Your Monday moment of zen.
Kitchen counter, Viejo Rancho Lake. © 2006, 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
The current photo series is from my ‘favorites’ file, hence the dates jumping about
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 5:38 am Mon May 21 2012 | Comments(0) |
“It’s Full of Stars” — Scrivener’s Error is curmudgeonly about the Nebulas.
H.P. Lovecraft and Nikola Tesla: Paranormal Investigators — Hahaha. (Via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1){kind=small}
goulo
U.S. could lose aging eyes in the sky
European Physicists Smash Chinese Teleportation Record — The battle over distance records sets up a fascinating race to be the first to teleport to an orbiting satellite. God, I love living in the future.
A Close Pass of Saturn’s Moon Dione
For troops on Siachen Glacier, the elements are the enemy — Veterans of the India-Pakistan conflict on Siachen Glacier in Kashmir do not tell stories of battle, but of battling subzero temperatures, the wind and the altitude.
Criminal Exonerations: 2,000 Convicted Then Exonerated In U.S. Over Last 23 Years, Says Study — Does our criminal justice system make you feel safer? How safe would you feel if you were one of the wrongfully convicted? Or wrongfully executed? I’ve often said conservativism is a failure of both empathy and imagination. The way most American conservatives think about crime and punishment is one of the clearest examples of this.
B.C. student’s bra artwork sparks controversy over portrayal of Muslim dress — Ah, tolerance.
Faculty leave Baptist school, Shorter University, over “lifestyle” statement — Sometimes even Christianists and their enablers get it right. (Via Slacktivist Fred Clark.)
Tribalism and the cruelly weird idea of zero-sum human rights — Welcome to the world of conservative thought.
Compare and Contrast — Over at Editorial Explanations, Andrew Wheeler nails the difference between conservatives and liberals.
Obama could have a prayer among Ohio’s white evangelicals — A recent gathering of religious leaders in Ohio indicates that churches don’t necessarily march in lock step with the Republican Party. Could have fooled me.
A peek into an alternate reality — Rachel Maddow on Mittens. I don’t think Mitt Romney is stupid. I do think Romney is operating from the assumption that voters are stupid.
?otd: Why did your temperature start to rise?
5/21/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (full day of conferencing and critique)
Body movement: 30 minute suburban walk
Hours slept: 7.0 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo
Posted: 5:37 am Mon May 21 2012 | Comments(0) |
It’s been quite a good conference here professionally speaking, but last night I went to bed early feeling irritated and sour. This morning I woke up feeling depressed and upset.
I walked for an hour along San Antonio’s Riverwalk and tried to really get down into why I felt the way I did. Some facile explanations readily presented themselves, but even in the midst of my emotional distress, I recognized those for what they were. I think I eventually reached a better understanding, which in turn made me rather uncomfortable.
The fact that I was rather uncomfortable strikes me as a important, and as a reason to talk about this despite my first impulse to keep the whole business to myself in a fit of passive-aggressive sulking. This is especially true in the light of John Scalzi’s recent, excellent post on the Lowest Difficulty Setting.
Last night, well after all our formal events were concluded, about a dozen of us were in the conference suite goofing off, cutting up, and so forth, as one does. Alcohol had been flowing, a little of it into me. For me, this evening space at writing conventions and conferences among like-minded people has always been one of the few places in my life where I can really cut loose and be my unfettered self. Fast talking, flirty, potty mouthed, pun riddled, and rather over the top. Those of you who’ve known me for a while in real life have probably seen me in this mode.
Most of the time I’m Dad, or an employee, or a professional writer representing myself, my work and my field, or a cancer patient. (A hell of a lot of that last one.) Or I’m just some guy in the grocery store or the post office or whatever, going about his business. All of those are roles, adopted with varying degrees of self-consciousness. But that convention/conference party space is one of those rare places where I have always felt I can just be me.
Except it went wrong for me last night. To be clear right up front, not through anyone else’s bad behavior, as no one treated me badly at all, but through my own internal processes.
A joke with religious content was told. Someone was offended and left abruptly. I neither told the joke nor was upset by it, but I certainly made a strong material contribution to the fast-and-loose social environment that made that joke seem reasonable to the teller, and made all of us but one laugh uproariously.
In the wake of that moment, the bunch of us got into a lengthy, serious discussion about our social responsibilities to one another, what I in a moment of flipness called a “white people encounter group.” It was rather productive, especially given that a number of us were at least tipsy, and we were all pretty tired. It was also eye-opening for me.
I’ve been explicitly aware of the concept of privilege, as discussed in progressive social circles, since the late 1980s. The first time I can recall hearing the term with this meaning was listening to an interview on NPR in 1988 or so with Peggy McIntosh discussing her essay on white privilege and male privilege, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.
I’ve been thinking and writing about it both directly and indirectly for the quarter century since then. I’ve expended a lot effort in my personal life to avoid leveraging that privilege in areas where I do have control. Put very simply, for example, not cutting in front of the deli line because I’m the tall(ish) white guy standing in the crowd and the clerk points to me next.
I’m also co-parenting a child who is a female person of color. One of my primary jobs as her parent is prepare for her life by helping her become a happy, self-confident, intelligent young woman with enough wisdom and resilience to deal with all the stuff she’ll have to wade through that has simply never come my way.
As for me, in Scalzi’s terms, yeah, I’m playing life on the lowest difficulty setting. I sometimes joke that if I were fifty pounds lighter and $500,000 richer, I would be The Man. Except that’s not a joke, it’s true. And yes, I can point to a lot of obstacles in my life history from childhood sexual abuse to deep clinical depression in my teens and twenties to cancer in my forties, but all of those were overcome in part through my privilege as a white male, for example, by having the kind of family support and adult employment that gave me full access to high quality healthcare with excellent doctors who treated me with respectful attention. Even with all the crap, I’m still playing on the lowest difficulty setting.
What I realized last night, what depressed and upset me, was that my sense of being free and unfettered, of being able to cut loose and be myself, is itself a distinct form of privilege. Once we got serious, some of the women in the room were willing to speak up and explain that certain jokes which had passed earlier made them uncomfortable, but they didn’t want to ruin the mood by saying anything. I myself pointed out that there had been some psuedohomoerotic clowning around by straight guys, including me, which would probably have made any LGBTQ-identified people in the room uncomfortable, though no one had spoken up. I was sharply (and appropriately) corrected when I prefaced one of my comments by saying we now live in a culture where offense is in the eye of the beholder. That is certainly my experience, but I’m speaking and thinking from a position of privilege, almost all of it transparent to me as its beneficiary. As the other person pointed out, women are constantly being told by men what they should or shouldn’t be offended by. Probably including me, some of the time.
I feel like I lost something important last night. I feel like I lost a sense of unguarded social freedom. How I lost that sense of unguarded social freedom was by realizing deep in my gut something which I’ve known intellectually for years. That is, that for most people, that sense of unguarded social freedom never existed in the first place.
That makes me very, very sad.
I hate teachable moments, especially when I’m on the receiving end of them.
Posted: 6:57 am Sun May 20 2012 | Comments(5) |
Your Sunday moment of zen.
Flower. © 2006, 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
The current photo series is from my ‘favorites’ file, hence the dates jumping about
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 6:17 am Sun May 20 2012 | Comments(0) |
Sunny Skies over the Pacific Northwest — I think I can see my house from here.
New-found exoplanet is evaporating away
Birther controversy: ‘Obama might not make ballot’ — In a revival of the controversy surrounding US President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Arizona’s top election official has said it is “possible” Obama may not make the state’s November ballot due to unanswered questions about his birth place. shsilver
‘Metrosexual Black Abe Lincoln’ — Charles M. Blow dissects the latest Republican crazy.
?otd: How do you feel about teachable moments?
5/20/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (full day of conferencing and critique)
Body movement: 60 minute walk along San Antonio’s Riverwalk
Hours slept: 7.5 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo
Posted: 6:15 am Sun May 20 2012 | Comments(0) |
About four years ago here on the blog, I mentioned the concept of “giraffe rules” [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. As I said at the time:
“Please don’t eat the giraffe” rules […] are the kinds of rules any society has which no one ever thinks to spell out in so many words, until someone comes along who tries to eat the giraffe. If you’re a parent, you’re pretty familiar with these rules, because kids are always finding some giraffe to eat. If you hang out with writers, many of whom are the beneficiaries of what at the kindest could be called quirky socialization, you run into some of these same rules. (And of course, there are places in the world where “Please don’t eat the giraffe” may well be a needed social rule.)
So a while ago, the_child
“Why?” I asked her, quite curious about this utterance.
“Because you don’t give me very many rules.”
“Well,” I pointed out, “You don’t need a lot rules. You pretty much behave yourself. Parents make rules when kids do things they shouldn’t.”
Such as trying to eat the giraffe.
There are so many unwritten rules in society. Not just unwritten, but even unconscious. A favorite example of mine is the priority of seating in an automobile. With the partial exception of a socially flat group of peers (such as high school kids of the same gender and clique in the same year-class), we almost always know who’s going to sit where in a car without having to ask. If you begin to pick at how that works, it’s a pretty complex hierarchy with a lot of exception management. Who owns the vehicle? Who has the keys? Who is dating or married to whom? Who’s infirm or elderly? Who’s exceptionally tall or short? What’s the gender mix? What’s the age mix? And even for peers, there’s a protocol. Calling “shotgun”, for example.
Yet no one ever sits down and explains this to people. We all just know, by some magic osmosis. We’ll call these shotgun rules.
So there are giraffe rules, which are so obvious they aren’t normally stated at all, then there are the shotgun rules which are the opposite of obvious, maybe even vanishingly subtle, but they aren’t normally stated either. And believe me, being a parent brings both sets of rules to consciousness, especially if you have a kid like mine, who spends a lot of time analyzing other people’s behavior. Or likewise if your kid’s on the autism spectrum, you spend a lot of time explaining these rules.
What are your favorite examples of giraffe rules? What are your favorite examples of shotgun rules?
Posted: 6:27 am Sat May 19 2012 | Comments(2) |
Today is the second full day of Paradise Lost, the writing conference I’m at in San Antonio. We’ve got a good crew here, including fellow pro mentors John Joseph Adams and Steven Brust, as well as organizer Sean Kelley, my good friends @dratz and Mrs. @dratz, and ton of other fun, interesting people, including a guest appearance from creed_of_hubris
So far we’ve eaten way too much food, hot tubbed, drank, engaged in deeply inappropriate conversation, played several games of Bang!, drank, critiqued, discussed submittals and editorial etiquette, drank, eaten way too much food, talked a lot about writing, and drank.
Why the hell do I come to these things anyway? Oh, the food. And drinking. (Though in truth, very little of that for me and my liver.)
It’s a fun group having a fun time being writers together. I like this part of the writing life, a lot.
Meanwhile, I have a lecture to go be a part of shortly.
Posted: 6:25 am Sat May 19 2012 | Comments(0) |
Your Saturday moment of zen.
Flower. © 2006, 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
The current photo series is from my ‘favorites’ file, hence the dates jumping about
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 6:16 am Sat May 19 2012 | Comments(0) |
Study: Organic food turns people into jerks — Heh. Who knew? (Snurched from @jackwilliambell.)
Hybrid: 1910 — A somewhat peculiar piece of railroading history.
How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit
Bugs Help Measure Impact of New Transoceanic Highway on Amazon
Australasia has hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists find — Study of tree rings, corals and ice cores finds unnatural spike in temperatures that lines up with manmade climate change. Amazing how the liberals even manage to get tree rings and coral reefs onto the climate change conspiracy. Good thing we have the GOP to remind us that the truth isn’t before our lying eyes.
Legal Experts: Sodomy Is a Civil Right — Unfortunately, so is bigotry. And hypocrisy. (Via danjite
Gay Marriage: The Republican Love Affair With the Past — In 2005 the Supreme Court made sodomy legal in all 50 states and since then there have been absolutely no reports of anyone turning into a pillar of salt. To be fair to the conservative viewpoint, we’ve all seen how places like Canada and Massachusetts have collapsed into apocalyptic Socialist hells since the advent of gay marriage. I mean, just look at the divorce rates in Massachusetts compared to the good, American gay-hating Red states. Oh, wait, never mind.
?otd: How many MC’s must get dissed?
5/19/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (WRPA, not to mention a full day of conferencing and critique)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo
Posted: 6:15 am Sat May 19 2012 | Comments(0) |
This is a repost
After some deliberation, I am calling an Open Dinner in Austin, Texas next Monday, May 21st. We’ll meet at the Hyde Park & Grill at their original location on Duval Street, at 6:30 pm. Please let me know here in comments if you’ll be attending, as headcount can be something of an issue there.
See some, all or none of you there.
Posted: 5:45 am Fri May 18 2012 | Comments(1) |