I missed God by no more than two days on a flight between Salt Lake and Baltimore. Sometimes I wonder who I would have been if I had found him--planting tomatoes and chasing toddlers, living a life of different struggles, a more rooted but so much less examined life.

As it is I lay awake at night and think of suicide. I'm not sure about anything, but I think there would be no answer no matter what I were to read, no way to transcend absurdity, and such a lack of endgame makes me want to die. This game isn't that much fun, to make it last forever. Still, I wake up in the morning and I do the things I would have done, if there was God, cleaning the dishes and turning the soil, just with my questions echoing in the stillness. I listen, and I try to escape them, and I'm happy for the wind and sky and sunlight through the glass.

People use each other to bury truth. This is why I'm afraid to be alone, why I shouldn't be with people. They're a refuge not an answer, a temporary peace, a short term solution to a long term problem. I'll take it but wonder what's next, and worry how to get there.

People say all sorts of things about just accepting where you are, becoming happy with your lot in life, joy in the journey, all of that. I think sometimes it's wrong. You can't layer sand over toxic waste and make a perfect beach.

It can be beautiful sand, the really fine stuff that feels like liquid velvet between your toes. You can lay in it and feel the waves crash over you gently in the shallows. You can appreciate it with every fiber of your being. That stuff that's trying to kill you will still seep up between the grains and be everywhere, all the time, impossible to wish away.

Toxic waste cleanup is expensive.

Also, God forbid we should talk about it.

A question for the missionaries

The Fundamental Attribution Error happens (all them time) when people attribute poor behavior to the fundamentally bad nature of the people who are behaving poorly--when in fact, it is a matter of their choices and especially circumstances.

We know that poor behavior is significantly a function of circumstance because of evidence from trials, like the Milgram Experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment.

As far as I'm aware, there are only two reasonable interpretations of said evidence. We can decide that virtually all people are fundamentally bad, or we can decide that virtually all people are fundamentally malleable. I believe that people are fundamentally malleable.

If we accept this premise (and you're welcome to debate it with me), we come swiftly to the conclusion that the circumstances in which people are placed, circumstances shaped by our societal institutions, are of paramount importance.


Having laid this groundwork, I now pose a question which applies to any conservative (/"conservative"?) form of Christianity. Research has shown that three greatest predictive factors for how frequently rape happens in a given society are:

-Separation of genders
-Level of power women hold
-General level of interpersonal violence.

Therefore, why would God--presuming there is a God, who desires a world where the occurrence of rape is minimized, within the constraint of preserving human agency--set up organizations and social structures in which genders are segregated and women are prohibited from holding primary power positions?

Everyone will fail you; keep trying

Ah, so I suppose I lied. However, posting once in March does give the post sequence a pleasing symmetry, so I've forgiven myself and I think you should too.

Also, home ownership is nice, thank you very much; pleasant and overwhelming. I just have to keep reminding myself to take it one repair at a time; it sat empty for at least six months before I got it, and even the really terrifying repairs (drainage!!!!!) will be alright till the end of the week. Meanwhile, I pace, stretch, sleep, and dream of turning the roof into a power source, the living room into a dance studio and the basement into a library--but as I said, one project at once. :)


Now that you are all updated, I can move on to being excessively morose and impassioned about things nobody cares about or can change, like self-immolation, and food. I know you're all on the edges of your seats. Ready?


Anyone I talk to often knows that I obsess a lot about "my" kids, most of them people in extraordinarily painful and probably hopeless circumstances. One of the ones I've been most worried about is in her mid teens, and has been in foster care since she was a toddler. Perhaps some of you can relate to the experience of being shunted from one place to the next; perhaps some of you know what it feels like to be abandoned by your family, and some of you may have experienced massive trauma and its aftermath. There might even be someone reading this who has had the experience of aging out of the foster care system--and if this is you, you are probably aware of how likely it is, in that circumstance, for a person to shortly end up crazy, homeless, or dead.

In my efforts to help this friend secure a home before being dropped headfirst into adulthood, there's a particularly important step that I've been working on. I've been trying to hammer the point that even if she had joined up every gang, tried every drug, broken every window, and burned down every shed she'd come across, she would still deserve a safe and loving home in which to grow up. Every child, no matter how ignorant, violent, or difficult, deserves to be kept safe and to be unconditionally loved.

This is a hard lesson to swallow, after a life like that, because it means you can no longer run away. It isn't because you weren't trying hard enough, it wasn't because you were dirty, or stupid, or deeply inadequate as a human being. It wasn't because no one cared. Talk of personal responsibility and systemic inevitability, in this context, adds only mud; you didn't get a family because the world we live in is profoundly, heartrendingly, terrifyingly unjust.


It is perhaps my favorite thing about humanity that when finally confronting ourselves with this kind of truth, we begin to calm. Regardless of all that we've been taught for our whole lives--about hard work paying off, about how being healthy means not getting hung up upon these things--this is what we see in our everyday. Injustice is the truth we feel and breathe. To touch it, name it, can be profoundly sane-making--perhaps because the only way to look such monstrosity unflinchingly in the eye is with an aim to change it.

And that is how we should be.


For systemic violence, systemic change.

Thanksgiving

When survival is a team effort

Recently, in the course of working with fucked up teenagers, I've gotten to thinking about all the essential contributions people have made to my life. Finding one's way to adulthood is never easy; throwing certain awful experiences or psychological conditions into the mix makes it infinitely harder. The following list is of people who directly contributed to my survival, literal or psychological. As such, it is missing any number of dear friends who have supported me through less dire circumstances, as well as people who contributed in less direct, more "behind the scenes" ways, such as my sister Sarah and, I'm sure, others. I appreciate you also.

I wish everyone could know what great gains a small contribution can make; I wish everyone could know what can happen in the scale of one other life when they have the courage to step forward and care.



For everyone who has gotten me this far--thank you.

Mum and Da, who chose to welcome 1984 in the best of all possible ways and have always tried to do their best for their kids

Nancy, for making her husband my brother by marrying him

Alma, the best older brother a girl could ask for, who taught me almost everything I know about set theory and people, and more than I would have imagined about unconditional love

The PHS chess team, which included the first real friends I ever had, Ben Werner, Rachel Smith, and Caleb Anderson--special thanks to Gribble for making it possible and giving us a safe place

Mary Hedengren, whose courage, insight, intelligence, excellent advice and inadvertently persistent friendship have pulled me through some of the darkest times

Kathrine O'Sullivan, who made my Spanish sound like French, made competence incredibly appealing, and took a moment to ask me how I was every day and mean it

Dan Krimmelbein, who believed in me so much it was embarrassing and let me do whatever I needed

Barbara Patillo, the best listener I have ever met, who never refused to mourn with those that mourned or comfort those who stood in need of comfort

Whatever assortment of my family (I think mostly Grandmother and Mom) made sure I had the funds and the guts to fly off around the world and then spend two years of my life studying dance, when they didn't know why but only knew that I needed it

Mykle Law, who showed me my best when I couldn't see

Greg Lucero, who cared, keeps his promises, passionately believed I belonged to myself, and wanted me to be better till I wanted it too

Everything

If we do not love life on our own account and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way. -Simone DeBeauvoir


It seems I must be joining the famous echo-chamber of the blogosphere, because somebody blogged on my ellipses. I could not help but be struck by how much the photographs, to her, seemed to mean only death, only destruction, only despair.

As some of you must know, I have a predilection for certain pastimes commonly considered depressing or hopeless. One of these is the protection of the small.

If there is to be humanity, it is impossible to prevent all child abuse. From my life and involvement in the systems that govern this matter, I can only conclude that as a society we don't care. . . And not only do we not care that complete success is impossible, as a society we don't even come close to caring enough to do what can be done. I believe we will never come close. It is across this background I paint.


A twelve year old throws a physically violent screaming tantrum because the brother who raped her is about to get out of jail. For this she must sleep on the floor of the group home, and she remains on low privileges; she's not allowed to talk to her peers, eat sweet things, listen to music, play musical instruments, wake up early, wear normal clothes, or use the exercise equipment. She may read with permission. She keeps sobbing, and going on about how her father beat her and the things that happened with her brother; the staff member who supervised this tantrum does not want details, does not want details. The child must learn to take responsibility and control her emotions; she is making excuses.

A young teenager is responsible for his siblings. He has heard more than once from his parents that they don't want him. For good reason the kids are all terrified of foster care; they've been burned. Their violent alcoholic father has completed his required therapy, and the case is about to close on the day when he towers over me and yells at me not to come around, liquor bottle in hand, slamming the door in my face. The case closes on schedule, family preserved.

A sixteen year old refuses to co-operate and keeps running away. She is given only a blanket and underwear for clothing and is under observation day and night. Had she been in the program under it's previous ownership, she might have been taken out to the pond when she kicked and screamed to "work it out in the water."


Perhaps the most impressive thing about these stories, from this vantage, is their darkness, and their closeness; these are stories of here and now, America the beautiful within the past few years. It is impossible to save them; it is impossible to vanquish the darkness. I can try, but nothing I can do will really keep these children safe from violence, from neglect, from profound institutionalized cruelty, or from rape.

Somehow, though, this is not all. Between the lines there is the constant victory of survival--and the constant victory of humanity. I had an irrevocable revelation once as a CASA, squatting with my charges in the dust behind their friend's apartment. We needed a place where we could go to talk away from Mom and Dad, where they could suss me out and decide if I was OK. We talked about school, about foster care, touched a little, briefly, on when things got "bad."

These children had been kicked out of their house in the rain and told never to come home, or watched their father beating their mom, or watched their mother go on meth, or eaten only when fed by their older brother--this all besides the direct violence they had experienced upon themselves. They had been torn away from everything they knew and learned that all the world was dangerous. They had their wariness; they had sore spots. Possibly they had patterns, internally, that would damage them for the rest of their lives.


What they had more than anything else, though, was that they were simply kids; kids who wanted a princess backpack and a new football, who yelled and laughed and ran around, who picked their noses and yelled at their brother for picking his nose. They were funny and smart and playful, silly and cool, constantly teasing me for being a geek and each other for damn near everything. No matter how much trouble they were in or how much I couldn't save them, they were still people. If you had been there to take pictures of us on that day, they would have seemed to be happy ones.

And this, perhaps, is the undercurrent I see in those photographs of destruction and pain; this, perhaps, is the reason I don't see them as even a little one-sided. Human beings will be human beings, whatever their circumstance, and just as tragedy can hide behind a smile, so are profound courage and compassion to be found in death, destruction, and despair.

Some are fortunate enough to find themselves in happier photographs--but if I had chosen happier photographs, they would still be photographs of human beings quite capable of murdering and starving one another--human beings capable of hurting, of falling, of holding a bleeding stranger in the open danger of the road--capable of growing to maturity after a childhood of torture; capable of standing before a column of tanks and dying before the world in support of what they believe in, capable of burning themselves alive to stop the burning of village after village, alive.

They could not save us, and neither can I, but life is in the trying--because we are all human, capable of squatting and joking in the dust, or comforting our children as they weep upon the sand.

freely cho$en

Markets are called "free" because actors in them are permitted certain choices--about whether and how to form contracts, what to do with "their" goods, and so forth.

This description of how some of those freedoms tend to actually work themselves out under capitalism is much truncated for the demands of bloggery; hopefully any unclarity can be worked out through discussion. The ideas, even the analogy, are not mine; I'm told they've been liberated mostly from Hegel and Zizek, and they've come to me through the much appreciated vicarious scholarship of my friend Greg.


Let's say I want to become a world class violinist. Given that I have the talent and basic physical abilities:

If I'm a member of the lower class, there are objective material restrictions on my ability to accomplish this. If I live in tar paper shack, sell rubbish for a living, and haul water an hour every day, I think we can all agree that no matter how much I'm willing to sacrifice it is practically impossible for me to succeed.

If I'm a member of the middle class, my success is significantly contingent on my ability to manipulate relationships to my material gain. I can maintain good relationships with family members in hopes that they will pay for lessons; if my boss likes the work I put in at my day job, he's more likely to be understanding of my need for flexibility in hours and travel to competitions. Even my access to the teachers I need may be a matter of presenting myself amicably.

If I'm a member of the upper class, the limits on my ability to accomplish are largely the limits of myself; for the most part, I just have to want it enough.


So, when the upper class says, "you just have to want it enough," it is true. . . for them. And they have to believe at some level that it's true for everyone else too.

That's part of why the middle class believes them. . . but the statement transfers well enough into a middle class paradigm anyway; you just have to want it enough to develop the skills, the relationships, the networking. If you want it enough to do those things, you have a very decent shot. Arguably this is why the middle class has such a neurotically selfish mentality; lurking in the background, there's always the possibility that their relationships will fail, and the material reality is that their success is contingent on all those relationships.

This is also why, in the realm of charity, they will speak of doing all they can--of giving all they can--while their house is not filled with the homeless and they spend their tax returns on expensive hobbies. To be middle class is to build a wall around me and mine and allow every relationship to become a commodity; morality is only efficient it in so far as it is less fun than a new boat, or appropriate Christmas presents for your family. . . with whom, of course, you must maintain certain relationships.

It's at the lower class level that reality intervenes; there is a material world, and without material wealth it intervenes in everything, no matter how much you want it. On top of this, the material manifestations of racism, of class culture, and of literal inability to transition to a middle class approach, are omnipresent in day to day life.


To some of us, this does not seem like a system to optimize freedom.

That was all.

loosing peace with more

For a long time, I worked hard to be easy to talk to, easy to understand, and easy to get along with. I'm glad I've had that experience, but it didn't end entirely well for me. I can do it, but it's stressful. . . and more importantly, I'm not sure that approach is what I want to support.

I question how I ought to interact with others. I don't want to hurt people's feelings--in fact, I want very badly not to, which makes it painful for all involved when I mess up and don't understand why.

Still, I blunder on, haunted by certain questions-- especially,

Why not expect more of people?

The world I see around me is in shreds.

I could say a lot about the political and economic catastrophes that lead to the more personal circumstances I'm about to describe. Those things would be important, and true. What is more relevant here, though, is a net profit of empty relationships and empty lives.

To many of my more conservative friends and family members, I must mention that I don't know the America you grew up in, or the one you live in now; I only know your experience of this place must be different from mine.


The people who have been closest to me, besides my family, are mostly young and single. They struggle to pay rent and to get an education; some of them are dying, in their early twenties, from cancers of unknown source. Many have been homeless; some are raising children they had when they were still children themselves. Nearly all have already been ground into depression by the Promethean tasks of modern "life".

They work jobs where they are disposable and have virtually no time for education or human relationships. They rarely have mentors who can help them learn the skills of survival and stability, or even temporarily aid them with the enormous economic burdens of childrearing, health problems, or education. They struggle for what to identify with in a world where they, and all the people around them, are primarily commodities, and they respond accordingly--generally by buying all they can.

Most importantly, they have no sense of power to shape their own lives; their outlook is of survival, or of drifting, or of determined conformity in a stream they never could control.


And these, we may note, are not the people being raped, displaced, dismembered or starved in Africa, tortured in China and Cuba or bombed in Georgia and the middle east. These are but a few of the casualties closest to home.

All this is merely an attempt to put into the most accessible terms my motivation: the world doesn't have to be this way. I am profoundly fortunate to have an education, and profoundly obligated to use what resources I have to bring about change.

When I am provocative, demanding, or controversial, it is because of the part of me that can't help but think that every person who lives without that sense of obligation only contributes to this inferno. Part of me never wants ever to judge, and another part thinks we all belong in hell. Both parts want me and everybody else to be better.

I want us to be smarter and more passionate, to work harder, to try longer, to never forgive ourselves and never give up. I want us to plan better, to sacrifice more, to build more awareness and more skills and more actions till we've made solutions.

I want us to cultivate a stronger morality until we actually make it happen.

I want to live in a world where being "well adjusted" no longer means having patience with injustice and accepting that there is everything going wrong and nothing you can do about it.

I have no idea how to reconcile wanting more.

Competence

Back in. . .*cough* the day, this was me. Mostly. The exception would be that, preferring this idea of leveling up in real life, I never generally understood why people were into games. I wanted to learn everything, know everything, do everything.

And so I tried. I read classics no one around me had heard of or cared about, studied obsessively on certain topics, trying not to miss any corner or detail. I threw myself haplessly but wholeheartedly into efforts to understand human social interaction and to make my body function better. I obsessively collected books and refined my library in the hope that I'd come up with the the best ones for learning. . .well. . . everything.

Along the way, there were several major changes in my life and in me. At some point it became actually clear to me that my childhood dream of becoming the next real-life Indian Jones would not be fulfilled, slightly preceded by an understanding that that was no longer quite what I wanted. When people asked me what I wanted, I could only say that I wanted to live a good life. . . it had to be full, and rich, and . . . and something. Directed, maybe. I didn't really have anything for them if they required a specific definition of good.

In retrospect, I find my then budding and intuitive existentialism to be sort of charming. . . and I suppose that's a good thing, considering how much I seem to find myself again in the same boat. I hone myself on the acquisition of various skills, not quite sure what they will be for, making course corrections as the course resolves before me.

We can never be sure what things we will need to be able to do, but it seems like a good idea to do it well, whatever it is. Therefore, the current project--competence. In my case, the question is focus, gathering widely applicable skills that still, somehow, don't leave me a generalist--always, of course, adjusting as the field of "what I want to do with my life" becomes less vast and more clear.

meta-skills:
1) Finish things I start
2) Ability to modify/create habits
3) Organized and disciplined--affairs in order
er) -Also to be playful. is this something to work on or an implicit personality trait?

practicalities:
1) No more languages (just French) till I've enough fluency to have deep conversations without annoying the hell out of everybody
2) Have an actual reading list, including severe limitation of library books and the paring down of my library via reading the things I've actually been intending to read
3) Write. . . always write, though I'm not a wannabe writer, damnit. This is for me. . . and all of you, clearly. I want to do it fabulously well.
4) School and physics; great exercise in discipline, plus much fun
5) Take care of health as priorities dictate.
6) Music practice--collaborative, consistent, and less random
7) still, playfulness.


p.s. todays blog dedicated to Danielle, our waitress at IHOP. Mad props for craftsmanship--jobs well done are inspiring.

this is about us

(original music video)


(lyrics)


*tips hat to rise against*

this is most effective if you can get them playing simultaneously; try letting the first one go for about three seconds, then starting the lyrics on 0 volume.



P.S. Happy birthday, Dad.

Groundhog Day's Blog

Let the "enlightened elites" strive to change the situation of the child, the illiterate, the primitive crushed beneath his superstitions; that is one of their most urgent tasks; but in this very effort they must respect a freedom which, like theirs, is absolute.

They are always opposed, for example, to the extension of universal suffrage by adducing the incompetence of the masses, of women, of the natives in the colonies; but this forgetting that man always has to decide by himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. If infinite knowledge were necessary (even supposing that it were conceivable), then the colonial administrator himself would not have the right to freedom; he is much further from perfect knowledge than the most backward savage is from him.

Believing De Beauvoir

We object to the inquisitors who want to create faith and virtue from without; we object to all forms of fascism which seek to fashion the happiness of man from without; and also the paternalism which thinks that it has done something for man by prohibiting him from certain possibilities of temptation, whereas what is necessary is to give him reasons for resisting it. . .

Let the "enlightened elites" strive to change the situation of the child, the illiterate, the primitive crushed beneath his superstitions; that is one of their most urgent tasks; but in this very effort they must respect a freedom which, like theirs, is absolute.

They are always opposed, for example, to the extension of universal suffrage by adducing the incompetence of the masses, of women, of the natives in the colonies; but this forgetting that man always has to decide by himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. If infinite knowledge were necessary (even supposing that it were conceivable), then the colonial administrator himself would not have the right to freedom; he is much further from perfect knowledge than the most backward savage is from him.

the other morning I woke up

and the only remnant of my dream was the feeling I really needed to somehow get a geiger counter.

Best of

Written 5:44 5/13/08
I've been thinking about how to make a good blog. . . sort of like how my sister wants to make a good cookbook; a cookbook, as it were, that is full only of cream. . .

So how do you do that--how do you stay that interesting? After kicking off with rather too much about myself, I think it's worth setting up a few ground rules. .

1) No immediate postage. . . let it sit overnight, or at least for a few hours, as a draft before posting. I don't know how I feel about blogger in this way, actually, because there isn't an easy way to save drafts in it. .

2) Enough pictures, but not too many. . And, of course particularly good ones.
Like this:

Maybe a similar rule on links.
Not exactly the elements of style, but we'll have a go.


Of course, maybe it also pays to look at how other people have done it better.

I could get thousands of submissions before every weekly post, so that I'd have plenty to choose from. . .
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

Or I could invite a cast of bitingly witty and repetitively sarcastic political contributors to help shoulder the burden.
http://www.thismodernworld.com/

If I wanted to be really content driven (snort), I could locate myself in some excruciatingly relevant position and then give articulate humanist commentary on it.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

I could allow anyone to correct, edit, and expand into an infinite variety of topics. . .
http://www.wikipedia.org/

Or I could just be totally "effing," as we say here in Zion, talented.
http://xkcd.com/341/


meh. . .

I'm gonna do it my way.