-susceptible to doublethink, but perhaps that isn't true. Maybe it's just that I have an abnormally large amount of time to sit and examine the things I believe in, entire mornings that I can take to walk around a cemetery by myself.

An atheist's creed

2008-03-07T10:08:00.001-08:00

Now, since I don't like to only whine about the things I see on the internet, I thought I would post a link to something PZ Meyers put up at Pharyngula today. He wrote this in response to a particularly ugly manifestation of the idea that atheism is synonymous with nihilism and despair, and I thought it was rather beautiful. I don't have the scientific background to give the correct explanations of the world that others can, but still this resonates with me. Something that I've begun to learn to accept as part of coping with chronic illness is this idea that my existence is contingent on a billion coincidences, that my life is not inevitable in any way, that things change whether I want them to or not. This is a scary idea, and I remember being taught as a child that believing it would leave you with nothing worth living for.

The truth is, acknowledging the vastness and complexity of the universe is no more nihilistic than contemplating the night sky. The refusal to believe in a universe that isn't centered around one's particular subsection of a tribe of a species on this little planet is a pathetic agoraphobia of the soul, and it is this state of mind that is to be pitied.

An atheist's creed
I believe in time,
matter, and energy,
which make up the whole of the world.

I believe in reason, evidence and the human mind,
the only tools we have;
they are the product of natural forces
in a majestic but impersonal universe,
grander and richer than we can imagine,
a source of endless opportunities for discovery.

I believe in the power of doubt;
I do not seek out reassurances,
but embrace the question,
and strive to challenge my own beliefs.

I accept human mortality.

We have but one life,
brief and full of struggle,
leavened with love and community,
learning and exploration,
beauty and the creation of
new life, new art, and new ideas.

I rejoice in this life that I have,
and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me,
and an earth that will abide without me.

When I am king

2008-03-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

Sitting in my email inbox right now is a letter from a caseworker at the VA Regional Office of Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment, St Louis (Voc Rehab). This is the office that works with veterans who are disabled by a condition caused by their military service in order to retrain them for the workplace and help them find employment by providing things like assistive devices: voice recognition software, specialized wheelchairs or whatever you need in order to get back to work. They also do things like paying for college if they think that's what you need to be a productive member of society, or small business planning advice and loans. Voc Rehab interviewed me in January to see if there was anything they could do for me, a disabled veteran.

The letter in my inbox confirms that a paper copy of my official rejection letter will be sent to me as soon as possible so I can add it to my medical and employment history. The VA office here has found that I am unemployable, not rehabable, not worth spending tax dollars on, so I am not eligible for their program at this time. Incidentally, they made this decision in January, told me they sent me the letter in January, and are only now getting around to resending it.

There is another VA office in town, Disability Compensation and Pension (Comp & Pen). This office is tasked with taking care of veterans who have been disabled by their service; and by 'taking care of' I mean 'giving money to.' This is the branch that gives out disability payments, which are scaled based on the severity of disability from almost negligible, something like $110/month, to completely disabling, over $2k/month. If your disability is so severe that you can't find any kind of employment, you are officially entitled to the full 100% disability payments, which gives you about $25k a year to live on. It's not money that anyone would call riches, but at least it's above the poverty line.

You would think, that since the branch of the VA responsible for helping veterans find employment has found that I am unemployable- and this particular office is the fourth in two states, on the state, federal, and nonprofit levels, to find this- the Comp & Pen branch of the VA would be obligated to also find me unemployable, and therefore give me disability payments that I can live on. Well, you would think that IF you don't know the way the VA works. So here I am, poking at my library account online, bored because someone else has all the Buffy DVDs checked out and I can't afford to buy them so I must wait, contemplating the day when I am no longer able to access the internet from my home because my savings will have run out and I will no longer be able to afford internet access. In my bleaker moments, I contemplate a day when I will no longer have a home from which to not access the internet; but I know that this will probably never happen, because I have family. But if I didn't have family... it already would have. The VA provides me with enough to have a nice car to live out of.

All of which leads me to comment on this article that's been floating around, from the Christian Science Monitor: "Homeless: Can you build a life from $25?" Basically some former athlete white boy with a college degree and rich parents went out to prove that it's possible to go from being homeless to renting a place, even if you're ... a young, healthy, rich white boy with a college degree. Some choice quotes:

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family.

"I was getting by on chicken and Rice-A-Roni dinner and was happy."

"I had a credit card in my back pocket in case of an emergency. The rule was if I used the credit card then, "The project's over, I'm going home.""

[In response to a question about whether his game would have been more difficult if he had child support payments or was on probation] "The question isn't whether I would have been able to succeed. I think it's the attitude that I take in."

"This isn't a "rags-to-riches million-dollar" story. This is very realistic. I truly believe, based on what I saw at the shelter ...that anyone can do that."

Speaking as someone who doesn't have the luxury of "quitting" my life when someone gets sick, who doesn't have an emergency credit card or any "previous contacts" that would do me any good, I just have to say that eating chicken and Rice-a-Roni for dinner sounds like the lap of luxury to me (meat is expensive, even chicken), and I deeply resent the implication that the reason I'm in the situation I'm in is because my attitude isn't focused enough on tugging at my own bootstraps. Yeah, I made some stupid decisions. I joined the Army- that was, in hindsight, blindingly stupid. But I'm not sick and unemployed because I'm lazy, and this kid's condescension makes me want to punch him in the face. Knowing that in the future people are going to point to the book he wrote as "proof!" that poverty is a choice that the government shouldn't subsidize with things like food stamps makes me want to puke.

There's a more eloquent takedown of this at Resist Racism: Playing at poverty.

If heaven is on the way

2008-03-06T05:31:00.001-08:00

So I was talking with my mother-in-law the other day, and the conversation went like our conversations usually do, where she talks about 95% of the time, and I say "mmhmm" and "oh really?" and "yeah" a lot. She was telling stories about how she got into trouble in high school, but then got diverted onto the subject of how inconvenient it was for everyone she knew when the school district policy started to require forced integration of the school districts, which meant that the bus rides for some people took longer. She honestly couldn't see any need at all for integration of schools, because after all, the people she knew would never harass black students, and if the black students all sat at one table at lunch it was just because they wanted to. All integration was to her was a pointless hassle, and at that point I really didn't have anything to say.

My in-laws and the people I've met here in St Louis since moving here last summer are not bad people. They are intelligent, educated, middle class white folks who insist that St Louis is not, in fact, in the South, but is in the Midwest and so must be untainted with horrible horrible racism. It puzzles me, that they don't see it. St Louis is about half white and half black, I think, although I don't know the current statistics; we are currently living in my grandmother-in-law's house, which is in a neighborhood with exactly zero people who aren't lily white. I go to the grocery store around the corner and it's no more diverse than the stores in rural Washington state where I grew up. On the other hand, if you go up to the northern part of St Louis county, communities there are almost 100% nonwhite. My in-laws' social circle does not include a single person who isn't white.

The way money is spent by the local governments here reflects this segregation to a degree that makes my skin itch. The neighborhood here, which is white and upper middle class, is perfectly safe. You can leave your doors unlocked when you run to the store and you can walk alone at night. I get the impression that the nonwhite neighborhoods are rather dangerous; the principle advice I got when I moved here about how to get around the city was to not go north of downtown or across the river, because doing so means you're going to get shot. It's not just dangerous crime, either. The VA hospital downtown is in a part of town that is right on the edge between a university campus and, to the north of it, a patch of urban poverty recognizable by ancient, poorly maintained, or abandoned buildings: it's a 'black' part of town.

Some of the history of the area is outlined in these posts by The Infamous Brad, which I found via Orcinus. The shooting he talks about occurred in Kirkwood, which is a suburb of St Louis that is only about ten minutes from where I'm living now. Orcinus also gives a link to a previous discussion of sundown towns that mentions Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, which I thought was very interesting. It's easy for a white kid from a white town like me to grow up almost completely ignorant of the complexities of race in our society, but it seems to me like it ought to be more difficult to stay ignorant when your white town is right next to a black town and the difference is so stark. My in-laws do manage to be ignorant, though.

It makes me wonder if the difference between us really is just that I read so much science fiction at such an impressionable age, or if there actually is less racism in the Pacific Northwest like I used to assume. Or maybe the type of racism in Washington- the kind people don't talk about- just doesn't pass along to the next generation as reliably.

if you go straight long enough

2008-03-03T21:49:00.001-08:00

I keep trying to write a post and every time it turns into a rant about how much I hate the VA. So instead of a real post, here's some links to things I've been reading.

driftglass writes about Orwell's 1984 and the modern Republican Party's doctrine of endless war.

John McCain apparently is an alternative medicine sucker: according to this article, "McCain said, per ABC News' Bret Hovell, that "It’s indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children, the question is what’s causing it. And we go back and forth and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines."" The 'mercury in vaccines' theory of autism origin has been pretty thoroughly debunked, but I guess being a Republican means you just have to be against scientific evidence no matter what.

Also, here's some awesome leopard cubs.

Riva Lehrer

2008-02-27T20:06:00.000-08:00

Continuing on the subject of art and disability, I found this site today via Wheelchair Dancer. Riva Lehrer is an artist who draws and paints what appears to be mostly disability themed portraits. Her gallery is an interesting portrayal of a community of people she obviously loves very much, but although I think it's valuable to have someone out there making these pictures, this isn't what I want to do.

This picture, for example, shows a woman who is an amputee swimming with an otter (or seal?). It says a lot of things about the social and psychological consequences of disability but much less about the immediate physical experience. Maybe my problem is just that my experience of disability has nothing to do with other people seeing me a certain way, or with anything visible at all. My experience of disability is almost completely opposite; my body has betrayed me in the most subtle and subjective ways possible, so that I look completely normal when nothing is right.

What I want from art is a path to expressing all the things that aren't obvious. Not that there's anything wrong with expressing things that are obvious, or more accurately things that should be obvious but are still mistaken all the time. It's just that the struggle that I have isn't convincing people that I'm still human in spite of differences in appearance, it's convincing them that although I look the same, my knowledge of life is different because everything I see is stained with pain. Unfortunately, I am not convinced that this message is one that it's possible to convey. Pain is such an oddly hard concept to grasp.

No one's taking showers anymore

2008-02-26T22:10:00.000-08:00

I've been in a bit of a 90s funk lately, listening to some of the songs that were important to me when I was a teenager: OK Computer, The Lonesome Crowded West. I rediscovered my CD of The Moon & Antarctica, put it on my computer, and I've been listening to it on repeat for the last day or so. I've never really been one to have a favorite song or favorite band, but I think if I did, Modest Mouse would be my favorite.

I've been on a quest to express myself through art. Well, not to express myself so much as to express the sensation of pain. To make people understand, to revive the memories we all have and bury of physical agony. I don't think this sort of art would be terribly popular, but I want to know if it can be done. It's been tried before, of course. The two artists that immediately come to mind are Rodin and Kahlo, but even the explicit physical pain portrayed by those two don't make you hurt if you don't have the memory of pain readily available. Art like this connects on an emotional level, not a physical level. I don't know if it's even possible for art to make you hurt like I think it ought to; maybe this is impossible. Well, impossible without performance art with audience participation, anyway.

I used to write poetry, some of which was pretty decent. These days, though, my skill with language is so poor it disgusts me. Sometimes I can manage a well structured paragraph, but the spark of beauty I used to see in what I wrote eludes me. Now, I only convey information. I've tried off and on to pick up writing again, but have had no luck, so part of my Grand Plan for Happiness involves learning other kinds of art. I'm currently taking a pottery class at the local community college. It's pretty low key, basic stuff, and I'm not very good at it. My unfamiliarity with the medium plus the pain in my hands and arms from handling the clay conspire to make me too clumsy. When I started the class I thought that something I make with my hands ought to express pain the most clearly, but I don't think pottery is going to work out.

Music is out- I tried for years to be good at it and I'm just not. Photography is interesting but frankly most of the things I take pictures of are either beautiful or interesting intellectually; pain is not a purely visual thing, being a collection of invisible nerve impulses, and barring taking a camera into an emergency surgery theater, I don't think photography is the right medium to capture it. Drawing and painting are less literally visual, and although I've never shown any talent for either I'm curious about taking some sort of class. The only place that offers drawing classes, though, (that I know of) is the community college, and the classes there are on a semester system so nothing starts up again until at least the summer.

In the meantime I have some books on basic drawing out from the library, and I'm listening to Modest Mouse for inspiration.

Cliff Cave Park

2008-02-19T15:26:00.000-08:00

In the abyss

2008-02-17T12:04:00.000-08:00

I was going to go out to the park today and take some pictures. There's a park I found on the internet that isn't too far from here and appears to have both a cave (although you need a permit to go spelunking) and a good view of the Mississippi River, and someday soon I swear I'm going to go and take pictures there. Not today, though, today the trees are whipping around and it's been raining off and on and the sky glowers like we should be expecting a thunderstorm. I suppose it would be possible to take pictures in those conditions, but it doesn't sound all that appealing. So instead of a nice photo post, here's a quote from the book I'm reading:

[Suffering] alienates me from my established moorings, blurring what was once clear discernment of the order of things. As the microcosm of the body crumbles in pain, so does the cosmos itself. The world that once made sense, that was once meaningfully whole, founded and guaranteed by a God who sits enthroned over chaos, suddenly crumbles under overwhelming torrents. Suffering is radically uncreative. It undoes the world.

Pain is an abyss. To be in pain is to be in the abyss. And indeed, when I am in it, even when I am with another who is in it, it is as though the abyss of suffering is overtaking the entire world. ... [T]he body in pain is an embodiment of chaos, a chaos monster, whose chaos spreads like poison from the individual body to the entire universe.

From Religion and Its Monsters, by Timothy K. Beal. The book is not on the atrocities committed in the name of religion, which is what I first thought when I saw the title on the shelf at the library; it's about the monstrous as portrayed in religious texts from the ancient Near East and also the religious as portrayed in monster stories, although I haven't read that far yet. The above passage is from the opening of a chapter on the book of Job, and the portrayal of Leviathan, Yam, and the sea monsters in that story. What I've read so far has been quite interesting.

the sticky-sweet taste of vomit clinging to my teeth

2008-02-15T20:12:00.000-08:00

I stopped taking fluoxetine today. Today was only the fourth day since I started taking it; this is certainly not a record for me, but still I worry that I'm not giving the medication a fair chance. Maybe I'm really not.

It's gotten so that I expect that any new medication will make me ill right off. My memory for pain and illness is hazy but somehow the fear doesn't diminish with the sharpness of the memory, so although I no longer remember exactly what it felt like the time trazodone made me ill, or the time Effexor made me ill, I do remember laying in bed wondering if I ought to call 9-1-1, wondering if I was dying. I remember the vomiting, and the wanting to vomit, the dozing for a day and half broken by bouts of pain, the tremors and the rapid heartbeat, the feeling of being about to faint, the feeling of things being very not right.

I remember that no doctor has ever even tried to explain why this happens to me.

Some of this I remember more clearly because it happened again this morning. The nausea, the lightheadedness and tremors, the spacey fatigue. My stomach clenches remembering it.

The worst part of it all, though, is the fear. I got lucky this time. The sickness passed in only a few minutes; by anyone's standards it was almost nothing at all. But when it hit me, I didn't know that was how it was going to happen, and the fear was almost overwhelming. It scares me deep down, this sensation that my body is going wrong. I look into this pit of unknown sickness and I see death, or rather, since nothing is clear but the conviction of danger, I smell death. The scent of it sticks to me and although I don't really believe that taking one more 10mg dose of fluoxetine will kill me still the fear has a solid hold of me and I just can't make myself take it.

I honestly don't know if I'm being prudent and reasonable and coping well, or if I'm just a coward. Fear makes it easy to justify a decision and I suspect that the wise thing to do is to continue taking these pills until they either make me seriously ill for days or my body gets used to them. There's just something about making a clear choice to do something that you believe will harm you (and won't benefit anyone) that is incredibly difficult. It's what kept me from starting this medication for so long, and maybe now it's keeping me from giving it a fair chance to work. I wish I knew, but I can't tell.

look me in the eye

2008-02-12T14:21:00.000-08:00

I was wandering through the library the other day and, on the New Books shelf, I noticed look me in the eye: my life with asperger's, by John Elder Robison (and now I see Mr. Robison has a blog, which I will have to add to my reading list). The book is, obviously, a memoir that focuses on life with Asperger's Syndrome. I've been interested in autism and autism-spectrum disorders for awhile now; oddly enough, a lot of the crackpot alternative "cures" for things like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue are also billed as cures for autism, or are closely related to the "cures" for autism. Techniques like the elimination of metallic tooth fillings, or candida, or mold in your house, the use of acupuncture, or massive doses of the vitamin of your choice, or eating only organic whole food, or positive (magical) thinking, are all sold as cures for both autism and fibromyalgia. There was even a scientist on the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome forum I used to frequent who hypothesized that a regimen of dietary supplements developed for autistic children was actually the cure for CFS (registration required). (As a side note, the Methylation Protocol did seem to have some effect, as it made some people feel slightly better before making them horribly ill. The world of alternative medicine is a disturbing place.)

Some of this overlap is no doubt due to the thinking of the sellers of these "cures," which is "medical science can't solve Problem X, so the solution for Problem X is clearly this bit of quackery that makes me so much money." But there is also this sense that both autism and fibromyalgia are somehow caused by significant systems in the brain going subtly wrong, and this, to me, is very interesting. This kind of connection makes me wish I could stand formal schooling long enough to have a chance at becoming a scientist on the cutting edge of research into these questions; how typical of the world that the pain that motivates me to ask these questions is the very same thing that keeps me from being able to find the answers.

The science of pain isn't the only thing that interests me in autism-spectrum disorders, though. Robison's stories of growing up with Asperger's reminded me very forcefully of what it was like for me growing up. Not that I think I have Asperger's; I know how easy it is to read a description of anything like this and self-diagnose, simply because the mind is complicated and diverse enough that whatever it is you're looking for there, you'll probably find it. However, so many of his stories that focus specifically on what Asperger's is are things I can relate to that the whole idea of Asperger's intrigues me.

For example, he writes about being yelled at for not looking people in the eye during conversations; no one ever really yelled at me, but I certainly agree with him that looking people in the eye is unnatural and weird and uncomfortable. He talks about learning to drive, and then having problems driving and talking at the same time; when I'm in traffic and my husband is sitting next to me and he tries to talk to me, even to give directions, I ask him to stop because the distraction makes me panic, and I even have to turn down the radio so it's quiet. I relate to his description of how being petted- constant gentle physical contact- is so soothing to his nervous system that it keeps him from fidgeting without even noticing it, and some of what he says about how he relates to machines reminds me of the way I used to relate to political ideas, before I got hurt. The usefulness of training oneself to converse in ways that other people will find normal is something that I discovered as a teenager. Also, the clarity of focus that he describes as part of his savant-like ability to work with sound circuits is something that I have experienced. The single-minded abstractness required to work at a certain level of brilliance is something that I had, on occasion, but that I've lost since fibromyalgic fatigue clouded my thought processes.

The most emotional parallel between my life and Mr. Robison's life, though, is his stories about making friends as a child- or rather, failing to make friends. The bewildering emptiness of being unable to connect with the people around you, the desperate loneliness of knowing that the people you want to be friends with think you're weird and alien, all of that is very familiar to me. My childhood was, if my memories are accurate, thoroughly unhappy. It is tempting, as my brother said in comments on this post, to blame that unhappiness on my external situation, on the church or the school or the kids at school or my parents, but if I am quite honest with myself the truth is that nothing in my childhood, including my parents' religion, did quite so much damage to me as did my failure to make friends.

It's enough to make me wish that when I was young, someone had told me that I had Asperger's, even if that diagnosis wasn't justified. If I had had a diagnosis to explain why I felt no connection with other people, would I have believed for years that there was something wrong with me that made me impossible to love? I don't know. It's impossible to know what things would be like if the past was different, but I can't help but think that if someone had just recognized that I had a problem I could have been a whole lot happier.

In my dreams I've found this place

2008-02-09T15:11:00.000-08:00

About a week and a half ago I went to the emergency room with blinding abdominal pain accompanied by frequent vomiting and that intense feeling you get of things being not right. Turns out I had kidney stones and an infection to go with them. At the ER, I got a prescription for Vicodin, among other things, to deal with the pain, but I didn't get it filled right after being discharged because I've tried Vicodin before for my fibromyalgia pain and it does nothing whatsoever to alleviate the pain, but it does make me vomit, and I was doing enough of that already.

After I was discharged from the ER, though, the pain got bad again quickly and I eventually sent my husband to the pharmacy to pick up my Vicodin prescription. I took it, and it dramatically reduced the amount of pain I was feeling from the kidney stones. However, at the same time I was in pain from my fibromyalgia because I'd been laying down for over twenty-four hours at that point, with breaks only to go to the bathroom or vomit. My shoulders and back were compressed from being immobile and the pain grew to the point where it was about 3/4s as bad as the kidney stone pain was without any medication at all. Once I took the Vicodin, the kidney stone pain was reduced by 85% or more, but the fibromyalgia pain was not affected at all, just like usual. I only had one episode of vomiting that I think was due to the medications, too; despite the lack of relief of my fibromyalgia pain, I was pretty pleased with this outcome.

I assume doctors are aware of this difference in medication efficacy between pains; thinking on it, they must be, or why would they develop drugs like Lyrica specifically for nerve pain? I haven't heard a doctor articulate this difference before, though, and you'd think that, as a patient with a chronic pain condition, I would have a fair chance of hearing it if they were in the habit of talking about it. It makes me curious, though, if whether in my lifetime I will see the development of pain treatments that acknowledge all the different kinds of pain. I have this theory that the way our bodies sense pain is much more complicated than medical science currently acknowledges. My experience with kidney stones suggests that if you view opiates like Vicodin as acting primarily to block pain receptors in the brain so that pain signals don't get through (which I believe is more or less accurate), there has to be more than one set of pain receptors, or more than one way in which those receptors accept information, and perhaps whole different systems built for sensing different kinds of pain.

In Pain: the Science of Suffering, by Patrick Wall, Dr. Wall describes the traditional medical model for pain as something like a contraption where at one end you knock a ball with a hammer to start it rolling on its path and then at the other end once the ball gets there it rings a bell: injury equals nervous system reaction equals pain. This traditional model is clearly sadly lacking, and often cruelly misleading, and I'm interested to see what medical science is going to discover to put in it's place.

and you were walking sideways too

2008-02-07T19:31:00.000-08:00

I forget how I got there (perhaps via The Digital Cuttlefish), but I was reading Pharyngula yesterday and this morning. The author of the blog recently was in a debate with a creationist on the radio and so several of the posts were about intelligent design as a scientific theory and its lack of merit in the scientific arena. It's all very interesting. To say that my scientific education was neglected in high school is an understatement; I don't think my parents would have allowed me to study evolutionary biology in any form were they consulted about it, and my own lack of interest in the hard sciences at the time ensured that I didn't put the effort in to pursue it behind their backs (unless you count reading science fiction of every variety, which certainly exposed me to ideas my parents didn't approve of, but sadly didn't educate me in the specifics of biology).

Recently, I've been on a kick to educate myself independently, as part of accepting that I won't be able to go back to formal schooling as a path to employment any time soon. I want to know things, and my general desire to know everything has focused more on science lately, mostly because of some reading I've done about the medical science behind pain, the nervous system and the brain and so forth. My knowledge is horribly shallow, but one of the benefits of this is that when I come across things that I ought to already know, they seem incredibly fascinating. Take, for example, the evolution of whales. Ever since I read David Brin's Startide Rising and The Uplift War as a freshman in high school, I've thought dolphins are probably the coolest animals ever. Now, thanks to Pharyngula, I've learned that the not only are dolphins and whales amazing as they are, but their evolution is also endlessly fascinating. And here's a Wikipedia article that gives similar but less information, but has pictures.

It kind of makes me sad that my level of interaction with this information is on the level of a sixth grader with dolphin posters on the wall: "ooo, what neat pictures!" I should probably think about taking a community college class in biology or something. If only I were, you know, rich.

One intelligent thought that I do have on the subject is related to an idea I saw at Greta Christina's Blog. Well, the idea originates in a book she talks about, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): there is a process by which we humans, instead of confessing mistakes and changing our actions, justify and excuse our wrong decisions, sometimes building huge constructs to show why we weren't wrong to do what we did. And part of that process is that when we've convinced ourselves that a mistake was wisdom and then we're confronted with a counter argument, we can't confront it rationally, because we can't admit mistakes. So instead we get defensive and angry and so on. Everyone does this, it's a feature of the brain.

So how does this relate to evolution?

Evolutionary biologists, and I suppose other types of scientists who argue for evolution, try to argue with creationists on a scientific field, and creationists have attempted to argue back, developing things like Intelligent Design and the Creation Museum. The problem is, in a purely scientific arena, creationists can't win. There is a pretense in creationist circles that they can, but it's pretty clear to me that in fact they can't. Scientifically, the case against creationism is made and scientists who know this and still have to argue with creationists about it are frustrated by the fact that these people don't realize what's going on.

The problem is, creationism is a necessary part of the supporting rationalization that has been built to sustain a belief in a God who is good, omniscient and omnipotent. Scientists who attack creationism are attacking part of a belief structure that is mistaken, but getting people to admit a mistake, particularly one of this magnitude, isn't a matter of simply laying out a true argument, it's a tricky finagle that, depending on the person you're trying to persuade, isn't always possible.

There are a lot of people who claim a general belief in God while also acknowledging that evolutionary theory is true, so this claim that creationism is necessary for belief in God might seem to be a little out there. It's true, though.

This is how it goes. There is a classic philosophical question to do with the existence of God, the Question of Suffering, as in, if God is good, powerful, and all-knowing, why do random storms come out of the sky and kill dozens of people? It seems that this could happen if God didn't know about it, or couldn't stop it, or didn't care, but doesn't seem compatible with the definition of God in the major monotheistic religions.

There are two explanations that I've heard for this question in the Christian tradition in which I was raised, and although I could be wrong, I think they're the answers generally accepted to be correct by Christian theologians. First, there's the idea that God created a perfect world and then humans came along and messed everything up, and second, there's the idea that in fact this is a perfect world, the best of all worlds, and it only seems to be flawed and full of suffering because we don't understand God's ineffable plan which is actually both morally good and beneficial for us in the long run.

The creationist underpinnings of the first answer are pretty clear: in the beginning there was a perfect Eden, God made Adam and Eve and everything was perfect until Eve ate the apple. Once you introduce the idea of a gradual emergence of human intelligence over generations, in a world that pre-existed humanity by a great deal of time, you can still posit the existence of sin, but you can't blame suffering on it. If sin is a human invention, but tornadoes and landslides and forest fires predate humanity, sin can't be to blame for these disasters. Even if you assume some sort of evolutionary step in one generation where pre-humans gave birth to humans and this first generation of humans is responsible for the existence of sin because one of them 'ate the apple,' real or metaphorical, you still have the problem of the time when those first humans were children, innocent and yet subject to cold and hunger and natural disaster. As this whole fanciful scenario shows, if you accept evolution you cannot blame sin for suffering, and honestly I don't think anyone really tries anymore. If I recall correctly, this was one of the early arguments for why evolution couldn't possibly be true, though.

The second answer, that God is Unknowable, is a little more complicated because sometimes it's invoked as a way of simply saying, "I have no idea what's going on but instead of trying to figure it out I'm just going to embrace these conclusions about God that I already have and like." It can also be used as a genuine argument, though, and often is, by people who are smart and thoughtful and fairly openminded, for example some of the community at Slacktivist. This idea- that God has a plan that we humans can't comprehend because it's so complicated or whatever, so what appears to be completely gratuitous and inexplicable horror is actually part of a good plan- isn't decimated by the time line of evolution, but the two still cannot co-exist.

The mechanics of evolution require suffering to work. Natural selection, environmental pressure, and competition with other species are all abstract ways of saying misery and death to the innocent. Without pressures that kill those who can't cope, species would never differentiate. Suffering is a feature of the process that resulted in the world as it is, not an anomaly, not something that the world could do without.

When I was a good little church kid, I used to memorize Bible verses. One of the tear-jerkers was Jeremiah 29:11: "For I know the plans I have for you," says the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." It's possible to reconcile evolution, and the suffering it entails, with the idea of a God with a plan, but not the God who promises a plan to prosper his people. People who accept evolution and the suffering it requires are left with either a God who is amoral at best and sociopathic at worst, or no God at all.

All of this means that, for people of a certain religious persuasion, creationism absolutely must be true. Evidence of fact doesn't enter into the equation because evidence for evolution threatens these basic elements of their worldview, and scientists who try to argue for evolution are using rational arguments to combat a gut terror of a Godless world. It's an interesting situation.

On qualifications

2008-02-06T15:28:00.000-08:00

So the primaries were yesterday, and I was well enough to go out and vote. I didn't vote for Clinton, mostly because of her foreign policy. The last thing this country needs is another warmaker, and she's shown that she doesn't have a strong ideological objection to preemptive war. I couldn't vote for her, but I sure wanted to.

I don't watch TV news, since my attention span can't take a lot of blow-dried people saying the same thing over and over for very long. I get my news from various points on the internet, so I sometimes miss the memes that infect the TV. However, I've picked up the impression that a lot of the talk about why people vote for Clinton has to do with whether or not women are voting for her just because she's a woman (and I guess whether or not men aren't voting for her just because she's not a man, although there is a slight possibility that that question gets asked less often). I think the way the meme goes is that of course people who vote for a woman simply because she's a woman are emotional, irrational and politically ugly people who shouldn't be allowed to vote, because elections should be decided on the issues and not gut reactions. If I were a proper blogger I'd have links to people like Chris Matthews backing up this interpretation of the situation, but sadly I'm not a particularly proper blogger, so if you want that go read Echidne or Shakesville; they know what they're doing.

I'm just going to suggest that maybe voting for a woman just because she's a woman isn't such a bad thing. Being a woman is a singularly different experience than being a man. In every area of life, in everything you do, the expectations people have for you are different, the challenges you face are different, and the shit you have to put up with to get along is much, much different. This is true not because of some biological difference between the sexes but because of the way our society operates. A woman who has risen to Hillary Clinton's position has faced and overcome challenges that a male politician in her position has never encountered in his entire life. Hillary Clinton, simply because she is a woman, is a stronger person than most of the other candidates have to be, and I have immense respect for because of it.

Not only has her rise to power demonstrated greater strength than a similar male rise to power would demonstrate, but because she is a woman she knows what it's like to deal with discrimination. She knows what it's like to be completely and utterly dismissed because of her gender. Like I wrote about a few weeks ago, the only way to really sustain a belief in the reality of discrimination is to be subject to it continually, and honestly there's no way in the world that she will ever be free of the attempts at humiliation. The "iron my shirt," "make me a sandwich," "get back in the kitchen" comments will never end until she stops trying to be a part of public life, and by this point the hate is so ingrained that I expect that the mouth-breathers will continue to insult her until after she's dead. This means that she knows what its like to be powerless, and while not everyone who believes in discrimination champions the down-trodden, the belief itself is a valuable asset for anyone who seeks to lead a country.

Being a woman doesn't make you more qualified to be President than being a man does. But being a politically powerful woman in modern America does, I think, make you more qualified to be President than being a politically powerful man does. It makes me wish she wasn't such a hawk so I could have voted for her with a clear conscience, and honestly, like Melissa at Shakesville, if she does end up the Democratic nominee I will vote for her in November and then cry with joy because I'm just so goddamn happy to have a woman in the running.

Of course, a lot of this applies to Obama as well, although the discrimination he faced/faces is different, and although I don't have the personal connection of sharing the experience of the same kind of discrimination, I'll probably get all misty if I end up voting for him also.

all we have is an old ball of string

2008-01-22T21:18:00.001-08:00

There is a certain kind of children's story, a formula that is quite popular. The quintessential example of it is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: the story of a child who is perfectly ordinary in our world, who travels through a magical portal to another land, where they play a key role in the battle between good and evil. There was a time when almost all the stories I read followed this pattern, promising another world, a world where struggle had meaning and bravery was worth something. I wanted so badly for this to be true that I'm sure that if wanting could make anything real, this would have become real.

It didn't, of course. Looking back, I wonder if my desperation was a yearning toward a better world, or fear spurring me to get away from the situation I was in, although maybe that question isn't even a true question; maybe it was both. I thought for a while that I had a grip on things in the real world that I wanted enough to keep me from wishing I was away, but these days I'm feeling it again: the urge to escape, to run away, to abandon my life to become a different person in a world where the colors are deeper, the pains fiercer and the joys brighter.

The problem is that everything that I want to escape from is what I would take with me. My physical pain, my bad skin and limp hair, my aspie personality and my preoccupation with death are not things I can separate from myself and so I am stuck. My prison bars are made of my flesh, and even if a doorway opened in front of me and I walked through it I would be imprisoned exactly the same.

I tell myself this over and over, but the desire to drop everything and run won't leave me alone. I hear a roadtrip in the music on the radio, I walk to the mailbox and the decaying leaves on the lawn smell of old-growth forest paths. The distant sound of the highway sounds like the ocean, the heating oven shimmers like the empty desert, and the ache to be somewhere else is almost physical.

This afternoon I went to the park. It was freezing cold and the park was empty, although there were footprints in the dusting of snow that said that one or two people had been there before me. I wrapped myself up in a scarf and walked along taking pictures of the brittle, brown plants. There was a spot where, looking through the leafless branches, I could see that off the paved running path there was a break in the bushes that could be walked through; the snow made it through the brush where branches had been pushed aside, highlighting the way like a white ribbon. I'm not usually one for trampling on wildlife off the marked paths, but there was no one else in shouting distance today and I couldn't resist the sensation of leaving what I knew.

In the end, the way came out again and I was back in reality, still the same person I've always been. I think there probably is no way to escape.

2008-01-19T11:17:00.000-08:00

I'm finally feeling better after being sick for a week; I have a phlegmy cough and I'm still blowing my nose every so often but I think the fever is gone at last and I don't feel as miserable as I did. The great thing about being sick is that you can get better, and once you get better life just feels grand. To celebrate, I went for a walk around the block.

Unfortunately, although it's sunny and cheerful-looking out, it's about ten degrees. My feet are still frozen into little blocks. The sky is terribly gorgeous, though.

Sweet Potato Soup

2008-01-14T06:11:00.000-08:00

I made this soup yesterday. It's kind of like chowder and super tasty, so I thought I'd write the recipe down to prevent my forgetting it. It's easiest if the potatoes are left over from something else, but there's nothing wrong with cooking a potato for the soup, they don't need to be cold or anything.

1 already cooked sweet potato, skinned and mashed
1 stalk of celery, chopped
1/3-1/2 medium red onion, chopped (sweet onions would probably also work but I like red ones)
some butter to fry the onions in
1/2 cup frozen or canned corn
1 cup (or so) milk
some water
salt to taste
black pepper to taste (I use maybe 1/2 a teaspoon)

You can add more vegetables as you have them. This soup began as a kind of leftover mashup, and this is what I had. I can verify that it's good this way, though.

First, fry the onion for a minute or two in a pot, then add the celery and fry for another minute or so, so the onion is more than halfway translucent and the celery is still crunchy. Remove from heat, and add the potatoes and corn. I never manage to mash the potatoes properly, so at this point I make sure there aren't any large chunks left in the potatoes by poking them around with a spoon. Add milk and enough water to make the soup the consistency you want it, which will depend on the size of the potato. Last time I made this I had a rather small potato and it took maybe a cup of water, although I can't be sure because I just stuck the pan under the faucet and filled it until it looked right. If you don't use enough water, the potato will suck it all up and instead of soup you'll have mash.

Return the pot to heat and warm it until just before boiling. Add spices to the point where it's a little salty and slightly peppery. Before you add the salt this soup will be pretty sweet, but it takes a surprisingly small amount to make it taste like chowder so don't get too enthusiastic. When it comes to the pepper, though, enthusiasm isn't a bad thing; I always end up adding more in the end. Garlic powder is optional.

This recipe makes approximately two servings, but of course you could make a huge pot of it if you happen to have several left over sweet potatoes.

No more moon in the water

2008-01-11T00:15:00.000-08:00

The ads on top of the blog here were all about meditation today. I don't think I've written anything about meditation... perhaps I did and don't remember it but that wouldn't make much sense since I've tried meditation as a relaxation technique and I fail utterly at it, so what would I have to write about? A more reasonable explanation is that Google's ad picking mechanism is utterly irrational.

However, I did pick up a book of Zen koans from the library the other day, and I've been reading it. Needless to say, I don't understand it. Here is a koan that I don't understand:

No Water, No Moon
When the nun Chiyono studied Zen under Bukko of Engaku she was unable to attain the fruits of meditation for a long time. At last one moonlit might she was carrying water in an old pail bound with bamboo. The bamboo broke and the bottom fell out of the pail, and at that moment Chiyono was set free!
In commemoration, she wrote a poem:

In this way and that I tried to save the old pail
Since the bamboo strip was weakening and about to break
Until at last the bottom fell out.
No more water in the pail!
No more moon in the water!

Taqwacore

2008-01-08T06:36:00.000-08:00

This is like something out of a novel by Ursula K. LeGuin. I mean, look at it one way and it's a bunch of kids with no sense. Look at it another way and it's everything that is good about humanity, it is freedom out of oppression, it is life out of death, it is music giving people hope.

From the video:

I stopped trying to define punk around the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. They aren't so far removed as you'd think. Both began in tremendous bursts of truth and vitality but seem to have lost something along the way. The energy, perhaps, that comes from knowing that the world has never seen such positive force and fury and never would again. Both have suffered from sellouts and hypocrits, but also from true believers whose devotion has crippled their creative drive. Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing could be further from the truth... Like punk, Islam itself is a flag, an open symbol representing not things but ideas. You cannot hold punk or Islam in your hands, so what could they mean besides what you want them to?

Sexist views in the video game industry

2008-01-08T04:16:00.000-08:00

Via the f-word, I came across this editorial on sexism in the video game industry and also this blog post responding to it. The editorial's point was that video game companies are stupid for not marketing to women, because women do in fact play video games; the blogs point was, well: "Have you ever noticed how the instant someone points out that you shouldn’t treat women gamers like trash there’s instantly a swarm of commenters who trip all over themselves to be the first to reply “yes, you should!”"

As much as I'd like to pretend that this set of posts sparked a philosophical chain of thought and now I have something deep and meaningful to contribute on the subject of women who play video games and the designers/marketers who (fail to) market to them, I don't really have a conclusive contribution. I would like to have a solution; what I do have are some random thoughts on the subject.

+ Like the guy in the original editorial, people often assume that women don't like to play first person shooters or "violent" games because 'women are naturally nurturing and social.' I think women are actually just as violent as men and there are many other factors that influence the choices women make about gaming. One huge factor is the way games are made for and marketed to young men only. Another factor is the way those young men have been trained to believe that video games are an environment where the most vile and hateful conversation is funny. Battle Net is a more misogynistic, racist, homophobic environment than anywhere else I've seen on the Internet.

+ It seems like women are "casual gamers" by definition; so when it turns out that women play MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, instead of admitting that women can be hardcore gamers, people insist that MMOs are casual games. The women I know who play MMOs are often very expert and spend enormous amounts of time and energy ingame, so much so that we joke about addiction and obsession and not having real lives.

FPS games are seen as more "hardcore" than MMOs. I think this is partly because they're seen as more masculine. The big FPS that came out this winter was Team Fortress 2, which is innovative for a FPS because there are nine classes with different abilities that you can pick from to play in a fairly stereotypical 2 team battle scenario. Here's a picture of the nine different classes; apparently the designers of this game are not aware that only half the population of the world is male. I can't help but think that "testosterone" is associated with "hardcore" in the minds of people who design video games.

+ A common characteristic of game design is the idea that if men are playing, they prefer to play a male character, while women are supposed to prefer playing female characters. I don't think this is actually true, though. I know personal anecdote doesn't prove points, but nevertheless, in my experience people tend to pick characters of either gender based on things other than identification with the character's gender. For example, I know men who play female characters because they tend to be smaller, so your character takes up less space on the screen and you get a better view of what's going on. I know women who play male characters so they can fit in with misogynistic male players more smoothly. I know people who play both male and female characters based on the way the character looks, for example men who roll female blood elf paladins because the male blood elf model is ridiculous looking and you have to be a blood elf to be a paladin. Anyway, the point is, marketing things to women by including female characters would probably be so unexceptional to male video game players that they wouldn't even notice it as something to do with equality.

My take on the situation is definitely not authoritative, as I don't play games from large swathes of the market (RTS isn't my thing and console games are out when you're too poor to afford a console). From the little I've seen, though, it seems like it would only take a very few changes in perspective by designers and players for the video game world to be exceedingly more egalitarian.

Which would be nice; it would make my world that much more comfortable if I could play games like TF2 without feeling like I'm contributing to my own oppression.

A Failure of Imagination

2008-01-07T04:13:00.000-08:00

There's a liquor store in the area here called "Dirt Cheap Cigarettes & Beer." Classy name notwithstanding, they're pretty scuzzy; they don't even have a website or anything. They do run TV ads, though. I saw one on Comedy Central the other day, during a routine by Dave Chappelle. I was sitting next to my husband, and there were a few of his friends over to plan for a D&D session they were going to have (my husband is a bigger nerd than even I am), although mostly we were just sitting watching Dave, because he's such a fabulous comedian.

These ads were of the cheap, not-made-by-an-agency variety, with the store owner standing in front of a still picture of his store talking about the specials they had. Pretty unremarkable until it got to the ending slogan, "The More She Drinks, the Better You Look." As in, "shop at Dirt Cheap, because the more she drinks, the better you look!"

I was shocked. Now, I grew up in a fairly liberal area, and didn't watch television growing up, so maybe I was sheltered from some of this kind of thing. But on the other hand, I was a woman in the Army, and I've encountered a number of 'women belong in the kitchen or giving blow jobs' types, and even more 'all women are liars' types (many of whom, oddly enough, have been women). Anyway, naive or not, I was shocked. The idea that a company would choose to associate itself with rape, would choose to advocate rape as a way to convince people to buy its products, just shocks me.

The ad itself, however, didn't upset me as much as the reaction to the ad of the people I was with. Now, we were watching comedy, and sometimes when you've been laughing for an hour things that you wouldn't normally find funny make you laugh. So when the ad got to the punchline and everyone laughed, I said something; I don't remember exactly what I said, but it was probably something along the lines of a rather humorless "I hate those ads. It makes my skin crawl to know that people think advocating that kind of thing is acceptable."

The response I got was not what I expected. The guys I was with defended the slogan. "It just means she'll appreciate you for buying her such great liquor. You might as well say, The More He Drinks, the Better You Look. Its a trashy slogan but they mean it to be funny. The store is just saying alcohol lowers inhibitions." I pointed out that in fact if someone doesn't want to sleep with you, plying them with alcohol until they can't say no is rape. RAPE. And everyone turned to look at M, who is male, a binge drinker, and has a few nasty stories that I keep trying not to hear, and bust out laughing. "M, you're in trouble now!" they said. At first I didn't get it- why was it so funny to say that M is a rapist? And then he says, "You're right, you're right- I'm a rape victim. Poor me!"

All this leads me to develop a hypothesis: discrimination is a lot like physical pain in that it's very difficult to believe in. These guys aren't bad guys; with the exception of M, none of them would ever approve of an actual rape of anyone, ever, and I only exclude him because he binge drinks to the point of unconsciousness and that has a serious effect on your judgment (speaking of which, why do girls always get told not to drink lest some asshole take advantage of them, but boys are never told not to drink lest they become the asshole?). All four of these guys have always treated me with the utmost respect, and I believe that while they may assign me motives and inclinations based on my gender they really do consider me a real person. They don't think rape by alcohol is funny because they're evil, they think it's funny because it doesn't happen to them.

I don't mean that they think rape is OK as long as it happens to other people. I mean, when something doesn't affect you constantly, you don't really internalize the significance. It's the same way with pain. I am in constant physical pain; I am not able to let this completely slip my mind, ever, because I have to govern my movement so that I don't make it worse. However, I'm not always in excruciating, 'dowse me in gasoline and light me afire' pain; usually I just get a low, diffuse ache that flares up and down. When it's been awhile since I've pushed myself into real pain, I forget what it's like when my mind is overrun with agony. Once I forget, I start to disbelieve. I start to think, "pain isn't so bad. I should go for a walk. I should go to the grocery store. A neat band is coming to town, I should get tickets and go, it'll hurt but hurting isn't important."

My situation is unusual because as soon as I forget, my body reminds me. I forget what it's like to walk around the block, but then I do and I remember. However, when you don't get reminded on a regular basis, not only do you forget, but you start to disbelieve in the existence of pain that blocks rational thought with fire. Pain shrinks in your memory like everything else does, until it fits the lines your mind draws to make sense of your life. Agony doesn't make you mentally healthy, and so you stop believing in it. You can see this in doctors who refuse to prescribe certain pain medications, relatives who insist that an aversion to pain is actually laziness, disability systems that don't treat pain as disabling, physical therapists who insist that although they don't know why I'm in pain or how to treat it effectively, it's better that I be in pain than rely on assistive devices like a brace or a wheelchair. They aren't in pain; they don't believe in it, and they act accordingly.

I think that the mind treats discrimination the same way it treats pain: the experience is too awful to be borne, so it gets shut away. The memory is manipulated and bleached until it's bearable, and you end up not believing. This unfortunate feature of the brain, I think, is responsible not only for good men who laugh at rape jokes but also institutionalized injustice as it exists in our country today.

2008-01-05T03:18:00.000-08:00

After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
with a little patience

G'Kar is dead. Not the television character, the blogger, who wrote at Obsidian Wings. He and two other American soldiers were killed in an ambush, the first casualties of 2008.

Its funny how on the internet you can talk to people, briefly, about things that matter very much to you, and then drop away again, anonymous and perhaps forgotten. I don't comment frequently on other peoples' posts; my thoughts are too slow and I always find that after thinking for a while about my reflexive reactions to what I read, I reconsider. Nevertheless, I read, and find an odd one-sided friendship in eating the thoughts of strangers. You get to know people, even if you never really talk to them. You read their thoughts and those thoughts become a part of your own thoughts, and even if you disagree you have still become a different person because you read what they wrote.

I read what he wrote, and now he's dead.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?

the birds can always fly

2008-01-04T07:28:00.000-08:00

These pictures don't fully communicate what it is to be standing on the brown earth, the air so frozen all the water is wrung out of it, watching the pastel grays and blues and oranges of the sunrise, alone but for the cold, a subtle presence encroaching on the boundaries of self, turning everything translucent and alien. These pictures don't do this justice, but they are what the camera captured.

2008-01-04T05:02:00.001-08:00

A lot of blogs have been doing an end of the year thing where the writers pick out their best post of the year and repost it, or pick out their favorite post by someone else, and link to it. I'm not much for this end of the year nonsense, and I don't have a post of my own to put up again. I suppose I shouldn't even pretend that I think this is the best post I've read all year; I don't think you can make that kind of statement when you can't remember 85% of the year at all, although I suppose you can't stop people from saying these things anyway. All that aside, here is a post from Elizabeth at Screw Bronze!, that says some of the things I would like to say about pain. Her pain is not the same as mine, but the experience of agony marks us in the same ways and what she writes is true.

Things happening for no reason at all.

2008-01-04T02:25:00.000-08:00

I tried to write a post today, about companionship and the elusiveness of genuine human contact, but it turns out my quota for angst is already full. I suppose I should write about the Iowa Caucuses as an alternative, but I think I will save my rant about Huckabee for some other time- preferably after he gets his ass handed to him in New Hampshire.

you can't see the thin air

2007-12-28T17:21:00.000-08:00

I had a medical appointment today. I was under the impression that it was supposed to be a referral for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, so I went in all ready to explain that techniques for correcting irrational beliefs in order to improve one's outlook on life are all well and good, but if my beliefs are rational CBT isn't going to be helpful. I firmly believe that my expectation that my health is not going to significantly improve in the future is realistic, and furthermore, that accepting this hard truth is more helpful and healthy than continuing to deny it in the hope that positive thinking will magically cure me.

Turns out this referral wasn't actually for CBT, it was for drugs. The doctor I saw wasn't at all interested in hearing about my memory, concentration, or comprehension problems, and she wasn't at all interested in my history of extremely bad reactions to ridiculously low doses of various medications. What she was interested in was writing me a prescription for Prozac.

I'm not excited about the prospect of taking Prozac, although I agreed to it, of course; I don't ever feel comfortable not agreeing to a suggested course of treatment, because I'm very afraid that if I am ever the least bit non-compliant, for ever after every doctor will point to it and say "Well, it's too bad you didn't agree to this treatment, or you'd be well now. It's your fault you're ill." I'm not sure how rational this fear is, although it has some basis in how I was treated in the Army. Anyway, taking Prozac isn't that big a deal. I am fairly certain it will make me ill just like Effexor did, and I will vomit for a few days, lay about in bed feeling like I'm dying and then I'll recover and not take it anymore. I just wish that I could hurry up and get past the phase of treatment where doctors insist that making me more ill is the best way to treat me.

When going through my medical history with this most recent doctor, we discussed previous medications' lack of benefit on the pain relieving front. She was concerned that I may not be taking medication with the right attitude; her worry is that my cynicism is actually preventing the medication from working like it's supposed to, causing medications that would otherwise relieve my pain to do nothing.

This philosophy that attributes supernatural powers to my emotions is, I think, the worst thing about going to the doctor. I'm not a religious person, nor am I superstitious. I let go of my childhood faith when I could no longer convince myself to pretend to believe in a gigantic Santa in the sky causing good things to happen to good people and bad things to happen to the bad; I couldn't even believe in fate. Things happen because they are caused to happen by real things that exist in the real world, not because you wish they would happen, or pray for them to happen, or believe that they will happen, or deserve for them to happen. This is true of disasters and good fortune alike, and it's true whether I like it or not. It's also true whether you like it or not, which is why mostly I don't give a crap what other people believe about the world. I recognize that there is a human inclination to assign causation to things, and as this seems to be a fairly universal trait (that even I haven't missed out on) I might as well accept it.

It does get to be a problem, though, when it interferes with my health care. I wish I knew how to change things.

2007-12-25T22:08:00.001-08:00

Whenever someone asks me how I am, I am reluctant to lie and say that I am doing well, but I am also reluctant to lay bare the truth; I am afraid if I mention constantly how much pain I am in, people will see me as nothing but a whining hypochondriac. So in order to keep people asking me how I am, I don't tell them how I am. Instead, I tell them that I'm cold. It communicates that I am clearly miserable, and yet it's not so negative that no one wants to hear about it. In fact, in the current situation it's interpreted as a reaction to my first winter in the Midwest, and so people are eager to tell me all about how cold its been and how to stay warm and about their thyroid problem that made them always cold.

However, for Christmas this year, I got: a sweater, a down coat, slippers, a hat-glove-scarf set, long underwear, and the most fabulous electric blanket.

I'm going to need a new strategy.

2007-12-24T22:58:00.000-08:00

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-W.B. Yeats

the Evil Hermit

2007-12-24T01:17:00.001-08:00

It's 3am Christmas Eve, and I'm sitting awake contemplating the merits of consuming large quantities of energy drinks and coffee tomorrow so that on Christmas morning I will be vomiting my guts out. I wouldn't have to go out and be cozy with people whose names I can't remember. I wouldn't have to smile and nod and say "thank you" when people give me things I don't want and pretend like I feel like family. I could stay home in bed alone, ill but at peace.

War:

2007-12-23T03:48:00.000-08:00

You can’t end it by disarmament conferences. You can’t eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can’t wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation—it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages—all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers—yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders—everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.

Why shouldn’t they?

They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered.

They aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren’t hungry. The soldiers are!

Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket—that and nothing else.

- "War is a Racket", Major General Smedley Butler, 1935

2007-12-17T14:35:00.000-08:00

Too scattered to blog, but I thought I'd preserve this link. It's a good post: You Don't Have to Be Pretty.

Til we crack the code

2007-12-06T13:31:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney gave a speech today somewhere in Texas, purportedly to rescue his campaign from the rise of Mike Huckabee, who is a Southern Baptist preacher. Romney is, of course, a Mormon, and he gave this speech hoping to calm fears about his religion among the evangelical base. I remember, when I was young, seeing books and pamphlets and videos that warned of the Evil Cult of Mormonism and equated it with Satanism and the Heaven's Gate cult (I really think that in some ways Heaven's Gate was preferred, as at least they had the decency to off themselves and save Good Christians the trouble), and so it amazes me that he thinks he ever had a chance of getting elected in 2008. The idea of the fundies being forced to choose between the Evil Cultist and Hitlery is amusing, but I really think they would mostly just stay home instead of voting.

Religion is a terribly political issue in this election, right up there with gender and probably more so than race. I've seen people freaking out because Obama's middle name is Hussein, which means he's a Muslim, never mind that he's a member of the United Church of Christ (I think). I've read at least three or four different articles about how the Democrats, those filthy atheists, have suddenly discovered the religious voter. Issues are cast in religious terms; even global warming is 'stewardship of the earth,' health care laws are moral because Jesus said to take care of the poor, and of course the War on Terror is an apocalyptic battle between Islam and Christianity.

While I've known enough religious people who are genuinely good to believe that religion in the public square is not necessarily pernicious, I think that it often can be. Christianity in the form of modern evangelical millenialism has influenced American public policy in subtle ways; I think it was at least partially responsible for the invasion of Iraq, it is certainly responsible for our support of Israel's rights over the rights of other countries and peoples, and it's responsible for things like abstinence-only sex ed and reduction in government support for contraception. Religion can be very very harmful.

Which is why it irritates me that the current electoral climate requires Presidential candidates to say things like this:

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

like Romney did today, in order to reassure voters that they're electable.

Contrast this with someone who did, in fact, get elected to the Presidency of the United States:

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814

(Ok, so maybe "elected to the Presidency" is a simplification, but he was Vice President and then President and, of course, wrote the Declaration of Independence and was a genuine Founding Father, and so maybe he ranks a little higher than Mr. Romney in the conservative hierarchy of political thought.)

Torture and Blubber

2007-12-05T01:16:00.000-08:00

While looking for the quote in the post below, I spent a fair amount of time browsing quotes from Kurt Vonnegut's books, as I was under the mistaken impression that the neon-tubes in the forehead idea was Vonnegut's. This is actually one of my more reasonable recent memory glitches; I mean, really, that sounds like something Vonnegut would write.

Anyway, I found this interesting little essay written by Vonnegut in 1971, titled "Torture and Blubber", which apparently was published in the New York Times. It was written about the war in Vietnam, but it applies to the war in Iraq equally well. A few gems from the piece:

I am sorry we tried torture, I am sorry we tried anything. I hope we will never try torture again. It doesn’t work. Human beings are stubborn and brave animals everywhere. They can endure amazing amounts of pain, if they have to.

and

The American armada to Indochina has been as narrow-minded and futile as the Spanish Armada to England was, though effectively more cruel. Only 27,000 men were involved in the Spanish fiasco. We are said to have more dope addicts than that in Vietnam. Hail, Victory.

Never mind who the American equivalent of Spain’s Philip II was. Never mind who lied. Everybody should shut up for a while. Let there be deathly silence as our armada sails home.