Just a Thought about Reality Shows

Go read Dave's post "Fallacies" if you haven't yet, it's much more weighty than this academic observation I've made:

Reality shows take place in the past.

Almost all of other storytelling formats - fictional TV, movies, novels, plays, even some documentaries - take place in the "literary present." Because fiction is made up and never actually happened, it "is happening" whenever you watch/read it - even if the setting is historical.

Reality shows, however - the kind that simply follow (and impose through judicious editing a narratife structure upon) the lives of various interesting individuals and pseudo-celebrities - can not take place entirely within the "literary present." Why? Because the lives of these real people continued after the show was finished being filming, and still continue to this day (or at least until their death). There is, in other words, story outside of the "story." A reality show, in this sense, is much more like, say, a show on the History Channel - a narrative imposed on the past - than it is like a scripted drama.

Sure, reality show producers enforce a code of silence on their subjects and crews to prevent the viewers from learning about the intervening history, but no matter what they do - particularly in the case of public figures who we are already aware of (like Marion Barry) - those peoples' lives continued after filming was done.

News programs, by contrast, take place in the actual present (excepting a trivial reporting delay). Documentaries either fall into the review-of-the-past type and are thus similar to reality shows as mentioned, or are stories imposed on random subjects in a version of "literary present." (Like the Earth series.)

However, unlike history shows, reality shows seem claim to be "literary present" because of the way they are shown; and unlike documentaries that are current but become dated, reality shows were dated from the very moment they aired.

(Note that this does not apply to some genres of reality shows, mainly contest-type ones like Top Chef, which, like game shows, take the contest [with its clear beginning-and-end] as their subject; since the contest ends with the show, it doesn't have the same issue with meta-show continuing lives as, say, Real World or The Osbournes.)

There has always been, for me, a slightly uncanny or awkward feeling to watching person-based reality shows, and I think this is something to do with it.

Some literary theory ruminations for your Friday morning!

Life Made of Arsenic Equals More Probable Aliens

NASA announces discovery of arsenic-based life in a California lake.

Here's the super-quick summary:
Until pretty much just now, it was understood that all life was built on six elements: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous.
This newly recognized bacteria replaces phosphorous with arsenic.

This is Big News.

(Note that the fact that the scientists' experiments are responsible for the arsenic bacteria doesn't change the fact that life is now factually possible with arsenic instead of phosphorous.)

NASA originally set the stage for this by announcing a press conference that would "impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." What does arsenic-based life on Earth have to do with alien life? Well, if life can exist on Earth with a different basic chemistry, there's no reason to believe it is not possible that life could exist on other worlds with radically different chemistries. No longer is an alien world required to have sufficient O, H, C, N, S or P for life. It could have O, H, C, N, S, As. It could be theoretically be built with Helium, or Selenium, or Silicon, or Neon. This vastly, vastly increases the number of places in the universe that life could exist.

Personally, I (among others) had no doubt that there was extraterrestrial life in the universe prior to this announcement. This discovery only reinforces that. To state my own position more clearly, it's not a matter of whether life exists elsewhere, nor is this a matter of belief; it is all but utterly ridiculous to think otherwise based on the sheer numbers. The only question is "will we ever be able to communicate with the other life?"

There are estimated to be as many as 170 billion or more galaxies in the universe. Galaxies contain billions of stars on average. Even if life is so rare that intelligent life only occurs once in any given galaxy over the entire course of time, that still means 170 billion civilizations at some point or other exist. And that's an astronomically low estimate.

The Fermi paradox questions how, if there are so many life forms, we haven't heard from any. That Wikipedia article gives plenty of the counterarguments, so I won't get way into it, except to say that the key factor, from my point of view, is that aliens are going to be so alien that is is unlikely that we are listening in the right way at the right time in the right spot to identify them - or vice versa. Don't forget that only a little more than 100 years ago human beings sent no recognizable signs of our intelligent life into space, so only civilizations 100 light years away can see us yet. The galaxy is 1,000 light years thick - and 100,000 light years across. (So less than 1%of the galaxy is potentially aware of us.) Don't forget, also, that we can only detect distant civilizations if they're pretty advanced. If there are alien lions and tigers and bears living on a planet only a couple star systems over, we'll have no idea whatsoever for quite a while - but it would still be history-shattering to discover that such life existed, wouldn't it? Heck, it would be pretty much The Most Important Discovery In History to discover with certainty that bacteria-sized simple life developed independently on Mars, or Europa, or Titan.

Keep in mind also that we've been discovering exoplanets at an increasing rate only in the last two decades. We're up to about 400.

That's about all I've got to say at the moment.

(My apologies to those schooled in these matters, for whom little of this is particarly revelatory and is probably better analyzed on more specialized blogs. I think this news is so exciting that I wanted to share it with any of our readers who are not familiar or have not heard about it.)

Republicans and The Great Unemployment Screw

House Republicans blocked unemployment extensions.

This is a very bad thing.

Here's why in a super-tiny nutshell (more details and numbers here - also the source of the image above - and here): in a recession, there are fewer jobs than there are job-seekers. (We've been making improvments, but not enough yet.) This means that without unemployment, many many qualified workers - not deadbeats, mind you, but people who are simply victims of the numbers imbalance - will be pretty well and screwed.

These folks may cease to be able to pay mortgages or rents, cease to be able to buy significant amounts of food, and so forth. This money therefore does not go to the retailers and renters who depend on their customers and rentees. It's a domino effect of badness. The Congressional Budget Office recognizes how bad things would have been had we not had UI extensions previously.

Compare this to the tax cuts for the wealthy which the Republicans want to keep (while saying that we "can't afford" the UI extensions) - the wealthy tend to sit on their money, and that which they spend may well go to foreign countries via strange tax loopholes and business ventures or plain old vacations and importing. Regular joes who are unemployed spend much more locally.

I was unemployed for several months in 2009-early 2010 and again late this summer. The money I got from the government (some of which was unemployment extension from Congress), where did it go? Why, to groceries. Local dining. Gas. Rent. Utilities. Student loans. Household items. Local entertainment (largely theatre, which was then most likely spent by those artists on groceries rent etc.). Health insurance via COBRA. A car repair or two. I carefully balanced my budget to make sure my expenses did not excede my unemployment payments, so that I could keep my savings for luxuries or emergencies (I only ending up using about $200 of them). The point is - nearly every penny of the money the government sent to me went straight back into the economy. (By the way, most of these purchases did also incur sales tax, and the businesses I and those liked me helped support pay taxes, too.)

Now, the economy wouldn't work whatsoever if the government just took money from the working people, gave it to the non-working people, and expected that this money would then go back to the working people when it's spent on groceries. Someone has to generate the money in the first place.

The important thing here - the one super-important thing to remember is:
THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH JOBS FOR EVERYBODY.

During my unemployment, I applied to two jobs a week minimum. I took my time crafting those applications, customizing the cover letters, etc. It didn't matter. If there are dozens of qualified people applying for the same jobs, then dozens-minus-one of them are not going to get it. Period.

In this original post about my unemployment (which cooked up quite a little localized Internet firestorm, albeit with typical talking points) (and which I never realized was getting so many responses at the time - I should learn to watch for comments more closely), I mention how the prospect of going to work at Starbucks was not a pleasant one. Two things I neglect to point out in that post: one, Starbucks does not have infinite jobs to offer for unemployed knowledge workers/college graduates. Neither do Walmart or anyone else. During a recession, all the unemployed middle-managers and artmakers and decently-paid office peons (myself being in the latter two categories) can't just all suck it up and move over to Starbucks and Walmart. Especially because some of them couldn't feed their families or keep their houses on Starbucks wages (whereas unemployment gives them enough to do so). Nor can little part-time jobs always fill the gap, because some people - like me - can't afford health insurance without employer assistance or a significant paycheck ($350 of my unemployment checks went to my insurance, plus deductibles), and can't go without insurance for health reasons.

(The thrust of my original post was more complex than that, and, as a late response to those that misread it, was mainly critical of myself. The point of that post was to examine the psyche of someone in my position, not to argue for or against unemployment insurance. This post you're reading now is arguing for unemployment insurance.)

(Additional note - I am currently employed, thanks to our very own b.graham and ali d. Networking trumps both brute force resume-carpet-bombing and tactical cover-letter-strikes.)

Simply put: if you think that, during a recession, leaving the unemployed high and dry will either lead them to get off their lazy asses and get work, or at least give them their due punishment for being freeloading bums, you're wrong. (Even if, reading my previous post, you deem me to be in the lazy-freeloading category, there are millions who definitely are not.)

In a recession, preventing the bankruptcy and poverty of the qualified-but-unemployed prevents the recession from worsening and allows the economy to recover while maintaining quality of life. When the recession is over, that's when you get tough on the expense of unemployment and start looking for deadbeats.

In conclusion: letting these benefits expire does no good for anybody. The government only saves money in the immediate sense; in the long run, tax incomes are hurt, economies weakened, and everybody loses.

So the Republicans are either total hypocrites ($830 billion for tax cuts to the rich okay, $12.5 billion for UI extensions not okay!) - practically bald-faced in their commitment to robbing the poor to feed the rich - or they're stupid.

Or there's a third option (not incompatible with the other two): the Republicans may realize this is all a bad thing, and are doing it anyways, because the only thing that matters is making Obama lose in 2012. It's for the good of the country!

Postscript: It should be noted that the extension bill isn't necessarily scuttled yet; but it's unlikely that it'll get altered to the Republicans' liking before it expires on November 30, thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday. Give some serious thanks!

Reading This Post Will Make You Sneeze

Human beings are weird.

Just to review a couple more bits of evidence to this regard I've personally come across recently:

Working for food makes it taste better.

If a menu has healthy food on it, we're more likely to pick something unhealthy.

Along similar lines, triggering our "I've done something good" switch makes us more likely to do something not-so-good, like in this study where simply looking at an eco-friendly website leads to stealing.

Oh, and daydreaming makes us sad.

Our brains and bodies seem to want to make us act against every moral and common-sensical principle we like to think we adhere to. I imagine that it will eventually be demonstrated that being loved makes us hate ourselves, experience makes us dumb, sharing makes us selfish, chocolate makes us cynical and sleeping makes us dead.

It seems strange to me that so much of what we do is preprogrammed, predictable, messed up and unconscious. We all of us like to think of ourselves as thoughtful individuals who do everything we do for a reason, based on a personal system of morals and preferences. But we're totally wrong. We're not drivers taking our body-vehicles down whatever road we choose. We're sitting on the roof with a fake steering wheel, coming up with explanations for why we go where we go, how we totally meant to turn left there or right here or go off that cliff there - when really, the car is being driven by a mischeivious chimpanzee, or maybe a malfunctioning robot, or no one at all.

I think in the future (you regular readers didn't think I'd stray from that topic for long, did you?) we might achieve a complete understanding of how humans tend to work, including knowledge of all our counterintuitive intuitions. We might even achieve a holistic picture of the principles that drive human behavior - which won't make us perfectly predictable, of course, because we still have free will and individual differences and so forth, but will make it more like we are at least sitting on that roof of that car with some bananas on a fishing pole to entice the chimp one way or the other.

At such future time - or, heck, right now - we might all benefit from taking a class, in high school or earlier, on How to Be A Human Being. It would consist mainly in participating in experiments that demonstrate our own weirdnesses and subconscious processes to us, so we can be better decision-makers in the future. Wouldn't have to be anything as extreme as the Milgram experiment (although we should read about it), but simply having many of our own cognitive biases demonstrated to us by, for instance, playing simple gambling games to demonstrate the negative effects of the sunk cost fallacy, etc., would make all of us better people and so much less vulnerable to exploitative advertising, con artistry, groupthink, political trickery, and Internet trolls.

It's a pipe dream, but even if it makes me sad pondering it, I'll do it anyways.

Just Framing Marriage and Social Life in a Pseudo-Game Theoretic Way

I have no training whatsoever in game theory or whatever science you might say I'm evoking here, but this is just me riffing, off the cuff, not attempting an academically rigorous thesis of any kind. I proceed with tongue in cheek, please be aware.)

We all want companionship, whether in the form of public socialization or private friendship, active dating or closed marriage, or some mix thereof. Marriage, however, particularly when it leads to childrearing, is the option that does the most to remove the participants (the married couple/parents) from the socialization pool. (Which is not to say that married people never socialize with friends - far from it - but that marriage brings a very, very increased likelihood of essentially removing the couple from the social pool.)

This has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, but it is a really big pool. With a sailboat in it.

This leads to decreased companionship for the married couple's friends, who not only see the couple less, but probably see each other less due to a loss of the social glue/gravity that attracts groups of friends together. If these friends previously were not experiencing a surplus of socialization (a "surplus" meaning, for example, that they would be going out four times a week, when they would have been satisfied with a minimum of twice a week), then they will now have a deficiency of socialization that they need to refill in order to be happiest.

They may be able to fill this deficiency with new friends (or dating, going to bars and clubs, etc), but more likely than not, given enough time, their pool of potential socialization options will decrease to the point where they are now permamently dissatisfied. Part of the reason for this will be that increasing numbers of established friends and potential dating partners will get married; which is to be expected, since some people just plain want to get married and/or have kids and/or they fall in love.

However, this also particularly could happen if, for example, the value of clubbing or dating around or meeting new friends is decreased for them; if the amount of energy these take is not proportional to the socialization received, thanks in large part to the huge turnover of established relationships that is to be expected when your socialization is with entirely new people, devoid of commitment-forming longevity. (To put it more simply, it's not satisfying because these new people they meet don't mean that much to them and keep wandering away.)

Now these dissatisfied persons have only a small number of options: 1) continue to stay dissatsifed, 2) rely on established friends or other less fleeting socialization options, or 3) get married.

1) is obviously sub-optimal. Some will choose 2) and some 3). Of those that choose 3), some will choose it because marriage is attractive to them anyways, and/or they have found a mate, while others will fall into it to escape option 1), especially if option 2) doesn't work for them for whatever reason. Whether or not 2) works for them depends on their own personal proclivities, the availability of like-minded people, and the particular habits and coincidences amongst their immediate social circles. Some people will choose 2) and stay in that option, more or less, for life; there are entire communities built on this. (And as well, it should be noted again, plenty of people blend 2) and 3) successfully.)

However, for many people living in many places and local societies, the more that 3) is chosen, the fewer people there will be available to provide 2), and so, increasingly, 3) will become the only viable option.

It's practically a mathematical trade-off: getting married sacrifices variety and group-cohesion in exchange for intimacy and availability - a sensible choice when one's variety and group-cohesion has already been diminished by... other people getting married.

It's not like this at all. But I wanted another picture.

One might say that, in a pseudo-evolutionary sense, marriage is the most fit competitor in the sphere of socialization options, because it is the only option that eliminates its competitors' "food supply."

Thus marriage leads to more marriage even amongst people who don't want to be married.

(Disclaimer: if it wasn't clear, I am not against marraige. I think it's one viable option amongst many for how to live your life, have a family, raise a child, and/or get your socialization, and which is definitely for some people and definitely not for others. I shall now remove my tongue from cheek. Move along.)

After Shel Silverstein

A CANDY-CORNY HALLOWEEN POEM SOMEWHAT AFTER THE MANNER OF SHEL SILVERSTEIN

Pity the costumeless
For today they are like
The nuts in the trail mix
The string on the kite
The plot in pornography
Or the mice at the zoo
They're too tall for the ride
So thank Heck they're not you.

Pity the costumeless
For maybe they feel
Like they are in costume
The rest of the year
But today, they can be
Nice and normal and plain
By dressing up like
It's just Monday again.

Pity the costumeless
Whether lazy or poor
Or Halloween-Scrooge-ish
Or the perpetual bore
Though they have disenfranchised
Themselves from the fun
Do still grudge them some candy
For I am one!

Would This Work?

There's an idea I've wondered about in the past. I'm sure it would be completely impractical for some reason, and that I betray my relatively amateur knowledge of political science and military organization and international law by even suggesting it, but here goes:

What if there were single-mission volunteer peacekeeping armies?

Although it seems to have fallen out of the public spotlight, the war in Darfur (which is still going on) was, for a while, a major cause for liberal types. "Why aren't we doing anything?" was the cry, meaning "Why aren't we sending our army/NATO/somebody over there for heaven's sake?" It particularly upset people that we were losing soldiers and spending billions in Afghanistan and Iraq supposedly protecting the peace and spreading democracy while we hypocritically ignored the situation in Sudan. ("We" here meaning the U.S., although the international community has been pretty hands-off on the whole - possibly because to condemn the actions in Darfur as genocide would morally obligate the expense of lives and money to fight the problem.)

So what if those who were so upset could join a volunteer force and be sent over to Darfur to establish peace?

It could work like this: the government announces there is enough interest that they are opening the peacekeeping Darfur program. Volunteer officers from the standing army will train the recruits and lead the mission, but the majority of the force will consist of completely new volunteers. These volunteers will *pay* their own way. In other words, no tax dollars are spent on the mission - it's essentially a citizen-funded enterprise with government-level organization. Those individuals who cannot afford the tens of thousands of dollars it will cost to train, ship and arm them can try and get sponsorship from those who have the means and are interested, or conduct fundraisers.

(Maybe a very small amount of tax dollars are spent paying the standing army officers who lead the mission or who train the recruits, but this can be considered an acceptable investment because in the end, the country still gains battle-ready soldiers, should we ever seriously need them.)

This approach solves two problems:

One, the people who volunteer are presumably, many of them, not interested in being regular soldiers, with the attendant long period of service and the requirement to serve in conflicts which they may not personally support. They are, however, humanitarian in spirit, and want to help stop a genocide; so this way they can contribute.

Two, because no tax dollars are used, this bypasses the question of whether public opinion supports sending our tax-paid soldiers over to a foreign country to do good deeds. The volunteer soldiers are privately funded.

Note that since the volunteers are unpaid and receive no benefits besides the knowledge that they are doing good, this would have no effect on our standing national army, which would still be staffed by patriots and people who can't afford not to be paid or who want to go to college via the military's programs.

In order for one of these volunteer army single-mission operations to happen, three criteria would need to be met: 1) there is enough interest from potential volunteers and funders to enact the mission; 2) there is no direct objection from the rest of the public [i.e., the prevailing attitude is not *against* the mission, but rather merely does not favor spending tax dollars on the mission]; and 3) the international community/UN does not frown upon the particular purpose of this mission.

So the general intention would be that this would work for cases like Darfur, where nobody, to my knowledge, thinks that ending the conflict would be a bad thing, merely that spending our own resources to do it would be; and there are some individuals who just might be (self-)righteous enough to be willing to fight to help end the conflict.

The main issue would be how committed and well-trained the volunteers are when over there. If they go over thinking it will be easy, that they'll just get to stand around brandishing guns and peace will happen, then all it will take is for some enemies to kill a few and the volunteers will want to turn and run. It might have to be the kind of thing where once you commit, you're obligated to a year of service (unless the mission is completed first), and if you desert, it will be prosecuted no differently than in the regular army. It might also have to be that passing through the basic training for the mission is not guaranteed no matter if you've paid or not; you have to prove that you're capable of being a soldier and of following orders.

The other big issue is just how you stop a conflict like that in Darfur with the mere application of firearms, but that's not specific to this volunteer concept.

So I'm sure this wouldn't work in the real world - but I'm not sure precisely why.

Thus, two questions for you, O readership:

1) Would this work and why/why not?

2) If there were, say, a corporate sponsor who was willing to pay your way and it was sanctioned by the international community, would you yourself volunteer for such a mission, get trained as a soldier, and go to Darfur for a year to help protect civilians and end the conflict?

Can You Give It Up? The Facebook Saga Continues

A massive sidenote to preface my main post:

I think we talk about Facebook so much both here on These Gentlemen and - what with The Social Experiment - in our culture as a whole, because it is simultaneously the harbinger of, most prominent symbol of, and testing ground for an entirely new way of organizing society and approaching human relationships. No doubt about it, the way individual people and groups(who can afford computers) interact with each other is in the process of being changed by online and social media more drastically - and definitely more rapidly - than almost ever before; definitely moreso than by television (which is proprietary), moreso than by the telephone/telegraph, possibly even more so (particularly when you consider the "rapidly" modifier) than by the printing press. OF COURSE we're going to want to talk about it; it's practically the beginning of a new stage of evolution - albeit a voluntary one - and it's affecting us in new and unexpected ways that we were never even equipped to consider in the past. (Compare to other online systems like Wikipedia and email, which, while revolutionary, are essentially speed/access upgrades of systems we already had and were equipped to handle.) In certain circles, Facebook is becoming, or has already become, as bedrock a cultural signifier as etiquette, dress or diction - which is a strange thing, when you think about it, for a single, branded virtual business enterprise to be. At the very least, you can say that about social media as a whole, if not Facebook specifically - one's "online presence" is an element of our lives that we manage as diligently/haphazardly as our love lives, careers and hobbies. No wonder there's a movie about it.

ALL that said, my real subject: quitting Facebook.

I have, in the past couple months, wavered over a decision to attempt one of two... let's call them "modifications to my social-interactive experience." The first, less drastic (and not really "quitting"), would be to make a Facebook post to the following effect:

-If you want to remain my Facebook friend, please respond. If you can see this message, it means I DO want you to stay Facebook friend, but I am only going to keep you on if you actively respond.-

Totally emo, I know. But bear with me.

I don't post a lot on Facebook, so I don't have a lot of knowledge of who pays attention to - or cares about - my online face. This might make it seem like there's no reason for me to ask people to confirm their interest in me, since they get very little actual information about me in return; but the point isn't a visible exchange of status-posts and updates, but rather the knowledge of awareness. If someone and I remain Facebook friends, then we are both mutually aware that we can keep up with each other; it's an invisible connection.

I suppose the reason I have considered doing this is because I have begun to find it upsetting that I have 450 invisible connections and can't find anything to do on a Friday night - or any more direct method of soliciting serious conversation than a socially passive-agressive 'BRETT is bored, somebody call him' status update.

This is not to say that I feel completely alone or anything (my next four or five Fridays are all booked, I am proud to assure you, O Internet readers), but that the contrast is disheartening and cognitavely dissonant. In reality, I have the same number of friends and casual acquaintances as any twentysomething whose friends keep getting married - a number which naturally lends itself to not being able to hang out with someone every night of the week, which is typical and fine. But - online I have an army of hundreds, with all of whom I share passive, invisible knowledge of awareness, yet none of whom I'm close enough with (even narrowing down to those who are in close physical proximity) to go out and grab a spontaneous bite on a Monday evening.

It's the dissonance that's the problem.

Of course, the fear with enacting this plan is: nobody will respond.

At the very least, I would have to leave a sufficient window for infrequent-Facebook-checkers to catch my post and reply. But even given a chance, even people who would like to remain friends or to maintain knowledge of awareness with me might not respond, for the same self-defeating, lazy reason why people just automatically reply "maybe" to any Facebook event invitation. (Why? Facebook is passive. The more we feel we are being forced into being active, the more we can't be bothered... even if we spend hours upon hours on the site. We have to maintain the myth, at least for now, that Facebook is just a diversion/helpful tool, and no, definitely not our virtual agora.)

Which is why I've considered the more drastic second measure of leaving Facebook entirely, either for a week- or month-long "trial period" or "for good." (This would also, theoretically, include all other social media with the exception of Skype, which is just an Internet videophone and which is my only means of contact with foreign-nation-bound friends - but let's be serious, Facebook is the core of the whole enterprise.) The point of this would be to escape the peculiarities of Facebook communication - my farewell post would go something like this:

-Brett is leaving Facebook [for a while/for good]. The only ways to communicate with him will be on the phone, through email or snail mail, and on Skype if you live in a foreign country. I will have no status posts to read, and will not read yours; I will not be on Facebook chat, AIM or Gchat; I will not see your twitter or anything else. I hope this will lead to me communicating with you more, not less.-

It's a scary thought, not the least reason for which is that I've become dependent on Facebook for my WORLD NEWS. Seriously, I no longer read any news source directly; I merely wait for something to become enough of a hot item that it appears in someone's status post, and then I either click their handy article link or Google the topic. The same goes for my friends' personal news; without Facebook, there are slightly-distant friends I would not even know were getting/had gotten married - and would STILL not know about it, as much as a year later, because every piece of information about their nuptials has come through instant messaging or Facebook-stalking.

Many of the articles I've read about quitting Facebook have focused on the giving-up-an-addictive-time-waster angle, akin to giving up television so you can read more books and get outside (although a good number do touch on my perspective). But I'm more concerned with the social and personal cost of invisible relationships. It's a strange, unnatural strain on the mind, methinks, to be so totally aware of people one essentially doesn't even care about (in the truest, intimate sense of 'caring'); it's social grooming without the socializing, without the actual contact, without the actual reward.

Will I do it? Probably not. Maybe I'd try the month-long-moratorium, to see if it does actually increase my face-to-face socializing from friends who have suddenly lost the illusion of being in touch with me; it might make an interesting series of articles, at any rate. But I'm probably not bold enough, and far too dependent on it, to go whole hog, for either version. Without it, there are people who I do, actually, care about, and am interested in, who I would be completely out of touch with; there are events I would miss; real-time HELP ME WITH THIS THING, PLEASE COMMENT dramas I would be left out of; and in general, I would have the feeling that I'm being left out. Or who knows; maybe I wouldn't.

(I interrupt here to note that I am definitely not at an extreme in my reaction to social networks; on one hand, you've got the hikkomori in Japan, and on the other you've got folks who successfully use social networks to *increase* their physical contact with their friends via more efficient planning and coordinating and day-to-day life tracking.)

I can't help feeling that these dissonant feelings will have to be parsed out and the conflicts resolved - for my brain which is wired for the calculus of face-to-face society to reconcile with the brave new world of online society - because this is definitely the future. The old has to integrate with the new. It's like the history of architecture - we wouldn't have been able to progress to building glass-metal-and-concrete skyscrapers and Sydney Opera Houses if not for the knowledge we've been accumulating since as far back as Rome and earlier, dealing with stonework and arches and domes. These are the Roman times of social networking; we have to learn to become natural, masterful users of these rather crude materials before we get to the next level (full-on integration of all Internet-accessing devices - phones, computers, GPS devices, cars - with our personal online presence, automatic non-intentional updating, retinal-implant webcams, etc.) or the whole structure may collapse.

Rocky Horror Glee Show: A Preemptive Strike

So, if you hadn't heard, some TV show that some people apparently like to watch is putting on a episode centered around some campy rock musical that some of us like to shadowcast.

I've never watched Glee. I've been a Rocky Horror fan/performer/cultist for 8 years.

I'm not going to comment extensively until I've seen the episode, but I just wanted to put it out there: this is... interesting.

Rocky Horror has always danced in strange circles around the mainstream. If you were a young adult in the 70s, you definitely know about it, and have probably been to it a few times. If you're super conservative, it's the devil. If you're reasonably liberal, you'll recognize that, yes, it's fairly transgressive, but not the most out-there subculture on the planet.

But my totally uninformed guess would be that the average Glee viewer - or at least a sizable portion of its audience - is not familiar with it.

This could go lots of different ways. The unfamiliar audience could see it as just another set of old rock n roll chestnuts that the show has dug up, and, man, weren't they freaky in the Seventies?

It could get backlash. Even if they don't watch the show, conservative media like to jump on any chance to make controversy. (Well, all media, really.) If not for the fact that Glee airs on Fox, it would be right up Fox News' alley to have a news segment about the controversial episode that features cross-dressing, cannibalism, incest and orgies. (Or at least, that features music from a movie that features those things.)

It could increase the actual Rocky Horror's popularity, particularly if they at all mention that, you know, there are still people putting it on, every weekend, in a large city near you. Us Rocky kids are probably both dreaming of and dreading the possibility of an upsurge in popularity; for one thing, we love an audience, and for another, we love to scoff at normals.

The real interesting thing to me is that this is probably the closest brush with the mainstream Rocky Horror has had in a while. It will be an interesting test to see if still has any power whatsoever to shock. After all, there are, in a way, two Rocky Horrors: theres the movie as it is seen by most not-straightlaced-people, as a fun, weird, Halloweeny diversion; and then there's the cult, featuring folks (like me) who are most likely to inspire a why's-it-such-a-big-deal-to-them? reaction.

We'll see, I guess.

Get Healthy for the Future!

An experiment: a soundtrack for this blog post. Go here and listen to that in the background while reading! (There's no video to speak of, so don't feel you're missing anything while not watching.) It's THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE.

Speaking of the future...

I had a thought the other day while riding my bike for some much-needed get-out-of-the-house exercise. It's often said that our technological innovation increases at an accelerating rate. It's not a great leap to believe that within this century, we will see at least a few of the most mind-boggling amazing technologies from science-fiction and futurist prediction:

Space tourism, nanomachines (good ol' nanomachines), AI, teledildonics and giant mind-controlled mechas, virtual reality, mood organs, or, most relevantly to this post, curing aging.

So I thought:
Wouldn't it suck something awful if I got old, decrepit or died before these technologies were achieved?

We (I assume most readers are of my generation) may just be living at just about the cusp. There's no way to tell, of course, but it's entirely possible that these technologies - particularly ones that halt, cure or reverse aging and damage to the body - will be invented and implemented just in time for us to be too damn old to get any benefit from them.

I know I would be damn upset if, when I'm 60, space travel suddenly becomes as affordable and accessible to the average person as a trip to Six Flags... and I can't pass the physical. Meanwhile, folks just ten years younger than me - or folks who are my age or older, but in better health - can not only pass the physical and make the trip, but, thanks to medical improvements, will be able to remain in that state of health for decades and decades, taking weekly trips to Freeside space station to play zero-G hoopball with sexy robots.

So, methought... I better get healthy for the future!

The tricky thing about living when we live now is that people living in the time periods before and after us might be said to have good reason to treat their bodies poorly when they are young. The generations before us could argue that it was better to enjoy your body while you were young - rough it up with sex, drugs, loud music, tattoos and piercings, sports, junk food, weekend-long gaming sessions, etc. - than to be all prim and proper and careful with it, only to find out you'd gotten old anyways and your youth was wasted.

And the generations ahead of us might have the medical technology (easy body repair, mind-body uploading, nanobiomachinermagimechanicals, whatever) to abuse their bodies as badly as they wish, because the damage isn't irreversible.

But we, living now, may just have incentive to really do our bodies good so that we can preserve them until technology allows us to be more reckless.

The tricky thing, again, is that, barring a highly unlikely major breakthrough in the next couple years, we won't know until it's too late to change strategies.

Of course, I'm presenting a false dilemma here. It's not like it's not possible to enjoy yourself, party hearty and often, and still, as is preferred in our culture, keep in good health and keep your body looking good (the incentive being sexual appeal instead of personal health). The question is whether it's worth it to, I don't know, expend the effort to become a strict vegetarian gym-rat Zen monk marathon-runner on the off-chance that, when you turn 63, you'll be able to laugh in the faces of your run-down peers as your still-lithe body is now ready for decades upon decades of life-extended sex, drugs and space-adventuring.

I don't want to go on too long, particularly with all those links, and risk your awesomely retro Kraftwerk awesomeness background track run out, so I'll end somewhat abruptly here, by turning it over to you, Dear Reader, by asking you one question:

When you go about trying to improve your health (exercising, dieting, making New Year's Resolutions), are you doing it more so you can be fit and good-looking for Right Now, or are you doing it so you can be hale and hearty in Your Future?

Is A Jew Supporting the "Ground Zero Mosque" A Traitor?

Mr. Mark Williams,

In your article here and in your response to Mr. McMorris-Santoro quoted in his article here, you apparently decided that Jews who support the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" should be called Judenrat.

(For those unfamiliar and who didn't go and read the linked articles, before I go on, the Judenrat were the Jews living in the Nazi ghettos who snitched and reported on their fellow prisoners, and essentially sold out their neighbors to the Nazis. Also, I am myself a Jew, although my argument has nothing to do with that fact.)

Mr. Williams, this is an inaccurate comparison, because it makes one assumption:

It assumes that the Muslims building the "Ground Zero Mosque" are our enemy.

They are not.

(As it has repeatedly been pointed out, <LindaRichman> the "Ground Zero Mosque" is neither at Ground Zero, nor really a mosque... discuss amongst yourselves </LindaRichman>. The official name is Park51, since people raised a stink about calling it "Cordoba House.")

The problem we have, and have been having, on a large scale and for the past several years, is that we equate the radical Muslims with all Muslims. The radical Muslims - they are our enemy, they are anti-Semitic, and murderous, and all those other bad things. But first of all, they are hardly Muslims; the Koran preaches peace and goodwill just like the Christian Bible (and assuredly has some less-than-modern morals just like the Christian Bible). Islam is not vastly different from Christianity or Judaism in the grand scheme of things; it just has some different wallpaper. The differences between radical Muslims and moderate Muslims are greater than those between moderate Muslims and moderate Christians and Jews. If we could get beyond our prejudices - the natural reaction of "That's so foreign!" whenever we see Muslims with their strange, alien prayer methods and forms of dress and their typically differently-colored skin - we could see that.

We should not be shunning and spitting at the Muslims founding this Center. They are our friends. What we should be doing is embracing them, saying, "Hey, radical Muslims of the world! Look here! Here are the true Muslims, and we are proud to call them friends. You see, it is we - the moderate, peace-loving of the world - who are united against you, the hate-mongers and the opportunists."

This is not what we are doing, or at the very least, this is not the message we are sending out because the All-Muslims-Are-Bad folks scream the loudest. This is counter-productive. Radical Muslims and moderate Muslims are not a hair's-breadth apart. Suggesting they are barely distinguishable is like saying you or I are barely distinguishable from the Unabomber or the Oklahoma City bomber because we are all Americans. We are vastly different, we just happen to live within the same nation. And so with the Muslims - the moderate and radicals just happen to be within the same (metaphorical) nation, and it's one considerably vaster than America, for that matter. It does nobody any good to lump all those moderates in with those few extremists; all this achieves is driving the dispossessed and unhappy moderates into a state where they can swallowed up by the extremists.

We should want to hug close the vast, moderate mainstream of Islam, that wide swath that includes the likes of the liberal Iranians whose secular lifestyle is almost identical to the typical American middle-class one (remember the Twitter thing?) and, of course, the many good-citizen decent-folk Muslims living in America, who, again, would be indistinguishable from typical Americans except for some differences in skin color and cultural heritage.

There is no way to justify lumping all the Muslims together without resorting to racism and prejudice. And here is the important part: There is also no way to justify saying the Center should be scrapped because its in "bad taste" without implying that we are incapable of distinguishing honest, true Islam from radical, in-name-only Islam. This should be, as they say, a teaching moment. We should be teaching the world, each other, and ourselves that love of peace, community, education, communication and tolerance are better umbrellas under which to lump together disparate peoples than the name and minimal trappings of a vast religion.

In other words, this would be an excellent opportunity for we, Americans and Jews, to re-define our concept of Muslims - to perhaps even invent a contrasting pair of terms more specific and simple than the generic modifiers "moderate" and "radical" - such that we can talk about either group of Muslims without having to spout disclaimers all the time. Imagine if we referred to the extremist so-called Muslims who are more interested in power, oppression and control of the legacy of the Koran as "Jihadists." (This would not be accurate given the definition of the word within Islam, but it's evocative for Americans, at least, and I can't do any better at the moment.)

It was Jihadists who attacked the World Trade Center - not Muslims. Muslims, like any regular Christians or Jews, are merely interested in practicing their own religion and living their own life and being, you know, normal - they don't attack people. Jihadists attack people, and they did. Jihadists caused 9/11 - Muslims want to build a Center nearby. Wait, where's the problem there? It's Group A and Group B.

We have everything to gain from doing our best to separate and distinguish the totally fine, normal everyday Muslims from the out-there violent evil quote-"Muslims"-unquote. Our aim should be to extricate the Muslims from the complicated universe of ties that connect them to the Jihadists, not to treat them as tainted.

I am not a Judenrat because I support the foundation of Park51. You, Mr. Williams, are giving more comfort to the enemy than I, by doing everything you can to drive a wedge between peace-loving peoples. The nerve you have, trying to de-legitimize the opinions of your fellow Jews by calling them such a loaded word (which very nearly evokes Hitler and thus loses your argument by Internet Law anyways). And if you would read this (I'm sure you won't, but I have to assume you will given the nature of an open letter), I am sure you would call me naive - but you are naive, to believe it possible for a religion with X million adherents worldwide to be so monolithic that to support one (moderate) member of it to be equivalent to supporting the most distant and extremist member of it.

And since I'm on a roll, responses to a couple other common anti-Park51 arguments:

"They should have known people would react negatively to it, and so not have done it." (A slightly differently worded version of the "bad taste" argument.) Yes, and the lawmakers who passed the civil rights bills in the 60s knew that people were going to react negatively. But they did it anyways, because it was right, and because those people who reacted negatively needed to grow up and learn better.

"Oh so NOW they want to build a Mosque right where they killed people on 9/11!" and any similar arguments that mean the same thing, but are worded more diplomatically. You can't make this argument without suggesting there is some Muslim committee that makes all the decisions. That use of the word "they." There is no "they." There is no monolithic Islam. There are Jihadists and there are Muslims, and even amongst those two groups, there are no steering committees. This isn't Catholicism with the Pope we're talking about. The "they" who are building Park51 are not the same "they" who flew planes into the towers - nor the same "they" who launch rockets at
Israeli civilians, for that matter.

I will conclude by saying that the choice often lies with us as to whether we identify an Other as either enemy or friend. (The key word being "often" - if someone is literally pointing a gun at you, they are probably not your friend - but this is not the case, is it?) So if we have the choice of having one more friend or one more enemy, why should we make the choice that leaves us one ally fewer and one enemy more?

Oh Look, A Bandwagon!

B. Graham posted about hers. Ali posted about hers, twice. Now it's my turn. But (as I'll explain momentarily), that's not why I titled the post "The Bandwagon."

I have ADD.

::crickets::

Not impressed?

In our generation, ADD has become the poster child for overdiagnosed, almost meaningless disorders. It's the butt of a million "let's go ride bikes!" jokes. It's hardly considered a debilitating, harmful or particularly special disease. We all know a few people who take their Adderall do their homework (if they don't sell it), or who took Ritalin back before Adderall. It is a bandwagon that millions ride on, a silly bandwagon with streamers on it, that mostly serves to deliver the children riding it straight to Medication Land, via one of two routes - Easy Street, or Stop Being A Kid, Kid Avenue. A kid on the ADD bandwagon is either someone to be laughed at/with for being diagnosed with something so meaningless, or an opportunity to rail against the Overmedication Culture.

In other words - it's no big deal, just stop diagnosing every last hyper kid with it, ok? Moving on.

Even comparing it to OCD or Tourette's seems whiny, self-absorbed, or ill-informed. And it is not my intent with this post to say "ADD IS A REAL DISEASE GUYZ STOP MAKING FUN OF US." My main problem with ADD has not been the disease itself - it's been dealing with the question of whether I should even think of myself as having a problem at all, or if whether even suggesting my ADD is something to be considered problematic is in itself whiny etc.

I was diagnosed in '94 or so, as a 4th or 5th grader. At the time - for those who know me, this should be surprising - I was very hyper and talkative - hard to get to shut up, even. (Why I stopped being like that has nothing to do with the ADD and is a completely separate story.) The ADD test at the time (I don't know what it's like now) consisted of putting me in front of a computer for some simple tests that required me to pay attention to rather uninteresting patterns. I don't know how I did, but evidently the result was "ADHD all the way." They put me on Ritalin; it almost immediately made me narcoleptically sleepy. (Bear in mind Ritalin is a stimulant.) I said I couldn't take it anymore, and was taken off of it. I have not taken any further treatment for the ADHD to this day. Arguably, I no longer have the "H for Hyperactive" part, although you might not be so sure if you saw me on a long car ride by myself.

At the time, my parents told me not to use the ADD as an excuse for anything, not to think like I was disabled or something, or that I should act or be treated like someone who needs special help. I took this advice personally.

Over the years, on occasion, I would use the ADD as an excuse, like when I got extra time on some tests in elementary school; but for the most part, I didn't request any special treatment.

For the most part, I don't think it interfered that much with my school until the end of college. I learned how to deal with it (probably before I was even diagnosed); I am to this day a master of barely listening to a lecture, but still picking up all the crucial information, and being able to regurgitate it for the exam.

Where it has affected me has been in other, stranger places. Like socially.

The way ADD works - for me, at least - is my mind is essentially incapable of not-following any train of thought, or focusing on any situation, any situation at all, for longer than a few seconds. Only tasks that simultaneously require active unbroken thought and are rote can hold my entire attention continuously - like playing certain video games (press B, move right, press B, move left, press B, move right, press B, move left, can't think of something else for even a split second or Mario will die, but thankfully there's nothing in "press B move left" that inspires me to think of other things). Everything else - nope.

If I read a book, no matter if it's Great Literature that I love, or easy fun reading like Harry Potter, every couple sentences or so I'll start thinking about some other random thing. Maybe it will be something related to a word on the page. Maybe it will involve me imagining the situation on the page going a different way. I read very, very fast, but it takes me a long time to finish reading any novel because for every five minutes reading, I spend anywhere between one and ten minutes daydreaming - no matter what I'm reading.

The same thing applies to conversation, on a smaller scale. If I am conversing with you, then every couple seconds, I am thinking of something else. It's only thanks to echoic memory that I'm able to actually hold a conversation; without it, every few words you say to me would go missing.

Occasionally, I'm not able to compensate, however, and I miss chunks of what people say - again, no matter how interested I am. This happens especially if there is a lot going on. I have a very hard time making anything useful or sociable of myself at a party, because anytime somebody laughs across the room, no matter what conversation I am involved with in front of me, I will usually look over in their direction and have to intentionally pull myself back to what's in front of me. If you converse with me in any busy place, you will probably notice that I constantly look away and look back.

Now we get to the meta part, because how I feel about all this depends on whether I feel like it's legitimate for me to consider my ADD a real thing or not (am I just riding on that bandwagon?) If not - then every time I have a conversation in which I fade out and miss a chunk, I have to get mad at myself for being rude, or wonder if I really like this person, and if not, what am I doing? And if so - then does that mean I either go on being like that with an excuse and never try to change, or take medicine and admit that the past 27 years of conversation have been damaged?

This gets worse for other activities, considering I can sustain continued attention for almost nothing. Seeing a play can be a struggle, especially if a plot point hinges on one word, and I blink out for that word. And, worse - as I venture into serious TMI territory here, apologies - sex is not exempt. I REALLY have to ask what's wrong with me if I start thinking about dinner, or that school dance in 8th grade, or what I might write on These Gentlemen during sex. I definitely CAN'T say it's because of ADD. How f***ing ridiculous is that? "ADD interferes with my sex life?" Get over yourself, dude. Luckily, I don't think any partners have noticed (bear in mind my blink-outs are very brief), or I'd also have had to deal with some sort of horrible "No, I really like you, it's the ADD!" conversation. Yikes.

But it does happen.

The ADD has definitely interfered with work; it may have contributed to me getting fired from a job because I was barely there during boring staff meetings. The ADD has made me late on turning in homework assignments, particularly at the end of college (when for some reason it seemed to have gotten worse). It's simple math - if it takes me two hours to do an assignment because I'm a fast writer, and I have three hours to do it, then I should be fine, until you add in two hours of blinking out.

So why don't I take Adderall?

For one thing, if I took Adderall, that would be saying I have some sort of Problem that needs to be Remedied. I don't have a problem! I just need to stop being a lazy, rude jackass and grow up and engage in my conversations and deal with boring assignments!

For another thing, it would cost some money. For another, I try to avoid medicine when it's unnecessary. For another, I don't want people bugging me to sell extras to them.

But the main thing is... I credit my ADD (if mine exists and isn't just some chimera) with a lot of my creativity.

I spend almost all day, every day, thinking about... everything. As a writer of plays and fiction, I have approximately twenty five to thirty story ideas in my head, which I intend to put on paper some day (I work on about three-four at a time). At any given moment, something might remind me of an element in a story, which leads me to plotting the next step in that story.

Or, more accurately, I might be sitting with you, complaining in a standard way about how nice it would be to take a vacation, maybe to the beach. "Oh man," you say, in response, "My aunt and uncle have..." I think about the beach and how it has sand, and imagine this one beach I was on in North Carolina or was it Assateague, and how it had seaweed stuck in the white sand, and the white sand in those little boxes in kindergarten in the middle of the classroom, and those little rounded scissors and Elmer's glue, and glue is like the Shmooze from that My Little Pony movie the family used to watch when I was little in the living room which later appeared in a dream I had which also had a volcano like that other volcano dream in that big valley like that gentle valley that also has a lake in my novel-in-progress "Angels Come," and maybe there should be a lighthouse in that one, too, wouldn't that be an interesting metaphor for Amanda's growing empathy? "...house on the beach in Ocean City," you finish saying.

In other words, I'm afraid that without the ADD, which may or may not exist and may or not be a valid excuse for irresponsible and rude things I do, I would be nothing as a writer. I'm afraid to take Adderall and learn that the ADD is part of who I am. And for such a silly disease to be part of who I am - to be responsible for my art - when, really, who doesn't have trouble paying attention to boring things? - suggests I'm quite the dunce.

Recently, a good friend discovered she had ADD when a doctor finally said to her that she sounded like a textbook case. She told me, and said "it explains SO MUCH!" The idea that discovering you had ADD, in this day and age, could be considered any sort of meaningful revelation, or even really called a "diagnosis," struck me. It's not really a disease, I thought, it's just an excuse for being a procrastinator. Doesn't she know this? You're not joining some special club. Nobody considers ADD a real problem; it's practically unheard of for someone to talk about it as if it's anything more than a mild annoyance. Nobody even laughs that hard at the jokes because no one's really offended. Isn't she lucky, I thought, to have such a naive view of the disorder.

Oh look, online Settlers of Catan!

Once-A-Year Excuse

Gentlemanly readers,

I apologize for my regular scheduled blog post which did not appear yesterday. I know you are writhing in the streets in woe for want of it, but alas it was my birthday (I'm old + 2) and I was otherwise occupied. But there will be new posts soon to make up for it. Oh yes there will.

In the meantime, enjoy this webcomic about wacky philosophical robots in SPACE.

Economic Fantasies

I considered posting about my unemployment situation. (Yes, again.) I considered posting thoughts about the economy as a whole, particularly in reference to Gentleman Pratt's post and this contrasting article. But trying to tackle such economic questions kept leading me to question myself along these lines: just what is the ideal I am shooting for? In other words, when critiquing our economic policy, and talking about what I hope would change, what am I hoping it will change to?

Obviously, I want gainful employment for myself, and prosperity and all that. But what does that really look like?

So my mind went wandery and I fantasized two economic utopias (utopiae?):

1) Pseudo-Anarchistic Agrarian Localized Economic Fantasy

The economy is entirely localized. Food is grown mere miles from your city, and it is expensive and rare to eat exotic foods from around the world - no strawberries in wintertime, no Colombian coffee in the District of Columbia. The same goes for every other small craft, from furniture making and clothes weaving to local filmmaking. There is no complicated global system of number-moving that allows an entire nation's economy to be based on managing the money and information of another nation. Essentially, it's like the way the world just before the Industrial Revolution - everyone is naturally employed taking care of the

The downside? Greatly reduced progress. Hard to organize the major human-race-size projects like a space program without larger infrastructure. Downside/upside, depending on your point of view: instead of cushy office jobs, people tend to work with their hands. Lastly, the only way this could work is if people voluntarily and intentionally avoided the advanced assembly line machinery of our modern age, because otherwise people just don't have enough work to do. It's not capitalistic, but it's healthy.

2) Pseudo-Randian Laissez-Faire Capitalist's Fantasy

There are nearly no taxes, particularly not on corporations or the rich. The government is minimal, essentially only providing the rule of law, a smaller military (unless private donors want to finance it) and diplomatic functions. Everything else is provided by private business. Roads are maintained the same way that water and electricity are - through billing of private citizens by large-scale corporations. Everyone is not only employed, but paid very well because the big corporations, disburdened of taxes, can afford to employ Americans at living wages. Also, thanks to widespread Carnegie-like philanthropy, every town has a privately funded, well-stocked library as well as every other modern public-use amenity.

~~~

If you think I find neither of these particularly plausible, you're correct. If you think I find one of them a good dream and the other a nightmare, you're also correct.

So, your turn, readers! What is your economic fantasy world?

The Quandries of the No-Longer-Unemployed

If you read here, you may recall that I was unemployed since August. Well, now that it's been nearly a full nine months (my unemployment has come to term? -sorry) I have finally acquired a job! Never fear, dear reader, who has undoubtedly been biting thy nails in agony for my plight!

Of course, since I'm a human being and the leafy growth on the ground is perpetually more viridian on the other side, this kinda sucks.

No longer is the majority of my day mine own to dispense with as I please. I have been totally not a slouch with it (at least, after an initial period last September in which I spent every day wallowing in self-pity, in a little inflatable pool in the backyard); rather I have been all kinds of self-improvey, gettin' on with reading and exercising and writing and other worthy projects. But since these self-improvments have taken up most of my day each day, and no longer will I have most of my day to call mine own, I expect that I will no longer be doing much exercising and writing and so forth. (Reading I will be, since I now will have approximately 90 minutes of Metro riding each day to work.)

No longer do I live as master Gentleman of my daily fate. Now the weekday and weekend are my king and queen (or queen and king, I ain't tryin' to be sexist in my anthropomorphization). Weekdays are for repetitive nothingness - my time Monday-Friday to be divided up such that approximately half is used giving my attention to projects which Have Nothing To Do With Me Except That I Get Paid To Make Them Happen. (It's a nonprofit, a cool workplace, don't get me wrong, but they still aren't my projects.) The other half of those five days are spent traveling, eating, and sleeping in preparation for enacting those projects which HNTDWMETIGPTMTH. I may as well be renting my body and mind to another person during those days, so much the usefulness they have for my personal goals. (Writing, learning via books, getting in better shape, learning via travel.) Only the weekend remains.

Of course I'm being a bit doomsday. I've been employed before (shock!) and have managed to do some things of my own in those evenings after work. But considering how much I have left uncompleted - scripts unwritten, books unread - in the nine months since losing my previous job, it seems, at this moment, like I have no free time to look forward to in comparison. Strange, it seems, to me, in my spoiled state of mind, that we have created a society in which we must sacrifice half our waking hours in order to half the official wherewithal to do as we please in the remainder. Course, it's better than having to work sunup to sundown just to raise your food like a medieval serf, and of course having everyone be on state-funded unemployment like I shamefully/shamelessly was would be untenable, but. Still. I wasn't slotful; I was gainfully unemployed, writing and taking care of myself and even occasionally volunteering to help others out. It's just society does not deem these things to be worth monetary or temporal compensation.

You know, sometimes I think this is why people so much feel the need to start a family. It seems awfully silly to spend 5 days a week working just to be able to have 2 days all to yourself. But if you add a family to take care of - at the very least a house with a dog in it - suddenly you've multiplied the produce of your labors; those 5 days of work now support not just your royal weekend, but also your hearth, home and puppy dish.

But that's a navel-gazing tract to be written some other day. Right now I've got 6 days of freedom, and should be using them far less productively than contributing an article to the Internet. I'm thinking spontaneous road trip.

Where I Went to High School: Poolesville

I did not ever live in Poolesville, MD, but I consider it more my hometown than my real one.

Truth is, that's a somewhat disingenuous thing to say, as I will describe in a moment. It's a little bit appropriate-y. I would never say I'm from Poolesville; I'm from Gaithersburg. But since Gaithersburg is amongst the most boring and unexceptional of all DC suburbs, it has had little influence on me, unlike Poolesville. My wooded neighborhood within Gaithersburg, that has a place in my psyche, with my childhood romps and secretive bonfires in the forest; but not so much Gaithersburg itself. Poolesville, however, is a place with far more character, maybe too much for its own good, and at the same time not enough character whatsoever. It managed to produce a renaissance during the four years I was there, and at the same time it remains a perpetual cul-de-sac for many unhappy souls.

I went to Poolesville High School because it has a magnet program, the Global Ecology Studies Program. I, like everyone else on the planet, was unhappy in middle school, but on getting accepted to a couple magnet high schools I had the opportunity to start over. I chose Poolesville because my best friend at the time would go there too. (We would cease to be particularly close by sophomore year.)

PHS (yes, I'm another Gentleman who went to a PHS) had about 600 students. Each grade of 150 had about 50 of those students in the Global program; of those 50, about 40 were from out of town, and the rest were Poolesville native. (Since I left, Poolesville has gained additional magnet programs.) PHS' attendance net covers the entirety of northwestern Montgomery County. For those who don't know, Montgomery is one of the richest and best educated counties in the nation. The northwestern third of the diamond-shaped area, west of the major highway that is 270 (270 cuts through Gaithersburg) is farmland. When you head west from 270, through that half of Gaithersburg, you quickly leave the DC suburbs that are so intimately connected with the city in character, and so similar to the other Eastern Seaboard suburbs and mini-cities that stretch from DC all the way to Boston. Poolesville is practically in another region, the same way that Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore are. Civil War manuevers are memorialized in the town.

Poolesville's population is around 5000. There are some hundreds or perhaps thousands more people scattered throughout the wide countryside that comprises the school's attendance net. Some of them live in little tiny townships like Barnesville, which consists of a stop sign, a couple churches, and two craft stores; Barnesvillians have to drive a good 20 minutes to get to a grocery store. Poolesville has a grocery store, and a McDonald's, and in the years since I graduated it's gotten a CVS and a Mexican restaurant that if I remember correctly is called Mexican Cafe.

The people that live in and around Poolesville are that strange mix so peculiar to border zones. It's got some wealthy, middle-class people who raise straight-A, clean-cut students, many of whom end up one of those locals in the magnet programs; they're the ones who wanted even more privacy and space than could be afforded in regular suburbs like Gaithersburg, and don't mind a 45-minute rush hour drive to the Metro. It's got hippies and artists; the town has two frame shops, and just to the south there's a really cool Buddhist temple. And it's got rednecks, many of whom are proud to be so. There are many, many horses and young women who love riding them. I went to school with one girl who proudly claimed redneck status (although you probably wouldn't believe her), rode horses, and was at one time a model.

In plenty of ways, the students of PHS that me and my 40 fellow interloping Global students from way out East went to school with from 1998-2002 were not that different than those of any white-bread suburb. (Non-white population of the school: approximately 30, I'd guess. By contrast, the high school I would've attended if I hadn't gone to the magnet was probably minority white. I didn't know this when I chose the school, and I doubt I cared much about race as a shy 14-year old anyways. Disclaimer over.) I'm sure that they're even less different nowadays, what with that newfangled Internet thing and its increased influence.

But in many other ways, Poolesville, in its 20-minute-drive isolation and its everything-closes-at-9pm nothing-to-entertain-a-teenager emptiness, is a very special place. Getting out of Poolesville is hard for many of the kids, at least many of the ones who aren't living in the big houses in the new neighborhoods. If your parents can't afford to give you a car at 16, and you live in Poolesville, or, worse, 20 minutes outside of Poolesville, you may have a rather tough time of it as a teenager. I had a car, and I didn't live there, of course; that's why it was disngenuous to say I think of it as a home, because I was only a tourist, and still am in some ways when I still, regularly, visit.

Drugs in Poolesville are so accepted and common it doesn't register as any sort of scandal or epidemic. I've never heard a word of the town elders calling for crackdowns and only on occasion have I heard of a meth lab getting busted. I have heard of a drug-addled friend-of-a-friend who was raped by some guys in the woods during high school, or maybe that was a rumor; he later became the sort of guy who if he showed up at his friends' houses, they had to very firmly and nervously turn him away, because he'd rob them blind for drug money if he was allowed in.

Certainly drugs are pretty standard nationwide; but the unique thing about Poolesville (or, about Poolesville and thousands of towns like it) is that, being such an isolated little cradle, it doesn't produce drug addicts who spiral down into serious shit like in a city (although some do wander far enough astray they end up in prison or rehab); it mostly just produces dead-ends. Even kids who don't use drugs in Poolesville can get stuck in an endless cycle of not having money for a car, not leaving town for weeks on end, working at the pizza parlor or maybe taking the twice-a-day bus to work the Starbucks in Gaithersburg, and just... staying there. If there's drugs involved, they blow their money on them, never getting in serious legal or health trouble. Poolesville isn't hell for these kids; it's limbo.

Funny how a 20-minute removal from the rest of society can be sufficient to trap people. Even the ones who regularly travel to Gaithersburg or College Park to visit people seem to stay trapped and unhappy and depressed if their home base is Poolesville.

I mentioned a renaissance earlier, didn't I?

When I got to PHS in 1998, so did a new teacher, an art teacher named Walter Bartman III; the prior to Walt Bartmans were also artists and art teachers. Mr. Bartman isn't a modernist or progressive artist; he believes in artmaking for its own sake, and in the act of creating; appraise his work for yourself here: http://www.waltbartmaniiipaintings.com/. Whether or not you are a fan of his creamy style, I can assure you he was an excellent teacher. He emphasized creation and practice. Before his arrival - and after he left, in 2002, the same year I graduated - the art program at PHS was, like so many stereotypical ones, focused on making this random pot for Project Number One and now drawing a picture in Pastels for Project Number Two. But Bartman gave the students serious freedom; if you produced artwork, he simply let you work. He helped spark a little renaissance in art at PHS. Two of his students, kids in my year, got Presidential-level awards. Several of my friends, under his influence, went to art school, some on scholarships, and many are still doing art.

Concurrently with the visual arts renaissance came a smaller, outside one, that perhaps only a small percentage of the school actually experienced. I think of it as the four-year punk renaissance. A little too late as far as the larger trend-following world was probably concerned, and definitely too early for the punk-descended emo scene, punk came to Poolesville largely thanks to the efforts of my friend Jenny, the handed-down influence of some older students, and the musical stylings of Poolesville's very own frequently horrible but enthusiastically rebellious punk band, Poindexter (chorus of their hit song: "GO! YOUTH! GO! GO YOUTH GO YEAH"). Poindexter operated in a very Poolesville-specific place, mixed of actual anger and ennui, intellectual appreciation for the DIY punk ethic, and a kind of ironic irony. When shouting along to "Go Youth," we weren't being strictly serious, but we weren't being ironic in the way modern hipsters are; it was sort of like we were being ironically defiant in how serious we were being.

Analysis aside, the punk scene - the smaller local one within Poolesville, and the larger suburban-Maryland continuum that Poolesville punks became attached to - was all about community, of course. Jenny threw parties at her house, and punk bands from Sterling, VA and West Virginia and Frederick came and played. We broke a china cabinet, so the next party CAUTION tape was strung everywhere; and if you're completely unfamiliar with punk, of course whenever someone fell moshing they were picked right up. For these Poolesville kids trapped out in Poolesville, it was everything they needed, along with Bartman's artistic encouragement. There was, of course, significant crossover; Jenny, the punk-party thrower, was also the number one artist. Punk and art provided many kids a rebellious outlet, a sense of greater purpose (punk shows led to protests against the war), a feeling of being part of something beyond the small town. Poolesville students became political anarchists and straight edgers who refused drugs.

Of course, most of that didn't last; the majority of the millenial PHS punks left the music, the anarchism, the straight edge, and some of them even the artmaking behind. But I don't think that's really important. I'm trying extremely hard not to wax nostalgic (calling it a renaissance probably gives me away, though), but I do believe these alternative influences created a very curious and original social cocoon for those four years. As far as I'm aware, after Bartman, Jenny, and the kids from Poindexter all moved on, the school ceased to have that pocket society which could nurture that third of its population. The serious redneck-y types, they never went for it, and the serious suburban-well-off straight-A types, they never went for it either, but probably neither group really needed it; it was the artsy kids who needed a home within their hometown, a place to recognize that they fit a paradigm of (youthful, burgeoning) free thought and (youthful, burgeoning) political awareness and (youthful, burgeoning) art and community. I'm not sure if PHS, nowadays, has that. Heck, I'm not even sure, when I try and cut through the nostalgia, just how much the art-punk scene helped in the long run (as I check Facebook to find out whether that one fellow punk made it out of rehab or not); but for lack of knowledge of anything else, and for the influence it had on me, that community-within-a-small town is where I consider myself to have gone to high school.

The Quandries of the Unemployed

I am unemployed, and I have been since past August, a long enough time that I have just switched over from 'normal' unemployment payouts to Emergency Unemployment Compensation. Once upon a time, this would have been highly embarassing to admit, but not so much in this economy, when the typical reaction I get when I tell that to someone is... well, "In this economy!" A sort of sympathetic exclamation, it's said with a smile and a raise of the eyebrows and a shrug of the shoulders. Similar to "duh, I get it, of course you are, that's totally normal." And if that's not the response, then it is "Me too!"

The State of Maryland determines how much your unemployment payout is on how much you got paid in the 6-18 months prior to your date of unemployment (by which I mean, they look at the time priod from 18 months prior through 6 months prior, skipping the most recent 6). I was lucky enough to have a decent-paying job during that time, so I qualified for the maximum. And I will now tell you how much I'm taking in because I apparently have no qualms about sharing a bit of my financial information over the Internet (what?): approximately $1400 a month. This translates to getting a job which pays either $12/hour or, with higher taxes, nearly $28,000/year.

As has oft been pointed out by economic theorists, this takes away a whooole lot of incentive to get a job. I definitely have no reason to go to Starbucks or something, trading in a workweek's worth of free time and some part of my income for the mere title of "employed." That's a straight up easy decision there, folks.

(Please note at this point in this post that this is not a dangers-of-unemployment-insurance rant; kindly read to the end fearlessly.)

It goes beyond that as well. Personally, like so many liberal arts majors of this generation, I have yet to find any place of considerably meaningful employment. (Like it is with ali d, Starbucks just isn't what I want to be doing.) Since graduating, I've hopped from generic permanent office job to generic temporary office job and back, never once finding some place I would be comfortable staying for year after year. Job security is worthless if you don't like the job.

So in many ways, I have been glad to have this opportunity to take my time finding the next job. (Okay, yes, I apply to two+ jobs every week, as that is required to keep my unemployment checks coming, and I apply my heart out to those office jobs, but I never get a call. I suspect that this is because my resume clearly shows I haven't been employed since August, and who wants to employ someone who hasn't been employed?) I want to work in the arts, particularly the theatre, and with any luck before my 47 weeks of Emergency Unemployment Compensation runs out, I will find such a position.

(I might have been working in the theatre long ago, if I were at all capable of affording to do a poorly-paid/unpaid internship, but that's the subject of another post.)

So here's where it gets complex. I personally consider myself very libertarian. Nevertheless, I understand the need for a social safety net - it makes no sense for anybody if the unemployed immediately go broke in a bad economy, which contributes to their landlords going broke, and then their grocers, and so forth. My understanding is that the way it's supposed to work is sort of like storing grain in a granary during good years, so that you can survive a famine year; in a good economy, everyone pays taxes into a common fund, which, in a bad year, we then tap into to prevent rolling bankruptcies. (Go oversimplification go!) But at the same time I naturally feel, well, a little uncomfortable sitting here for months on end, cracking open the newly released Final Fantasy XIII while you're at work.

(If the unemployment agency is reading this: NO THAT'S NOT ALL I DO. ...I also write plays!)

(And apply for jobs! And apply for jobs too!)

How does one handle being in a situation that is extremely beneficial to oneself, but on a moral level, one feels guilty for, and on a political-philosophical level, one doesn't necessarily agree with? After all, if everyone did what I'm doing, society would collapse. But on the other hand, if I just went and got some mediocre table waiting job, or an underpaid brainless office job, or, even worse, a temp job, I would not last long for one reason or another, and would quickly be unemployed, again. But on the other other hand, is that somehow my duty to this Great Nation, to - if I can't find work that I stay married to for years on end - at least be a serial monogamist? But on the other other other hand (I guess basically we're talking Goro from Mortal Kombat here), am I not essentially doing little different than if I were employed, in the sense that the money the state is giving me is going straight through me to my landlord, and my grocer, and the Chipotle, and the Metro? (Not to Square Enix, though, FFXIII was a gift.) There is no clear, definite answer to the question of "is this right, what I am doing, and if not, should I do differently?"

America is supposedly the land of freedom, last I heard. A conservative (or libertarian, which I may be a bad example of) will tell you that taxing Peter so that Paul can stay afloat after Paul lost his job is a violation of freedom; a liberal might say that this preserves Paul's freedom from dire economic straits, and after all Peter has that same peace of mind-type-freedom, should Peter lose his. (Well, okay, no, a liberal would say "where's your compassion?") A Me-Myself-and-I would say being forced to move back to my parents' house or work at Starbucks would severely limit my freedom, to which a conservative would reply, "that ain't my problem, dude!" (A conservative who is both a hick and a surfer, apparently.) Circles, circles, circles.

So, is there, somewhere out there amidst all the bureaucracy, perhaps an assumption about my behavior that I can ascribe to? Meaning, did the government - of Maryland, I suppose, which is the one paying me - make certain assumptions about the reasons for providing unemployment, or how long and for what reasons a person might be on unemployment? If so, that would make it easy for me to be somewhat more certain of myself - if there is an underlying assumption for what type of behavior makes the system work best, I can follow that, and at the very least I can know that I'm contributing to the effective functioning of the welfare system, regardless of how I feel about the policy itself. But I'd be willing to bet the government program is not so well-defined (I mean this is government we're talking about), and I'm no economist. So for all I know, I am either keeping in line with, or breaking, a system which I either do, or do not, agree with.

(I told you this is not a rant. It's an existential wail of confusion.)

*Sigh.* I think I'll just go back to playing Final Fantasy.

Some Reflections on the Snowmageddon

For those of us living in the snow-hammered regions of the Mid-Atlantic (DC-Baltimore-Philly in particular), I think a blizzard of this proportion gives us with our modern, technological, compartmentalized existence the closest thing to experiencing what it was like to live before the Industrial Revolution.

Stocking up on food and goods - check.

Potentially going without electricity and relying on blankets, clothes or fires - check.

Getting cut off from the world beyond that which can be walked to - check.

Shared plight and interconnection with the neighbors - check. (I only now met my across-the-street neighbors, who are my age, despite having lived here five months; we worked together to get my car and their car up the hill.)

Treating any visitors to your residence like houseguests - check. (If someone's come over to your place, you're probably going to end up feeding, showering and bedding them. [Um, I mean "providing food, a shower and a bed."]) No wonder most ancient peoples considered the responsibility of the host to the guest to be paramount.

Being left to our own devices for our entertainment - check. (Of course, one of those devices is an Internet-connected computer, and another is probably a DVD player or a video game system, but either way, there's not much in the way of stores, restaurants, bars, movies or shows to choose from, and definitely no non-local options.) Some hundreds of years ago, during the winter, this is what people would do, after all - stay inside, perform the occasional chore. If you were a substinence farmer, what did you have to do during the winter? Not much. It's not like you were missing work hours at the office.

We even have to put our backs into some shoveling and do a bit of manual labor if we want to get anywhere. And heck, some people have probably died in the snowstorm. How 17th century is that?

Yes, we're able to keep up with our less next-door friends and hobbies via the Internet, and maybe I'm writing the wrong blog post, because this really could be about the key role the Internet has played in this blizzard. (Maybe another Gentleman can write on that.) But by and large, most of us still depend on in-person interactions for true socialization; Facebook is just for keeping tabs, passing time and sharing observations - but most of the observations on Facebook are pretty much the same. In other words, we're not really learning anything to see ten different friends post "Snow go away!" and another ten post pictures of their whited-out backyards. Despite being from different people in different places, these all add up to just a monotonous reflection of our own little landscape (even if it's nice to know - not that we couldn't have guessed - that we're not the only ones wishing it was over). In fact, I considered not posting this at all, because I figured all of you readers out there, being in exactly the same situation, have probably thought more or less exactly these same things. Thus, I believe that the snowstorm has rendered the Internet and its connections moot - overall, these five-foot snow drifts have reduced our world. Brought it inwards. Slowed it down.

And holy **** it's boring.

Thresholds of Truth (a.k.a. Futurism, Episode 3)

I humbly propose that in the future we will reach the Photographic Truth Threshold.

We are already closing in on it, thanks to Photoshop. The PTT is the point in time at which you can no longer believe that a photograph, no matter how realistic looking, wasn’t faked, either in part or in its entirety. Specifically, it may be the point at which photographs are no longer admissible evidence in courts of law, at least not without strict standards to their origins and handling (e.g., having official chain of custody on the camera from the moment the photo was taken), because even an expert could not identify a fake any more.

Take a look at this woman. She’s not a particularly attractive woman, is she? Am I cruel for saying that? Not really, because she doesn’t exist. She’s a face created via averaging many faces to create a prototype “unattractive female face.” (The site also has prototypical male unattractive, and both gender attractive, faces, for the curious; I just picked that one because it was first on the page.) Surely it’s not much of a stretch from images like that to simply creating a photorealistic human being out of thin air.

Photoshop itself is becoming more and more accessible. Once, you would need complex tools and understanding, or at least a lot of patience and skill, to de-blemish a model’s image a magazine. Now, there’s a one-click tool that will do that for you. It’s not long before there’s a tool that identifies face structure and allows you to realistically wrinkle the skin in a photo, or move the cheekbones, or change the apparent ethnicity, or gender. Eventually, it may be commonplace for not just highly skilled graphics designers, but random shmoes like you and me, to have a program on our computers that automatically de-blemishes any photo we post of ourselves online, click-free. (The main obstacle to this right now is that, eventually, you have to meet people face-to-face...)

But the PTT is only the beginning.

Next after the Photographic Truth Threshold will be the Videographic Truth Threshold. Video is, after all, just photos in rapid sequence; it’s really just a matter of more work, realistically faking a video, plus a little understanding of make videorealistic movement. Certainly Avatar had moments of near-realism, but we’re not just talking about blue people.

To understand the technology that is going into this, watch this video. It’s kind of techno-babbly, but believe me when I say it makes sense by the end.

The implications, once this starts to become just a little bit a reality, are dangerous. Of course, if someone fakes a video of a UFO, we’ll all be incredulous (what happens if someone captures a real UFO? We’d never believe them), but if someone does something more innocuous and believable, like make it appear a person was in a location they weren’t, we could get into trouble. Presumably, if you could disguise the underlying coding or remove the traces of changes, no one would be able to tell through technological means; or at the very least, the ability to detect a fake would be inaccessible and highly advanced, so if some prankster made it look like you pissed your pants in a video, you’d have a hard time disproving the visual evidence.

Not to mention, if, say, a news network with a political agenda wants to make a point, they can fake the video. If the experts say its fake, they can produce counter-experts who say it isn’t, because, you know, they’re a news network. As of right now news networks and would-be propagandists are pretty much limited to carefully cutting and selectively reinterpreting existing documents of verifiable reality; but if they can insert a false smile at the right point here, or add someone in the background who wasn’t present there, all bets are off. Or, to take an alternative and less massive-conspiracy-theory scenario, imagine a grainy store surveillance video being manipulated.

Quick, without looking at the telltale video descriptions or comments – guess which one of these is CGI, and which one is not: Exhibit A - Exhibit B.

Of course, this only applies to visuals. Faking audio seems like another matter, but consider the advances we’ve had with ProTools and Auto-Tune, that can make a rank amateur vocalist on an detuned ukulele sound at least pleasant, if not quite like a pop star.

If the technology improves, however, and we can learn to manipulate the recorded sound waves so minutely that we can change the timbre of someone’s voice – then we’ll be in trouble.

Lastly, and most distant-future-fantastically, will be the Reality Truth Threshold. Assuming advances as mentioned in my post on brain-computer interfaces, there could eventually be a time when nothing you experience is necessarily real; someone could be screwing with your sensory input. Of course, on some level, that’s not technically different than right now – any introductory philosophy student will tell you that for all we truly know we could be brains in a vat, or inside the Matrix – and additionally the possibility of hallucination and schizophrenia cast our subjective experiences into doubt – but when we’ve observed the actualization of technology that allows the manipulation of sensory experience, it’ll be a whole different box of cats we’re dealing with. After all, the Matrix is only a theoretical possibility as far as we know at the moment, and schizophrenia can’t be artificially and intentionally induced (though a little LSD can help…), but if the technology is produced and verified, you’ll no longer know for sure when you’ve woken up in the morning that someone hasn’t implanted something in you and tweaked things just a little bit, so that whenever you step into the shower, the water feels cold, even though it’s actually scalding. You wouldn’t know the difference until your skin started peeling off. (Or the stall filled with steam.)

(I readily admit this is an idea oft-noted in sci-fi; but very rarely, as far as I am aware, does the writer of sci-fi have his protagonist in a world which is *actually* reality, but no one can be sure if it is. Always - because it's more interesting plot-wise - it turns out that it was Not Real All Along. But, if this comes to pass for you and me, it Will Be Real, but We Won't Know For Sure.)

So there, I’ve gone from near-future actual possibilities to sci-fi doom scenarios. But isn’t that always the slippery slope? Till then, have fun enjoying each other’s Facebook photos… while you can trust them.