It's bad enough that Facebook won't let you pretend your exes are
dead and that the people who tormented and bullied you in school are not
only still alive but also usually having a much better life than you
are. And they have less thigh fat and get laid more often. But even when your memories of people are fond ones, Facebook can still make you kind of depressed about them anyway.
As shitty as my memory is, I still remember a few names from Way
Back When (TM) and among the names I actually remember is the name of my
first really serious crush. His name was Daniel and we were in the
sixth grade. Our last names were similar so we tended to end up near one
another when seated or ordered alphabetically. I'm sure it wasn't any
fun for him because I was incredibly weird back then and even more of a
complete social retard than I am currently. (Which is definitely saying
something.) But I could stare unabashedly at him easier that way. I
thought I was being smooth and sly about it but in reality I'm sure he
and everyone else in the northern hemisphere was aware that I was
staring and swooning and totally had a massive crush on this guy. We
didn't really even talk too much except when we were assigned projects
together, which wasn't often. Not that I didn't want to, of course. I would sit and stare at him in the classes we shared--math, PE, homeroom--and try to come up with amazing opening lines for conversations that, in my embarrassingly cliched and unrealistic overactive pre-teen imagination, always inevitably ended with him falling in love with me. I rarely ever plucked up the courage to talk to him, which in retrospect is probably really fortunate for me, because most of my fantabulous fool-proof opening lines were about Pokemon, horses, or were terrible 'random humour' that is universally accepted as being the most obnoxious shit in the universe that appeals only to kids between the ages of ten and thirteen. You know the ones I mean--the kind that resulted in 'inside jokes' with your friends that were overwhelmingly loud and almost invariably included cheese, chickens, or wordless high-pitched squealing. Sometimes all three at once.
Yeah. I am probably pretty fucking lucky I didn't talk to Daniel whenever I got the urge to do so. I have a feeling it would have resulted in a worse school experience than the one I ultimately had.
I remember Daniel being quite good-looking. Like me, he was from
an Italian family--and, like me, he was olive-skinned but a very light
olive. He had jet black hair and, rather unusually for being of Italian
descent, very light blue eyes. It was a striking and very attractive
combination. One that I still quite fancy. I'm pretty sure that's where
it started.
He also dressed a lot like a miniature adult. Back in the late
90s and early 2000s, out of a decade of grunge fashion, there arose a
vogue for teens and adolescents to dress as adult as possible. Gone were
the days of overalls, plaid flannel, Doc Martens, and general unkempt
aesthetics--girls weren't quite so adult, but boys who could afford to
would come to school dressed in slacks and polo shirts, blazers,
loafers, dress shoes, dress shirts, and expensive-looking watches. Wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon character was completely unacceptable, a tragic loss in my youth for which I am trying to compensate as an adult by wearing shirts with cartoon characters well past the age where that is in any way acceptable. Boys
started spending more time on their hair than girls and happily, enthusiastically followed the trend of the day that involved hair gel applied by the bucketful. For a good five or ten years, it was actually possible to puncture tires on the spiked and gelled hair of America's adolescent population.
And Daniel was one of the most grown-up and stylish of them all.
Cologne/aftershave/body spray were popular for guys, even when they were too young to have to shave yet. Axe and all its equally potent brethren had yet to be invented, but that didn't stop boys from applying enough smelly stuff to the point where they emitted scent fumes so intense they were actually visible to the naked eye. And Daniel, every the showmaster, was the most cologne-drenched boy around. You could smell him coming across the freaking school. It was a bit much, in retrospect, particularly as that was about the time I had started to develop my mysterious asthmatic cough--I was set off by other triggers back then, and intense artificial or chemical scents like cologne could make me erupt into a violent and very loud coughing fit.
No freaking wonder Daniel wanted nothing to do with me. I was a socially retarded freak with a terrible obnoxious 'sense of humour' I thought was comedic genius, and an impressive unibrow, and who had horrible dress sense (I was one of those dweebs that wore their pants a couple of inches too short in a style often scorningly and mockingly called 'high-waters' or 'flood-waters' for which I was teased--I don't know what it is, but it seems like there's a requirement for dorky, dweeby, nerdy, awkward people to wear pants that are several inches too short even through adulthood... does anyone else notice this??)--on top of which I would stare unabashedly at him in ways that were probably pretty creepy. And I was often hacking and coughing like I was about to drop dead right on the spot from plague.
I was not, in other words, anyone's idea of a catch. I'm still not. And I did know this back then, despite having all those daydreams about Daniel falling deeply in love with me for my inner beauty and my personality which was actually even less attractive than I aesthetically was. So I was aware that I was probably not going to have what I wanted. And a bit of angst was born. Daniel was never actually explicitly mean to me, which actually went a long way to encouraging my crush to intensify--when you get treated like shit by your peers, you start to expect that treatment all the time from everyone and it essentially becomes normal to you. You get so used to it that it warps your perception and interpretation of how people behave around you and someone who is polite but not friendly seems like the sweetest person in the world who must obviously like you a whole lot because they didn't dump tomato soup in your hair at lunch. It didn't help that I wasn't treated a whole hell of a lot better at home, either. Lifetime movies have jack shit on my upbringing most of the time.
Over the next two years the crush ran its course and by high school it had pretty much waned completely. My high school was enormous--2100 students--so the odds of being around any one specific person regularly were pretty freaking slim and I don't think I had another class of any kind with Daniel again. I would still see him around every now and then, though you couldn't smell him coming anymore, and I still thought he was really cute--probably just because in general I found the fair-skinned, dark-haired, light-eyed combination really attractive on pretty much everybody--but the pangs of longing and the sighing and the daydreams were long gone.
Years later, in an Anthropology class at college, who should turn up on the student roster but Daniel. I knew straight away it was him because his last name is very distinctive and not one likely to be shared by anyone else. I was a bit surprised when I saw him (not that I was anxiously looking or anything like that...) because he'd put on a whole lot of weight and was sporting kind of a greasy-looking goatee. He was still dressing like a sophisticated adult in tailored business-casual clothing and expensive leather shoes and a Rolex--except now it wasn't novel or interesting anymore because he was an adult by then. His hair was still gelled solid, but he didn't stink up the whole room with his cologne. It was more just a curiosity to me that we'd ended up in the same class since I almost never saw people I knew from old schools. I guess he was still cute but to be honest the intensity of my reaction was limited to thinking, 'Oh, lookit that, it's Daniel. He's changed. I wonder if this professor is going to punctuate every other fucking sentence with 'um' and 'all right'? That'll get annoying...'
(I did end up parking next to him in the car park a few times. Not in any way deliberately--it was the kind of place where you got there early and had to take whatever parking spot you could find--but I was sort of mildly surprised when, after class one afternoon, he hopped into the shiny new Lexus next to my classy ancient Jetta while I was swapping books. I have no idea what he was doing at the time that let him afford a car like that, but it's possible his parents paid for it. Equally possible is that he was up to his designer glasses in debt just because it was an expensive car. One thing I did learn about Daniel over my years of staring and swooning was that he really liked to portray an image of being very sophisticated and well-off. It wouldn't have been out of character for him.)
Funnily enough, I did catch Daniel staring in my direction a few times over the course of that semester. By then I looked a bit more like a person and nothing like I had as a kid. I wore girl's clothes and makeup and wore my hair down a lot. So it's likely he didn't even know who I was. I don't think he fancied me or anything. He was probably just trying to figure out if he knew me or something. We didn't talk except casually in that class, either.
So where the fuck does Facebook come into this?
In following links provided by 'People You May Know', I ended up at his profile. I really haven't thought much about him in years but I recognized the name straight away. Even though I don't have any really negative memories connected with Daniel--apart from adolescent lovesick pining--it still managed to be kind of a depressing experience for me to see this guy that I used to so intensely fancy so long ago.
This sounds terribly shallow, but the first thing I noticed was... Daniel got fat. He'd put on weight when I last saw him in college but now he's just pretty robust. He's about as chunky as it's possible to be without really standing out as being 'fat'. His face is very round, his neck has a muffin-top in his collared shirts, and in general he looks like a guy who hasn't quite realized yet that he no longer has the metabolism of a hummingbird. He still tries to look good but he doesn't do too well with it. Possibly because he dressed so much like an adult as a kid, he doesn't seem to have bothered to sort of let his sense of style grow with him. So he still dresses exactly the same but now he looks pretty dated and not especially handsome or stylish. And he seems to have also taken to dressing like a teenage rap-musician wannabe. The backward hat thing looks stupid even on teenagers, when it's acceptable; on men pushing thirty, it looks pretty freaking sad. The goatee is still there but he looks really bad with it. The hair gel still seems to be his primary choice of weapon--I'm sure this guy has singlehandedly kept the hair gel business thriving over the last eight or nine years.
I didn't even think he was cute anymore. Just sort of... blah. And I'm someone who finds just about everybody attractive. I guess those ice-blue eyes weren't enough on their own to hold my attention. I can't say whether or not his personality balances that shit out--I didn't know him back then and I definitely don't know him now. Kinda glad Facebook doesn't let you see who looked at your profile recently. I'm sure nothing good would happen if he saw that I'd tracked him down. If he's remembered me at all, it'll be because I was a bit on the creepy side.
It's a bit of a disturbing trend for me--the people I hated are all doing fabulously, and the people I fancied or just liked aren't. Almost without exception, the people I had crushes on (that I can remember having crushes on, anyway) seem to have grown up pretty unfortunate-looking. It sort of makes me wonder if I don't have really bad taste in people. Like, if I fancy someone it means they're not going to age well.
Well, oh well. All I can do is hope that won't be the case with Max. Of course, I adore him inside and out so I like to think it wouldn't matter to me. In his favour, he does have yellow eyes. Which is awesome and sexy at the same time. Weird eye colours are my thing.
And he doesn't wear any cologne at all.
Or have a Facebook.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Colour Theory
The next time I hear someone make the claim that their eyes randomly 'change colour', I am going to beat them stupid with whatever object is handy. I am so sick to death of hearing this I cannot adequately communicate how annoying I find it except by screaming wordlessly.
Listen, you worthless little fuckbuckets: your eyes are not changing colour. Nobody in normal circumstances, barring medical abnormalities, has eyes that change colour. Ever. At all. Full stop.
I can't tell you how often I hear people--particularly girls, but men do this as well and it seems to be some kind of desperate bid to make yourself seem more interesting or alluring or mysterious or exciting or something. You aren't. And your eyes are not changing colour. It's called 'contrast' you assbiscuits. Look it the fuck up.
The brain is a funny thing, especially with regard to how it processes visual stimuli. The eye isn't quite as fine-tuned a piece of equipment as we're inclined to think and, likewise, the brain interprets things in ways that might not always fit with reality. Everyone has seen that 'simultaneous contrast' illusion--where two small squares of the same colour appear different when situated in a background of different contrasting colours. The small coloured squares don't change--they merely appear different because they are being contrasted with different colours. Your visual processing wants the colours it sees to do one of two things: appear as close as possible to one another, or as different as possible. This is why artists and fashion designers and makeup artists and interior decorators of all flavours talk about how to 'bring out' certain colours by either surrounding them with a similar colour or a completely different one. You can emphasize the colour blue with either more blue, or a colour opposite blue on the colour wheel, like orange or red. Because your brain wants the colours to be really similar or really different, in both cases it makes the blue more intense based not on the actual intensity of the blue itself but on what immediately surrounds it.
It's like making yourself look more attractive by surrounding yourself with ugly friends.
When a colour is a combination of others, it can be made to look more one way or the other by carefully picking the colours close to it. People with, say, blue-grey eyes can make their eyes look much more blue by wearing certain colours of makeup and clothing--or more grey, by again picking certain colours to surround them.
The eye itself is not changing colour. It hasn't changed at all. It's an optical illusion.
You don't see this with people who have very distinct single-colour eyes. People with black eyes don't go, 'Oh, my eyes look orange sometimes, they totes change colours!!' Because there isn't enough variation there to produce the illusion. It's something you find with people who have greyish or hazel eyes--they think their eyes change colour. No, they don't. Educate yourselves because every time you say that shit, god kills a kitten. Seriously. He does.
My eyes do appear different colours occasionally, depending on my makeup and my clothing and the light. But I stopped saying my eyes 'change colour' when I was about fourteen because I realized that that sounded stupid as fuck and also wasn't actually happening. I should get off a photo the next time I cry or something. When my eyes go red and bloodshot, they look really intensely blue. My eyes are not actually blue--they're green. It's just that, surrounded by red, for some reason they stand out as being quite blue.
Your eyes aren't changing colour. No one's are. Unless you're an infant or have an eye disease. You all need to stop telling people your eyes change colour. It's like saying your height changes, just because you happen to look shorter next to people taller than you and taller next to people who are shorter--it has to do with comparison, and not a change of reality.
Morons.
Listen, you worthless little fuckbuckets: your eyes are not changing colour. Nobody in normal circumstances, barring medical abnormalities, has eyes that change colour. Ever. At all. Full stop.
I can't tell you how often I hear people--particularly girls, but men do this as well and it seems to be some kind of desperate bid to make yourself seem more interesting or alluring or mysterious or exciting or something. You aren't. And your eyes are not changing colour. It's called 'contrast' you assbiscuits. Look it the fuck up.
The brain is a funny thing, especially with regard to how it processes visual stimuli. The eye isn't quite as fine-tuned a piece of equipment as we're inclined to think and, likewise, the brain interprets things in ways that might not always fit with reality. Everyone has seen that 'simultaneous contrast' illusion--where two small squares of the same colour appear different when situated in a background of different contrasting colours. The small coloured squares don't change--they merely appear different because they are being contrasted with different colours. Your visual processing wants the colours it sees to do one of two things: appear as close as possible to one another, or as different as possible. This is why artists and fashion designers and makeup artists and interior decorators of all flavours talk about how to 'bring out' certain colours by either surrounding them with a similar colour or a completely different one. You can emphasize the colour blue with either more blue, or a colour opposite blue on the colour wheel, like orange or red. Because your brain wants the colours to be really similar or really different, in both cases it makes the blue more intense based not on the actual intensity of the blue itself but on what immediately surrounds it.
It's like making yourself look more attractive by surrounding yourself with ugly friends.
When a colour is a combination of others, it can be made to look more one way or the other by carefully picking the colours close to it. People with, say, blue-grey eyes can make their eyes look much more blue by wearing certain colours of makeup and clothing--or more grey, by again picking certain colours to surround them.
The eye itself is not changing colour. It hasn't changed at all. It's an optical illusion.
You don't see this with people who have very distinct single-colour eyes. People with black eyes don't go, 'Oh, my eyes look orange sometimes, they totes change colours!!' Because there isn't enough variation there to produce the illusion. It's something you find with people who have greyish or hazel eyes--they think their eyes change colour. No, they don't. Educate yourselves because every time you say that shit, god kills a kitten. Seriously. He does.
My eyes do appear different colours occasionally, depending on my makeup and my clothing and the light. But I stopped saying my eyes 'change colour' when I was about fourteen because I realized that that sounded stupid as fuck and also wasn't actually happening. I should get off a photo the next time I cry or something. When my eyes go red and bloodshot, they look really intensely blue. My eyes are not actually blue--they're green. It's just that, surrounded by red, for some reason they stand out as being quite blue.
Your eyes aren't changing colour. No one's are. Unless you're an infant or have an eye disease. You all need to stop telling people your eyes change colour. It's like saying your height changes, just because you happen to look shorter next to people taller than you and taller next to people who are shorter--it has to do with comparison, and not a change of reality.
Morons.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Results!
I know how to deal with people. I dare say I'm good at it. It's
remarkably easy to me to get a feel for someone very quickly and then
adjust my approach in order to achieve a desired outcome.
One thing--of a good many things--that I've learned about people is that they often prepare themselves for multiple different possible scenarios. You sort of have a battle plan when it comes to confronting people. You think, 'Okay, if X happens, I'm going to do Y; if A happens, I'm going to do B', and so on for every permutation of results you can think of. So it's not always easy to cut them off at the pass, so to speak, because they'll have already thought of contingency plans for most of the reactions you would think of.
Which is why I quoted Shakespeare at a problem customer.
There are three main ways in which it's considered 'acceptable' for clerks to react to belligerent customers: they can be super nice, or ignore them. Sometimes you get clerks who are rude back, which occasionally startles them into silence. Most of the time it doesn't, because even being mean right back isn't weird or strange. They may not have thought you'd do it, but that doesn't mean they'd be unprepared for it. People's reactions to shit they hadn't though of is usually hostility, but there does come a point--and everyone has this point, it's just located in different areas--where you are experiencing something so unbelievably insane, so totally out of the ordinary, so unexpected, that you cannot meaningfully react. Because you just have no fucking idea what you're supposed to do in that situation.
I've been there myself. There are situations I look back on where I wonder why I didn't do something or say something, but it's like coming up with a biting retort--you only do it after you've had time to think about it because you were too shocked to on the spot. I've had time and the benefit of not actually being in that place anymore to aid me in coming up with possible coping strategies. At the time I was pretty much just sitting there thinking, 'What the ever-loving shit am I supposed to do here? Is this even real? What the fuck?'
So after a very long day with very long queues and very big purchases and very picky customers, I got a woman who was annoyed with me for taking too long and was being a complete entitlement whore. By then I'd had enough and, while I didn't want to get fired, I figured there would be no established protocol at the store in the event that an employee regurgitated Shakespeare.
Which they don't.
Which is great, because that's exactly what I did.
Specifically, it was Shylock's famous quote from 'The Merchant of Venice'. The woman was ranting about how clerks are horrible and no one is helping any customers and we're all being jerks and we should be ashamed and...
And then I piped up with, 'Hath not a clerk eyes? Hath not a clerk hands? Organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?'
Then went back to the transaction as if nothing had happened.
I'm not sure if I eventually will be in any trouble for this, but it did make the woman shut up out of pure shock.
Which was all I wanted in the first place.
One thing--of a good many things--that I've learned about people is that they often prepare themselves for multiple different possible scenarios. You sort of have a battle plan when it comes to confronting people. You think, 'Okay, if X happens, I'm going to do Y; if A happens, I'm going to do B', and so on for every permutation of results you can think of. So it's not always easy to cut them off at the pass, so to speak, because they'll have already thought of contingency plans for most of the reactions you would think of.
Which is why I quoted Shakespeare at a problem customer.
There are three main ways in which it's considered 'acceptable' for clerks to react to belligerent customers: they can be super nice, or ignore them. Sometimes you get clerks who are rude back, which occasionally startles them into silence. Most of the time it doesn't, because even being mean right back isn't weird or strange. They may not have thought you'd do it, but that doesn't mean they'd be unprepared for it. People's reactions to shit they hadn't though of is usually hostility, but there does come a point--and everyone has this point, it's just located in different areas--where you are experiencing something so unbelievably insane, so totally out of the ordinary, so unexpected, that you cannot meaningfully react. Because you just have no fucking idea what you're supposed to do in that situation.
I've been there myself. There are situations I look back on where I wonder why I didn't do something or say something, but it's like coming up with a biting retort--you only do it after you've had time to think about it because you were too shocked to on the spot. I've had time and the benefit of not actually being in that place anymore to aid me in coming up with possible coping strategies. At the time I was pretty much just sitting there thinking, 'What the ever-loving shit am I supposed to do here? Is this even real? What the fuck?'
So after a very long day with very long queues and very big purchases and very picky customers, I got a woman who was annoyed with me for taking too long and was being a complete entitlement whore. By then I'd had enough and, while I didn't want to get fired, I figured there would be no established protocol at the store in the event that an employee regurgitated Shakespeare.
Which they don't.
Which is great, because that's exactly what I did.
Specifically, it was Shylock's famous quote from 'The Merchant of Venice'. The woman was ranting about how clerks are horrible and no one is helping any customers and we're all being jerks and we should be ashamed and...
And then I piped up with, 'Hath not a clerk eyes? Hath not a clerk hands? Organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?'
Then went back to the transaction as if nothing had happened.
I'm not sure if I eventually will be in any trouble for this, but it did make the woman shut up out of pure shock.
Which was all I wanted in the first place.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Chit-Chat
We in the English-speaking world are a bit spoiled when it comes to how we understand one another no matter where we come from. People make grouse about certain linguistic disparities between the English spoken in the UK or Ireland or Australia or Canada or the US--and certainly there are differences, enough to induce some frustration in people trying to effectively communicate with another person who is familiar with a different version of the language. Most of the time you end up with a miscommunication--if you ask for 'chips' in the UK and Australia, you get what Americans call French fries--but there's also a major risk of embarrassment when certain words have a meaning that's not only different but also potentially obscene or offensive. That much-maligned, unattractive little nylon pouch losers and touristy people wear around their waists is called a 'fanny pack' in America, but if you call it that in England you'll get a lot of stares and a very awkward silence will descend upon the room, because the word 'fanny' is a crass slang term for a woman's genitals. Instead they call it a 'bum bag'.
So it's easy to get a bit frustrated sometimes, though in the last decade or two it has somewhat diminished owing to the internet and its ability to link people across the planet who might otherwise never have an opportunity to talk to one another. But in fact, this is significantly improved when compared to the past.
One somewhat surprising--but less known--aspect of non-European English-speaking countries is that there aren't too terribly many regional dialects in them. There are varying accents, of course, a few slang terms or phrases common in one area that are unknown or mean something different elsewhere. There really isn't much in the way of linguistic variety--they mostly speak the same way as their countrymen. This shouldn't have happened, and the fact that it worked out this way is a turn of events that most people aren't aware of to appreciate.
The British isles, on paper, speak all the same language: English. Technically this is true, but there are an awful fucking lot of accents there. there are more regional dialects and distinct accents in England alone than there are in the whole of the US. This is true for every country in Europe--people within the same country (especially larger ones), while technically normally speaking the same language on paper, employ regional dialects that are often pretty substantially different from one another. To the point that they're sometimes actually mutually incomprehensible.
No, really, this happens. My aunt married a guy from Germany, who grew up in a small town in the south right near the French border. He speaks very good English but his family members mostly don't. Though most of my mother's family can speak German, and speak it well--my parents both do, as does my grandmother--the two sets of families can't talk to one another because the German my uncle and his family speak is so different from the one everyone else speaks that they're mutually incomprehensible. My uncle is even good friends with a woman originally from Berlin, to whom German is her first language, and they have to converse in English because neither of them can understand the other's regional dialects.
It's nuts.
England and English aren't that bad, even with the myriad dialects and accents within the country. But it wasn't always like that. A 1490 account by William Caxton describes a group of sailors from London getting stranded and becalmed on the Thames in Kent, just sixty miles from their start point. A few men went ashore to buy supplies and food during the wait, but when they asked a local woman where to get these things, she didn't understand them. Their words were so different from her native tongue that she actually thought they were speaking French. And this was within the same country, a mere sixty miles from where they began.
This is gradually changing, as I said, but that's the kind of disparity I mean--people living so close to one another just a few centuries ago couldn't communicate in the same language, yet people speak more or less the same across entire continents without trouble in Australia and North America.
And were it not for a few fortuitous circumstances, that's how it would have turned out, particularly in the USA. When settlers first grew in number enough to cover a large area, and when they pushed further west and discovered they were standing on a lot more land than they realized, the assumption most people made was that communities would each individually develop their own dialects based on who settled there and when. It was also believed that the continent would ultimately divide itself into separate countries much like Europe. And it's largely thanks to two very under-appreciated things that prevented this from happening.
Part of the reason is that expansion to the west in America occurred around the time railroads were being built all over the world--one reason regional dialects form and become wildly variant is due to isolation or limited influence of outsiders. Groups of people scattered across a large area wouldn't have much--if any--contact between one another when there was a distance between them and no efficient, speedy way of crossing it. The railroads changed all that. Rather than remaining cut off from each other, distant communities were never left along long enough to develop a manner of speech too terribly different from anyone else's. Again, differences remained, but they were very minor ones. People gave Abraham Lincoln an awful lot of crap because he was from Illinois and spoke with what the snobs of Washington perceived as an embarrassingly uncultured backwoodsy way. (He purportedly greeted people with 'Howdy'.) But he had no problems making himself understood whether he was in Washington DC or Maine or Ohio or California--the language was still very much the same across the country.
Another big reason regional dialects never formed--and no other language prevailed like English outside of isolated small communities--is, somewhat ironically, because of the fact that America attracted immigrants from many different countries across Europe and Asia. And they came speaking an awful lot of very different languages, making it difficult for the newly arrived immigrants to communicate with their fellow immigrants as well as with the colonists and Americans who already lived there. Even immigrants from the same country--as we've already seen--weren't always able to talk to each other. (Italian is notoriously schizophrenic.) The most practical solution was not for all the new immigrants to learn the native tongues of all the other new immigrants--that would have been hard, time-consuming, confusing, and complicated. The easiest solution for everybody was for them to adopt a single language, and adopt one that was foreign to all of them. This sounds insane, but it is actually what happened.
More or less the same pattern happened in Australia and Canada--expansion and exploration were accompanied by advances in modes of travel that didn't let any community remain isolated enough to form a new language, and immigrants adopted a mutual language that none of them knew but that they all could learn in order to talk with one another.
Of course, I'm perfectly aware that linguistic pockets exist in all of these places. People tended to settle with their own 'kind', so to speak, which is why New York City's various neighbourhoods became associated with one particular country and culture--the Chinatowns, Little Italys, Little Havanas, and Little Haitis scattered across the United States prove that. But these are basically just anomalies, and the linguistic influence doesn't extend very far in any area. There even used to be a lot more of these linguistic pockets, little communities where people could primarily talk in any number of European or Asian languages. But these are anomalies.
The final death blow--at least in the US--to regional dialects and little towns channelling old countries came during the First World War in the 1910s. There was an intense sense of paranoia and even outright hate of Europeans and Europe in general--seen as the enemy by most Americans, immigrants and inhabitants of those little pockets (especially ones who couldn't speak English) were treated appallingly. In a fit of nationalistic ego, the state and sometimes federal governments enacted laws prohibiting newspapers from being printed in another language but English, for schools (including private ones) to teach in any foreign language, and even for church services and telephone calls to be conducted in something other than English.
The fact that any of these pockets survived is something of a marvel.
All of this seems quite a marvel to us--we find it hard to believe that such things can happen, that it's possible for so few people in so small an area can speak so many different languages so different from each other. But we only see it that way because we have no experience with a world that's structured that way--and had the people of the fifteenth century been told that one day hundreds of years in the future, people living thousands of miles apart would speak the exact same language, I imagine they'd've thought that was just as strange.
I can't honestly say whether or not I believe that an eventual linguistic amalgamation would have occurred in the end anyway, had mutually incomprehensible regional dialects arisen in what is now the English-speaking world had these things not happened when they did. They may have, had worldwide communications developed the same way--which is unlikely, I admit. I'm not an expert, so it's impossible for me to even meaningfully speculate on the matter.
But that's life, No, seriously, that's what all life is like. Everything that has ever happened, everything we know today--from the ground we walk on to our very existence to our advanced technology--is the result of the right things happening at the right time.
So it's easy to get a bit frustrated sometimes, though in the last decade or two it has somewhat diminished owing to the internet and its ability to link people across the planet who might otherwise never have an opportunity to talk to one another. But in fact, this is significantly improved when compared to the past.
One somewhat surprising--but less known--aspect of non-European English-speaking countries is that there aren't too terribly many regional dialects in them. There are varying accents, of course, a few slang terms or phrases common in one area that are unknown or mean something different elsewhere. There really isn't much in the way of linguistic variety--they mostly speak the same way as their countrymen. This shouldn't have happened, and the fact that it worked out this way is a turn of events that most people aren't aware of to appreciate.
The British isles, on paper, speak all the same language: English. Technically this is true, but there are an awful fucking lot of accents there. there are more regional dialects and distinct accents in England alone than there are in the whole of the US. This is true for every country in Europe--people within the same country (especially larger ones), while technically normally speaking the same language on paper, employ regional dialects that are often pretty substantially different from one another. To the point that they're sometimes actually mutually incomprehensible.
No, really, this happens. My aunt married a guy from Germany, who grew up in a small town in the south right near the French border. He speaks very good English but his family members mostly don't. Though most of my mother's family can speak German, and speak it well--my parents both do, as does my grandmother--the two sets of families can't talk to one another because the German my uncle and his family speak is so different from the one everyone else speaks that they're mutually incomprehensible. My uncle is even good friends with a woman originally from Berlin, to whom German is her first language, and they have to converse in English because neither of them can understand the other's regional dialects.
It's nuts.
England and English aren't that bad, even with the myriad dialects and accents within the country. But it wasn't always like that. A 1490 account by William Caxton describes a group of sailors from London getting stranded and becalmed on the Thames in Kent, just sixty miles from their start point. A few men went ashore to buy supplies and food during the wait, but when they asked a local woman where to get these things, she didn't understand them. Their words were so different from her native tongue that she actually thought they were speaking French. And this was within the same country, a mere sixty miles from where they began.
This is gradually changing, as I said, but that's the kind of disparity I mean--people living so close to one another just a few centuries ago couldn't communicate in the same language, yet people speak more or less the same across entire continents without trouble in Australia and North America.
And were it not for a few fortuitous circumstances, that's how it would have turned out, particularly in the USA. When settlers first grew in number enough to cover a large area, and when they pushed further west and discovered they were standing on a lot more land than they realized, the assumption most people made was that communities would each individually develop their own dialects based on who settled there and when. It was also believed that the continent would ultimately divide itself into separate countries much like Europe. And it's largely thanks to two very under-appreciated things that prevented this from happening.
Part of the reason is that expansion to the west in America occurred around the time railroads were being built all over the world--one reason regional dialects form and become wildly variant is due to isolation or limited influence of outsiders. Groups of people scattered across a large area wouldn't have much--if any--contact between one another when there was a distance between them and no efficient, speedy way of crossing it. The railroads changed all that. Rather than remaining cut off from each other, distant communities were never left along long enough to develop a manner of speech too terribly different from anyone else's. Again, differences remained, but they were very minor ones. People gave Abraham Lincoln an awful lot of crap because he was from Illinois and spoke with what the snobs of Washington perceived as an embarrassingly uncultured backwoodsy way. (He purportedly greeted people with 'Howdy'.) But he had no problems making himself understood whether he was in Washington DC or Maine or Ohio or California--the language was still very much the same across the country.
Another big reason regional dialects never formed--and no other language prevailed like English outside of isolated small communities--is, somewhat ironically, because of the fact that America attracted immigrants from many different countries across Europe and Asia. And they came speaking an awful lot of very different languages, making it difficult for the newly arrived immigrants to communicate with their fellow immigrants as well as with the colonists and Americans who already lived there. Even immigrants from the same country--as we've already seen--weren't always able to talk to each other. (Italian is notoriously schizophrenic.) The most practical solution was not for all the new immigrants to learn the native tongues of all the other new immigrants--that would have been hard, time-consuming, confusing, and complicated. The easiest solution for everybody was for them to adopt a single language, and adopt one that was foreign to all of them. This sounds insane, but it is actually what happened.
More or less the same pattern happened in Australia and Canada--expansion and exploration were accompanied by advances in modes of travel that didn't let any community remain isolated enough to form a new language, and immigrants adopted a mutual language that none of them knew but that they all could learn in order to talk with one another.
Of course, I'm perfectly aware that linguistic pockets exist in all of these places. People tended to settle with their own 'kind', so to speak, which is why New York City's various neighbourhoods became associated with one particular country and culture--the Chinatowns, Little Italys, Little Havanas, and Little Haitis scattered across the United States prove that. But these are basically just anomalies, and the linguistic influence doesn't extend very far in any area. There even used to be a lot more of these linguistic pockets, little communities where people could primarily talk in any number of European or Asian languages. But these are anomalies.
The final death blow--at least in the US--to regional dialects and little towns channelling old countries came during the First World War in the 1910s. There was an intense sense of paranoia and even outright hate of Europeans and Europe in general--seen as the enemy by most Americans, immigrants and inhabitants of those little pockets (especially ones who couldn't speak English) were treated appallingly. In a fit of nationalistic ego, the state and sometimes federal governments enacted laws prohibiting newspapers from being printed in another language but English, for schools (including private ones) to teach in any foreign language, and even for church services and telephone calls to be conducted in something other than English.
The fact that any of these pockets survived is something of a marvel.
All of this seems quite a marvel to us--we find it hard to believe that such things can happen, that it's possible for so few people in so small an area can speak so many different languages so different from each other. But we only see it that way because we have no experience with a world that's structured that way--and had the people of the fifteenth century been told that one day hundreds of years in the future, people living thousands of miles apart would speak the exact same language, I imagine they'd've thought that was just as strange.
I can't honestly say whether or not I believe that an eventual linguistic amalgamation would have occurred in the end anyway, had mutually incomprehensible regional dialects arisen in what is now the English-speaking world had these things not happened when they did. They may have, had worldwide communications developed the same way--which is unlikely, I admit. I'm not an expert, so it's impossible for me to even meaningfully speculate on the matter.
But that's life, No, seriously, that's what all life is like. Everything that has ever happened, everything we know today--from the ground we walk on to our very existence to our advanced technology--is the result of the right things happening at the right time.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Old Dog, New Tricks
As can be ascertained pretty easily by the title of this blog, I'm one of those weird people that actually enjoys Shakespeare. Liking Shakespeare isn't by itself especially unusual. Lots of people do, for lots of reasons. Most of them are scholarly, or at least pretend to be--trying to interpret the nuances every which way, including the people trying to prove that Shakespeare was someone other than Shakespeare. For me personally, I find the mystery surrounding the man himself kind of interesting, but am not otherwise particularly interested in that facet. I don't even really like the sonnets, though they become a whole lot more entertaining to read once you realize that most of them are addressed to another man. Sonnet Eighteen (they're numbered, not titled, and the numbers are completely arbitrary and have nothing at all to do with continuity or chronological order) begins with the famous lines, 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate', which is pretty standard formula for a love poem but the subject being addressed is actually a man.
Whatever this means about Shakespeare himself can only be speculated. It would rather appear that he had some fiery romantic blood in his veins just because a huge chunk of his plays, poems, and sonnets are romantic in nature. But the only thing that tells us is that he was comfortable and talented enough to write about it, and write about it really well. As anyone who has spent any time in fanfiction communities knows, you don't actually have to be a gay man to write convincingly well about gay men.
My interest isn't scholarly, though. It'd be nice to know more about him just because he's so fascinating--or would appear to be fascinating, based on the content of his work, but he appears to be an awful lot of contradictory things, gay and straight and romantic and dark and funny and brutal, based on the content of his work. But we probably aren't going to, so I don't think too much about it other than to scoff and roll my eyes at people who try and assert that someone else wrote it all. My interest is purely literary--I just like his shit. I'm a fan of his work just as I'm a fan of other writers; I don't necessarily like everything he ever created, but most of it is enjoyable.
In some ways I think I'm kind of lucky that I have this kind of interest because it makes it so much easier for me to enjoy his work in any form--reading it for fun, watching performances live or on film, seeing various adaptations of the stories in other settings. I'm not at all concerned with interpreting symbolism that might or might not be there in the first place. So it's just a good read for me. And especially, it means it's okay for me to like re-worked versions of the stories.
There are two camps in Shakespeare's 'fandom' when it comes to the plays being reworked and tweaked to having a different setting than the canon. One group thinks it's good fun, because it shows how the material itself--while the language might be arcane and the references and jokes and puns outdated--is still just as relevant and real and accessible and human today as it was four hundred years ago. The other camp views contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare as akin to, like, raping kittens. The kind of fire-breathing, hateful purism that comes from fans whenever any book is adapted to a film is significantly intensified when Shakespeare is involved.
As with so much else, I don't feel very strongly either way. I've seen good adaptations and I've seen bad ones. 'Ten Things I Hate About You' was based on 'Taming of the Shrew', and I used to like it, but I kinda grew out of it. I love 'The Lion King' but don't really feel it owes anything to being a supposed adaptation of 'Hamlet'. But when the adaptations are good, they're really freaking good.
Anyway. About the time I was learning I enjoyed Shakespeare--thanks to Beatrice and Bennedick in 'Much Ado About Nothing'--the BBC released a series of four films based on four of Shakespeare's plays, set in contemporary Britain. 'Taming of the Shrew', 'Much Ado', 'Macbeth', and 'Midsummer Night's Dream'. I think this was part of why I eventually grew into Shakespeare, because these modern adaptations are actually really amazing and do very splendidly show how the plays are still relevant today. They weren't well-received by a lot of the audience, though, because certain changes were made to each play. But that's part of why I loved them.
People get really worked up whenever source material is tampered with. I never understood that. Some things don't translate well from book to film. Some things are outdated. Petruchio's treatment of Katherine is today classified as abuse. There aren't real witches in the world for an adaptation of 'Macbeth'. So they need to be adjusted. And adjusted they were. Very well. At least, I think so. The BBC made Katherine a career woman who becomes Prime Minister while Petruchio becomes a stay-at-home dad who crossdresses. (Seriously.)
My favourite adjustment was that Hero didn't take Claudio back in 'Much Ado'. Hero always struck me as having no personality. And Claudio is an insecure douche--he proves that time and again. When he doesn't get his way he gets really bitchy. THE PRINCE WOOS FOR HIMSELF, OH NO!! It never sat well with me that after humiliating her at her own wedding in front of everyone she knows by calling her a whore, Hero still thought it would be hunky dory to marry Claudio. Oh my god, girl, this is why women turn up hacked to pieces in trunks at the bottom of the ocean!! Instead of taking him back in the BBC's version, she flat-out turns him down. "Get married? Never in a million years."
I don't like everything Shakespeare ever wrote. But I don't like everything any of my favourite writers ever wrote. That's normal. People pretend you can't be a 'real fan' if you don't 100% love everything. But that's silly. I don't really like the tragedies but I don't like ANYBODY'S tragedies. The history plays are 'meh'. And don't even get me started on 'Titus Andronicus'. You've probably never freaking heard of that play before but it is indeed one of Shakespeare's and it is hands-down the most jaw-droppingly fucked up story in the entire world. It makes 'Psycho' look like 'Sesame Street'. Don't read it. You will regret it. Seriously.
Whatever form it takes, Shakespeare's work has earned a special place in my heart. It's still a shame we know so little about him, but we're so lucky to have so much of what he left behind. You really have no idea just how fortunate we are to have most of his plays--Shakespeare's canon accounts for 15% of the surviving plays from Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He left us two thousand new words and phrases we would be pretty lost without.
So. Whomever the 'real' William Shakespeare was, whatever he was like outside the fantastic realm of writing--I, personally, am grateful.
We all should be.
Whatever this means about Shakespeare himself can only be speculated. It would rather appear that he had some fiery romantic blood in his veins just because a huge chunk of his plays, poems, and sonnets are romantic in nature. But the only thing that tells us is that he was comfortable and talented enough to write about it, and write about it really well. As anyone who has spent any time in fanfiction communities knows, you don't actually have to be a gay man to write convincingly well about gay men.
My interest isn't scholarly, though. It'd be nice to know more about him just because he's so fascinating--or would appear to be fascinating, based on the content of his work, but he appears to be an awful lot of contradictory things, gay and straight and romantic and dark and funny and brutal, based on the content of his work. But we probably aren't going to, so I don't think too much about it other than to scoff and roll my eyes at people who try and assert that someone else wrote it all. My interest is purely literary--I just like his shit. I'm a fan of his work just as I'm a fan of other writers; I don't necessarily like everything he ever created, but most of it is enjoyable.
In some ways I think I'm kind of lucky that I have this kind of interest because it makes it so much easier for me to enjoy his work in any form--reading it for fun, watching performances live or on film, seeing various adaptations of the stories in other settings. I'm not at all concerned with interpreting symbolism that might or might not be there in the first place. So it's just a good read for me. And especially, it means it's okay for me to like re-worked versions of the stories.
There are two camps in Shakespeare's 'fandom' when it comes to the plays being reworked and tweaked to having a different setting than the canon. One group thinks it's good fun, because it shows how the material itself--while the language might be arcane and the references and jokes and puns outdated--is still just as relevant and real and accessible and human today as it was four hundred years ago. The other camp views contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare as akin to, like, raping kittens. The kind of fire-breathing, hateful purism that comes from fans whenever any book is adapted to a film is significantly intensified when Shakespeare is involved.
As with so much else, I don't feel very strongly either way. I've seen good adaptations and I've seen bad ones. 'Ten Things I Hate About You' was based on 'Taming of the Shrew', and I used to like it, but I kinda grew out of it. I love 'The Lion King' but don't really feel it owes anything to being a supposed adaptation of 'Hamlet'. But when the adaptations are good, they're really freaking good.
Anyway. About the time I was learning I enjoyed Shakespeare--thanks to Beatrice and Bennedick in 'Much Ado About Nothing'--the BBC released a series of four films based on four of Shakespeare's plays, set in contemporary Britain. 'Taming of the Shrew', 'Much Ado', 'Macbeth', and 'Midsummer Night's Dream'. I think this was part of why I eventually grew into Shakespeare, because these modern adaptations are actually really amazing and do very splendidly show how the plays are still relevant today. They weren't well-received by a lot of the audience, though, because certain changes were made to each play. But that's part of why I loved them.
People get really worked up whenever source material is tampered with. I never understood that. Some things don't translate well from book to film. Some things are outdated. Petruchio's treatment of Katherine is today classified as abuse. There aren't real witches in the world for an adaptation of 'Macbeth'. So they need to be adjusted. And adjusted they were. Very well. At least, I think so. The BBC made Katherine a career woman who becomes Prime Minister while Petruchio becomes a stay-at-home dad who crossdresses. (Seriously.)
My favourite adjustment was that Hero didn't take Claudio back in 'Much Ado'. Hero always struck me as having no personality. And Claudio is an insecure douche--he proves that time and again. When he doesn't get his way he gets really bitchy. THE PRINCE WOOS FOR HIMSELF, OH NO!! It never sat well with me that after humiliating her at her own wedding in front of everyone she knows by calling her a whore, Hero still thought it would be hunky dory to marry Claudio. Oh my god, girl, this is why women turn up hacked to pieces in trunks at the bottom of the ocean!! Instead of taking him back in the BBC's version, she flat-out turns him down. "Get married? Never in a million years."
I don't like everything Shakespeare ever wrote. But I don't like everything any of my favourite writers ever wrote. That's normal. People pretend you can't be a 'real fan' if you don't 100% love everything. But that's silly. I don't really like the tragedies but I don't like ANYBODY'S tragedies. The history plays are 'meh'. And don't even get me started on 'Titus Andronicus'. You've probably never freaking heard of that play before but it is indeed one of Shakespeare's and it is hands-down the most jaw-droppingly fucked up story in the entire world. It makes 'Psycho' look like 'Sesame Street'. Don't read it. You will regret it. Seriously.
Whatever form it takes, Shakespeare's work has earned a special place in my heart. It's still a shame we know so little about him, but we're so lucky to have so much of what he left behind. You really have no idea just how fortunate we are to have most of his plays--Shakespeare's canon accounts for 15% of the surviving plays from Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He left us two thousand new words and phrases we would be pretty lost without.
So. Whomever the 'real' William Shakespeare was, whatever he was like outside the fantastic realm of writing--I, personally, am grateful.
We all should be.
Observed in the Wild: Douchebags
I am unbelievably fascinated by human psychology and sociology. How
people react, to what, and when--and how I can manipulate the
conditions. This is seriously fascinating and amazingly fun for me.
Which is why I maintain two dating website profiles despite having a boyfriend. It's a breeding ground for studies like that.
I get a lot of mail that's not especially noteworthy--cliche-ridden and poorly-written, but not really outstanding. Every now and then I get doozies. And dick pics. Because women totally dig it when you just whip it out randomly for no reason, guys! I read it on the intertube, so it must be true.
I only respond to messages when I feel like it and act like myself as often as I play an outrageous character. Just controlling the conditions, nothing more. I once spent a few weeks emailing a guy who was clearly into me (I'm reasonably good-looking and into video games, this is Geek Goddess Territory here), all the while making very clear but unspecific allusions to the fact that I might or might not have been a pre-op male-to-female transexual. I never said 'HEY I GOT A PENIS LAWL!!', but I mentioned 'transitioning', 'surgery', a messy break from family and friends over something they refused to accept about me, and so on. He didn't catch on for aaaaages. I'm pretty sure he eventually figured it out himself but he was OBLIVIOUS for AGES.
One thing I get every now and then is unsolicited phone numbers. I don't know why anyone would do this. Not only is it easily traceable, it's also a very effective tool for harassment and stalking. You don't know who you're talking to at first, in any situation--giving a total stranger your number offline or on is a Really Freaking Stupid Idea (TM) because that's information that can be used to invade your privacy and harass you.
Naturally I'd never do this, but I cannot resist dicking with people who are that desperate and that stupid. I discovered a website called ICantFindMyPhone.com which is a completely safe bot program into which you enter your phone number in order to locate it by sound when you've misplaced it. Since I lose my phone a minimum of all the fucking time, I found this website useful. It totally works, it doesn't sign you up for solicitor calls or spam or charge you or anything. All it does is dial the phone.
So whenever I get a phone number from a freakoid online, I plug it into ICFMP a bunch of times at extremely odd and inconvenient times. I did it just now. It's 3.15am on a weeknight. It's going to annoy the piss out of him.
Which just totally gladdens my empty, shriveled little black heart. Have fun getting phone calls, dumbfuck! It won't teach anybody a lesson, I don't think, but it sure makes me cackle like a crazy person over my silly and petty (but mostly harmless) revenge tactic.
Which is why I maintain two dating website profiles despite having a boyfriend. It's a breeding ground for studies like that.
I get a lot of mail that's not especially noteworthy--cliche-ridden and poorly-written, but not really outstanding. Every now and then I get doozies. And dick pics. Because women totally dig it when you just whip it out randomly for no reason, guys! I read it on the intertube, so it must be true.
I only respond to messages when I feel like it and act like myself as often as I play an outrageous character. Just controlling the conditions, nothing more. I once spent a few weeks emailing a guy who was clearly into me (I'm reasonably good-looking and into video games, this is Geek Goddess Territory here), all the while making very clear but unspecific allusions to the fact that I might or might not have been a pre-op male-to-female transexual. I never said 'HEY I GOT A PENIS LAWL!!', but I mentioned 'transitioning', 'surgery', a messy break from family and friends over something they refused to accept about me, and so on. He didn't catch on for aaaaages. I'm pretty sure he eventually figured it out himself but he was OBLIVIOUS for AGES.
One thing I get every now and then is unsolicited phone numbers. I don't know why anyone would do this. Not only is it easily traceable, it's also a very effective tool for harassment and stalking. You don't know who you're talking to at first, in any situation--giving a total stranger your number offline or on is a Really Freaking Stupid Idea (TM) because that's information that can be used to invade your privacy and harass you.
Naturally I'd never do this, but I cannot resist dicking with people who are that desperate and that stupid. I discovered a website called ICantFindMyPhone.com which is a completely safe bot program into which you enter your phone number in order to locate it by sound when you've misplaced it. Since I lose my phone a minimum of all the fucking time, I found this website useful. It totally works, it doesn't sign you up for solicitor calls or spam or charge you or anything. All it does is dial the phone.
So whenever I get a phone number from a freakoid online, I plug it into ICFMP a bunch of times at extremely odd and inconvenient times. I did it just now. It's 3.15am on a weeknight. It's going to annoy the piss out of him.
Which just totally gladdens my empty, shriveled little black heart. Have fun getting phone calls, dumbfuck! It won't teach anybody a lesson, I don't think, but it sure makes me cackle like a crazy person over my silly and petty (but mostly harmless) revenge tactic.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
High Horses, Low Blows, and Military Elitism
I read this from advice columnist and frequent shitty person Amy Dickenson the other day. She almost never gives good advice, advising people to make bad choices and take subservient roles or compromise on things that have no business being the subject of compromise. I hate her advice but I belong to a snark community online dedicated to mocking her and other bad advice columnists from the internet and archives.
For those who don't want to read, the letter I am focusing on is the first one, which proclaims to be from a woman whose family served in the military, whose husbands and sons are all military, and who tragically lost a child to the military. Her daughter (of whom tehre is no mention of military service, incidentally) is dating a young doctor who, by the letter-writer's own admission, is respectful and nice and makes her happy. But she can't stand him because he didn't serve in the military. The letter-writer thinks he's 'entitled' and a bad person because he doesn't go to church and never joined any armed forces, because he's (the horror!) a plastic surgeon, and because he (????) drives a foreign car.
Look, lady, I'm sorry for your loss and shit but seriously--you need to go fucking die in a brick kiln for your attitude. Fuck you hard with a hammer. This is not fucking Communist North Korea. This is not the Vietnam War. This is not the fucking Roman Empire or Sparta. Military service is not and should never, ever be compulsory. You know what you get for forcing people to serve their country? People who really fucking hate their countries. You can't make people be patriotic and sacrifice their lives and their freedom--even in the event they never see combat, they lose their fucking freedom selling their souls to the fucking military--to their country. That becomes meaningless, for one; a country is best served by the people who want to serve it. Though my cynical brain makes me wonder how voluntary the service of the children actually was. People who come from military families tend not to actually realistically have very much of a choice in this area. There's almost never an explicitly-stated message of 'enlist or we disown you', but that tends to be the subtext.
Military service is fucking sacred and no one dares speak against it, but I'm going to. Not everybody who joins the military is an all-around hero. They're not automatically good people because of this. Even when they go off to fight and die. They are not always doing it for the purest of intentions. Sometimes they're really, really fucking atrocious individuals. Criminals exist in the ranks of the armed forces just as they exist everywhere else. Just as there are bad people who join the priesthood, or the medical profession, or become teachers, or police officers, or any other 'respected' authoritarian profession purely to gain access to people to victimize, there are people who join the military because they really, really fucking suck. They do it to kill people. Not everyone who wears a uniform is like this, obviously, and there are bad people in uniform who are bad in ways that have nothing to do with their reasons for joining the military. Charles Whitman was a marine--before he climbed the fucking clock tower at the University of Texas in 1966 and shot people.
Wearing a uniform doesn't make you a hero. And refusing to wear one doesn't make you a bad person.
What I really, really, really fucking hate that I've seen time and again in military families is this elitist prejudice against people who aren't military. Like no one is worth a shit until they sell their soul and stop being human for the motherfucking government. Go fuck yourselves. You all deserve to be slapped for thinking of this.
People who like the military have such a fucking hard-on for it. I've known military families from all branches, good and bad people. Most of them are not like this, but the ones who are tend to be really egregious offenders. When you think the military should be the be-all, end-all for everyone you really need to pull your head out of your ass. Not everyone is cut out for that shit. Not many people actually are. I, for one, would not last a week. I am emotionally unstable and extremely volatile and if you taught me how to handle a gun I would probably follow Charles Whitman right up to the clock tower and shoot people. I don't take orders. I odn't like answering to other people. I do it all to an extent because I have to but beyond what I consider reasonable accommodation, I refuse to do any of it. I would not be a stellar choice for anyone's military unless you decided to plant me with the enemy for the sole purpose of collapsing their entire system of government.
My grandfather was in the Air Force and is one of those guys with a major fucking hard-on for military service. He has pressured--really, seriously, intensely pressured with the threat of cutting off communication and disinheritance--every one of his grandchildren as they get older to join the military. None of us so far have been obvious first choices for military. I am not, my brother is a fat nerd who doesn't shower and can't be nice to anyone (actually that sounds pretty military to me), my cousin Ian is a very skinny computer nerd type and extremely timid. None of us are military types. We would not have ever done well. We all passed through high school and Grandpa pressured us all to join the military--some branch, any branch--ostensibly to 'help pay for college' but frankly the price is too high for any degree. For some reason he wants us all to be Marines. I don't know why.
Anyway: the answer has always been NO, but Grandpa doesn't listen to this. He talks about how awesome it would be for us to be in the military. He talks about the 'opportunities' (yeah, to get fucking killed). He talks about how good an experience it would be. (Know what else is an experience? Cancer. It's also an experience I hope I never have.) The answer has always been NO. I get that he just wants to make us do what he thinks is right but he needs to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. No means no. No means I do not want to join any branch of the military for any reason whatso ever and no circumstance conceivable, including gunpoint, would entice me to try it. The discussion should end there, but the discussion never ended there. We got literature in the mail, calls from recruiters, applications to unwanted places sent to us.
No.
Knock it the fuck off, Grandpa. Go away. Stop it. Cease and desist or I will switch your multivitamin for cyanide.
My next cousin is going to be a junior in high school and he's pressuring her. Join the military, military service, military, military, military!!!!!!!!!!! No. She is not military type either. She has said no. Still he bugs her.
This is not acceptable. Someone says no, that is the end of everything.
If you want to join the armed forces or something, go ahead. Have at it. Totally your choice. That's what the freedom you rub your tiny little peen with comes from--people who choose to serve because they want to and they defend those freedoms. When you take freedom out of the equation it becomes meaningless. I understand wanting to recommend something you love to people you love--like sharing a good movie or a book or music. But when they don't like it, you stop pushing it.
And that is especially applicable with things as life-changing as a decision to enter military service.
I don't know whether or not the initial letter-writer was simply writing out of grief and anger at her son's death (guilt, perhaps?), or whether she wrote it because she genuinely believes that those who serve are inherently more valuable than those who don't. I sincerely hope she gets the help she clearly needs because this is not an attitude that should continue. She's so worried about how 'future grandchildren' might receive a 'message' from this--but what message is she so scared they'll get? That it's okay to be different and follow your dreams? OH, wait, that's right, military shitbags don't like people who are different. Somehow I don't think she'll have to worry--if there are grandkids and she keeps that attitude, I suspect she won't be invited to spend too terribly much time with them in the end.
Get over yourselves. Stop insisting everyone needs to be a military personnel to be a human being. They don't. You know what you are? A terrible little entitled fuckhead.
Not all military families are like that. Most aren't. But, as I said, when things go bad there... they go really bad.
For those who don't want to read, the letter I am focusing on is the first one, which proclaims to be from a woman whose family served in the military, whose husbands and sons are all military, and who tragically lost a child to the military. Her daughter (of whom tehre is no mention of military service, incidentally) is dating a young doctor who, by the letter-writer's own admission, is respectful and nice and makes her happy. But she can't stand him because he didn't serve in the military. The letter-writer thinks he's 'entitled' and a bad person because he doesn't go to church and never joined any armed forces, because he's (the horror!) a plastic surgeon, and because he (????) drives a foreign car.
Look, lady, I'm sorry for your loss and shit but seriously--you need to go fucking die in a brick kiln for your attitude. Fuck you hard with a hammer. This is not fucking Communist North Korea. This is not the Vietnam War. This is not the fucking Roman Empire or Sparta. Military service is not and should never, ever be compulsory. You know what you get for forcing people to serve their country? People who really fucking hate their countries. You can't make people be patriotic and sacrifice their lives and their freedom--even in the event they never see combat, they lose their fucking freedom selling their souls to the fucking military--to their country. That becomes meaningless, for one; a country is best served by the people who want to serve it. Though my cynical brain makes me wonder how voluntary the service of the children actually was. People who come from military families tend not to actually realistically have very much of a choice in this area. There's almost never an explicitly-stated message of 'enlist or we disown you', but that tends to be the subtext.
Military service is fucking sacred and no one dares speak against it, but I'm going to. Not everybody who joins the military is an all-around hero. They're not automatically good people because of this. Even when they go off to fight and die. They are not always doing it for the purest of intentions. Sometimes they're really, really fucking atrocious individuals. Criminals exist in the ranks of the armed forces just as they exist everywhere else. Just as there are bad people who join the priesthood, or the medical profession, or become teachers, or police officers, or any other 'respected' authoritarian profession purely to gain access to people to victimize, there are people who join the military because they really, really fucking suck. They do it to kill people. Not everyone who wears a uniform is like this, obviously, and there are bad people in uniform who are bad in ways that have nothing to do with their reasons for joining the military. Charles Whitman was a marine--before he climbed the fucking clock tower at the University of Texas in 1966 and shot people.
Wearing a uniform doesn't make you a hero. And refusing to wear one doesn't make you a bad person.
What I really, really, really fucking hate that I've seen time and again in military families is this elitist prejudice against people who aren't military. Like no one is worth a shit until they sell their soul and stop being human for the motherfucking government. Go fuck yourselves. You all deserve to be slapped for thinking of this.
People who like the military have such a fucking hard-on for it. I've known military families from all branches, good and bad people. Most of them are not like this, but the ones who are tend to be really egregious offenders. When you think the military should be the be-all, end-all for everyone you really need to pull your head out of your ass. Not everyone is cut out for that shit. Not many people actually are. I, for one, would not last a week. I am emotionally unstable and extremely volatile and if you taught me how to handle a gun I would probably follow Charles Whitman right up to the clock tower and shoot people. I don't take orders. I odn't like answering to other people. I do it all to an extent because I have to but beyond what I consider reasonable accommodation, I refuse to do any of it. I would not be a stellar choice for anyone's military unless you decided to plant me with the enemy for the sole purpose of collapsing their entire system of government.
My grandfather was in the Air Force and is one of those guys with a major fucking hard-on for military service. He has pressured--really, seriously, intensely pressured with the threat of cutting off communication and disinheritance--every one of his grandchildren as they get older to join the military. None of us so far have been obvious first choices for military. I am not, my brother is a fat nerd who doesn't shower and can't be nice to anyone (actually that sounds pretty military to me), my cousin Ian is a very skinny computer nerd type and extremely timid. None of us are military types. We would not have ever done well. We all passed through high school and Grandpa pressured us all to join the military--some branch, any branch--ostensibly to 'help pay for college' but frankly the price is too high for any degree. For some reason he wants us all to be Marines. I don't know why.
Anyway: the answer has always been NO, but Grandpa doesn't listen to this. He talks about how awesome it would be for us to be in the military. He talks about the 'opportunities' (yeah, to get fucking killed). He talks about how good an experience it would be. (Know what else is an experience? Cancer. It's also an experience I hope I never have.) The answer has always been NO. I get that he just wants to make us do what he thinks is right but he needs to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. No means no. No means I do not want to join any branch of the military for any reason whatso ever and no circumstance conceivable, including gunpoint, would entice me to try it. The discussion should end there, but the discussion never ended there. We got literature in the mail, calls from recruiters, applications to unwanted places sent to us.
No.
Knock it the fuck off, Grandpa. Go away. Stop it. Cease and desist or I will switch your multivitamin for cyanide.
My next cousin is going to be a junior in high school and he's pressuring her. Join the military, military service, military, military, military!!!!!!!!!!! No. She is not military type either. She has said no. Still he bugs her.
This is not acceptable. Someone says no, that is the end of everything.
If you want to join the armed forces or something, go ahead. Have at it. Totally your choice. That's what the freedom you rub your tiny little peen with comes from--people who choose to serve because they want to and they defend those freedoms. When you take freedom out of the equation it becomes meaningless. I understand wanting to recommend something you love to people you love--like sharing a good movie or a book or music. But when they don't like it, you stop pushing it.
And that is especially applicable with things as life-changing as a decision to enter military service.
I don't know whether or not the initial letter-writer was simply writing out of grief and anger at her son's death (guilt, perhaps?), or whether she wrote it because she genuinely believes that those who serve are inherently more valuable than those who don't. I sincerely hope she gets the help she clearly needs because this is not an attitude that should continue. She's so worried about how 'future grandchildren' might receive a 'message' from this--but what message is she so scared they'll get? That it's okay to be different and follow your dreams? OH, wait, that's right, military shitbags don't like people who are different. Somehow I don't think she'll have to worry--if there are grandkids and she keeps that attitude, I suspect she won't be invited to spend too terribly much time with them in the end.
Get over yourselves. Stop insisting everyone needs to be a military personnel to be a human being. They don't. You know what you are? A terrible little entitled fuckhead.
Not all military families are like that. Most aren't. But, as I said, when things go bad there... they go really bad.
Brawlin'
So, I think I have enough experience as a girl and as a person who got into an awful fucking lot of fights in school to talk about this. It's 'girl fighting'. And every stereotype that goes with it.
And I'm not going to say what you think I will.
First of all, girls fight. No, we do. Maybe not that often and it's maybe not as big a deal, but girls fight. There's this stereotype that girls don't get into fights--it's so pervasive and deeply-ingrained that I actually successfully used it to my advantage as a kid in order to fucking get away with fighting as much as I did. Since girls don't fight, and small cute girls especially don't fight, no one was willing to report that I had kicked their ass and they were even less likely to be believed in the event they did. Why do my genitals and stature immediately influence my proclivity and ability to get into physical altercations? They don't. Girls fight. Full stop.
I also don't understand how or why stereotypical 'girl fight moves' are so laughable. Or are considered 'fighting dirty'. Or are just plain unacceptable. People actually think that girl fights don't count as fights because so much of it consists of no one actually fighting. Well, maybe they don't. But guy fights don't either. Guys throw punches when they fight and try to put each other in headlocks, but 90% of any given guy-fight is spent circling each other, trash-talk, spitting, and not technically making contact with anyone else. You can't have it both ways, people.
And pulling hair, scratching, biting, eye-clawing, and the like aren't 'fighting'? Or they don't count and are 'playing dirty'? Except for professional settings, the whole fucking point of a fight is to break the fucking rules. Either you're breaking the rules, or there are rules to be followed. Again, you don't get both. No, girls don't just swing at each other. Yes, they sometimes claw and pull hair. But so what? Why is that disallowed? Why doesn't that 'count'? It's still a fight. That's like saying a chihuahua isn't a dog because it's small. It just looks a little different, but I assure you, it is in fact a dog.
Look, here's the thing about clawing and pulling hair: there's nothing wrong with either of these. Personally I see them as legitimate tactics. And smart ones. If you claw someone's eyes at arm's length, you're attempting to disable them and keeping them away from you at the same time. That's not a bad plan. Same with pulling hair--if you can grab a fistful of hair, you can control the opponent's head, which makes the rest of them pretty easy to control as well.
Enough about 'fair fighting' and shit. There is no such fucking thing. If you're going to get into a fight, do whatever the fuck you want. I don't fight anymore, mostly because I'm not bullied anymore and also because I'm an adult now and can be put in jail for doing it. The only legitimate excuse I can come up with for getting into a fight at my age would be if I felt I was otherwise in danger.
And in those circumstances, you and I and everyone else are completely entitled to do whatever the fuck we want in order to not die.
So shut the fuck up about 'girl fights'. It's still a fight. I'm just as capable of biting you as I am of punching you in the fucking face.
And I'm not going to say what you think I will.
First of all, girls fight. No, we do. Maybe not that often and it's maybe not as big a deal, but girls fight. There's this stereotype that girls don't get into fights--it's so pervasive and deeply-ingrained that I actually successfully used it to my advantage as a kid in order to fucking get away with fighting as much as I did. Since girls don't fight, and small cute girls especially don't fight, no one was willing to report that I had kicked their ass and they were even less likely to be believed in the event they did. Why do my genitals and stature immediately influence my proclivity and ability to get into physical altercations? They don't. Girls fight. Full stop.
I also don't understand how or why stereotypical 'girl fight moves' are so laughable. Or are considered 'fighting dirty'. Or are just plain unacceptable. People actually think that girl fights don't count as fights because so much of it consists of no one actually fighting. Well, maybe they don't. But guy fights don't either. Guys throw punches when they fight and try to put each other in headlocks, but 90% of any given guy-fight is spent circling each other, trash-talk, spitting, and not technically making contact with anyone else. You can't have it both ways, people.
And pulling hair, scratching, biting, eye-clawing, and the like aren't 'fighting'? Or they don't count and are 'playing dirty'? Except for professional settings, the whole fucking point of a fight is to break the fucking rules. Either you're breaking the rules, or there are rules to be followed. Again, you don't get both. No, girls don't just swing at each other. Yes, they sometimes claw and pull hair. But so what? Why is that disallowed? Why doesn't that 'count'? It's still a fight. That's like saying a chihuahua isn't a dog because it's small. It just looks a little different, but I assure you, it is in fact a dog.
Look, here's the thing about clawing and pulling hair: there's nothing wrong with either of these. Personally I see them as legitimate tactics. And smart ones. If you claw someone's eyes at arm's length, you're attempting to disable them and keeping them away from you at the same time. That's not a bad plan. Same with pulling hair--if you can grab a fistful of hair, you can control the opponent's head, which makes the rest of them pretty easy to control as well.
Enough about 'fair fighting' and shit. There is no such fucking thing. If you're going to get into a fight, do whatever the fuck you want. I don't fight anymore, mostly because I'm not bullied anymore and also because I'm an adult now and can be put in jail for doing it. The only legitimate excuse I can come up with for getting into a fight at my age would be if I felt I was otherwise in danger.
And in those circumstances, you and I and everyone else are completely entitled to do whatever the fuck we want in order to not die.
So shut the fuck up about 'girl fights'. It's still a fight. I'm just as capable of biting you as I am of punching you in the fucking face.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Snap, Crackle---SHIT
So, I don't crack whips anymore.
Here's the thing. I used to do it all the time. I also used to wear a bandana all the time and wore the same one so often that the ends were frayed and I could basically snap it like a whip. No, seriously. It made a noise that stopped the fucking traffic in the halls of my 2000-student high school. I was a kid who wasn't especially threatening so I needed all the help I could get when it came to scaring the fuck out of people.
But, I don't do that anymore.
I used to do it all the time. I thought it was cool. (It more or less goes without saying that I have an extremely warped perception of what 'cool' is.) Then my brother brought home a whip.
No, this is not a dirty joke.
Anyway. I thought the whip was cool so I cracked it in the back yard. I failed. Really, really hard. I actually missed like no one's business and hit myself in the face. For those of you who don't know, the sound a whip makes is caused by the flagellum moving faster than the speed of sound--that crack is a sonic explosion. Which is why it's dangerous. I'm extremely lucky I didn't kill myself or put an eye out--I hit myself under my left eye and I'm insanely lucky I didn't even break skin. Scared the fuck out of me though.
Ow.
So, yeah. I don't snap whips anymore. Whips are insanely unwieldy, the shortest are six foot long and they go up to twelve. I'm five foot. That is not a great height for whips.
Also, my eye hurts like a bitch today. Too much rubbing. That's what SHE said.
And what.
Here's the thing. I used to do it all the time. I also used to wear a bandana all the time and wore the same one so often that the ends were frayed and I could basically snap it like a whip. No, seriously. It made a noise that stopped the fucking traffic in the halls of my 2000-student high school. I was a kid who wasn't especially threatening so I needed all the help I could get when it came to scaring the fuck out of people.
But, I don't do that anymore.
I used to do it all the time. I thought it was cool. (It more or less goes without saying that I have an extremely warped perception of what 'cool' is.) Then my brother brought home a whip.
No, this is not a dirty joke.
Anyway. I thought the whip was cool so I cracked it in the back yard. I failed. Really, really hard. I actually missed like no one's business and hit myself in the face. For those of you who don't know, the sound a whip makes is caused by the flagellum moving faster than the speed of sound--that crack is a sonic explosion. Which is why it's dangerous. I'm extremely lucky I didn't kill myself or put an eye out--I hit myself under my left eye and I'm insanely lucky I didn't even break skin. Scared the fuck out of me though.
Ow.
So, yeah. I don't snap whips anymore. Whips are insanely unwieldy, the shortest are six foot long and they go up to twelve. I'm five foot. That is not a great height for whips.
Also, my eye hurts like a bitch today. Too much rubbing. That's what SHE said.
And what.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Thanks, Ma
Apart from all that twee rubbish about giving me life--which, if you
think about it, isn't actually especially noteworthy because if this
hadn't happened then you obviously wouldn't be around to know--I'm
grateful to my mother for one very specific thing.
I've mentioned this before, but my all-time favourite writer EVER is the late humourist and playwright Jean Kerr. She wrote several plays, including 'Mary, Mary' in collaboration with her husband, drama critic Walter Kerr. For a time it was the longest running play in Broadway history. But Jean Kerr is better known for a book of her collected humour essays entitled 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies', which was a national bestseller and spawned a movie starring Doris Day.
Today, she's largely forgotten. Her books are out of print and hard to find and her plays are no longer being performed. Hardly anyone knows who she was or what she did and I always felt like this was a terrible shame because she truly was an incredibly funny woman.
And I probably wouldn't know she existed myself, were it not for my mom.
When I was about ten or so, my mom checked out a bunch of books on tape for me to keep me busy on an upcoming ten-hour road trip to North Carolina. (I can't read or anything in the car because I get carsick.) Among them, for whatever reason, was an abridged recording of 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies'. I don't even know why she picked it, since it was never in the children's section and it honestly doesn't look or seem like a book a ten-year-old girl might enjoy, but she did, and from there on I was in love with Jean Kerr's wit and humour.
It actually took me over a decade to track down any more of her work--I did attempt to learn more about her in the late 90s and early 2000s but never found much of anything. Most of what I found was about the movie version of her book and nothing about what else she wrote and where and how to find them. All of her books were out of print and had been for many years. So I just kind of gave up for a while and tried to accept that I was probably never going to be able to read them.
Then randomly one day a family friend gave me a very old copy of another of her books: 'The Snake Has All the Lines'. By this time the library from which I borrowed and re-borrowed the audiobook had closed and taken its copy with it, so I was very happy to not only have something of hers I hadn't read before, but also because it reinvigorated my desire to track down more of her books. Over the next few years, aided by the increase in user-to-user transactions on Amazon that hadn't existed before, I managed to find the rest of her books. They're some of my most treasured ones.
Reading Jean Kerr's work was what really kickstarted my love of writing. I'd enjoyed writing before then, but wrote only fiction and poetry; it was Jean Kerr who showed me that you can write about absolutely anything and everything, no matter how mundane, and you can even make it incredibly funny. While I have long since abandoned any ambitions of literary success, I've never stopped writing. I hope I never do. I want to keep writing--and reading--forever.
And I have my abusive mother to thank for it.
I've mentioned this before, but my all-time favourite writer EVER is the late humourist and playwright Jean Kerr. She wrote several plays, including 'Mary, Mary' in collaboration with her husband, drama critic Walter Kerr. For a time it was the longest running play in Broadway history. But Jean Kerr is better known for a book of her collected humour essays entitled 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies', which was a national bestseller and spawned a movie starring Doris Day.
Today, she's largely forgotten. Her books are out of print and hard to find and her plays are no longer being performed. Hardly anyone knows who she was or what she did and I always felt like this was a terrible shame because she truly was an incredibly funny woman.
And I probably wouldn't know she existed myself, were it not for my mom.
When I was about ten or so, my mom checked out a bunch of books on tape for me to keep me busy on an upcoming ten-hour road trip to North Carolina. (I can't read or anything in the car because I get carsick.) Among them, for whatever reason, was an abridged recording of 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies'. I don't even know why she picked it, since it was never in the children's section and it honestly doesn't look or seem like a book a ten-year-old girl might enjoy, but she did, and from there on I was in love with Jean Kerr's wit and humour.
It actually took me over a decade to track down any more of her work--I did attempt to learn more about her in the late 90s and early 2000s but never found much of anything. Most of what I found was about the movie version of her book and nothing about what else she wrote and where and how to find them. All of her books were out of print and had been for many years. So I just kind of gave up for a while and tried to accept that I was probably never going to be able to read them.
Then randomly one day a family friend gave me a very old copy of another of her books: 'The Snake Has All the Lines'. By this time the library from which I borrowed and re-borrowed the audiobook had closed and taken its copy with it, so I was very happy to not only have something of hers I hadn't read before, but also because it reinvigorated my desire to track down more of her books. Over the next few years, aided by the increase in user-to-user transactions on Amazon that hadn't existed before, I managed to find the rest of her books. They're some of my most treasured ones.
Reading Jean Kerr's work was what really kickstarted my love of writing. I'd enjoyed writing before then, but wrote only fiction and poetry; it was Jean Kerr who showed me that you can write about absolutely anything and everything, no matter how mundane, and you can even make it incredibly funny. While I have long since abandoned any ambitions of literary success, I've never stopped writing. I hope I never do. I want to keep writing--and reading--forever.
And I have my abusive mother to thank for it.
Friday, May 4, 2012
A Shame...
In high school while taking journalism as well as writing and editing
for the school's paper, I became friendly with a classmate named John.
(Who was also eerily similar to my dad--same dress sense, modes of
speech, and even nearly identical glasses frames.) He also happened to
be a real hardcore Bible-humping near-fundamentalist Christian. We
weren't friends, but we were friendly, but the fact that
we got on as well as we did always strikes me as surprising. I don't
generally get along with really religious people and my views on
religion were pretty much the same then, only less critical.
John and I would chat in class (we were allowed to!!) and these chats often became theistic/scientific debates. I was never trying to convert him--nor was he trying to convert me--but was interested in how he viewed the world. He wasn't fiercely skeptical of science, and knew more about the details than most mouth-frothing religious loons. The two seem so diametrically opposed to me (and still does) and I was genuinely interested in hearing how he squared the two.
Even when our debates grew heated--as they occasionally did--our relationship stayed the same. He was just a genuinely nice guy, and very intelligent. His religious beliefs held him back sometimes though--I got the feeling that he might have had an inkling that his beliefs were on shaky ground. Which is a shame.
Now, John had a terrific radio voice--just that articulate, clear, even, hard-to-define thing that makes a voice so commercial-sounding. This combined with his intellect could have taken him a long way. Since we weren't friends, though, we never spoke again after graduation.
A couple of years ago I discovered a series of creationist Christian propaganda videos attacking evolution. They were done in Flash animation with a male voiceover, and the second I heard the voice I immediately thought of John. It sounded just like him. (He had a very distinct sort of low softness in his speech that sorta stuck out. There were no credits that I could see so I've no idea who the narrator really was, but if it's John part of me will be disappointed. I knew he was about as likely to change his mind about his beliefs as I was (read: when pigs fly down to play ice hockey with the devil), but part of me had hoped that maybe one day he might at least come to terms with the opposing assertions of science and the bible. Funnily enough, evolution wasn't something I remember him saying he disagreed with. He never said he agreed with it, either, so it could go either way.
John liked me enough that he asked me to sign his yearbook. I left two words, words I think everyone should consider:
Question everything.
John and I would chat in class (we were allowed to!!) and these chats often became theistic/scientific debates. I was never trying to convert him--nor was he trying to convert me--but was interested in how he viewed the world. He wasn't fiercely skeptical of science, and knew more about the details than most mouth-frothing religious loons. The two seem so diametrically opposed to me (and still does) and I was genuinely interested in hearing how he squared the two.
Even when our debates grew heated--as they occasionally did--our relationship stayed the same. He was just a genuinely nice guy, and very intelligent. His religious beliefs held him back sometimes though--I got the feeling that he might have had an inkling that his beliefs were on shaky ground. Which is a shame.
Now, John had a terrific radio voice--just that articulate, clear, even, hard-to-define thing that makes a voice so commercial-sounding. This combined with his intellect could have taken him a long way. Since we weren't friends, though, we never spoke again after graduation.
A couple of years ago I discovered a series of creationist Christian propaganda videos attacking evolution. They were done in Flash animation with a male voiceover, and the second I heard the voice I immediately thought of John. It sounded just like him. (He had a very distinct sort of low softness in his speech that sorta stuck out. There were no credits that I could see so I've no idea who the narrator really was, but if it's John part of me will be disappointed. I knew he was about as likely to change his mind about his beliefs as I was (read: when pigs fly down to play ice hockey with the devil), but part of me had hoped that maybe one day he might at least come to terms with the opposing assertions of science and the bible. Funnily enough, evolution wasn't something I remember him saying he disagreed with. He never said he agreed with it, either, so it could go either way.
John liked me enough that he asked me to sign his yearbook. I left two words, words I think everyone should consider:
Question everything.
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