Minor Distractions

It's Not Sarah's Fault

2011-01-10T15:00:00.000-08:00

Of course it's not the fault of the Grand Mistress of Scorn that a Democratic Congressional representative was shot in the head. Nope. That political map with the sniper scope cross hairs was just supposed to illustrate her folks' survey of politicians who failed to see the wisdom of the Republican Party's more rational solutions to the nation's ills. All those photo ops showing Ma Sarissima's mad gun skillz are just a way of communicating how down-2-urth she is; one of us you know... hunting for her dinner. Sure.

Futhermore, I don't understand why anyone would ever think for a picosecond that all those calls for a "Second Amendment Solution" (the amendment being referred to having something I believe to do with the right of the individual, no matter how blatantly crackershite, to bear arms) has anything to do with random nut-wings fondling their rifle at night in front of the television and fantasizing about the fame that could be theirs if they just had the cojones to do it to that antique Reid guy as has been not so subtly suggested by a clever advertising bit juxtaposing guns, the aforesaid old guy, and a comment about taking him out.

That's silly. Just because the rabid pack of developmentally-disabled she-hyenas masquerading as conservatives in some parts of the good old U.S.A. imply that homicide might be the answer, doesn't mean there's any incitement to violence going on. Surely you can see that. Right?

The sad fact is that we're always going to have unstable people causing trouble. Just look at that evil journalist "stalking" La Palinista by actually looking at the same lake she sees when she's making her morning coffee, all so that he can write a nasty book about her. (because we know darned well that any book someone else writes about Ms. Not-Quite-VP can't possibly be unbiased, truthful and ... um, nice.) It's a real crime that it's not just liberals having to deal with unpleasant behavior of the general public anymore. Of course, it does seem to really knot the undercurlies when that happens. That's just plain wrong after all! Sarah, Anne, Sharron, Ms Bachmann and all the other fertile ursines are entitled to a safe, quiet, private life without fear of violence. It's not like they're stirring up any dissention and hate out there amoungst those unstable folk who we all secretly know are card carrying Dummocrats anyhow. (except when they turn out to be conservatives which is just plain inconvenient)

These good women are, after all, on the side of the angels - unlike all those Liberals ... who are clearly just pretending to be good Christians. Heck. I'll bet they don't even wear a hat and tie to church on Easter Sunday.

O Holy Night: Of Boyle, Evancho, and other Christmas Noises

2010-11-24T20:12:00.000-08:00

It is a sad day when a ten year old is the bright star in my seasonal music-verse.

I look forward every year to Christmas, not for the kisses under the mistletoe nor the yule log. In fact, I've found Christmas meals and celebrations to be a hit or miss affair, one year full of laughter and joy... the next, not so much. And I'm okay with that. Holidays are largely habit and tradition. If you have a stable life full of a regular cast of characters, you get the same basic event year upon year. If your multiverse is a bit less organized, you take pot luck.

All that I ask each year is one truly soulful rendition of what I consider to be the most stunning of all songs ever written. Yeah. Ever. In my small pantheon of soul-stirring experiences, is the performance of the song, "O Holy Night", sung like the artist REALLY MEANS IT. Seriously. These are words penned by a poet and composed by an unbeliever. Yet even my skeptical soul is stirred each time I hear those words, "Fall on your knees! Oh hear the angel voices.".

And I want to hear it sung like the performer means it, dammit!

I've listened to at least two dozen versions of "O Holy Night", and every one of them fails to make that transition from the somewhat exhausted language concluding the first verse:

Till He appeared and the Spirit felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn

(i.e. until now, I've just not been feeling all that zippy about the way my life has been playing out,but something happened to give me a shot of electricity up my spine, enough to make me forget that I've gotta get up at 6 am, do my usual workout and head off to the daily job in which I feel completely uninspired)

Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices!
O night divine, the night when Christ was born;
O night, O holy night, O night divine!
O night, O holy night, O night divine!

And this is where I expect to hear the heart of the artist. This is the moment of revelation. If you're a Christian, and you think that "God" has suddenly made himself physically real (i.e. "manifest") in the world, this is (excuse my french) fucking amazing! This is indeed when you fall to your knees, struck dumb with awe. This is a transcendent moment, when something our five senses cannot penetrate makes itself ... felt.

Even if you're not a card carrying Christian with a church you regularly attend, there's still a space in the human soul for an appreciation of the divine - whatever you may call that "divine" thing. Perhaps appreciation is too weak a term. If there is something transcending the liminal norm, some divine spark that saps the will to resist from your soul, then you too might find yourself collapsing to your knees at the reminder of an other-worldly revelation, a presence in the world that had never previously been considered.

The point being, the phrase calls for power, and glory... and more than a little bit of whatever resembles awe in the performer's repetoire.

And most performers, to my annual disapointment, miss this completely. But I persist. I check out the latest Christmas albums for the latest variations. Celine Dion, David Phelps, and Allison Crowe have done something reasonably akin to what I consider the heart and soul of the song. Most musicians, some of whom are equally capable, fall sadly short - which I cannot understand (because I have a serious fetish where this song is concerned).

I love Susan Boyle's voice and I think some day when she breaks away from her handlers and starts singing from her gut again like that day she wacked us aside our head with her performance of "I Dreamed a Dream" on Britain's Got Talent... that she will become an icon the world won't quickly forget. This year's Christmas album, unfortunately, won't be that moment.

Instead I'm stuck with young Jackie Evancho, who has managed to produce, at age ten, a credible version of my favorite song. It's not the penultimate performance the song deserves, but then... I've yet to hear it.

Everyone has their Christmas traditions. This is mine... to track down the latest version of that amazing hymn, and see what we've done with it.

Dear Manufacturers of Land Line Telephones

2010-09-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Manufacturers of Land Line Telephones,

Recent deterioration in the quality of the sounds produced by my telephone sent me in search of a replacement. Imagine my surprise to discover that, like a flighty bunch of fashion designers rolling the latest season's brain storm down the runway, you have apparently forgotten some of the most fundamental reasons a customer might actually use a cordless telephone. I.E. mobility.

Since it has obviously escaped your design team's attention, I'll happily share with you some of the reasons I purchase a cordless telephone (as opposed to a corded telephone which would require me to sit down and enjoy the moment).

First, I'm in search of a cordless telephone because I want to carry my cordless phone around my office. This should not be confused with a desire to share my conversation with anyone else who might be in the general vicinity. Hence the need for a headset jack. (In an ideal world I'd be able to use a wireless headset with my cordless phone, but I'm not looking for miracles here, just the basics)

Likewise I may not wish to share the noises on my end of the phone call with a group of my peers. Said noises may include the washing of hands, or the taking of a dump since I am often on calls for many hours of the day and occasionally, well, nature calls. Hence the need for a mute function and a nice clear indicator showing that the mute is indeed on so that I am not constantly having to test whether the mute function is on or off by shouting, "Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?"... before, um, washing my hands.

I also want a speaker and a microphone on the cordless handset of sufficient quality to allow me to actually set it in front of me and conduct a conversation. This allows me to give my deteriorating hearing and tender ears a vacation from the headset from time to time.

Not to be too demanding, but I'd also like a nice bright display with large characters, as well as large, clearly labeled buttons which do not require the use of my magnifying glass to read.

And finally, it would be lovely to be able to turn off the ringer for all handsets on the base unit so that the whole house will be quiet the morning after a large dinner party. I wouldn't mind a feature that allows me to turn off the ringer on just the handset in my bedroom for those occasional morning afters when everyone else has been prudent and judicious in their late night activities.

One feature that I have absolutely no interest in whatsoever is an answering machines. Answering machines are so nineteen eighties. I have this thing called voice mail. In fact I have multiple voice mailboxes. The last thing I need is one more place for people to leave me messages. I seriously doubt that I am in the minority in this situation. So lose the answering machine, m'kay? Just give me the headset jack and my mute button and no one needs to get another cranky post phone-shopping blog.

Dear Marriott Oakland

2010-09-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Marriott Oakland,

I can't tell you how pleased I am to read on your little in-room advert for seriously over-priced room service that you serve ocean-friendly fish selections that are "abundant in population and caught wild with little impact on the ocean's ecosystem". It's impressive that you're concerned about the earth's resources, using them wisely, etc...

I'm particularly intrigued by your decision to serve sustainably produced wines from New Zealand. While I'm sure that New Zealand is a lovely place, and the source of any number of quaffable vintages, I do hope you'll forgive me if I point out the elephant in the room.

In light of your interest in sustainable practices, I can't help but question why you would fly wine 6500 miles when you could find hundreds of vineyards within a 50 mile radius of this hotel with far superior sustainably produced wines at a perfectly reasonable price point.

When I see a business located in California serving wines from other countries, I really hope to be impressed. In this case your big sell is both ill-considered and uninteresting. Next time you want to do a little green-washing, please bear in mind the demographics of the venue.

Sustainably yours,
A California Wine Fan

Town Hall Tussle in Tampa

2009-08-08T11:52:00.000-07:00

Grass roots campaigns against new legislation are common. Unfortunately the mob scenes at Town Hall meetings on health care reform in Tampa, FL, Boiling Springs, MO and Oconto Falls, WI are a sad example of how a small group of people can make rational dialogue impossible for the majority of interested citizens.

The people interrupting Town Halls on health care reform are using one of the fine traditions of our free American heritage. I respect the tradition, but I’m not able to respect their use of it. What these “Tea Party” crowds appear to represent is a bunch of infantilized adults who want to stick their fingers in their ears and yell, "La la la la la la la la la!" so they don’t have to worry about sullying the purity of their ignorance. When interviewed it becomes abundantly clear that the majority of these people don’t understand the problem. They don’t understand insurance. They don’t understand the complexities of managing costs across the spectrum of patients that represent health care today. They don’t really understand how Medicare or Medicaid work, and they for darned sure don’t understand things like risk pooling or the interaction of taxation and the social fabric of our country… and they don’t want to understand.

At least this is what cranky Tea Party goers demonstrate when they disrupt legitimate meetings designed to explain what is going on and solicit feedback.

I personally would be embarrassed to be associated with this kind of silliness, but these people seem to have rationalized their behavior into some pious mockery of patriotism. If "patriotism" is belligerent intolerance, and a complete refusal to do the hard work of learning about the complexities facing our country, then we need to come up with a better word for love of country and a determination to work toward the greatest good. Quite frankly I’m a little tired of people who have no idea how an American health care overhaul is going to help us hold onto the hard won threads of economic recovery.

I’m even more tired of people who are clueless and proud of it. I want them to leave, to go sit down and shut up until they’re willing to invest some effort in really understanding the issues, and working on constructive ways to solve the problem. As long as they’re wasting their time trying to convince the rest of us to ignore what we know and just go along with their ostrich strategy, they’re just dead weight. In spite of the media’s fluffy economic recovery stories, this is a difficult time in the history of the United States.

We’re just entering the wings of a really tough economic slog to pay off national debt and figure out how to avoid another financial crisis slash auto manufacturer collapse slash market crash any time in the near future. If I were feeling passionate about government, I would want to be part of making our country and our government better, more intelligent, more compassionate, more rational, and generally more effective. Anyone who thinks leaving things the way they are is the best approach, has clearly lost more brain cells than they can afford.

In Plain English - Reading the 'Affordable Health Choices Act'

2009-06-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

What's hiding in the "Affordable Health Choices Act"?

I know I'm a cynic, but any legislation that tops 600 pages has to be hiding some sneaky pork. It's just a fact of political life. The trick, I suppose, is ferreting it out: which is a more difficult proposition than one would think. Give me a 615 page novel, and I'll read it in a couple of days. A business book of that size would never get published, but even so, I think I could absorb the principles in less than a business week.

615 pages of Federal bull, I mean bill? Not so easy. It's not just that the document is really, really long. It's also full of bad English, twisted syntax, and bureaucratic structure that only makes it more difficult to understand.

Do you know that the Federal Government has passed laws governing how easy it must be to read 'Informed Consent' forms, Federal Land Management Plans, and HIPAA Privacy Notices? In fact, many states have some kind of Plain English statute on the books.

Yet laws submitted for review and voting by members of the Senate and Congress (temporary public servants, many without any advanced legal degree) are written in such an arcane, convoluted, counter-intuitive way that it is impossible to believe that these duly elected representatives can actually grasp the details of most of the laws on which they vote. Which means they depend on career staff to read, understand, analyze, and present these laws.

Let me give you a small example from the Kennedy-Dodd Affordable Health Choices act.

14 “(1) IN GENERAL. – Every person required to
15 make a return under subsection (a) shall furnish to
16 each individual whose name is required to be set
17 forth in such return a written statement

Yes, the numbers are there, as are the hiccoughs in capitalization, and the confusing splatter of parenthetic ordination.

I could go on, but why? The point being that the 'Affordable Health Choices Act' is difficult to read and I think it should be really easy for everyone to understand.

After all, this is about health care for us, our children, and many generations to come. The law is supposed to be designed to effect a dramatic shift in the social fabric of the United States. At the very least it should be comprehensible to anyone with a high school diploma.

Instead it's verbose, full of (admittedly necessary) references to previous laws (which must be amended to make this law... well, legal) and packed with lawyer-speak. I can say this because I've spent hours sifting through the thing - and I'm just beginning to scratch the surface.

I'll be the first to admit that the list of things I don't do particularly well is extensive. But I am a world class reader, and I have twenty-two years of experience in the health care and health insurance industries. So when I struggle to grasp what is being said in a health care bill, something is just plain wrong.

It is my considered opinion, that before any health care reform legislation is put before the voting bodies of the Federal government, it should be subjected to a ‘plain English’ rewrite in which the actual meat of the law is extracted from the morass of legal formatting and mangled English, and presented to the American public for consideration and input.

What do you think? Does that seem like too much to ask?

Career Ghouls

2009-05-07T15:28:00.001-07:00

The latest cause for snickering and holding-of-tongues in my life is a healthy Human Resources process known as "career planning". In principle I applaud our VP's desire to invest in his staff and develop a deep bench. In practice, not so much.

This wholesome capitalist activity is based on the premise that we minions actually have a desire to either A) advance our position in business, or B) have conversations with our managers about what we'd really like to do if God and the Universe saw fit to hand us a Gold Ticket to the future of our dreams.

As one co-worker puts it, "What I want to be doing in 10 years is sitting on a beach in the Bahamas, sipping a fruity cocktail.". Methinks this is not what our esteemed leadership has in mind.

What all this corporate-influenced naval-gazing caused me to realize is that I don't trust my management with the truth about my career goals. My career goals aren't fiscally-centered enough to be of any interest to people wanting to advance the credibility of their department. My life goals, sadly enough, have to do with personal experiences... travel, a gourmet bicycle tour of Italy, fine food, achieving Satori... You know, the simple pleasures. If I have to talk about money, I might mention something about earning enough money to cover my mortgage by selling art works and writing esoteric stories about alien cultures facing the ravages of space pirates.

Inspecting this grid I've been provided - to document said "Personal Development Plan" - I see things like INDUSTRY and BUSINESS AREA and TECHNOLOGY. This leads me not only to wonder at their naivete, but also about the amount of glue they have quite obviously been sniffing. In this economy, even if I did want to work in a different "Industry" or "Business Area", now is certainly not the time to try to get a job for which I am only peripherally qualified. If employers want someone inexperienced, they can hire a fresh College graduate with the stamina of a Marmoset on Sudafed.

No, I'm afraid the economy and a hefty California mortgage mean that I'm going to be pretending I want to improve my business knowledge, develop my negotiation skills, and acquire more training: all of which I will then be prevented from applying to the job because they are contrary to the entrenched culture.

Just think, someone is getting paid for creating these exercises in corporate futility. Maybe that's the destination of my career path.

Revitalizing the US Auto Industry

2008-11-16T13:24:00.001-08:00

One of the things I like about traveling is getting a newspaper delivered to my hotel room door. (Even if I've dutifully declined as a gesture toward global sustainable lifestyle practices which is ultimately moot since I've just displaced a few metric tons of carbon flying to wherever I may be.)

I usually read quite a bit of the newspaper while enjoying some stale decaf and that yellow stuff that is supposed to be eggs. This allows me to read stories which aren't front web-page news. What with the war, the election, and the economy, I haven't enjoyed a below-the-fold article in a while. (okay, with the exception of that story about canceling 'My Own Worst Enemy', the next-gen-Alias-type show with the ever so yummy and strangely believable Christian Slater)

So I was catching up on the non-essential bits in the Money section when the lead-in, "Auto industry help on the agenda" caught my eye.

Now I get that cars are iconic to American culture, and the domestic automotive industry contributes disproportionately to the US. economy considering the actual necessity of the product.

As opposed to say... feet, bikes, subway trains, mopeds, buses, surface trains, and light rail. (Now, before you get sidetracked, let me say that I understand the whole slogging-through-the-snow-in-minus-degree-temperatures argument. I went to college in Minneapolis. Believe me. I understand. I'm not opposed to private transportation. I just think we need to inspect our conviction that the best way to get from Point A to Point B is by hopping in a two - six ton machine and sucking down a few irreplaceable gallons of fossil fuel.)

What I am suggesting is that perhaps... perhaps, the automotive industry might be expected to help itself - like any other business providing products people have come to realize they no longer require in such abundance. Whalebone stays for corsets comes to mind. So do horse drawn carriages, and steam engines.

Instead of focusing myopically on the current rate of consumption of cars, trucks and the ubiquitous mini-van, perhaps Ford, GM and Chrysler need to consider diversifying. Retool a few plants to produce something without an internal combustion engine: like tankless water heaters, or solar-powered pool pumps, or treadmill-powered generators. Stuff we may come to depend on once people fully comprehend how scarce our planetary resources are.

Just a thought.

Reconnecting with the Planet - Facebook

2008-09-17T08:53:00.001-07:00

Okay, maybe I'm a hermit by nature. Most days the only people I see are my fellow gym rats, sweat-stained and fragrant - and my partner (fragrant in a much nicer way).

One of the things I love about working from home is... well, everything. No commute. I wear what I want. I can get up and make myself a snack while I'm in the middle of a high tension meeting. I can work on a business report at 2am when I can't sleep. If I want a "water cooler chat" there is always Instant Messaging. In short... heaven. Why any knowledge-worker on the planet would have to consume office space and gasoline is beyond me. Businesses that require people to work from their office if their job doesn't demand it should be in a higher tax bracket. Something to motivate them to move their HR practices into the 21st century.

At lunch I walk over to the post office (half a block away), or pick up some books I have on hold at the Library (1 block away). If I'm having guests over for dinner, I might make a quick run to the grocery store to pick up the odd pint of Silk or head of garlic. (2 blocks away)

I may have been raised on a farm and miss the smell of fresh cut alfalfa, but the pleasures of urban living are obvious.

Most days I don't interact much with people, and as a result I've gotten seriously out of touch with the world. Then, in one of those internet search chains that started with clinical studies then leapt into a health care blog, which led to another blog, and another, and finally seduced me onto Polyvore, I discovered Facebook.

Okay. So I'm no longer the Cutting Edgie I was in my thirties. I do realize that Facebook is... well, adopted tech. It's been around. But I haven't been using it. Why bother? What's it going to do for me?

In one evening I discovered a little bit of what it can do for me. A lot. It's the digital equivalent of going to school, or the mall, or the office. In high school I'd stuff my books in the locker, talk to my BFF, eye the hottest girls and boys for new trends, observe how stressed Mr. Peterson was today (an indicator of whether he was planning to let us do experiments in the Chem Lab) and check out what my ex was doing with Sally Kashner. (the names have been changed to... you know) Anyhow. You could tell whether there was some kind of big After School Event happening from how clean the hallways were. I don't know how things are today, but that was how it went in my day. But that's how the Facebook experience feels. Multi-sensory, and intimate, and ... well, connected.

You see, it's not just the deep profound conversations you have with someone that make up a friendship. It's not the monthly Town Hall Meeting that makes up a community. It's the little things from day to day. Old Miss Esterhazy with her morning cup of coffee sitting in the window at the Local Grind. Joe and Herb and Bill at the gym in the same old tee shirts and shorts they always wear. It's an event when they get a new pair of tennis shoes. It's the guy in the decrepit white Cadillac who always seems to be coming out the alley when I turn to get into the parking garage. It's the new cologne Mary is wearing in the cubicle next door, or washing your hands next to that chronically morose woman from Marketing, and noticing a sparkly new engagement ring.

Human beings are capable of processing millions of fragments of data a minute... and we do. It's how we analyze our environment, and the people we meet. Working at home, you don't get those little clues, those insights into the people you know from old conferences, high school, work: unless you have Face Book.

Suddenly I know an old friend is still healthy enough to play tennis with her usual competitive spirit. I see that a co-worker is planning a trip to China. A fellow artist is planning a show in New York. I discover the names of people I have never spoken with in spite of sharing sweat on the dance floor on a regular basis. A guy I met on a Yoga retreat has a blog for me to read.

Facebook is a tool you can use rarely, or daily. The returns are obviously commensurate with the time and energy invested. If you just want to keep in touch with fellow sorority members, or your bridge club - facebook will let you keep up on all the gossip. If you're part of a Home Owners Association, you can keep track of a big joint construction project.

And like all tools, there are two edges to this one. If you compartmentalized your personal and work life before, adding just one friendly co-worker opens the door to all your hobbies, your contacts - and their lives. This is not for people with a passion for privacy.

It is however, perfect for me.

The Non Crimes of G.W. Bush.

2008-06-11T11:30:00.000-07:00

America. We’re "tough on crime". More or less. After all, this is a country where people ante up to incarcerate seventeen year olds for the rest of their lives. This is the product of the penal code better known as the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ laws. You know. Felonies. Serious crimes which can include anything from rape, murder, and a bad weed habit, to joy-riding sans-permission in the neighbor’s SUV and sampling the wrong brownies at a frat party.

So anyhow, depending on the perp’s age, genetic history, and attitude, Americans can be pretty unforgiving about violations of our local ordinances. Unless you’re a white politician from a family with a pedigreed bank account. Then the consequences of bad behavior and worse judgment may be a bit less dire.

There are some who would like to believe the esteemed leader of the free world (aka ‘W’) was hoodwinked into believing that Saddam Hussein held Weapons of Mass Destruction. In fact, some folks *cough*bloggerchrisjones*cough* claim to believe Saddam Hussein’s warblings from behind bars to the effect that he was merely engaged in a brilliant game of blind-man’s-bluff to protect himself against Iran. A bluff so masterful and sophisticated that it completely fooled US and allied intelligence. A bluff so compelling that it actually got him attacked... not by his feared foe Iran, but by a much larger foe... the United States. Yep. That’s some savvy bluffing there. I can see how someone not in their right mind might actually find some sense in that.

Or maybe not. Let’s reflect on this for a moment.

Iraq, third world country a little bigger than Utah and Nebraska combined.

The United States, source of enough sophisticated technology to track and report how frequently you pass gas in a concealed bunker anywhere on the planet. And we couldn’t figure out whether Iraq had actually destroyed weapon stockpiles as ordered by the UN back in 1991?

Possible.

Implausible, but possible.

Apparently we could not be sure. So... um... How come we went to war with Iraq? I mean seriously folks. We know Iran, Syria, North Korea, and who knows how many more tiny countries with nothing better to spend their revenue on than chemicals and lethal bacteria, have WMD. Has the US declared war on them recently?

Speaking of which, did you know there is a definition for Weapons of Mass Destruction? Seriously. According to Google, "WMD is a term used to describe a massive weapon with the capacity to indiscriminately kill large numbers of people.". Which describes a train car loaded with dynamite and aimed at downtown Fort Atkinson. So apparently everyone has them. It’s just Iraq that wasn’t allowed to have them without suffering a bit of "shock and awe" courtesy of the good old U.S. of A.

Okaaay. Is anyone else confused? 'Cause I'd hate to feel stupid and confused all on my lonesome.

Anyhow, the answer to my previous rhetorical question is obviously no. Right?

Right.

So this fossilized Senate report released in June 2008 is merely confirming what everyone has known since 2003. There just wasn’t enough evidence to justify declaring war against Iraq. That’s it. There might have been evidence. Conflicting evidence. Unsubstantiated speculative evidence. But. Not. Enough.

4,000 deaths and 33,000 American casualties (not to mention our allied forces), and some 90,000 to 655,000 dead Iraqis later, the general public has confirmation that every excuse used to justify declaring war was exaggerated. Greatly. Our duly elected government officials dragged you and I and every other tax paying citizen into an aggressive act that cannot be justified. Given all of the data, it's crystal clear that the President and his key advisors failed in their sworn duty to serve the best interests of the citizens of the United States. The People. (that’s you and me, and that guy sitting next to you with the hummus on his collar)

The question isn’t "Why?" It’s not even "Who?" The real question is what are we going to do about it now that we have no possible means of avoiding the grim truth that our leaders have been waging a war out of our pockets and using our children, that is just plain wrong?

Well. We’re not going to punish George W. Bush for being a weasly, self-serving, hypocritical liar. That much is clear. And good luck pinning anything on Cheney; Halliburton has deep pockets and he clearly has access to some unraveled hole. On June 6th, 2008, the Senate Intelligence Committee rebuked Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. Rebuked. Yeah. Of course the committee stops short of actually doing anything. No demand for an investigation or sanctions or anything real like that. Call me atavistic, but my idea of an appropriate rebuke would involve a flogging post, a ping pong paddle, and a lot of video cameras.

In spite of the mealy-mouthed milque-toast bullshit conclusion to this report funded by my tax dollars, the Republicans on the committee actually had the gall to protest its release.

‘Cause you just don’t want to keep repeating an ugly truth like that an all... now do ya?

Speaking of which, have you ever noticed that when the media is covering the bad behavior of Republicans it’s an "eager Left Wing Press" impugning a good man’s integrity ... but when they give a lot of ink to stories involving Democrats – no matter how puerile, tenuous, or tangential (think Lewinsky, Whitewater, and that White House travel agency pseudo-scandal) it’s just Good Journalism?

If you could pump, refine and deliver Republican Outrage Against Being Criticized, the U.S. would be well on its way to solving the gas crisis.

So nothing is going to be done.

Mind you, if it was a Democratic president... say Clinton, or Obama... you KNOW the Republicans would be all over it like brown on feces. There would be calls for investigations and Grand Jury Prosecution. There would be a call on the floor for impeachment, and lots and lots of tax payer dollars would be tossed to all of the good folks who spin this kind of story into an 18-24 month Front Page Saga.

And folks - if it was a Democrat who had done this... I would be saying the same thing: "Right. Fecking. On."

But it’s not - and because it’s not, America is going to do what it’s been doing for the past eighty years when the Republicans mess things up. Republicans will hunker down and drink bourbon until it all blows over because they KNOW that there just isn’t enough OUTRAGE out there amongst the electorate to actually kick Republican butt until they clean their own house. Democrats are going to wring their hands and moan about how terrible it is. No one is going to step in the sewage. Because the only way to clean up this kind of mess is to jump in with your waders and splash the stink around until everyone is smelling it high up in their sinuses and is willing to do just about anything to CLEAN IT UP.

On the news last night I heard a political commentator say that Americans go for impeachment about once a generation. Apparently we’ve "used up" our allotment of impeachment-energy with Clinton. After all, if you can’t kick a guy out of office for getting a blow job, what’s a few thousand deaths, trillions of dollars of national debt, and the utter devastation of our image as the Good Guys in the eyes of the whole world?

So I guess we’re just going to wait the misery out and hope that the next president is better? I guess so. With 6 months on the clock, why waste the money pushing for impeachment. It might have been useful if we'd never voted him in at all. Or if we the voting public had developed a backbone and stopped sniveling about how Bush and his cronies were "protecting" us from Al Quaeda et al... and impeached him two years ago before we racked up several trillion more dollars in national debt. But now? Naw. Not worth the bother.

Of course we should bear in mind that we've set up the next president to fail, and fail big. Doesn't matter if he walks on water. He's doomed. You see, in business, if you’re considering hiring a replacement, you don’t let the situation get as bad as it possibly can before you pull the plug on the poor incompetent sod currently in the hot seat. You get him out as soon as you realize he has no hope of achieving the objectives of the organization.

Of course that means we'd have to figure out what the objectives of the United States actually are, and I'm not sure we have enough money or intelligence to arrive at a consensus on that one. Half of us think we should hold dominion over the land, the animals, and the rest of the human race. The other half is divided up into a lot of factions who can't agree on whether animals are more important than plants, or other people are more important than the planet, or the planet is more important than other animals and plants. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So whomever may win this November is doomed. The economy, national policy, health care, employment, etc... You name it and they're already bad, and destined to get worse. Then we’re going to hand this steaming bowl of caca to the new President and wait with bated breath for him to turn it into rice and beans.

Sure.

Perhaps instead of waiting for a new president, we should all start right now by rolling up our sleeves and considering what we can do to help. This means anyone who claims they want fiscally prudent leadership (but managed to keep their mouths shut while the current leadership stacked up a multi-trillion dollar national debt), better do some seriously hard work, and figure out where all the money is going before they decide that whatever spending on the docket shoud be voted down. It means people should stop thinking about their pet cause and start thinking in terms of which projects serve the most pressing needs and can reasonably be addressed with available funds and public will. We're all going to have to engage in an unfun practice known as prioritization.

My priority is dealing with how badly flawed our flavor of democracy has proven itself to be. It was a brilliant idea in the beginning, but the US is bigger, richer, and way more complicated than it was back in the late 1700s. Aren't we about due for a bit of constitutional reupholstering? Seriously here. When the President has a lower approval rating than fat in a twinkie, it's time we all admit that we made a mistake with the latest hiring decision and do something about it. Unfortunately, the only mechanism available to us is controlled by Congress, and there will always be a significant number of legislators with a vested interest in keeping the Big Guy du Jour in office. This is supposed to be a government of the people, by the people, for the people. When did a few guys in expensive suits start making these decisions without regard for what The People actually want?

We have the technology right now to keep track of what people want in any particular case. Why not eliminate most of the power of the Senate and the House and put it back in the hands of the actual voting population? Perhaps it's time to use the "Wisdom of Crowds" to do what our founding fathers originally intended - run the country. Let us prioritize spending and identify graft and pork-barrel projects. Let us identify the most critical issues of our society. It's all our lives that are affected from day to day by the choices being made.

Instead we're encouraged to be good charitable citizens, helping out our neighbors and dedicating ourselves to improving local services. Patronizing though that may be, we could even deal with it except for the fact that we're all so distracted with the stupidity of our duly elected officials that our energy is being diverted into destructive criticism rather than constructive action. I'm not only tired of having so much to whine about, I'm tired of whining - period. So give me back some of the power I hand people with every election. Give me a voice in the decisions that are being made, as they are being made. Put all national referendums online and let us vote!

Retroactive Hip-ness

2008-05-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

There was a time when the phrase "ecologically sustainable" carried the whiff of unshaved armpits, whole wheat noodles, and greasy Birkenstocks. It was, as far as most people were concerned, on the opposite side of the spectrum from the it thing of the moment.

My childhood habitat was awash in things that were holistic, earth-friendly, organic, and full of unprocessed whole grain goodness. While other mothers were baking (or buying) cupcakes with bright pink icing, my mother was hunting down the whole wheat spinach lasagna noodles. My mother campaigned against the plan to cut down a row of huge (healthy) elm trees on a road leading into town.

Where other peoples’ clothing smelled of Tide and Downy, my mother had tracked down a phosphate-free, fully biodegradable detergent that left behind… nothing. For many years I actually thought other mothers sprayed their children with perfume before sending them out to play. My passion for perfumes and all things aromatic was planted in those early years, a stubborn fascination born from the lack of interesting aromas wafting from my childhood closet.

Our family belonged to the local co-op (thirty miles away), spent holidays in the woods appreciating nature, and picked squirmy things off the rutabaga and squash plants by hand. The fact that you could spray something on a plant to kill bugs actually shocked my twelve year old sensibilities. Wasn’t that cheating? Like a hunter, I believed there was some kind of ethical responsibility we gardeners had to give the bug a chance to chomp and run. If they were smarter, faster, or luckier than we were, they deserved the meal.

Before I wander too far down memory lane, let me sum up my childhood ― seriously out of touch with the crest of the consumer wave. My mother and father were eccentric in a slightly disconcerting manner. We never owned the latest anything. In fact, my grandparents had to give us objects they thought we should have; things like lawnmowers and television sets. (although my mother might have considered standing in line for the first dishwasher).

Fast forward twenty years and organic food becomes the height of urban chic in Los Angeles. Trendy philanthropists in organic silk gowns with diamonds procured through socially appropriate channels are pushing for global access to clean water and the end of air pollution. By 2006, we’re ready to pick up our environmentally friendly designer totes and demonstrate our commitment to sustainable practices by shopping only at businesses that proclaim their green practices. We’re not sure what green practices involve, but by Gore, we’re doing whatever people claim will reduce carbon emissions. Compost is actually considered an appropriate dinner topic when joining friends, and if you don’t recycle your cans, bottles, newspapers, cardboard boxes and plastic bags… you lie and claim you are.

Suddenly all the things I was raised with have become cool. It’s a bit of a disappointment actually. One minute I felt like I was distinctive, unusual, special. Now? I’m just one more Californian, doing the latest thing.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to turn down the opportunity to bask in my new found hip-i-tude.

For one thing, I don’t expect it to last very long. I just learned that my favorite acid-green nalgene bottle has been releasing toxins into my chilled water.

Save the Planet - Bring Your Own Designer Shopping Bag

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

It seems to have abruptly dawned on the whole world that disposable shopping bags are a Very Bad Idea. It only took us about thirty years and an impossible-to-determine number of billions of the slippery buggers to get there.

Actually, it’s an exaggeration to say "the whole world" because every single kid I run into at the Vons grocery checkout line seems positively shocked when I plop my red flowered bag down on the counter. Or I may be mistaking irritation for shock. After all, we’re asking them to stop using an assembly-line set up and start filling all these odd-sized, strange-shaped, and impossible-to-determine-strength one-off bags. In short, we’re making them work harder: and they don’t get paid much. Of course, why should they get paid a lot of money? It’s a job that can be filled from the ranks of the differently-intelligenced (or whatever the PC term of the day may be). Still, teens don’t think in terms of business realities, so it peeves them. Another failing of the American educational system and parenting in general… if you ask me. (which you didn’t, but you’re here so shut up and read)

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about the whole idea of the disposable shopping bag. Where did it come from? I mean, think about it. Some things you understand why they’re disposable. Surgical supplies for example. Who wants to re-use a bandage? And there’s not much of a market for previously-owned colostomy bags. Same with a garbage bag… or those little blue bags people carry around to pick up after their dog’s morning constitutional. It makes sense to use them once and send them off to the nearest garbage dump.

But shopping bags? Bags you put your prescription refill in? Or that three pack of Fruit of the Looms? Or a bag you put a green pepper in so they can weigh it at the check out… and put inside another plastic bag. Nope. Not making sense.

It was probably a marketing gimmick originally… prompted of course by some poor schmuck who got stuck with a couple of crates of these silly things that no one needed. So he (or she, not to be sexist), decided to create a market for these couple of crates of plastic bags.

And now here we are, almost forty years later, knee deep in the damned things. Which is a real problem, because long after you and I are dead, buried, decomposed, and our respective components distributed across several continents and at least one large body of water… the plastic – ah, the plastic.will.still.be.around.

In very very very small particles. But still plastic. Tons and tons of the stuff. Serving future earth species much like crude oil serves us, no doubt.
If you do your homework, you may notice that the data is a bit on the … shall we say… dubious side. So figure that Americans use and throw away somewhere between 10 and 100 billion plastic bags a year. Let’s just look at the low end and allow the EPA to figure out how to justify their oft-quoted figures later.

10 BILLION plastic bags. Go ahead. Go find a plastic bag and spread it out on the desk or table or whatever flat surface you have available. Now, let’s put this into context. If you take 1 billion dollar bills, and lay them end to end, they will encircle the equator four times.

Four ficking times! If that doesn’t make your brain hiccough, you’re part of that pool of differently-intelligenced.

Dead sea turtles are dissected from time to time. In more than one instance, the lucky coroner discovered plastic bags in the turtle’s stomach. There’s a lot of speculation about how and why. The best guess is that the turtle thinks it’s a jelly fish. Talk about a disappointing snack.

So there are reasons to start bringing your own bag to the party… er, store.

What’s particularly amusing, is that Americans, true to the consumer-culture to which we’re addicted, have started to sell (and buy) reuseable shopping bags for the image. I guess we figure if we have to buy one, we might as well buy several… in different colors, and made from different materials. And of course we need the latest cool bag by designed Anya Hindmarch for a mere $99 plus shipping off ebay because some actress decided those canvas bags at Whole Foods were really pretty handy.

So instead of having landfills stacked thousands of feet high in plastic, we’ll have millions of closets stacked thousands of feet high with nylon and canvas and organic flax shopping bags. A far superior solution. At least we can’t pretend they disappear when we stop using them.

A Happy New Foodie Year

2008-01-07T18:32:00.000-08:00

I love to eat. When I was younger, I cooked first to escape my mother's experiments with pig spinach and boiled okra. When I left home, I cooked so that I could afford to eat better than my bank account permitted. When my bank account finally caught up with my caviar-and-creme-caramel-tiramisu taste buds, I abandoned my hand me down pans and grandmother's second best flour sifter for little Sicilian bistros smelling of fresh baked bread and dark family restaurants serving sweaty hot North Indian curries.

After sauntering through one too many dinners that failed to live up to a review, I returned to the chopping board and rolling pin. I discovered that cooking was not only the way to a man's heart, but it worked with women too. Serving up creamy dill dressing on sirloin, smoked rambol cheese on caraway rye toast, and cumin infused black beans, I seduced a series of lovers: at least temporarily. There is, after all, only so much that maple nut cheesecake can do in the wake of one too many bad moods, or across a canyon of cultural disparities.

In my forties I discovered that good cooking not only made other people happy, it made me happy. Having something fabulous to eat was an appetizer, not the main course.

This year the gastronomic stars have shone especially bright in our kitchen. I tackled the perfect vegetarian non-meat-loaf, creamy gravy that passes the vegan sniff test, a delicately spicy pasilla chile and pepita corn bread stuffing, and yeast breads. As 2007 ended, I wrestled cinnamon buns into something resembling detante. The dough raised, the cognac soaked apricots oozed, and the cream cheese frosting was as addictive as ever; which makes me happy.

Of course this is happening while I'm suffering through recorded shows of "The Next Food Network Star" in which we slog along with a crewe of hapless wanna-be-paid-big-bucks-for-cooking applicants competing under time constraints, low ebbs of self-esteem, and the dry eye of the judges and general public.

Where, I ask as I skim through the latest "Iron Chef", is the joy of cooking under pressure? Isn't food supposed to be about relaxation and satisfaction? How American to turn something so innately pleasurable as cooking into a contest. I worry for those poor judges, forced to sample the results of a grim race against the clock and listen to strained descriptions of hastily improvised recipes that are supposed to represent some poor soul's raison d'cuisine. This can't be good for their digestion.

No matter what the Food Network has to say, cooking is about eating. If you don't enjoy the process, the food is just a product. As an American trying to live consciously in the world, I am beginning to realize that "product" is not unlimited. Resources are not unlimited. So my resolution for 2008, much though I despise the whole idea of New Years resolutions, is to savor. I'm going to savor shopping for the perfect fresh tomato, the firmest red pepper, the most fragrant cheeses. I'm going to savor the dicing and slicing of celerica and yam for my much-demanded rosemary root vegetables. I'm going to pick my guests carefully, and my fruit even more so. And most of all, I'm going to enjoy eating - even at the end of a busy afternoon of simmering and saucing.

Perhaps this year, I'll even make it to Spago... just to see what all the hush and whistling is about.

Republicans Love a National Deficit

2007-09-27T13:07:00.000-07:00

Lately a number of right wing, pro-Republican politicians and wonks of all stripe have declaimed eloquently on the ills of Democratic spending. They would like to pretend that the current national debt is the fault of bleeding heart haters-of-free-enterprise trying to institute the evils of socialized medicine. The latest instance of this self-serving rhetoric washed up on the shores of the threatened veto of a much negotiated expansion of the government insurance program to cover lower income children, SCHIP. Cited as just one more example of soft-minded Democratic subsidies of money-grubbing families seeking to suck off the governmental teat, the expansion of SCHIP would cover an additional 4 million children – not quite half of a 2005 estimate of 8.3 million uninsured children in the US.

They may have miscalculated. If there is one area few Americans feel any qualm about subsidizing with their tax dollars, it is (wisely enough) the health and welfare of the next generation. Ironically, this resistance comes from a President who spent a lot of time in 2004 explaining how important it was that our educational system "leave no child behind", and who has refused to even consider permitting stem cell research – with the potential to treat conditions ranging from spinal cord injuries to Alzheimers - in spite of the fact that the so-called "life" he feels must be protected so vigorously is actually past tense.

Am I the only one who finds it counterintuitive that Mr. Bush’s adamant "pro-children" position doesn’t include ensuring the little darlings get reliable, quality health care?

Or maybe not. As a country, we still don’t seem to understand that lack of health insurance is something that is happening to about 1 out of every 3 Americans under the age of 65 at any given point in time. The fact that this doesn’t frighten more people, is simply a measure of how utterly clueless your average American is about how much it costs to treat a broken leg, a bad case of pneumonia, or god forbid, cancer – even the curable kind.

What seems truly odd, or maybe just typically hypocritical, is that all this gnashing of well-tended porcelain comes from a party who continues to support running up the national debt to feed a war that is now so unpopular that even fellow party members are starting to tiptoe quietly away from the position so stubbornly defended by our brilliant and insightful Commander-in-Chief.

In fact, the whole Democrats are spendthrifts and Republicans are fiscally conservative rhetoric is an outright canard. Let’s look at the numbers. Since President Theodore Roosevelt until George W. Bush, there has never been a Democrat in the office that did not reduce the national debt. Conversely, and in spite of their belligerent press to the contrary, since the time of Gerald Ford, the national debt has increased every time a Republican held the office. And the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) actually improved more during the time Democrats held the Oval Office than when Republicans were in power.

So the next time you hear some Republican waxing pompous about financial responsibility, or claiming that Democrats are just tree-hugging tax wasting socialists, tell them to blow it out their airhole.

Things I Want

2007-07-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

It's the Fourth of July, and in the spirit of all good Americans I'm thinking of things I'd like to own, rent, or otherwise consume.

For one, I'd like a hot little red sports car fromTesla Motors that does 0-60 in under 5 seconds, can do 130 MPH... and is completely electric. I could probably even trade in every investment I own in order to do so. Which I probably won't.

I'd also like to take a couple of years off from earning a living to study at Otis College and get my Masters of Fine Arts. But I consider the cost of tuition, and the loss of retirement benefits, and again... I probably won't.

More than anything, I'd like a little house on the hills of Mar Vista with a back yard, an outdoor eating area for coffee in the morning, a hot tub, a compost pile, and photovoltaic cells on the roof to power all the sundry gadgets I so enjoy. But in Los Angeles, even a two bedroom, one bath house is an expensive proposition. Even though I earn a decent living, I will probably never be able to live in a house of my own. (well, me and the bank)

It doesn't mean I can't want it, it just means I can't have it.

Life is like that. Even in America, there are limits to the dreams we can fulfill, no matter how optimistic we may be and how hard we work. Does this mean I'm miserable? Of course not. It just means I want what I can't have. Or that I choose not to have in order to have something else I want more.

Life is full of trade-offs. Americans want to be safe from terrorism, and we want to do the right thing in Iraq in spite of the fact that we've clearly made a lot of mistakes. We want to honor our democracy, and our president as the legally elected leader of that democracy. We also, at least 70+ percent of us, want poor George to wrap up his toys and head off to Kennebunkport, or Texas, or wherever... for good, so that the rest of us can go about the business of cleaning up the mess he's made.

Sometimes patience and persistence will give us what we want. Sometimes not. The best we can do is live with what we have, and to keep on working to make a few of our dreams a reality. I'd settle for a new president, which is as inevitable as rain.

The red Tesla sportscar I might have to work a little harder on.

The Inarticulate Leading the Ignorant

2007-06-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

A new bulletin board has appeared in my neighborhood. A sober young black man in soldier green and a red beret stares off into the distance. The text reads (and I'm not making this up, I swear) "My friend doesn't know her words help me graduate".

WTF?

Is this simply a case of punctuation gone AWOL, or is there a mystical message the average pedestrian is supposed to read into this garbled bit of pseudo-marketing? If so, it's far too esoteric for my poor brain. What over-paid marketing expert suggested this exercise in useless expenditure? What exactly is the purpose of a billboard whose message is completely incomprehensible to the target demographic? For that matter, who exactly is the target demographic?

Are we supposed to want to help this luckless "her"? And if so, why doesn't it say so? Are we supposed to want to help this guy graduate... um, so he can help this girl? As if someone who can't manage to install a comma or quotation marks in a sentence is going to be much use to anyone in the learning their words department.

I could almost forgive the sheer convolution of the syntax if there was a single misspelled word... some hint that the person who wrote it was, in fact, in dire need of a boost up educationally. But there's is no such indicator.

It doesn't make me want to help. The damned thing makes me want to slap someone. Call me a grammar nazi, but to what depths of incompetence and sheer uneducated stupidity has America sunk that writing a reasonable sentence with no misspellings, mis-chosen homophones, or absentee punctuation is not considered part of a basic high school education? What has happened to our culture that we are so lenient with ourselves that writing is considered an option? When did we stop teaching our children that an education is a privilege, not a right? A privilege that requires the active involvement of the student.

Instead, children are hearded through the halls of education like a bunch of black sheep, floating on a sea of tax dollars designed to ensure "no child is left behind". They are screened for weapons, warded in study halls and playgrounds from perpetrating violence on one another. Their intelligence is insulted by adults pleading with them to care about their future, then sent home to learn from their family and friends that they have no future.

Instead of facing the brutal truth that our social values are in sore need of restoration, we slap band-aid laws onto already burdened administrators and local governments. Pat ourselves on the back, and call it a day.

We ignore the fact that we are a nation built on the values and muscles of wave after wave of immigrants, legal and otherwise. We pretend that our economy is not bolstered by cheap labor provided by people who must pay taxes but live without benefit of the so-called social net. We tell ourselves that if those pesky illegal immigrants would all just go home, our world would be perfect. And yet... we eat food they pick, have them wash our cars and rake our yards, hire day laborers to help us move, and let them raise our children. We cannot imagine finding some way to bring all of those illegal aliens into the legal framework of our country, and yet we make no serious effort to send them home.

We do not institute a universal identity card that must be provided to an employer before a person can be hired, nor do we seriously penalize employers who hire people without proper identification. We are, in short, happy to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration as long as it serves our whims.

Has the United States become so dominated by hypocrites and self-rightous pendants that we are willing to let our President lie to us and our Vice President get away with defrauding tax-payors?

Oh wait. Yes. It has.

Umm..... Never mind.

Health Care Cost Reduction: Demonizing the Sick

2007-05-18T10:02:00.001-07:00

I've been reading a lot about cost-shifting these days. Cost-shifting of health insurance premiums from the employer to the employee. Cost-shifting of medical treatment from the insurance company to the patient. Cost-shifting of medical treatment from the hospital to the insurance company, and vice versa. In California, Governor Schwarzenegger wants to shift the costs further than ever before, and that makes all the usual players nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Apparently cost-shifting sounds good as long as you are the shifter, not the shafted... *cough* I mean, shifted-upon. Hmmm. Well, you get the idea.

It's a lot like a shell game. As long as everyone keeps their eyes on the money, we'll never figure out what is actually at stake. Go on. Ask me. I know what is at stake.

Health care for people who actually need health care.

Impressed aren't you? Isn't it a total revelation? That health care in America should not be focused on how much it costs, but how effective it is at doing what it's supposed to be doing. This would be maximizing health and well-being for Americans - and thereby, for America.

I'm not advocating that we ignore the cost of care, but let's get serious here. As long as we're talking about how much a service costs, we're not talking about whether the service is necessary, effective, or even a good idea. As long as we're talking about who will pay for what, we're ignoring the fact that we should all receive medical attention from time to time - even if it's just an innoculation to make sure you don't infect someone else.

Everyone. Yes, even those virtuous souls who drink purified water, eat only organic whole grains, fruits and vegetables, get nine hours of sleep a day, a moderate exposure to sunlight, practice yoga, and eschew any vice that might have any deleterious impact whatsoever on the internal organs. Pregnancy is one reason that comes to mind. Childhood innoculations. Broken bones. Genetically transmitted neurological disorders.

The idea that employers should only hire "healthy" employees, and insurance companies should only cover "healthy" members, and physicians should prevent patients from getting sick enough to require care in the first place, and every single soul in the country should live so virtuously that they will never get sick...

Well, it makes me laugh.

Yet this is the state of today's discourse around the health care "crisis" in America: A series of allusions to how the patient is responsible for getting sick and a justification for denying them coverage, health care, or even employment. Why not? They're bad. Surely every diabetic consumed too much sugar at some point and deserves their ailment. Anyone who gets cancer must have eaten (or breathed) the wrong thing. If you suffer from back problems you're either too stressed, too fat, or too active and insensitive to your body. Pregnant women with complications must surely have done something to cause their problems. In short, as long as we (the temporarily healthy) can pretend that what is wrong are all those pesky sick people, we don't have to face the fact that we might one day be one of those pesky sick people.

So the next time you look at an advertisement for one of those "wellness" programs, bear in mind the fact that one day, no matter how diligently you or anyone else adheres to all the best wellness advice in the world, you're still going to die. It might even take you a long time while you suffer from some miserable chronic condition. Just pray you're not one of the unfortunate majority who will have no access, and certainly no right to either health insurance, or health care.

The Psychology of... Waiting Rooms

2007-05-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed that health care waiting rooms all seem to be designed by someone who has never actually spent five minutes in a doctor’s waiting room or sitting around with a bunch of sick people waiting to have a couple of vials of blood siphoned off for their own good?

I was visiting my latest Kaiser doctor the other day. It strikes me as prudent to meet my health-care-provider-du-annum to avoid discovering that she or he and I do not share common ground on some fundamentals when I’m hacking up a lung or some such temporary annoyance. So there I was, ready to shake hands, introduce my ailments, and determine whether this one would join the last four on my list of insufficiently impressive physicians.

Kaiser’s waiting rooms, at least the five that I have experienced, are not any different than many waiting rooms I have encountered in my forty-five years of life. There have been some notable exceptions, but the whole experience is pretty generic. So this isn’t a blog about Kaiser specifically. I just wanted to get that out of the way.

No, this blog is about institutional habits, bad architecture, and the general disregard for patients that characterizes health care in America. I’m fortunate enough not to have to deal with free clinics and county hospitals, and the fact that so-called "quality health care" is as myopic and self-absorbed as it is makes me wonder about the future.

This waiting room possessed a couple of rows of stackable chairs reminiscent of 1970s office furnishings, piles of dog-eared out-of-date magazines, a messy rack of brochures on preventing or coping with various ailments, walls painted an indiscriminate shade of beige, dusty baseboards, and the usual aging industrial grade carpet that does not encourage close inspection. A couple of bored-looking nurse types wandered in and out of the area behind the greeter’s desk, and the whole place smelled faintly of dirty mop water.

It was crowded with the usual assortment of children too sick to do more than whine, stressed out parents, senior citizens who clearly felt this was the highlight of their day and weren’t terribly pleased by that fact, and a few reasonably healthy souls like myself who just wanted to get this chore off their To Do List.

I have a theory; there are two types of patients sitting in your average waiting room. The first kind are the actively ill, people in pain, people who would rather nurse their 102 degree fever in the comfort of their bed, people who can barely walk. They want soothing lighting, quiet, and a minimum of demands on their limited energy.

The other kind is in for a shot, to have their blood pressure taken, to talk to a doctor about that annoying mole that keeps getting larger. They’re usually taking time off of work, or out on a day of errand-running, and they’re impatient.

And the two types of patients hate each other. When I’m miserable, there is nothing quite so irritating as screaming children and stupid mothers asking a million questions about how often Junior needs his oral vitamins. Televisions running in the background, six phone lines ringing, and the receptionist complaining about her landlord take every bit of energy I have to maintain a fraction of the necessary social skills public places require. More importantly, I don’t want to infect anyone who seems to be healthy.

On the other hand, when I’m feeling chipper and dutifully checking in with the doctor about my blood pressure meds, I just want to be treated so I can get on with life. If I can’t get treated right away, I need to be distracted. Music, a current newspaper and evesdropping on family drama are all good for this. For small children shiny plastic blocks, a gameboy, and television will work.

It seems to me that health care providers in general just don’t care about their patients. Not really. Oh sure, they’ll all tell you they’re in health care because they like to help their fellow man. They lie. In most cases it just happens to be the career in which they first received formal training and now they’re stuck with it.

There are a few exceptions, and you can usually see it reflected in the waiting room. Current magazines. Interesting art. Relaxing color schemes. Quiet voices. Soothing music and the faint scent of some natural oil like lavender, lemon verbena, or sage. I’ve never seen an arrangement that accommodates both ailing and well patients, but then I’ve led a remarkably healthy life so I can’t exactly claim to be an expert.

Of course separate waiting rooms would cost extra money, and health care in America is all about cutting costs. So it’s unlikely there will ever be such a thing. But it’s nice to dream. Wouldn’t it be lovely if our whole culture focused more on the experience of life than on the acquisition of objects and resources? Imagine a world that wasn’t primarily profit-driven. Imagine caring just as much about the quality of the experience as the cost. Imagine not consuming resources just because we can.

Would major climate change be an issue today if our society was less interested in the latest shiny object, and more focused on the soothing silky feel of our grandfather’s favorite oak chair? At some point American society is going to have to change. Odds are good that we’ll wait until resource scarcity and global finances force us to change. Maybe it’s time to start planning for the Post-Warming American Culture. What does it look like from day to day? How does the concept of ownership and private property work? Is being rich still about how many resources an individual controls?

The Addictions of Old Age

2007-03-25T08:39:00.000-07:00

I have a little theory about human beings and the addictions they fall into later in life. The occasional toke that turns into a regular habit now that you have a regular income. The social drinking that turns into a six pack in front of the boob tube every night. The thrill of naked bodies having sex that turns into a regular pattern of downloading porn off the Internet. The fun of pretending you are a millionaire after buying the winning lottery ticket that turns into a hunger for more and more opportunities to dream.

Adulthood brings with it the freedom to learn what you want to learn, to interact with a selective set of people from work and after hours, and to spend your time either doing something you enjoy, or doing something that earns you the funds to do what you enjoy on your off hours.

Late adulthood brings with it the understanding that much of what you want to do with your life will never happen. For some people there is a freedom in that as well. The expectations of family and the aspirations unsupported by talent are left along the wayside. Pleasures become more predictable, and we give up on challenges that fail to produce a desired result. Passions that once filled our evenings with frustration and the thrill of mastery fade as we experience more frustration and abandon the effort, or settle into a mastery that no longer warms our spirit.

Fulfillment is an endless quest, and as we age, we lose the stamina, the physical strength, and the optimism that youth has in such abundance. In short, we lose hope.

My theory is that the bad habits of later life are not a product of that despair, that loss of hope. They are the shortest route possible to avoiding the sheer boredom of lives that feel futile or less fulfilling than we experienced in the early stages of our life. We give up on creating meaning in our lives and cling to the things that predictably offer some gratification: children and grandchildren, friends, and of course... our addictions to whatever once gave us a sense of ease, of belonging, of satisfaction, of excitement.

Unfortunately human beings are doomed to habituation. Whatever we do that brings us positive feelings will be repeated until they no longer serve their purpose. Then we have the choice to do more of them, or find something else. And this is where the challenge of mid-life becomes acute. We can choose to struggle all over again with some new skill, a new relationship, the acquisition of new toys, or we can fill the few spare hours most of us have after the job and the activities of daily life are finished with something that is easy, mindless, and ultimately, boring.

The wonder isn't how many people become closet alcoholics, drug addicts, and compulsive gamblers or players. The wonder is that it doesn't happen more often.

I have been pondering this little challenge in my own life. It is easy to come home, toss a load of laundry in or wash some dishes, and make myself a drink... which becomes two or three by the time I'm ready to hit my pillow. Periodically I fall into a pattern of smoking cigarettes just to excuse myself from the hard work of focusing on writing or painting. There I am... doing something, even if it is just smoking a cigarette. I feel justified in wandering away from anything that makes me work too hard knowing that it is just chaff on the wind. And a cigarette? What could be more reasonable than indulging in the intake of nicotine?

Lately I have been considering what I want to do with my time. What has always looked like fun? And I've made myself a list of things I want to do. In case it might be of amusement or use to someone else in the same boat, I'll share my list.

STUFF I WANT TO DO

Study a martial art
Study stand-up comedy
Learn glass working
Learn to speak Spanish fluently
Travel to Italy, Thailand, Hawaii, and New Zealand
Build an architecturally interesting, sustainable house
Sell my paintings
Breed Daylilies
Publish a book

Okay, so it's not all that exciting. A lot of people have already done these things, or couldn't care less. But this is my list. What would yours include? Really... tell me what you want to do with your fifties and sixties. Operators are standing by. Well, not really, but you could post a comment or send me an email.

For the love of a book

2007-03-15T16:19:00.000-07:00

Some books, like long time friends, are a pleasure to visit over and over again. As an inveterate reader I have built up more than three decades of old faithful companions. I just finished re-reading Robin McKinley's socially rich fantasy novel, The Blue Sword. It filled a rather dull commuter flight with sounds, places and faces that made my day so much richer. In fact, there was a moment when I finished the last page that was a bit tearful... exactly like saying goodbye to a cherished companion whose conversation and character will be sorely missed. The fortunate thing about such partings is that, unlike the death of someone dear, they are temporary. The Blue Sword will return to my bookshelf to sit side by side with a few dozen books that retain their hold on my imagination for their ability to make me sigh, laugh, and fly inside an entirely fictional universe so compelling that I profoundly wish it was a part of my real life.

As I have said, I am a long time reader, and a voracious one at that. I have read, on average, two books a week for my entire life. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. But that's the average. I have read at this headlong pace for as long as I can remember, starting with the Dick and Jane series when I was five and proceeding through all the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Trixie Beldens, then launching into science fiction greats like Alfred Bester, Arthur C. Clark, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury and Frederick Brown upon discovering my father's prediliction for lurid fiction of an extraterrestrial nature.

So when I say that I have a few favorites, it should be understood, that this comes after reading many thousands of the critters. Not all of my favorites have changed my life or shaped the person I am. They simply tickled my fancy. More frequently, they housed personalities I found compelling, or universes and inhuman powers that struck me as just plain fun. I mean, who wouldn't want to live in a world where dragons are intelligent, and wryly humorous? Or dance in the vacuum of outer space? Or share irish coffee with aliens?

Well, I'm sure there are people who don't find these ideas the least bit charming. But I do.

So today, after finishing McKinley's viscerally lyrical novel, I am moved to pay tribute to a few of the finer authors it has been my pleasure to indulge in over and over again... for when I keep a book - it is certain to lift my spirits and remind me of how fortunate I am to be literate and free to indulge in the product of generations of imaginative men and women creating worlds and lives and premises worth exploring.

In no particular order, I am listing some of the writers and books that I would cheerfully loan to anyone interested in a good read:

Frederick Brown - One of the original masters of the science fiction genre, his eerie, compelling short stories are fit for telling at a campfire
Sherri Tepper - whose science fiction worlds are bizarre and chilling and enlightening beyond words
Lois McMaster Bujold - whose characters never fail to make you wish you could meet them, in spite of the chaos and tight spots they would no doubt drag you into if they were real
Joan Cox - Whose two books (of which I'm aware) Mindsong and Star Web contain two of the most compelling universes ever conceived
C.L. Moore - Gut wrenching choices by characters so believable you know you would take the same dark paths to salvation ... or at least, self awareness
Ann Maxwell - Lush romantic drama fully of hostile grace, complex human relationships, and strangely inviting non-human capabilities. Written by someone who is most certainly an artist, a musician, and a dancer
Margaret Weis - Whose "Star of the Guardians" series introduces the dynamics of power in a four volume story of personal power, honor, sacrifice, love, and ambivalent greed. None of her other works, with frequent co-author Tracy Hicks, are to be missed either.
Melanie Rawn - I am scouting around for the third in the "Exiles" trilogy... but the "Dragon Prince" series will do for a first introduction. Lushly detailed characters, story lines, and worlds that you never want to leave.
Fred Saberhagen - His lesser known, Veils of Azlaroc, is absolutely unforgettable
Anne Rice - Doesn't everyone? Actually, my favorite is not one that sits on the top of most Must Read lists, Cry to Heaven. Not for the weak of heart but for those who can stomach the idea of castrati and gender ambivalence, this is a riotous story of betrayal, joy in the face of catastrophe, and the unquenchable nature of the creative spirit.

I will no doubt return to this blog with additions, but I will leave you for now with this small set of suggestions for a richer reading experience.

Suffocating in Microchips

2007-01-25T11:06:00.000-08:00

Modern American culture is founded on the premise that economic growth is the engine of positive social change. Even more dangerous is our conviction that economic growth is the same thing as comfort, safety, and happiness in general. We joke about "retail therapy", thrill to increases in the market value of our favorite stocks, and fantasize about a future in which we have enough money to escape the workaday world of deadlines, bosses, and corporate bullshit.

We are, in short, in love with the idea of more.

Unfortunately I live on a planet with a limited number of gallons of crude oil, cubic feet of natural gas, mature hardwood trees, unmined raw ore, and acreage without a scenic view of land fill. Last time I checked, we all do... the entire human race, and the number of human beings continues to grow. So I have to wonder, what happens when we have so many human beings that it's simply not possible for everyone to have more?

I mean, right now it‘s just a matter of whether or not you are one of the clever, unscrupulous, and/or lucky ones who enjoys fancier food, better health care, nicer cars, more expensive housing, and more footgear than your fellow human beings. Right now it is actually possible for a significant number of us to keep acquiring more. If however, the population of the Earth continues to expand, this will not always be the case. Think Harry Harrison‘s "Soylant Green".

Which makes me wonder why we haven‘t seen a remake. The plot line isn‘t exactly obsolete.
Hey! They remade "The Hitcher" didn‘t they? It‘s not like the movie-going public has grown more squeamishover the years.

Yet Americans continue to salivate over the latest Apple gadget like a starving village at a free lunch spread. Why? I‘mnot sure. It‘s an object, likely to be cool for a year, useful for a few more, and then? Disposable. In the past five years I have "disposed of"

two printers
a desktop computer
two external zip drives
two televisions
an external CD burner
two digital cameras,
three cell phones
an equal number of telephones...
and more headsets than I care to discuss

Now it‘s true that I work with information technology projects, which gives me an affinity for all the high tech goodies crowding the shelves of consumer electronic stores. But I‘m certainly not living on the bleeding edge. I wasn‘t replacing these things because their coolness factor had dipped below an acceptable Haute Cool-i-tude margin. They were replaced because, for one reason or another, they no longer worked. Even worse, several of them were purchased and broke within that five year period. The Canon Multipass multifunction printer for one, a couple of the phones, and all of the headsets. I'm not even a heavy-handed user of electronic devices. These things are just not very well constructed. In fact, most of the headsets were clearly produced (and priced) as disposable objects... like cars, and last season‘s blue jeans.

After all, if you buy a telephone headset for USD 25.00, and it breaks after a couple of years, you aren‘t supposed to feel cheated. You‘re supposed to be thrilled. After all, it‘s a perfect excuse to upgrade. You get to trot out to your local retailer and buy the latest toy with the newest features. And, in general, Americans do. Right?

Right.

Which makes me wonder why that vintage coat from the Forties I bought off Ebay is still in such great shape.

What changed between then and now? What happened to Americans to persuade us the grocery stores will always be well-stocked, and there will always be a new car to replace the one we bought a few years ago? When did good old American "planned obsolescence" accelerate to the point that we accept disposable hard goods (telephones, speakers, computers, barbecue grills). Or worse, when did it become more important for manufacturers to get the newest product on the shelves, than to avoid the expense of retooling production and the sales drop that results when you sell a marginally superior product to customers who just bought virtually the same damned thing a year ago?

An even more important question might be, "When will it stop?"

When we run out of the raw materials to produce new computers? When we must choose between growing food crops or opening new land fills? When we've permitted so much toxic sludge of various types to leak into the air and water that the health and well-being of our children is in jeapordy? Or our own?

I read in some slick new age magazine recently that "waste, is a failure of imagination".

Bullshit.

Waste is carelessness. Waste is stupidity. Waste is insanity. Waste is what happens when you choose to ignore the fact that human beings today are consuming natural resources at a pace that will leave this generation‘s children cold, starving... and (I‘m willing to bet good money), more than a little pissed off. Unless we find some interstellar source of the raw materials we take for granted today, our children will be forced to recycle our generation‘s "waste" to maintain any semblance of civilization.

Recently I heard a report on National Public Radio to the effect that there is a body of skeptics - including the atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen - challenging the science underlying Al Gore‘s movie, "An Inconvenient Truth". So basically, as Lindzen and friends believe, Al Gore is a self-serving politician whose aim here is to obtain the political clout to suck more tax dollars from hard working Americans solely for the pleasure of being able to advance his own personal agenda for life on the planet. Sounds about right. Let's pretend that Al Gore is just like most of us. He wants his children to have as happy and healthy a life as possible. He wants to be famous for making a positive contribution to the world. He is practical enough to recognize that any demand that Americans sacrifice our "Way of Life" is doomed, and savvy enough to realize that a wee bit of fear can be a healthy motivating force.

But Al Gore and his volumes of data and collection of respected scientific opinions hasn‘t persuaded every skeptic that global warming is, A) happening and, B) likely to cause human beings quite a bit of grief if things continue on their present course. So I'm not even going to bother. I‘m not pushing a single statistic in support of the fact that over-consumption is a symptom of an unhealthy social environment.

Instead, I‘m going to invite you to engage in a little thought experiement.

It's called, Taking out the Trash. Close your eyes and picture all the stuff you put in the dumpster (or trash cans or local dump) this week: all the dirty diapers, the cans of coke, the empty laundry soap bottles, the old newspapers, the rancid coffee grinds and molding pizza boxes. Picture it sitting in a pile in front of you. Now multiply that by 52 weeks.

And multiply that by the population of the United States, some 300 million people.

One year. Of garbage in the United States. Impossible to imagine? Yeah. Well, that‘s part of the problem.

Okay. Forget the garbage. Imagine a world in which we own less. Less to maintain. Less to protect. Less to store. Three pairs of shoes. No car. Twenty hour work weeks, and ten hours of community service spend tending a local vegetable garden and caring for senior citizens, or teaching children about local recycling. Feel free to imagine a less pressured world of your own. How would your life look if everyone and everything on the planet slowed down? After all, I‘m just making this up. No crystal ball. No special qualifications. Where does style and fashion and design and art fit into a world lacking Paris Hilton andWorth magazine? Is it possible to create beauty in a world without an endless hunger for more? What would it look like? Who would pay for it?

I believe that the human race is headed toward an economic, political, ecological and social shift so dynamic, and so large, that we cannot even imagine what 2090 will require of us. I believe that the collision between our current obsession with consumption, and a planet depleted of all easily accessible natural resources is going to happen in my lifetime. I also believe that acceptance of the impact of greenhouse gases and toxic production processes may rouse Americans sufficiently to start a quiet cultural revolution.

I think I‘m actually looking forward to this. I‘ve even begun to consider what our manifesto should include... things like;

quality matters
leisure is the greatest luxury
real beauty is unique
the purpose of play is to play
the purpose of work is to play

.
What would you add?

The L Word - When Good Television Goes Sour

2007-01-19T10:29:00.000-08:00

Some television shows are just destined to disappoint us. They fill their captive audience with so much anxiety, so much anticipation, so much sheer fizz, that the very thing that makes it compelling eventually becomes...

well...

Annoying.

ABC‘s "Lost" is a perfect example. From the middle of Season 1 when I first tuned in, until the end of Season 2, I was totally hooked. Recorded the show. Plunked my butt down in front of the tube as soon as I got home the next day. Coerced my girlfriend into watching. Yattered on about it at work. You get the picture. Fan. Big fan.

Then came the season finale, and the show which had built up so much steam, just sat there in the air. Lots of unanswered questions. No idea what to expect next. No clear sense that any one of the characters or situations on which the whole show hinges wouldn't abruptly vanish like a soap bubble in the sunshine. And I realized that the producer was never going to give us anything resembling a straight answer. Even worse, I began to suspect that the creators of "Lost" honestly believed that suspense trumps character development.

Which may be true for some people, but I'm not one of them.

In fact, the show's lack of anything resembling a foundation now that we're two seasons into the story line, looks to me like a simple lack of imagination. Someone appears to believe that if you start from a fixed data point, any fixed data point, you've sacrificed something essential to a compelling story.

So the very thing that made the show such a winner, eventually turned it into a bore.

ME: So we still don't know who The Others are, what they want or what to expect from them next.
GIRLFRIEND: Yeah.
ME: And we have no idea why they kidnapped that kid or what happened to that French woman.
GIRLFRIEND: Nope.
ME: And we don't know if people are losing their coconuts or there really is some kind of terrible horrible monster whooshing through the underbrush.
GIRLFRIEND: Ummm. No.
ME: Any clue as to whether the Dharma Project is defunct or just bad at maintenance?
GIRLFRIEND: Sorry.
ME: So basically we don't know any more about the whole situation than we did at the beginning of the season, plus the few people who had even the remotest chance of a happy moment have all been shot, betrayed, or dropped off a cliff.
GIRLFRIEND: Uh... yup.
ME: Why are we watching this?
GIRLFRIEND: Dunno. ... *pause* Want to grab some Thai?

Right.

So that was how I lost interest in "Lost". It‘s "Gilligan‘s Island" gone all dark and nihilistic, and what should have made the show interesting - watching how the characters coped with the situation à la Swiss Family Robinson and the like, isn‘t happening because they're not. Coping that is. Not since they moved off the beach. They're running around like ... well, like a bunch of stupid actors on a set, reacting in completely irrational and unbelievable ways to an environment that is equal parts artificial-soap-opera-construct and mental institution with bad soundtrack.

I am not a fan of the small screen. For me to blow some of my limited discretionary hours being stationary in front of a bunch of plastic and glass, a show has to have plausible, enjoyable characters dealing with believable and compelling issues in creative, inspiring, or otherwise interesting ways. Based on those criteria, "Lost" has officially struck out at our house.

Which brings me to "The L Word". Season 4 has started. Lesbians, heterosexual men with a girl-on-girl fetish, and straight women addicted to soap operas of all kinds have warmed up their DVRs and replaced their remote batteries.

I‘m weighing my options. Am I really optimistic enough to believe that the characters on this show are going to become even remotely interesting after Season 3 systematically decimated every possibility of quirky-but-fun relationship banter, interesting social commentary, unpredictable story arcs, or inspiringly powerful women?

I mean, no offense to the actors, but Bette has just taken the express route from understandably distressed to Poor-Judgement-City without reference to a map or the advice of her posse. Max is just plain fucked up without recourse to the most obvious solution, a shrink and a large supply of psychotropic medication. Jenny is as whiny and annoying as ever. Tina is (still) a clueless self-absorbed moron. We appear to have lost Carmen behind a protective haze of only semi-cute latino testosterone. Shane is still Shane and not even a long-lost half-brother named (stupidly enough) Shay is going to make her character deeper than the dregs of a scotch and soda. Worst of all losses is the intense Dana-Lara-Alice triangle, which actually seemed like something that might happen and which could have (if Dana hadn't been offed by a bad case of improbably potent opportunistic infection) been spun into an interesting personal growth storyline that the audience might actually have ... um, learned from.

But that was "The L Word" of the past. This is the new "The L Word", and whatever balls and brains the show once had appear atrophied beyond any hope of resurrection. It may be interesting to see how impossibly impractical Helena copes with being shut out of the (apparently not) bottomless Peabody family bank account, and how long Alice can pretend to be large and in charge before the writers drag her back to the land of the chemically imbalanced. In fact, that could be the source of a lot of terrific humor if the writers can be bothered to leverage Shelley and Hailey's superb comedic timing, instead of writing Beals into these absurd exercises in acting in which she must find a way to portray stupid-and-befuddled and tough-brilliant-and-responsible at the same time. I don‘t know about Jennifer Beals, but I find her character‘s endless waffling between the two, positively exhausting.

In fact, enough so that I just may not waste my time on Season 4.

But they're bringing Marina back... and let‘s face it - heterosexual or homosexual - Lombard is hot hot HOT! (and she can act).

Gays, Iraq, and the Conservative Agenda

2007-01-11T08:14:00.000-08:00

With all the hubub about a troop surge in Iraq, I've noticed something. Conservatives have gotten awfully quiet about issues related to ho-mo-SEX-u-aaals. Consider all the hysteria surrounding *gasp* gay marriage in 2004 and 2005. In fact, remember the sheer noise surrounding Clinton's "Don’t ask, don’t tell" policy?

Of course you do. Either you were one of the panicking masses yearning to poke your collective noses into the bedrooms, health coverage, and legal affairs of total strangers, or you were one of the disgusted American citizens pondering the sheer waste of government resources on an issue of absolutely no national significance. Maybe you were one of the gay minority who were either for the idea of legal equity for long term relationships on principle, or felt that being cheated out of all the benefits and hassles of married life was an affront to human dignity. One way or the other, there was a time when these issues were at the top of your list of things to kvetch about at dinner parties.

So I have to ask. Where has all that officious meddling and righteous indignation gone?

Is it just me, or has anyone else had the dawning realization that a couple of domestic laws one way or the other has nothing to do with the national agenda... until all those good Christian Republicans need a distraction for voters too easily motivated by shiny rhetoric and uncritical thinking?

I suppose, if I were on the side of the Christian Coalition for Family Values (not to mention every bigoted Conservative and Libertarian voting on the side of less-government-is-better-unless-it-comes-to-them-fudge-packing-pansies-by-god), I might ask, "How did we get so terribly side-tracked by troop movements, dead bodies, and international relations? What ever happened to the scourge of family values and the threat of women-in-comfortable-shoes bossing around our young men in uniform?"

Because although I'm no expert and I have absolutely no data to back this up, I would guess that if there were homosexuals serving in the military when Clinton was in office, there are homosexuals serving in the military under Bush. Which means that they have suddenly become useful to the Bush Administration’s agenda. Let’s break this down for anyone still confused by my run-on sentences. Homosexuality is a Bad Thing unless we need to send men and women to Iraq where they will be poorly compensated for risking life and limb in the service (not the defense, mind you, just the service) of their country. Then the sexual preferences of our military personnel is quite suddenly not up for discussion.

Ah, nothing like the stench of hypocrisy in the morning.

Up in Smoke - Flames, Flameability, and Foresight

2007-01-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

The Malibu, California fire of January 8, 2007 is an undeniable disaster. The loss of five houses and significant damage to 6 others represents the loss not just of millions of dollars of incredible beachfront property, but of homes, memories, dreams. Fortunately no lives were lost to the hungry blaze.

Still, sad as it must be to lose property, I find my sympathy for the people who lost their homes somewhat muted by the circumstances. It’s the same lack of empathy I feel for people whose riverside homes are flooded repeatedly due to their unfortunate location on a flood plane. One long time resident, in point of fact, was quoted as saying that she has lost two homes to Malibu fires.

I can’t help but consider who is paying to rebuild all this multi-million dollar property abutting the public beachfront - over and over and over. Because the one thing you know for sure, is that anyone wealthy enough to own beachfront property in Malibu has a kick ass fire insurance policy. It may have cost them a hefty chunk of cash every quarter, but weighed against the cost of rebuilding a six million dollar home? Chump change.

And given the odds of there being another major fire in which that particular geographic location is absolutely primed to go up in smoke – a solid investment in the future. Renovate? No need, everything is new. Maintenance? Why bother. Hate the floor plan your last architect talked you into? Be patient. It’s all going up in smoke sooner or later.

I realize they’ve lost their homes and whatever collections, memorabilia, and special moments that particular piece of real estate held for them. It’s unfortunate they’re going to have to deal with the inconvenience of having to live somewhere else. The time they’re going to have to spend rebuilding might be put to better use.

But I don’t pity them. They live where they live, and in the words of one old timer – "Malibu burns. Every five to ten years. Like clockwork she burns. It’s the nature of the place. You can’t fight it." Which leads – I believe – to a reasonable question, Why do people insist on paying absurd sums of money for buildings which are at significant risk of complete demolition in less time than it takes to wear out a good suit coat?

Anyone?

I mean, I get wanting to live next to the ocean, in spite of the fact that the beach is (theoretically at least) public property. There’s something primeval about the sound of surf, the sight of water lifting and foaming across the shallows. Water appeals to human beings like sunshine and the smell of fecund earth in the heart of the forest.

Let’s ignore the fact that we’ve polluted the local ocean waters so badly that the stink of dead fish and chemical residue can lift you out of your flip flops on a warm day. Let’s also overlook the waves of total strangers surfing and hiking across your back yard. And let’s definitely not talk about the horrendous traffic jams on your front doorstep. We’ll even pretend there’s a decent grocery store you can reach without an extended commute.

Because if we didn’t overlook all that, we’d have to consider the possibility that people who live in Malibu do so mainly because, well, it’s Malibu. Know what I mean? The reputation. The movie stars. The over-priced restaurants serving mediocre food. All that. So what is being insured, and rebuilt, and… most recently, "lost", isn’t really valuable architecture. It’s snob appeal. It’s the right to claim the address, and the compulsion to construct vast confections of marble and maple that house a couple of people and employ a few more. Empty square footage serving, primarily, the ego of a few sad souls who honestly believe that happiness can be purchased, and must arrive with a side of envy from their fellow human beings.

Or maybe not. For some people, Malibu is home. It’s been home for fifty years. It’s where their horse would automatically go after a long night at the saloon if we were all still riding horses. They live there out of habit and tradition. And I respect that. I can even feel a certain amount of sympathy for that. But not so much when the Santa Ana winds blow, and the company that provides my homeowners insurance gets nailed for the cost of rebuilding a bunch of over-built mansions in a location as foolish as the foot of an arroyo abutting the ocean where the fire has nowhere to go but up the coastline.

But enough sour grapes. Let’s look at this from a more practical point of view. People will be people. Beach houses will always be in demand (at least until global warming kicks into high gear and the ocean begins encroaching). And once you buy into an upper class part of town, you’re not about to throw in the towel just because of the occasional wild fire.

So I’m wondering, because of course this is what I would do if I were in their shoes, what kind of materials and design would be most easily salvaged after the next fire? I mean, if you just accept that the whole thing is going to go up in smoke regularly, and the fire is going to consume all standard construction and materials… what is left? How can you expedite the next rebuild? What can you use that not only won’t be destroyed by heat and smoke, but might actually accrue a bit of texture… a nice patina?

Yep. That’s the question I’d be asking my new architect the day after my home was destroyed in a Malibu fire. If I can’t or won’t avoid a fire, how do I plan for the future? How do I make this easier, the next time?

The Language of War

2006-12-21T11:03:00.000-08:00

Words are an interesting phenomenon. When there are three or four possible choices, several almost-synonyms, what prompts us to choose one over another? Sometimes we‘re just showing off our vocabulary, hoping to gain a reputation as a pundit or similarly respected pseudo-intellectual. Sometimes it‘s symptomatic of brain cells lost to a few too many evenings hoisting a bong or delving into the liquor cabinet: that frustrating "tip of the tongue" sensation. Most frequently, it‘s a not-quite-unconscious choice, a slip of the tongue in which the connotations of the word we choose reveals far more about our internal thought processes than we generally care to show anyone not a member of our regular breakfast table.

Take the latest proposals on "winning the war in Iraq". Now, winning is already an interesting choice. Winning? What exactly are we supposed to be winning? Doesn‘t winning imply a gain of some sort? Something is supposed to be exchanged, either in the currency of power, assets, or resources of the bipedal, biological, or inorganic type.

Of course we all know this is an utterly bogus objective in the case of Iraq. Banging around their back yard with our big guns and badly designed Humvees is not exactly designed to inspire a warm fuzzy feeling about democracy as modeled by the good old US of A. In fact… although I may be wrong about this… it appears the United States is modeling a power structure eerily similar to what we are trying to replace: I.E. the guy with the gun gets to make the rules.

And if we "win" - aren‘t we setting an encouraging precedent for all those militias roaming around with guns of their own (and the significant tactical advantage of Iraq being their home.)???

And "winning" will look like… ummmm… What? More guys-with-guns (GWG)? Only the next batch of GWG are likely to be a whole lot more fond of killing their fellow Iraqis for distinctions the current batch of GWG simply isn’t equipped to make. Sunni? Shiite? Don ‘t they all look alike?

So we ‘re not winning anything. Which also means that we can‘t lose. All those American egos currently inflamed at the idea of "losing" a competition involving cool military equipment and blood, are simply wallowing in a trough of the political equivalent of high grade testosterone.

It must be embarrassing to realize you‘ve been so easily manipulated. I wonder when they‘ll notice?

So it‘s not real. There is no "Win" or "Lose" about the present war. We‘ve done nothing but create a mess in an already unlovely political and economic environment. The "democratically" elected government has no power and less vision for the future of the Iraqis people than Sadaam Hussein had - back in the day. When the dust settles from the last tank, there won‘t be more human rights in the region, women and children will continue to be slaves and property, and poverty will be, as always, rampant. Most obviously, there is not going to be a reduced threat of terrorism in the US as a result of our attack on the Iraqis people. So basically we‘re blowing billions of tax dollars on a situation that we have only made worse.

And now we want to clean it up.

Gotcha. Admirable really. Basically we’re going to "win" by trying to undo some of the damage we ‘ve done while hyping public perception of anything that might remotely be considered a positive net result.

But enough about the artificial win-lose, US-vs-the terrorists dichotomies so beloved of the Republican party in general, and President Bush in particular. It was a means of obtaining temporary power, and that’s really as far into the future as a lot of the good conservative folks on Capitol Hill are capable of thinking. We-the-American-People can‘t hold it against them. We put them in power after all. Who could have imagined that all that flaming rhetoric and impassioned talk of keeping the American people "safe" and "winning the war on terror" would wear thin after a few years of ever-increasing national debt, photo montages of US-perpetrated torture and bloodshed in the Middle East, and a constant stream of dead soldiers returning home in wooden crates?

Well, I did, for one… along with about forty-nine percent of registered voters. In fact I pissed off one pro-Bush friend so badly in 2004 that she stopped speaking to me. Maybe I should give her a call, see how she feels today. Unfortunately hindsight is useless, and sadly for world peace, environmental health, and the general evolution of the human race as a rational species, a meaningful percentage of Americans just ain‘t too bright.

Instead, let‘s talk about the language we’re using today.

SECURING THE IRAQIS POPULATION
Lately the pundits have begun admitting that training Iraqis police and military forces to prevent widespread bloodshed in the streets and enforce a modicum of administrative essentials may not be the fastest exit path. Instead, we’re going to secure the population.

I love that one. Most reporters project an ernest belief that they‘re really saying America will "protect helpless Iraqis civilians" when they use it. If you think about it for twenty seconds, you can see that it‘s total and complete bullshit.

But it sounds so persuasive. Security is a good thing. Financial security. Emotional security. Peace in the streets. A reduction of violence. A chicken in every pot. Surely "securing the population" has to be the right approach.

Or not.

Consider exactly how happy you would be if some country sent their military forces into your neighborhood to "secure" you. I believe we’re talking curfews, unrestricted rights of search and seizure, non-evidence-based arrests, and a host of other invasions and abuses that typify, if I’m not completely wrong, everything America is supposed to stand against. In short, a totalitarian regime.

But the population will be pacified and that’s our objective.

PACIFYING THE POPULATION
This is another facile phrase spilling out of talking heads these days. It implies peace, tranquility, and general bonhomie. Sure. I can see how being "secured" is going to lead to a pacified population.

Temporarily at least.

But not the peace-tranquility-and-zen-detachment denoted by the phrase. More likely the seething, adversarial, patiently plotting resentment of a group of people whose daily behavior is being mandated by force and an external value set.

It also tells you exactly how politicians feel about Iraq today.

You pacify the unreasonable, the childish. You give babies pacifiers. You give the mentally ill drugs. In short, you do whatever you need to do to buy yourself a temporary respite from the noise and bratty behavior. Pacification is not a long term solution. It’s a stop gap for people who have lost all patience with the status quo.

It does absolutely nothing to resolve the status quo.

For that you have to assume that, however incomprehensible, the behavior exhibited by the people you’re trying to help is motivated by rational… or at least, internally consistent beliefs and emotions. Remember the ideal of offering a service to the people under the cruel thumb of an irrational dictator? Remember rolling in on our white tank to help Iraqis everywhere achieve security, health and shopping malls? We were there to help.

In spite of all intervening results to the contrary, we might want to revisit that initial intention.

A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
As I see it, most Iraqis today are scared. Not scared like farmers in Indiana fretting over whether or not their local Krogers is going to be the target of the next Al Qaeda attack. Scared like people in the less well-tended corners of New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and other cities boasting large gang populations, massive drug trafficking and a great deal of human despair and rage. Add to that - random bombing, contaminated water, and a major shortage of anything resembling food.

Sunni, Shia and Kurds alike are afraid they will be kidnapped, tortured, and executed. They‘re afraid their homes will be violated and the people they care about will suffer pain and humiliation. They‘re afraid this will happen because of where they were born, who donated the genes that make them who they are, and what they were raised to believe about fate, God, and the destiny of man.

They‘re afraid because they know they have little chance of avoiding these terrible things short of massive doses of luck, and the intervention of the very people who threw the balance of power so badly out of alignment in the first place.

This does not sound like irrational fear to me.

Incomprehensible as it may seem to some, America suffers from a global deficit in the department of trustworthiness. Good intentions simply do not suffice to explain our behavior over the past four years. We can only blame bad intelligence and poor judgment so many times before our international credibility is shot all to hell. And it is.

So here we are, throwing money at the problem, without a scrap of trust or good will in the coffers. The only green light on the great Game Board of War, is that – in a generalized manner - the American people still believe in being trustworthy, compassionate, and honorable. This is what put the Democratic party in power in the 2006 elections, and what may one day permit the U.S. to operate again from a foundation of trust and integrity.

It is clear in all this talk about the war in Iraq, that Americans don‘t really understand who is responsible for the on-going violence, where to find the specific individuals committing routine torture and murder, or how to persuade them to work toward a non-violent future.

Fair enough. Apparently neither do the Iraqis… at least in sufficient numbers to implement the necessary actions.

There are worse places to start from than admitting we don’t understand. In fact, I’m fairly certain it would work every bit as well… and quite probably far better than talking about "pacification" and "securing the population".

I want to believe that one day American will be able to point to a long history of helping, serving, and supporting the Iraqis population in it‘s journey toward fair self-administration, a reliable civilian infrastructure, and a safe environment in which to raise families, create beauty, and praise God in a way that is most personally meaningful.

In spite of how all this started out.

Holiday Napping

2006-11-27T09:16:00.000-08:00

I’ve just enjoyed five glorious days off of work in which I spent a great deal of time being slothful; sleeping late, going to bed early, and even napping.

Not only that but I got both my aging Volvos serviced, washed, and filled with petrol, arranged for the plumber to come fix my roommate’s shower valve, found two more glasses at T J Maxx that match my set, deposited checks and dropped off my dry cleaning. I bought a pair of lovely brown suede loafers complete with sparkly bangles, watched five movies, and put together a Thanksgiving dinner that would have impressed my grandmother. In short, I was nothing less than a spoiled 21st century domestic goddess.

It was lovely.

Thank god for the job. If I had to keep up that pace, I’d wear myself to a frayed nubbin in no time at all.

I will miss the napping though.

About Metamorphic Artist Octavio O'Campo

2006-11-14T11:23:00.000-08:00

I was looking all over the web and realized that there just weren't any articles correlating all the tidbits about this extremely talented artist. I even checked Wikipedia. As of the date of this blog, nada.

So I thought I'd help people out who wanted to know a little more about Mr. O'Campo and his work. I'd still like to see the artist himself, or someone publicizing the artist, publish something more significant. I mean, if you look at his work, it's intricate, skillful, and creative as hell. So why don't we know more about him? I don't know. Humility? Shyness? Lack of interest in the outside world? Whatever the reasons, it's a shame.

So here's my contribution to a better understanding of the artist Octavio O'Campo. I'm afraid time and money constraints prevented me from flying down to Mexico and interviewing The Man myself, but I've done what I could to compile every tidbit available online.

Octavio O'Campo - A Very Brief Biography

According to one of the few readily available sources of information about this artist, Octavio O’Campo Gonzalez was born on February 28, 1943 in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico. He was exposed to the creative arts growing up in a family of designers, and studied art as a boy at the local art school directed by Professor Salvador Zuniga.

In high school, Octavio was encouraged by Ruth Riviera, daughter of artist and muralist Diego Rivera, and Maria Luisa Mendoza to pursue training in the fine arts.

O’Campo studied dance and theatre as well as painting at the Art Institute of San Francisco, CA, USA. It seems likely that he stopped using the more common surname “Gonzalez” at this time. IMDB.com credits him as a production designer, art director, and actor in a variety of Spanish language films produced from 1968 to 1978.

In 1976, he began to focus on painting and sculpture, developing his skills in a technique he calls “metamorphic”. This metamorphic style creates optical illusions through the juxtaposition of various images to build larger images. Much of O’Campo’s work is devotional in nature, with a focus on images arising from the Catholic church. Other work draws on nature, and various cultural icons including Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Cher, Che Guevera, and John Lennon.

One of the sights touted in several Mexican travel guides are murals created by Octavio O’Campo in 1980 at the Presidencia Municipal. The murals are described as “impressive” and “in the metamorphic style”, and may be found going up the stairways from the entrance off the main square of the Presidencia Municipal in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico

Prints of O’Campo’s most famous paintings spring up all over the place. In some cases they are clearly credited to the artist. In others, it appears the work is being pirated for its commercial power. Many American celebrities have commissioned portraits from O’Campo, and a portrait of U.S. President Jimmy Carter hangs in Carter’s Presidential Library. An image of one of his better known paintings, “El Milagro de las Rosas” (Miracle of the Roses) was used in the filming of a Christmas television special in 1999.

A catalogue of O’Campos’ work has not been published to date, and original oils and watercolors are rare and difficult to find. The Visions Fine Art Gallery in Sedona, AZ is the only known commercial source authorized by the artist.

A Roadmap for Withdrawal from Iraq

2006-11-10T10:05:00.000-08:00

Now that the Democrats have something resembling a majority in both the House and Senate, there has been a fair amount of mumbling over what to do about "the war in Iraq". Do we send more troops? Do we pull out? If so, how quickly can we stop hemorrhaging tax dollars and accruing deficit? What happens to all those Iraqis without basic services like water, sewer, roads, schools, or a judicial system anyone respects? How do we justify our attack if we leave the country worse off than it was under Saddam Hussein?

An unpopular war is a political liability. The November 2006 election demonstrated to even the most resistant Republican just how much of a liability. Democrats, long accustomed to pouring gasoline on the bonfire-of-the-vanities that was conservative attachment to military solutions for badly defined political problems, are suddenly finding themselves holding the hot coal.

I’ve heard on several broadcasts that Iraq requires "a political solution". I can’t help wondering what exactly that means?

One thing we’ve been told following careful review of a report on terrorism by State Department Analysts, is that America’s conduct in Iraq has increased the threat of terrorism. Our generals on the ground are telling us that the American presence in Iraq is inflammatory. Clearly we’re not making things better with our military presence.

But we can’t very well rush into war, trash the countryside, kill tens of thousands of civilians, disrupt every system of civil service and justice, then just pick up our toys and leave. For one - our reputation would suffer internationally, and credibility is important for a country that is increasingly dependent on the global economy. Secondly, the American People need to believe that we’re not the Bad Guys, and even if we are, we need to make some kind of token gesture to demonstrate that our hearts are in the right place.

So what now?

A political solution

Now, I’m not a politician. I don’t even play one on TV. I don’t consider my blog a political blog, all recent evidence to the contrary, and I find administrivia (which is all politics is about when you get right down to it), painfully dull. I’m just an American. I’d even lay claim to being representative of "your average American" given the fact that modern Americans lack anything resembling a homogeneous culture or mindset. About the only thing you can count on with Americans is that we take great pride in being individuals.

On the other hand, I am an observer of the global theatre and human beings. So I’m going to propose my own course of action. It’s not likely to win any popular support, but I think it would be at least as effective as anything else that the experts will try… and would quite probably be far more effective.

Don’t leave.

Don’t send more soldiers or weapons.

Don't send aid of any kind.

Just step back. Settle into an American base off to the side, and let the Iraqis know that we’re not leaving until things settle down… but that we have no intention of applying force to the process. If the Iraqi government actually asks for help, we’ll do what we can to provide support with the resources on the ground. But we’re not bringing in more building crews, technicians, or other types of foreign aid until the Iraqis government specifically asks for it and the people coming in to help can walk the streets without an armed guard or even a bullet proof vest.

It’s their country. Sunnis and Shia need to figure out what kind of common ground is meaningful to every man, woman and child in Iraq, and what they want to do about those things.

A significant percentage of Iraqis today lack even the bare necessities of life; clean water, food, shelter, protection from violence, medical care. As long as American troops are stomping around trying to give them these things, we’re just muddying the water. Why? Because there are still a lot of people in Iraq who don’t value these things over power and revenge. They will go on telling themselves (and anyone else who will listen) that they can’t possibly be safe without power, and that they can’t respect themselves without revenge.

Aggressive action by American troops just makes those excuses credible.

So let’s step back. By all means, we should be prepared to offer compassionate assistance and to clean up some of the mess we contributed to making… but not until the people we came here to "help" actually start working together to build a future they feel is worth accepting peace to accomplish.

Representative of What? News, time-constraints, and democracy

2006-10-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

Okay. I’m going to have to admit defeat. I’ve been working on this blog off and on for more than three weeks now and I’m no closer to wrapping it up than I was in the beginning. One fairly significant problem is that I have no idea what I’m trying to say. Now you may be thinking that this is nothing unusual. While this is unfortunately true, it’s not an entirely pertinent criticism given that this is a blog and blogs ... for better or worse, are just puffs of digital hot air emanating from the over-heated brains of people with egos too large to sit still and let life move quietly along.

What is worse than not having a point, is that there are so many topics I’m trying to cover in a few short pages that I’m beginning to see that I’m going to have to give up on either clarity or brevity… perhaps both. This started out as a bit of a rant against yet another morning filled with NPR coverage of the latest Israeli-Lebanese conflict – the same three superficial bullet points we’d all come to know and hate for weeks.

Unfortunately, the more I criticized the news and the media, the more I realized how impossible it is to provide fair, clear, and extensive coverage of what is going on all over Planet Earth. Even more significantly, I started to consider exactly how much time it would take me (as a benchmark for The Everyman) to wade through a sufficient amount of detailed information to really understand what is going on in every part of the globe that has prompted a recent news story. The truth is that I don’t have time to understand what the heck is going on everywhere. In all probability, no one has the time.

This gritty realization led me to an even more unhappy thought: if no one is capable of making informed choices, how do we expect a democracy to succeed as a compassionate and efficient form of governance?

Which got me thinking… if the American population has increased significantly since we last decided how many Representatives, Senators and Congress-persons should represent the general viewpoint of various demographic segments, why haven’t we added more of them to reflect the population growth? I mean, if a Senator was representing an average of 20,000 people back in 1952, and he’s representing 50,000 today (all numbers being strictly arbitrary), doesn’t that mean that she or he is representing an increasingly homogenized opinion-base? Or to state this another way; "Is American government failing to represent the needs and political views of significant segments of the country?"

Anyhow, as you can see from this seriously verbose introduction to the blog that follows, I was just trying to cover too much ground. So I’m going to give up on making it the articulate and useful essay I’d like to believe I’m capable of writing. It’s time for me to move on to more productive commentary … like my thoughts on the timing of Britney Spear’s divorce announcement.

News, News, and The Failing of Democracy

After listening a fourth time to the same tidbit of news on NPR, I switched to my CD player. In the future I may stick with books-on-tape. This repetition of the same five items of BIN (Bad International News) over which I have no control, is why I have always found the news so problematic.

When I tune to the local broadcast channel, I come to be informed, educated, enlightened. I’m certainly looking for more than the crude fact that someone bombed a target last night. I want to know why. I want specifics. I want to know who signed the orders, who was in the meeting, why they felt bombing was the way to go, and whether doughnuts were served.

Paranoid as it may seem, I sometimes wonder whether the creators of newscasts across America actually hope we won’t understand the issues. Does it make their jobs easier if their audience remains slightly befuddled? Maybe it’s just a marketing play. It certainly ensures our continued interest in anything that might offer insight. Conversely, if we understood the issues of the moment, our sympathies might lean in an inconvenient direction. Or not at all. Maybe that’s what news editors fear the most. If the general public is too well informed, we might stop tuning in to the all too familiar reports of sad cyclical turmoil. We might accept the fact that the thirst for vengeance and dominance cannot be changed by self-righteous intervention and outside aid. Americans might be forced to consider our own problems as a culture, a country, and as individuals contributing to the destruction of the ecology on which our species depends and the demise of the species.

But spreading the focus out a bit would have drastic consequences. Suddenly we wouldn’t hear about the war in Iraq, civil unrest in Iraq, other wars in the Middle East, and the expanding influence of violent Islamic conservatives. Imagine the impact of a sudden vacuum in unifying political themes. What happens to the country when the news isn’t pumping in middle-east-Muslims=violent-and-unreasonable-mysoginistic-maniacs into the air 24/7?

Do we get bored? Is that why we have such tattered and conflicted news about the rebuilding of New Orleans, and such obsessive coverage of cases like OJ Simpson, Monica Lewinsky and Jon Benet Ramsey?

I don’t know about you, but all this sliced, diced and ready for the mental microwave pseudo-news grates on my pre-menstrual nerves. I want to hear a significantly broader range of news than the crap we get on the radio every morning. I’m tired of the stuff with the enteric coating, designed to slip pre-packaged conclusions past the voting public’s mental digestive process. I’ve paid the fees and as a card-carrying member of a democracy, I’m supposed to be part of the larger decision-making process. I’ll grant you - in the case of the United States - a small part…very, very small. But the system only functions if a significant percentage of the tax-paying American public participates. We have to go in and say Yes or No, and it’s really hard to summon the desire to get out and vote if we don’t have a clue as to what we’re saying "Yes" or "No" about.

So I want to know. In fact, I think a lot of people want to know.

Remind me again what is so important that neither side of a cyclical conflict can find some reason to maintain peace, economic stability, and civil discourse with the neighbors. I can think of a couple of reasons off the top of my head right here and now including grandchildren, a good night’s sleep, and even plain old mental health. Imagine not being afraid and angry all the time.

What a concept.

Maybe the problem with the news isn’t the editorial staff. After all, blaming "The Media" for the woes of the world is a time-honored means of abdicating responsibility. Maybe the problem with the news is the national attention span: hassled, hurried, impatient, scatter-brained, and completely disgusted. We don’t demand depth because depth requires more time and energy than we are willing to invest in activities not directly related to daily living. In fact, we dog-paddle through an overwhelming volume of information, actively fending off unnecessary detail. "Too much information!" we proclaim, side-stepping the conversation like a pile of bird droppings.

It seems to me that if we were actually going to fathom the "why" and "how" of current events, most of us would have to winnow our daily serving of news down to a few topics of genuine interest, and prioritization is tough slogging. It requires a willingness to do the intellectual equivalent of hard physical labor. Instead of relying on paid reporting to track down "pertinent" data, we’d have to find it for ourselves. Even with the Internet and sundry tools for keeping up to date on our areas of interest, verification alone is a full time job. Small wonder we’re still settling for a smattering of bullet points delivered at the flip of the radio dial, the local newspaper’s front page, or the web news page of our choice.

Much though I'd like to find an obvious villain in America’s two-step with the news, I have to admit that the news we’re generally fed is superficial because there is so much news available. Your average human being simply can’t assimilate it all. So we settle for being regularly glazed in a micro-coating of data by sources ranging from admirable to shoddy. Unfortunately, we don’t like to admit that our grasp on the facts are worse than non-existent. We keep convincing ourselves that we know enough to take a position, make a decision, argue a point.

This is the sin of our nation. We know too little to be so damned smug and bossy.

Some people get that much. They recognize they know too little to judge the decisions made by men and women whose life is dedicated to absorbing information, and who have superior access to the facts. But where does that leave us? I’ll tell you where. It requires us to depend on the intelligence, compassion, determination, and wisdom of our elected officials.

I don’t know about you, but that idea makes me want to laugh. Nervously.

In fact, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that our population has reached a level where the whole idea of democracy becomes impractical. Let’s face it. The democratic process doesn’t scale. By this I mean that we can’t keep adding more bodies into the equation and have it work the same way. Yet that is what we keep doing. We add increasing layers of complexity and detail onto our world and our individual lives, then wonder why our elected officials fail to accurately represent our position on any given set of issues. Or maybe we already know why. The more people you have involved in the election/selection process, the lower the common denominator. We can look at the quality of the Bush administration today and see that much.

You could say that I don’t trust "my fellow Americans". As individuals they strike me as generally tolerant, kind, generous, and reasonably intelligent. As a group, we’re just a bunch of confused herbivores waiting for Daddy to come bail us out of whatever doomed situation he got us into in the first place with his fuel sucking V8, cigars and six pack.

We’re not telling our elected officials what we want them to do. They’re telling us why their way is right. And we’re too frightened and ignorant to take a strong position against what they’ve decided is best. This is backwards. In a democracy, the beliefs of the voting public are supposed to be the foundation of the policies that drive our behavior as a nation.

With a country as culturally, ethnically, and spiritually diverse as the United States of America, is it any wonder we’ve lost sight of the national character? How do you homogenize every possible faith, race, culture, value system, and economic position? What is the common denominator? What are "our" core beliefs? Is the voting majority an actual representation of these beliefs, or just the largest block of informed voters?

Isn’t it about time we admitted that our current level of representation is simply not granular enough?

Our population is expanding, both in quantity and quality. Shouldn’t our body of governing representatives do the same? We need Senators and Congressmen (and women) capable of representing political parties other than the Democrats and Republicans. We need law makers who see things from the point of view of every significant group that is part of the larger American public. We need law makers who can negotiate compromises between disparate positions, and who genuinely represent the illegal immigrant Mexican working as a nanny, the lesbian lawyer, and the plumber from Des Moines because they come from the queer, illegal, and blue collar populations.

It’s time some of our Senators and Congress-persons do represent special interest groups. When you get right down to it, even the ostensible "majority" is nothing more than a cohesive set of special interest groups. I’m thinking it’s about time we gave the rest equal time and say in the process of moving this country forward into the 21st century.

The Appeal of Horatio Alger Fantasies

2006-09-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

Recently, while leafing through a current issue of Dwell magazine and lusting over some post-modern confection of steel and reclaimed lumber, I had a flashback to my college days. Unfortunately, I’m not talking parties, popcorn fights with dorm-mates, or even those marathon pre-final memorization sessions. I was remembering a conversation I had with an admissions counselor. A nice person I’m sure, in the bland fuzzy manner of people whose jobs are only ostensibly helpful. To be honest, I have no memory whatsoever of this person’s face. I have only the vaguest recollection that it was a man. I could be wrong.

This is the kind of person who can change a life, for better or worse.

I was one of those students who did reasonably well in High School, with a few notable exceptions in which I could summon neither the interest or the competency to achieve better than a B. Mostly I was an A student. I did get a single D, courtesy of a bitterly aging woman from whom I learned absolutely nothing and despised for her sheer incompetency. That D kept me out of the National Honor Society. Being of a certain mindset, this caused me no sleepless nights. Grades were a necessary evil in school, not the reason I was there. I knew that at sixteen and the intervening years have only encouraged this conviction.

Not everyone agrees. Good grades in school, impressive job titles on the resume, and articles lauding our achievements, are inextricably linked in everyone’s mind with character and competence: a sturdy work ethic, expertise, and the potential for future brilliance. These assumptions are a product of our culture, the need to be able to point to past accomplishments to justify our view of the individual’s future performance. It’s not an actual fact, but we behave as if it were.

I never felt grades demonstrated my intelligence, nor my ability to tackle a new skill. I’m the fortunate product of a home that valued books, writing, and raw curiosity about how one fact connects to the next. Success in school was something I took for granted. I could summon interest in any subject if an exchange of opinions was involved. If the teacher was going to indulge in monologues I felt it behooved him/her to make the information pertinent to me and my life. Sometimes this happened. Sometimes not.

In short, I didn’t find the first 12 years of my formal education terribly stressful or compelling. It was like an obstacle course for small children. The hurdles were inconvenient, and it took a long time to make my way around, but all the exits were locked and there really wasn’t anything better to do until I achieved my legal majority, and the subsequent freedom to pursue interests of my own. Or so I thought.

Unfortunately, the careless disregard of youth for foundations, building a history of achievement – on paper, if not in reality, is based on ignorance of the mental shorthand society uses to manage the bodies of which it is comprised: mental shorthand we accept because our culture conditions us to (eventually) accept that the past actively determines the future. This is a lie, but one so deeply internalized that few "well-adjusted" adults can imagine the possibility that the future is distinct and seperable from our history.

The result is the relegation of a significant percentage of young adults to mediocre education, undemanding jobs that lead them into marginalized careers, and the basis for the massive numbers of middle-aged Americans desperate for some hope of finding meaningful ways to explore the raw potential they have never had an opportunity to express because they failed to comprehend the need to obey the rules, excel at boring subjects, and convince their instructors that they gave a shit about the class in which they were trapped for a brief period during their earliest educational experience.

Strangely enough, a lot of people feel this way about the educational processes to which they were subjected during their formative years. It’s not strange that we feel this way. What is strange, is that we haven’t come up with a superior alternative by now. We can text our itinerary to our secretary from half way around the world, but we’re still warehousing our progeny in the name of "education".

But this is the kind of thing that interests my partner, not me. I’m more practical. I believe in picking my battles, choosing serenity over conflict, and allowing the natural forces of marketplace, politics, and modern culture to drive social transformation.

Besides that, I don’t have children.

On the other hand, I am surrounded by people whose job satisfaction can be identified somewhere between minimal and none. In fact, the number of people I know who would cheerfully show up to their place of employment tomorrow if they didn’t need the paycheck and benefits contingent upon their presence, is a limited and privileged clan.

This reflects badly on our manifest-destiny-rights-of-the-individual-to-self-expression-and-happiness culture, so we pretend it's not true.

I blame our educational system. Or more accurately, I blame the people who perpetrate the current system for managing our offspring while we’re out earning a paycheck under the misnomer of "education". Which brings me to my eighties flashback and the career counselor.

What I wanted as a small child, was to be a ballerina. Preferrably a prima ballerina, but I was willing to settle for a place in the chorus. This dream wasn’t of pink tulle and pretenses of princess-hood. It was born of sweat and regular lessons, and the small moments of sheer freedom that come from exercising a craft well-learned. This dream was squashed by pragmatic parents, lack of role models, and a local disregard for "artsy" careers of all kinds.

I didn’t really have a fall back position. I recall several vague efforts to help me and my fellow students decide what careers might be suitable to our temperaments and personal interests. The results, for me at least, were a panoply of undesirable options like forest ranger, private investigator and monastic; all careers you will note, founded on nothing more than a willingness to arrive on time and go through the motions. Or so it seemed to me. The very idea of doing something for a living that was actually interesting seemed surreal, or fictional. I’d read books about people who found something compelling to do with their lives, but I didn’t really know anyone who seemed to derive much overt satisfaction from whatever it was they did to buy eggs and toilet paper.

This is one of the disadvantages of growing up in the US Midwest.

So I wandered off to the halls of higher education with no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, with the slight disadvantage of already being half way there. Well, no idea may be a bit of an exaggeration. I did have at least one idea. I distinctly remember telling the counselor that I wanted to be an Architect.

He told me that the University program accepted only 8 students a year from my category (out of state students), and those openings were generally filled from outside the US. It was perfectly clear that he was capable of looking no further than the rather large institution to which he owed his fealty by right of receiving a regular paycheck. It was clear that he believed I had no chance of ever entering their program, becoming an Architect, and… as I look back, no real need to pursue a graduate degree. I was attractive, married, and destined to be content with children, bake-offs, and domestic hobbies.

And so it proved to be – more or less. I wound up with a suitably generic degree in a field of psychology and never completed my graduate degree. I did not become an Architect. I did not even think about becoming an Architect… until I hit my forties and realized that buildings, homes, construction, interior design, and indeed, architecture were a long-standing passion.

I am trying to imagine what my life would be like today if the circumstances of my past had been different. In fact, I’ve been imagining what it would be like if everyone had a chance to pursue what interested them at the time that it interests them. What if there were no barriers to entry to any college, course of study, or career? What if the only thing that prevented each of us from becoming a doctor, a nurse, an architect, a mathematician, a ballerina… was our own lack of desire?

Mind you, some people will argue that if you want something badly enough, you will find a way to make it happen. Sure. If you waste no energy on being the socially acceptable daughters/sons, students, citizens, wives/husbands, friends that families, our communities expect us to be. Anything is possible, or at least this is what Americans choose to tell themselves. This is the fund of much-needed hope most ordinary citizens cling to, hungrily reading magazine articles and absorbing made-for-television stories in which someone with grit, determination, and a special gift turned their hum drum life into the dream they always believed possible.

The rest of us do it the hard way. We negotiate, bully, work with the system, complete forms, pay fees, suck it up, kiss ass, live off wealthy mates whose sole value is their ability to pay the bills, and pray to the Almighty for one small favor.

Maybe two.

We find useful jobs that pay the bills and we sacrifice our own potential because there are few opportunities that allow us to earn a right to do what we want to do rather than what we are deemed capable of achieving. Once we’ve found some way to earn a living, we can’t get off the path. If you start out waiting tables and running a kitchen, you’re likely to spend your life in food service. If you work as a clerk at a store, you’re on a path into the merchandising industry. If you start out sewing buttons and zippers and hems, you may one day score a job ordering accessories for a designer. Sideways movement is a rarity because, as strangers, it’s hard to conceive of (much less bet your own success on) the potential in another human being. What we see is the history. Period.

In spite of the predictable and steady appeal of the Horatio Algier stories, our entire social order is predicated on the belief that the past is an indicator of the future. This is the biggest lie human society perpetrates on itself. We are not trained to comprehend the fact that skills are discreet, and transferable. A knack for finding solutions to a customer’s problem, the ability to maintain order, the gift of creating beauty from whatever raw materials are at hand, the skill to soothe unhappiness and help people find alternatives in their lives… these are larger than trades, industries, job titles.

But our culture, and therefore, our view of others, is formed by historical perspectives. We come from a history where craft Masters took on Apprentices, and Apprentices were trained to become Journeymen, and Journeymen perfected their skills to become the next generation of Masters. The past endlessly creating the future. Generation after generation of human beings trapped in trades that took everything and gave them nothing but an occupation.

What if we assumed that every human being is drawn to something that they are likely to learn willingly, and that what they learn willingly, they are likely to master? What if we stopped looking at age and gender and grade point average and SAT scores and family backgrounds? What if we were forced to hire based on the individual’s capabilities at the moment? What if admittance to every university’s professional degree program was based on what the individual had to say for him or herself? What if our mother’s sewing hobby was as valuable a portfolio as a high school student’s sketches? What if the desire to become a medical doctor was considered the only true criterion for learning how to heal?

Would we find our offices designed by people with a genuine interest in creating environments that enabled concentrated work? Would the nurse at our bedside genuinely care about our pain and fear? Would accountants be fascinated by manipulating financial scenarios to their customers’ best interests? Would juvenile delinquents find something to learn that gave them genuine motivation to sacrifice their habits of destruction? Would the original "low flush toilets" actually perform the function of carrying away waste?

Apptitude is valued over dreams and society loses the skills and will of people capable of being visionaries, world-movers, and happy members of the collective because all we can see is what they have already done – not what they want to do.

Our culture is sick because its members are sacrificed to the general good without consideration for anything resembling a constructive future. We want immediate performance, not future possibility. We are unwilling to take on the challenge of growing people into jobs they love. The necessary costs of failures, mistakes, and drop outs seems too high a price to pay for the yet-to-be-determined benefits of selecting people whose most important qualification is enthusiasm. Our society is trapped in a morass of fear and competition, reducing the end product to a level of mediocrity we only decry because it allows us to feel superior.

If we really wanted to transform our world, we would not be so willing to sacrifice potential.

But inhabitants of modern society don’t have the courage to stand for transformation on an individual basis. We would have to consider a future filled with people far more capable than ourselves because they were selected for passion and potential. Like the old Masters, we want to control those who follow in our footsteps – passing on our skills and knowledge, not learning something new from the generations to follow.

In spite of this, the next generation still manages to take what we have taught them and create tools, processes, beliefs that never occurred to us. It can be galling to those of us who have fitted ourselves too-easily into the machinery of our society, to watch those bright new faces doing what we never had to courage to do.

I live in a city that offers opportunities I never dreamed existed when I was starting my life, my career. I look at my life and realize that what I am today, is not what I wanted to be. I am the product of my resume, my past. I am trapped by my history, by the opportunities I never had, the skills I never learned, and the education I was not encouraged to pursue.

I watch the boys in the alley scrawling their initials on walls, bored and isolated from their possibilities. It makes me sad. Yet another generation of Americans destined to perform tasks they find meaningless.

Sociologists ponder why there is crime and violence. I wonder how there cannot be some expression of the revulsion and desperation the next generation feels when they watch us return home each day from our jobs, tired, frustrated, uninspired.

At a pivotal time in my life, I did not have a 4.0 grade average, nor was there any obvious opportunity for internships in construction or architecture offices in my home town of just under 4,000 people. In the one place I should have been able to find encouragement to pursue my dream – realistic or not, I found "practical" advice based on one man’s narrow view of what was possible.

I’d like to create possibilities for people who dream of doing something their resume, their school record, their police record, makes impossible. I want to turn tired wedding photographers into nurses, and exhausted nurses into doctors, and bored computer programmers into football coaches. I want to open doors to mediocre students, average employees, aging executives, and children of immigrants. I’d like to open everyones’ mind to future possibility over the sheer and deadly repetition of history. I’d like to see our culture return to the confident risk-taking nation it was before industry and stock prices governed the way we think future employees should have prepared for their place in the corporate matrix.

I’d like to see our country, and indeed, the whole world, focus more on what it takes for the individual to thrive. This is the foundation of a global awareness that performance is a product of intelligence, interest, conviction, and that in creating possibilities for others, we are creating better options for ourselves.

Is there a place for idealism in the inevitable transformation of our society, our world? In business practices? In global discussions of what is important to our species? Are human beings ready for a conversation that concedes the possibility that the era of the craftsman, content in his or her practice of meaningful work yet awaits us?

I don’t know that there is. I’m just an aging science fiction geek considering all those utopian futures in which people are well-matched to their work, and wondering if it’s just dungeons-and-dragons fantasy after all.

Existential Angst

2006-09-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I spent almost twelve hours dancing. By dancing I mean moving around in time (or not) to a wide variety of music in a room full of really terrific people. This is moving-meditation-barefoot-freeform stuff - no choreography or forms to follow. It’s rather relaxing (in a sweaty, panting, collapsing exhausted on the floor kind of way). Relaxing. Exhuberant. Joyful. Emotional.

Then Monday rolls around and it’s time to put on the black wool pants, starched shirt and blazer, and sit at my computer for eight hours.

Talk about coming down from a high. It’s quite enough to precipitate a depression. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Indulging in my usual post-workshop existential crisis in which I question everything. "Why can’t I find a way to earn my living doing something I love as much as I love to dance?" "Why does my job feel so dry and meaningless?" "Where did I go wrong and what would I be doing if I’d gotten it right?" "Why does my self-cleaning oven fail to self clean?" Blah. Blah. Blah.

So I've been moping around, feeling like there's something really wrong with my life. Unfortunately, the real truth (as I observed to one girlfriend) is that I’ve personally found nothing quite so depressing as being unemployed and facing the prospect of losing every investment I’ve set aside for when I'm old, tired, and too cranky to be nice to people every day. In the face of that… and I have faced that in the past… the fact that the source of my regular income and benefits is unexciting is trivial.

But that’s me, prone to the trivial. I not only want to be doing something from day to day that makes me feel like jumping out of bed, but I want it to pay well enough for me to continue to support myself in the style to which I’ve become accustomed, set aside money for retirement, and maintain a reasonable set of health care benefits.

It does occur to me that I’m missing something obvious. Maybe I’m failing to comprehend something important about myself and what I want to do with my life. Maybe I’m refusing to accept some bitter truth about my abilities. I can see the product of those abilities, or lack thereof… and it leaves me feeling dissatisfied. I’m just not quite ready to accept the present status quo as an irrefutable truth about what I’m capable of creating with my life.

Maybe it’s just bad luck and worse timing. Who knows? One thing is certain. If I stop trying to shape the inevitable changes in my life into something I find meaningful, satisfying, and (dare I say it) fun, I might as well go coffin shopping. So I guess the occasional post-workshop-let-down existential crisis is a small price to pay to ensure I never get too comfortable with The Way Things Are. It forces me to see some of the inner truths my daily routines and habits have so deftly disguised.

But I can only wallow for so long before … well, before I get really bored. It’s a shame, but I just don’t seem to have the capacity for regret and resistance I had in my youth. My job may always just be a job, not a career, not a vocation, not a passion. The better part of my life may be spent keeping a roof over my head and food on the table. I will probably leave nothing of lasting import to this world and my species.

Which makes me pretty much like everyone else on the planet with a few notable exceptions. While I’d rather be one of the exceptions, that’s hasn’t happened… quite… yet. However, as objectives go, I have to admit that’s not bad. At least it’s something to get me out of bed when I’m suffering from post-workshop-let-down existential angst.

Women Against Bad Shoes

2006-09-08T10:34:00.000-07:00

Shoes. Love them. Really. Better than sparkly things, even the ones that come in little blue boxes. Better than chocolates, gold foil wrapped or otherwise - even the Belgium kind… though chocolate from Belgium is an experience everyone should have at least once before they die in my not-so-humble opinion. Better than Sonoma wines, Beluga caviar, Texas barbecue, and sushi. (which - considering I’m an inveterate foodie - is saying a lot)

Shoes have been at the top of my list of Things That Make Me Happy since I left home and purchased my very first pair of not-orthopedically-correct shoes. (dark green snakeskin pumps with two inch heels – which, ironically enough, my mother immediately coveted).

There’s nothing I don’t love about shoes. I love the textures of shoe leather, the thick and the thin, goat, cow or pig. I love the trims, the glitter and bouffant bows. I even love to sneer at ugly shoes, belittle excessive heels and wax eloquent about the pros and cons of Earth shoes, Birkenstocks, and other implements of supportive orthopedic ornamentation. I love looking at them, trying them on, buying them, talking about them. I even love returning them. I love the chemical and fading musk smell of shoe stores. I love shoes so much that I even love giving them away.

And I always have shoes to give away because no matter how carefully I select a pair of shoes, there is a statistically significant percentage that give me blisters, cramps, or some other form of foot discomfort. This is not something I love about shoes. In fact one could say I take a very black-and-white position on this: Shoes good. Foot discomfort bad.

Very very bad.

This seems like a reasonable enough position for a girl to adopt in regard to items of personal adornment only obliquely related to the essential care and feeding of one’s body.

Or not. Women everywhere hobble, sluff, and wince along, accommodating bad fit, poor design, and shoddy manufacturing. Shoe designers persist in cranking out high heels no one in their right mind should wear, much less waste money purchasing. Quality control departments everywhere overlook obvious flaws destined to turn shoes into cute instruments of torture.

I have to ask, "What gives?". Are men correct in their assessment of the general mental health of the female population? Are we really all quite quite mad? Is there any other explanation for the fact that style and brand name will trump comfort for all but a few notable exceptions who genuinely believe Uggs, Doc Martins and Earth Shoes to be items of haute footwear? How many men would consider for ten seconds the possibility of purchasing a pair of shoes that didn’t actually fit? Yet women do this all the time. Half a size one way or the other is no hurdle to a dedicated shoe whore. Too tight? I’ll have them stretched., we tell ourselves. No problem. Too big? That’s why the Shoe Gods invented inserts.

On the other hand, shoe designers create far fewer obviously uncomfortable shoes for men. There’s no percentage in it. Men as a consumer population just don’t fall for the clever-little-detail-over-proper-construction game all too frequently perpetrated on women.

Much though I would like to defend my gender, I am forced to admit that we have no one but ourselves to blame for cheap construction and bad shoe design. If we had an ounce of compassion for our own bodies, Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo would be out of the shoe design business in less time than it takes to say spike heels are bad for the hard working bones in your foot, not to mention your knees, hips and low back. I mean really, who do Sarah Jessica Parker and the writers of "Sex and the City" think they’re kidding? We all know those scenes in which she removes one or the other absurdly high heeled pair of shoes while rubbing various foot bits and wincing are just the tip of the iceberg. In the real world, those shoes look far better on displays and mannequins than they do on women who have to figure out how to navigate curbs, stairs, and long hallways while teetering on the balls of their feet.

It’s not just high heels that should be endangered species of the fashion phylum. I’m also an advocate for ostracizing any footgear made of plastic, shoes with soles thinner than cereal box cardboard, and footgear with flashing lights for anyone over the age of eight. If there were no market for the things, the fashion industry would stop trying to persuade us to buy them, and manufacturers would stop churning them out like cheap liverwurst.

Admittedly, this is not likely to happen overnight. In fact, it may never happen. Human females will continue to deliberately wrap their feet in things that cause them pain, thereby justifying the bad behavior of a few men who think all a woman "needs" is to be knocked around a bit from time to time.

Or we can decide that we don’t deserve to suffer. We can empower ourselves and our gender. We can vote economically for a few quality shoes that are comfortable to wear eight hours a day, even when we’re on our feet for most of them. We can start choosing quality over quantity. I have personally discovered the wisdom in buying one pair of $100 shoes over four pairs at $29.99. It’s not an easy thing to do, saying "No" to the green glitter ballet flats with the crystal ornaments, but I’m learning. In fact it’s a bit like lifting weights. First you say "no" to anything with heels more than three inches high and the next thing you know, you’ll be insisting they come in under 1 ½". I have to draw the line at mules. I’m tired of having to clench my toes with every step in order to keep my footwear on my feet. It’s exhausting… and I’m not going to do it any more!

In the future, if shoe designers want to dip into my wallet, they’re going to have to include a decent amount of padding in the footbed and a completely designed mechanism for keeping my feet inside my shoes without any special effort on my part. I’m hoping my fellow shoe lovers will join me in my campaign against Bad Shoes. It would be nice to have the support of like-minded women.

Or maybe I just want an excuse to talk about shoes.

It's Not News Is It?

2006-08-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

Over a million more Americans are uninsured this year over last. On a not completely unrelated note, the High School class of 2006 showed the sharpest drop in SAT scores in 31 years, and economists are debating how successful Europe’s micro "smart car" will do in the United States.

Just another morning of optimism-building news here in Sunny Southern Cal.

This brings to mind one of the questions that surfaced in my recent consideration of not-for-profit health care. Can modern societies afford an unhealthy population? What is the price tag on our determined disregard for the general health of a significant percentage of our fellow Americans?

The latest headlines open a whole new set of questions. Can the consistently downward trend in academic performance by the last few generations be linked to a lack of medical care? Or have the advances in health care knowledge compensated for the progressive dwindling of a client base that can afford to take advantage of those advances? And then there is the outstanding question of whether or not American society is capable of withstanding the shock of downsizing our absurdly self-absorbed style of personal transportation. Because, of course, it’s a question. Can we?

In my humble view of things, the real problem with the news is that it invariably leads to questions: questions that would take time to answer, questions that make friends and co-workers just shake their heads, questions that make you wonder if there isn’t more lead in our water supply than we belive. I consider this a grave failing in our modern media. I don’t want news that makes me wonder where the rest of the story has been mislaid. I don’t want pre-digested bias-driven micro-encapsulated pseudo-news-drivel. I want more than headlines. But modern American media seems to be hung-up on "The Headline" - meaning whatever passes for Attention Grabbing phrases in our oh-so-cynical-age-of-instant-publication-and-digitally-manipulated-data. Let’s face it. Most of the news isn’t. New, that is. It’s just diluted extensions of older proven-to-grab-attention news. Jon Benet Ramsey? O.J. Simpson? Monica Lewinsky?

In theory, we’re actually concerned about world peace. That’s why we get those suspiciously familiar four sentence summaries of the killing in Beirut or Lebanon or Afghanistan or some place in Africa too small to be found on most maps between aggrieved-for-reasons-no-one-can-accurately-explain Party A and B. In practice most of us are trapped in the pacifist’s dilemma. How do you neutralize someone willing to kill others for illogical reasons? What happens after our sanctimonius mouthings of "How does killing people for killing people teach that killing is wrong?" – Nothing much. It’s a moral catch-22 and for all our good intentions the majority of America’s new-age-guru-following-peaceful-resolution-spiritual-advancement-intellectuals are just not that good at breaking internal gridlock.

We’re a lot more interested in the food on our table and how clean and accessible water will be in ten years. This is why we care about green house gases, global warming, toxic chemical spills, and locally produced foods. Or at least, anyone with an ounce of brain matter and the willingness to conceive of the idea that human beings aren’t going to survive long if we kill off every other living organism on the planet. In fact, when the media reports some pundit, politician, or good-old-boy carrying on about ecological alarmists and optimistic technologies, I can’t believe it. Some part of me honestly suspects the reporter of making it up.

So you can see, the news has ever been problematical for me. Should I ignore it, listen to mixes and books on tape to while away my commute? Let the whole damned world go to hell in its own special handbasket? Or do I listen but remain detached, knowing there isn’t bloody all I can do to resolve the latest conflict in the middle-wherever, or get people to actually think honestly about the five square miles surrounding their home? Do I get involved and spend the rest of my life trying to "make a difference" in the cause of my choice? I can’t honestly say that I’m opposed to any of these options, but I do find them mutually incompatible - and frustrating. If we inspect the news with any clarity at all, what stands out is the fact that it repeats itself. Endlessly. Nothing is resolved. Factions cling to their resentments generation after generation. A cool new invention radically changes the way people interact, only to create new problems. Climates shift. Animals and plants move on or die off. People adapt.

Seen from the long view, the news is just not very interesting.

Moreover, it's full of unnecessary detail. We can cut out a lot of fluff if we'd just resign our selves to the fact that history does repeat itself. What I’d like to do is write news stories. Imagine this newsbit from NPR - "Israel is once again pummelling the holy crap out of one of its neighbors." or maybe, "The President of the United States actually made a decision today. Slightly more than fifty percent of registered voters polled were against the decision. " And then, there is always the weather - "Today we have weather caused by pollution, a small natural disaster somewhere near a large body of water, and a significant chance of clouds shifting. "

See? Nothing to it. The only problem is... what are we going to talk about over lunch now?

Flower Envy

2006-08-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

by enemaria100

Okay. I just want to say that I envy this person's photos. This does not happen to me very often. It's not like you can compare the size of one person's photographs to anothers. Well, you can, but it's not the same as comparing male genitalia. It's just paper. But these flowers are really really B-I-G: close-ups that show you water drops, veins, and the intimate outlines of every stamen and petal.

I want to know what camera she's using, and where she took these photos... and whether the garden is hers... in which case, I have yet another reason to envy her - or beg for a tour.

Money Shame

2006-08-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

Remember the old cliché, "count your blessings"?

Of course you do. So do I. Everyone has at least one senior family member assigned to tell the youngest generation to count their respective blessings. Usually it happened when we were wailing about the loss of some object when naptime had been delayed, and was therefore more about making things peaceful and quiet for the aforementioned senior than for our long term spiritual benefit. This is a bit of adult hypocrisy we rarely inspect once we reach adulthood ourselves. I attribute this to the fact that we are now the senior family member, and we need our beauty rest.

Unfortunately, my sage elder failed to include any kind of definition of a "blessing" in case I needed to identify one in the wild. So I’ve always been a little fuzzy on the subject. I mean, what’s the difference between a blessing and just plain dumb luck? Do blessings always have a particular side-effect, a symptom? For example, whenever something makes me laugh, is that a blessing? Or is the ability to laugh at myself and the crazy world around me a blessing? Or both?

The most appropriate definition to be found at dictionary.com describes a blessing as "A special favor, mercy or benefit". Sure. In theory. In practice I suspect my sage elder wasn’t the only one who failed to provide a working definition because Americans quite clearly have more than a few internal conflicts over the pesky things, especially where it comes to our finances.

Blessings, as the Citibank billboards will tell you, are distinct from money. We embrace clichés telling us authoritatively that you can’t buy packages of "happiness" at the corner food mart. Apparently we can’t buy health or friendships either, though I’d be willing to bet the judicious application of a bit of money can produce results that compare quite favorably to the health, happiness and friendships one gets from dire grinding poverty.

Lately it’s become fashionable to talk about family values, work-life balance, and quality social networks. Money, on the other hand – the means by which we sustain our values, balance and networks, elicits a certain amount of eye shifting and mumbling. This is especially true when we consider the rest of the world. Regardless of our reasons, a vague sense of shame manages to permeate just about everyone’s view of their own finances. Either we’re ashamed that we aren’t better providers, or we’re ashamed that we have more than "those less fortunate".

What seems particularly odd is that we don’t feel the same way about blessings.

Why is that?

What is it about money that makes us want to look elsewhere to count our blessings?

Whether we have enough for our "needs" and then some, or are looking around for new ways to generate some spare cash, it remains a persistence source of competitiveness, envy, and discontent. Parents are loathe to acknowledge that their children have outstripped them in earning potential. Siblings protect one another (or themselves) from the potential embarrassment of being the low-earner. Friends, while celebrating our raises, promotions, and bonus packages, can’t help but compare their own income and expense ratios to ours.

I suspect it has to do with the fact that with money, there is never a figure that qualifies as "enough". There are always investments, gadgets, trips, and charities to soak up the increases. We never say, "Stop. I have enough money. I’m just going to sit here and count it."

Blessings? Those we’re supposed to count. Perhaps that’s because we perceive them as definite. Black and white. You’re healthy, or you’re not. You have an enjoyable marriage, or you don’t. You live in a safe place, or you don’t. You have children, or you don’t. Whether we realize it or not, blessings are the fixed stars around which our lives revolve.

Under that definition, is it possible for money to be a blessing? Not really. It’s just a symbol, a tool, a tangible representation of labor performed.

Me personally? I think it’s a specious distinction, designed to reinforce the subtle discomfort the general population feels about their finances. I say ‘Go ahead. Count your blessings, and your money.’ More importantly, be ready to negotiate for every penny you can get from every business arrangement, financial deal, and garage sale. Invest like growing the stuff will replace the ozone layer. Take it seriously.

Just not too seriously. It is, after all, only money. What makes money a blessing, are all the things you can do with it: buy your grandmother a chocolate chip cookie, or a new kidney, build an art center for children from economically disadvantaged homes, fund an art garden in an ugly part of town, develop the world’s first subscription-based holistic health care center. Done right, spending money is even more fun than earning it.

Kind of like writing, and reading.

Improving Monster.com - Truth in Job Posting

2006-08-23T10:53:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I’m looking at new jobs. New jobs which require an intelligence quotient slightly higher than boiled carrots. New jobs which provide a minimum of benefits, hygienic work conditions, and a salary somewhere in the neighborhood of fair market value for the work to be performed. New jobs which are within reasonable driving distance of my home. Preferrably proximate to public transportation.

This last criteria seems to be the stumper. For reasons I can’t quite grasp, employers don’t want to share their actual physical location with prospective employees. Maybe they want to see if we can figure it out. They’re testing our resourcefulness. Fine. If they have one physical address. More complicated are the businesses with multiple addresses, sprinkled all across the city, or even… the country. Maybe they don’t want to hire anyone who isn’t already familiar with the inner workings of their organization. Wouldn’t it be easier just to post that as a job requirement?

And speaking of job requirements, why is it that people who write job advertisements seem so unclear on the actual skills and knowledge required to perform the job? My employer regularly posts a line in their job ads that never fails to make me snort in my licorice tea: " Masters degree or clinical licenses (RN, MD, etc.) strongly preferred". This line is not only a joke, it pretty much guarantees they’re losing qualified candidates. First, how likely is it that a licensed medical doctor is going to want to manage software development? And what does a nursing degree have to do with managing intellectual property? Secondly, why would a skilled project manager, database analyst, or graphic artist consider applying for a job that tells them they should also be able to drain a cyst and provide intramuscular injections? That’s just psychotic. But they persist – one more example of the tired habits of this company’s human resources division, which is easily the worst run HR organization I’ve had the misfortune to have to deal with in … oh, ever. For a company that offers the richest benefit package and widest array of employee services of any company of similar size and revenues, they demonstrate a remarkable disinterest in seeing any kind of return on their employee investment.

But I digress. Job requirements, and the people who write them up. Why is this such a difficult thing to do? If you need someone to be able to write a coherent sentence, say so. If they will be training people, you need a trainer. This random fishing for a grab bag of skills in the hopes that they’ll find some brilliant jack of all trades who will not only be able to manage a team of 50 people, but design microchips and install the operating system on a million dollar AIX server is the obvious by-product of someone with an advanced case of either indecisiveness, or cluelessness.

Which is unfortunately, usually the case. People doing the hiring rarely seem to know what it is the people they want to hire will actually be doing from day to day. That’s how I came to have my current cushy-but-mind-numbing-career in doing nothing much.

This is another area where Monster.com utterly fails on the job hunting side of the fence. They want job seekers to fill out detailed lists of skills and experience. Job posters get away with, Um, like… we’re looking for someone easy-going to perform software development in a customer-facing role for a private company serving the public. It’s a really fun environment with good benefits and nice people. Must be experienced in .NET, accrual accounting, ASP, DB2, Tivoli, cost-benefit analysis, COBOL, MS SQL Server, and brand management.

Right. Do the authors of these exercises in wishful thinking have any idea how ridiculous they sound?

And if they’re going to ask for everything including a degree in post-revelation basket analysis, that must mean they want everyone to apply, and it’s up to the applicants to weed them out as a prospective employer. (In which case, the least they could do is list their address.)

I’d also like employers to be required to post a list of the specific activities involved in the job. It’s okay. I don’t need my ego stroked, and it won’t do you any good to disguise the truth. I’m going to find out sooner or later. If the job involves running to Starbucks six times a day for a team of high strung creative types, it would be good to know this before I apply for the job. It might actually make the job more appealing. Or not.

In fact, I can think of a number of bits of information that every job posting should include to allow job hunters to distinguish between work they’d enjoy, and work that is destined to send them hunting semi-automatic weapons with their manager in mind. These would include;

Location of Workplace

What I want to know is how I would get from my home to my office. I want to know if it’s on a convenient bus or train route. I want to know how far it is in miles. I want to be able to estimate how long it will take during rush hour. If the company allows telecommuting, I want to know what kind of arrangements are made and what I would be expected to do to manage the situation to maximize productivity.

It seems so simple. The best job on the planet will not interest me if it means I must spend several hours a day getting to and from work. I don’t care what it pays. I don’t care what kind of benefits are offered. I don’t care if it’s a "fun environment". I don’t work because I’m bored. I work to support my life. That would be the stuff that happens after my work day ends. Sitting inside a metal box on wheels for several hours a day listening to the news repeat itself is not the way I want to live my life. I’ve been given to understand that I’m not alone in this personal philosophy.

Dress code enforced: Y / N

Because we all know that the difference between a formal dress code and an informal dress code isn’t what the dress code actually says.

Health care: Y / N

I’m not interested in a stack of pamphlets describing benefits. What I want to know is whether or not I can actually get an illness or injury treated without having to pay for it up front myself? I work for a health care provider right now, and can attest that the answer here is no. Kind of sad really.

Office noise level: High / Medium / Low

Tall cubicles. Short cubicles. Offices. Open floor plans. None of that matters as much as the actual noise level. Will I be sitting on teleconferences while someone five feet away is shouting about last night’s game? Do we apologize when the printer disrupts someone’s concentration? We just need to know.

Equipment and facilities investment: High / Medium / Low

Does the printer break once a week? Do all the buttons work on the telephone? Is the network constantly suffering a breakdown? Do you use Lotus Notes or a real email application? How old are the computers? Is there competent technical support? Do the elevators get stuck? When were the carpets last cleaned? Don’t make me drive there to find out.

Lunch philosophy: Casual / Social / What lunch?

Do we pack our lunches for the refrigerator brigade, or conduct informal meetings over sushi? Is indulging in food at noontime considered a sign of weakness, or the ability to perform "self care". Everyone has their own style. It’s nice when it meshes with the office bias.

If only Monster and Dice, and all the other job boards could see how much more useful their services would be if they just enforced a little bit of self-disclosure on the part of the companies posting jobs. I realize that the companies are actually the paying client and the job seekers are nothing but grist for the mill, but this could easily be marketed as another service. We could call it "clarifying your objectives" or " goal definition" - possibly even "reality checking". No more than five completely unrelated specialties could be listed. Experience in a particular tool could not exceed the actual life span of the tool itself. Work environments could not be described as "fun" unless forms of chemical entertainment and free sports cars were officially involved.

And above all - work addresses would be required.

Dreams of a Trophy Employee

2006-08-23T07:30:00.000-07:00

I was recently accused of being a trophy employee.

This would be, as near as I can figure out, someone who appears competent and valuable, but who is actually useless and intended solely for the purposes of beautifying the landscape.

I know it was a joke. At least, I think it was a joke. It was even supposed to be complimentary in some kind of unintentionally left-handed manner.

Unfortunately, it pretty much reflects my own opinion of my current job and performance in the service of said job. So how can I blame my friends for agreeing with me? It’s true. I haven’t done everything I could to ensure that I am an integral and essential part of my work environment. I know I haven’t because I’m still working at the same job, for the same management, in the same company that I was six months ago when I realized that there wasn’t anything even remotely challenging about my job… and there wasn’t going to be anything challenging about my job anytime in the near future. Let’s face it, I work for a senescent company in a stale-but-necessary industry. It’s a company that deep down likes the way it does things, even when the old habits prove inefficient, counter-productive, and unfruitful.

But it’s a paycheck. It may be half of my paycheck in the days when my name was on my door and I was responsible for making new and exciting things happen, but it’s a paycheck. After going paycheck-less for an extended period of time, just the sight of the pay statement makes my palms sweaty and my pupils dilate. There is, for me, something positively sexy about having money in my checking account. Money smells of independence and freedom, power and self-respect.

More importantly, money smells like the roof over my head. My contribution toward the sizeable monthly debt payment we three intrepid homebuyers have taken on in the name of investment and income tax deductions depends on having an income, however uneventful the average day may be.

I like my home. I love having an income. I’d also like to turn this company on a corner and shake it like a Christmas present. I’m not convinced it’s completely moribund. But then, I’m an optimist and (lest we forget) a trophy employee.

But even trophy employees get to dream.

Strange Job Titles - The "Tumor Registrar"

2006-08-16T14:19:00.000-07:00

I love my employer. Really I do. It’s an endless source of amusement. (Not to mention being the fount from which my fiscal requirements are met on a regular basis. At least I hope so. Companies unable to meet payroll are pretty much doomed, as many survivors of the Dot Com Era can attest.) Today, while on my way to the mandatory annual injection to see if I test positive for tuberculosis, I passed a certificate proudly displayed on the wall of a darkened cubicle. It read, "Certified Tumor Registrar".

Umm. Brain whirring. Searching. Processing. Searching.

Nothing.

What the f*&#k?

Now, I have no clue what a Certified Tumor Registrar does, but I do have a fertile imagination (which has been known to get me in trouble from time to time). So there I am, on my way to the nurse’s office, visualizing the conversation between the Certified Tumor Registrar and the tumor.

How [insert my employer’s name here] Treats Tumors

NURSE: Have you ever been registered here or in any other medical facility?

TUMOR: Errr… well, to be honest, no. I meant to get registered, really I did. I understand it’s my duty as a fine growth-oriented tumor to register myself, but I’ve been really really busy. Little tumors running amok. Antibodies to fight. Cells to mutate. You understand don’t you?

NURSE: (soothingly) Of course. Of course.. Still, you have been active for well over six months now and your failure to register is not going to look good on your history.

TUMOR: (shuffling pseudopods) I see. *sigh* I was kind of hoping you could overlook my delinquency. Given my general ignorance of [insert employer name here]’s policy on tumor registration.

NURSE: (regretfully) I don’t think we can do that Ms. Tumor. It’s just not [insert employer name here]’s policy to accommodate ignorance of our procedures. We continue to sustain the delusion that everyone understands how things get done here and permitting variation from our general practice might cause us to question how effectively we really are managing … well, everything.

TUMOR: No deviance?

NURSE: No deviance.

TUMOR: Well, I should be used to it by now. I am a tumor after all. Could you just point me to the nearest exit?

NURSE: Thank you for your understanding. We appreciate your cooperation Ms. Tumor. Please have a pleasant metastases.

This is the kind of thing my brain gets up to when there’s nothing more interesting going on at work.

Termite Tenting

2006-08-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

We have unwelcome guests. They’re the kind of guests who consume everything edible in the house and fail to clean their gobs of toothpaste off the sink. Of course ours weren’t invited, but then, sometimes the two-legged variety aren’t either. They just show up one day sending the household into an uproar and requiring people to give up their beds until someone can figure out a reasonably polite way to get them to move along.

We have termites. This in spite of the fact that the whole building was tented and fumigated less than a year ago. It’s disconcerting it is: the idea that busy little insects are hollowing out the timbers supporting your extremely expensive piece of pseudo-real estate.

For those of you who haven’t experienced the fun of having your domicile tented for termites, it works something like this. Fumigators come by a week or so before the actual event and hand you large plastic bags. They explain that you must vacate the premises for a minimum of three days. Now of course, they don’t have the tent filled with poison gas for three days. They only fill it with poison gas on the first day, then they pump out the poisons (into the local environment I believe) and circulate "fresh" air into the building for the next two days. The cute guy from the fumigation company said that we should double bag everything edible, and anything that you would consume by mouth, like vitamins and toothpaste. Not lipstick though, because "you don’t actually ingest it".

Apparently Cute Fumigator Guy has never worn lipstick himself. I didn’t think so. He doesn’t look like the type to have a pair of size 12 patent leather pumps in the back of his closet. That’s not to say he wouldn’t look lovely in a pair of size 12 patent leather pumps, but it just doesn’t seem like it would be his style. Naturalizer. That’s more his style. Something in a very low heel with arch supports. And no sequins. Definitely no sequins. More of a Mary Chapin Carpenter than a Madonna.

But I digress.

We’re supposed to double bag all the food and other consumables, make arrangements for the pets to stay elsewhere for three (or more accurately, four) days and remove all the plants. This is due to the fact that they also pump tear gas in with the other fun poisons used to actually kill the termites, and it’s the tear gas that kills the plants.

Sure. Why not?

Well, I can tell you why not. We have a frikking forest in the living room. Large plants. Pots two feet in diameter. Eight foot fir trees. I kid you not. One of my roommates has the large economy size version of a green thumb. Ordinarily this is a lovely thing. Extra oxygen. Lots of foliage. Very soothing.

But not when they have to be moved out, then back in. I too have my share of viney, leafy, spiney things. Succulents on the roof. Vines on top of the furnishings. Just enough for accents. Still… moving them all to another venue is not going to be a good time.

On the other hand, if it’s a choice between moving the plants and keeping the termites. I’ll move the plants. No problem. Really. Not complaining at all. Not even complaining about having to stay at my in-laws for three nights. Really. Grateful I am.

Really.

No. Really. I am.

Noise Pollution in an Age of Too Much Everything

2006-08-09T08:10:00.000-07:00

In a Wired magazine interview, USC Professor Bart Kosko (and not-incidentally holder of degrees in electrical engineering, economics, philosophy, law and mathematics) commented, "With spam filters and digital audio and high definition TV, our signal-to-noise ratios are getting remarkably better. It’s odd, then, that our society just keeps getting noisier. " Now, whether this is backed up by research, a study or is merely Mr. Kosko’s somewhat informed opinion, I’m inclined to agree with him.

What I don’t understand is the lack of curiosity on the matter. This may be Mr. Kosko’s actual position (doubtful), the journalistic presentation (possible), or the editorial snipping of content they deemed irrelevant, uninteresting, or… dangerous to the position of the editor or Wired (most probable). I don’t know. All I know is that this little side bar piece did very little to elucidate the subject in its larger form and for that I’m inclined to blame Mr. Kosko and his interview. It’s unfair, but it’s Wired’s fault, not the reader. They set him up. I’m just following along.

Instead of focusing on the sources of added noise in modern life, the professor claims that it is good for us. It strengthens the mind. Unfortunately his premise that noise forces us to develop our powers of concentration goes just so far to convince me there’s anything to the idea. I don’t know about you, but the last time someone told me something was "good for me", I folded it in a napkin and fed it to the dog.

Now, while I lack the vast array of degrees and accomplishments Mr. Kosko has acquired over a lifetime spent savoring the pleasures of academia, I’d like to put forth a premise of my own:

Like lobsters in a pot, most people are clueless. They’re not even aware of the rising tide of noise (acoustic, visual and digital) cramming their mental closets like a flock of old shoes. People who do notice are considered neo-luddites, poor sports, and fun-spoiling old farts.

While this may be true, this does not automatically make an increase in general environmental noise a Good Thing. (Mr. Kosko’s opinion notwithstanding.) Going with the status quo is a great way to achieve a certain level of zen consciousness, but meanwhile the hindbrain is getting wacked with a multi-layered two-by-four – and our bodies respond. While we embrace the ceaseless hum of messages, mail, traffic, co-workers and equipment and music, advertisements, and cool restaurant design - this orgy of newer- brighter-faster-better has been shown to increase blood pressure and catecholamine and cortisol concentrations and generally wreak physiological and psychological mayhem above and beyond an impact on our hearing.

Is it possible that we are not physically adapting as quickly as the demands of our machines and social patterns require? And if so, what does that mean? What happens when we overload? Or perhaps more importantly, what happens to those of us who do adapt? Are we then a new branch of the tree? A different kind of homo sapiens?

This is the kind of stuff that keeps me awake in the afternoon, when I should be napping at my desk.

So it’s a noisier world. Noiser in every way. So what if this stresses us out at a subliminal level? What are we going to do about it? Especially if most of us aren’t even aware that all this flashing-plinking-phosphorescent-dancingboobies-bells-and-whistles-and-gothrock surrounding us every moment is bothering us.

Resign?

We could insist on noise-free (or at the very least, noise reduced) zones. We could insist that fitness clubs turn off that endless cacophony they run over their loud speakers. Most people have personal music players anyway. Or they could provide outlets for XM radio access and let people bring in their own headphones. We could insist stores turn off the Muzak, program the digital cash register not to play a sound when a sale is tallied, and encourage indoor voices like our parents did. We could walk softly, honk our horns less, replace sirens with flashing lights, and ban billboards from our cities. We could even resort to dire and repressive measures like banning the unsolicited distribution of advertising. Telemarketing, email and all that dead-tree spam that fills our mail box every day would be a thing of our dark and rustic past.

Unthinkable.

Less advertising means less spending. Less spending means more saving and decreased demand for things we don’t need. Lower demand means fewer sales. Fewer sales means fewer jobs, and/or pay cuts. Of course, since we’re spending less, we need less money and because we’re saving more, the money we do have is earning more money. If all this obscene economic virtue continued the upward spiral of inflation might actually … what? I don’t know. Stop?

Of course lots of people with a collection of number 02 pencils and a profound understanding of spread sheet formulae believe this would lead to Very Bad Things. They toss around phrases like Recession!, Economic Downturn, Decline of Modern Civilization and Love at the Five and Dime. (oh wait, that’s another blog). Worse, first world society as we know it today would come to a grinding halt. How much fun would it be to have a party without fabulous new clothes, jewelry and boyfriends to show off? How would we know we’re happy if we don’t have external sources describing the state-of-happiness and showing us what we need in order to get there? What would we have to talk about if we didn’t have anything new to show for the passage of time?

As usual, I have no point. This is just another one of those pre-apocalyptic under-informed-pseudo-nostalgiac rants about the possibility of social change and all the implications thereof. I have no idea what would happen if the American Cult-of-Superficiality culture actually got all newagegreenzonenewwaveethicalconsciousness on us. Would the condition most of us recognize as "happiness" increase? Or would there be a whole new set of issues and emotional dramas waiting over the Real & Simple hillside? Why would the majority want to sample an alternative to the twin joys of Shopping and Discarding? It’s working so well for us. It’s not like we’re facing the loss of everything that inexpensive private transportation offers us today. It’s not like the air, water and soil are becoming progressively less hospitable to human life.

Oh wait. Yes. That’s exactly what it’s like. We're fouling the proverbial nest and we Don't Want To Think About It. To avoid thinking about it, we distract ourselves. We accept more lights, words, notifications, jokes, pyramid schemes, background noises, foreground noise, lousy music, loud music, and anything else that blocks our ability to sit still and listen to the small quiet voice in the middle of ourselves. We're headed for an ecological and economical cliff, and we’re pumping the loudest possible sound track through our monitors so we can go on pretending it won't happen.

Mankind as a species? Not so bright.

Screwing America - Partisan Politics in the 21st Century

2006-08-04T10:51:00.000-07:00

Today’s news is all about the new Republican bill to raise the minimum wage, plus all kinds of other goodies designed to make Democrats drool and surrender their vote. Unfortunately it also included a healthy cut to the estate (death) tax. One Republican lawmaker was even quoted (anonymously of course) as saying something to the effect of, "We’ve made this irresistable.".

Or … as it turns out, not. Apparently the Democrats currently in office aren’t quite as stupid as the Republicans want to believe.

Whenever I see a bill that will cost the general public money to implement, and which sucks money out of the Federal treasury which budget makers everywhere were counting on to pay off debt and fund programs, I can’t help but wonder what goes through the heads of the people writing it. I mean, it has to be pretty delusional. I’m just curious as to how delusional.

There’s mildly delusional; "This won’t have much of an economic impact."

And there’s In-Dire-Need-of-Pharmaceutical-Intervention, "This is really good for America, I’m such a patriot the President should award me a medal. " (complete with Mitty-esque fantasy of said ceremony)

I’d like to believe that this bill was largely crafted by people doing their master’s bidding.

After all, "My boss told me to do it." is a much better excuse than, "I have honestly given no consideration to the repercussions of the bill, and couldn’t care less as long as it wins me another term in office.." A.K.A. the guy with the fewest actual scruples (all talk of good Christian morality aside) and most confident in his spin-meister’s skills.

In the endless struggle between Republicans and Democrats, I can’t help but wonder from time to time, what this whole epic tug-of-war is really all about.

In theory, all those legally elected officials want to impress the people that voted them into office by getting laws passed that conform to local values, reflect local priorities, and achieve local objectives. A few foresighted politicians actually operate from a platform that grants at least token importance to larger and longer term issues like the degradation of our ecology, human rights, and the post fossil fuel society.

Personally, I think the ability to consider a future that extends beyond the current campaign cycle should be a minimum criteria to running for office. Of course, the general public would have to enforce this criteria, and not everyone agrees with my priorities.

I hate it when that happens.

But it does. In fact, it happens to all of us. We’re not clones and we do disagree on what is important, and what kind of laws and behaviors threaten what we consider important. This is why we have the democratic process – to arrive at decisions that serve the greatest good. In theory.

In practice, what we seem to have are opposing teams jockeying for the next Big Win. Laws are being drafted not because they’re sound well-considered public policy that serves the good of most Americans , but because there is such a massive divide in value systems that the only way to get any bill passed into law is to bribe the other party. What happened to the idea of governance by men and women of good will, compassionate values, the intellectual capacity to understand that not all short term gains are a good idea, and the ability to articulate why an idea will result in long term hazards? How have Americans been persuaded so routinely to vote for politicians that are completely disinterested in anything but supporting their party?

Instead of a body of reasonably rational, smart adults running the country, we seem to have a poorly monitored playground in which a red gang and a blue gang try to undermine one another's efforts in order to gain the upper hand. In short, both parties appear to be more concerned with winning than with understanding the issues on the table and the impact of various solutions – to all Americans, to the planet, and to future generations.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of politicians who seem incapable of considering the merits of legislation in a non-partisan manner. There’s an old saying that is particularly valid here: There is no "them". There is only "us" What will it take for Americans to realize that by engaging in increasingly combative partisan behavior, we are only hurting ourselves, our country, and our future.

Drug Benefits, Part D and the Crippled Medicare Modernization Act

2006-08-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

Don't you love how policy wonks consistently overlook the most obvious explanation for public behavior? Seniors are opting out of the flimsy excuse for drug coverage the Medicare Modernization Act (MMA) of 2003 offers, by the Bingo Hall-ful.

This seems to come as a surprise to people who just plain oughta know better.

For those folks playing at home, Bush's MMA legislation offers no actual drug coverage to most Americans covered under Medicare health coverage. It's a discount program. So Grandma will pay less for the heart and incontinence medications she's already taking. Terrific... if she can currently afford the drugs. Unfortunately, prior to 2006 (when the MMA drug discount came into effect) a lot of seniors have been forced to make health care decisions with serious repercussions - like which drug to buy given a limited amount of money. If you can't afford to buy a drug, it doesn't matter whether it's $100 a month, or $80 a month. It's still out of reach.

In theory, low income seniors receive an additional $600 subsidy, pay no additional premiums, and have a reduced co-payment. Sure. If Grandma can survive on a little more than $13,000 a year, she might actually benefit from the coverage.

Not too surprisingly, most people with limited incomes aren't opting to pay for the drug benefit. This concerns the government because the more people who participate in the program, the more people are paying to support the program... and the less it has to be subsidized from tax payer dollars currently allocated to pay for *cough* someone's war.

Now, let’s review this from the perspective of a senior citizen in these United States.

You don't take any drugs and you’re looking at paying for coverage which you may (or may not) need in the near or not-so-near future.

You’re already taking medication and paying for it out of your pocket, which means
A) your drugs are inexpensive, or

B) you’re one of the fortunate retirees who are living on an annual income that is nowhere near the poverty line.

You can’t afford to take the medication prescribed.

In category one you have people who don’t trust doctors, pharmaceuticals, or anything smelling too redolently of non-consumable alcohol. You also have the aging healthy, who… if they’re 65 and older, and don’t have a personal acquaintance with maintenance drugs of any kind, aren’t likely to be convinced anytime soon that their health is going to fail them gradually, requiring chemical maintenance. They see themselves dropping dead of a heart attack while chopping wood, or getting run over by a motorist while out for their morning run. In fact, most of this group has a superstituious fear of western medicine, fearing that to surrender to it leads to death. They don’t need Xanax, chest x-rays, and catheters thank you very much. Given the statistics on errors in pharmaceutical administration and health care, they may not be as crazy as we’d like to think.

Category two is comprised largely of people who automatically signed up for the drug discount because it represented a way to protect their current income.

Category three is the group of people the government honestly believes they’re going to be able to persuade to sign up for Medicare drug coverage. They believe that blind ignorance and general stupidity are the reason these little old ladies and men haven’t rushed in to sacrifice a slice of their monthly retirement check. They believe this because government policy is generally developed by people with a less-than-current acquaintance with poverty.

These are people who would say something like, "We speculate that this [lack of enrollment in the drug benefit program] arises because of constraints or perceptions that make it difficult for people in these groups [elderly poor and those lacking college degrees] to account for future benefits"

Um… yeah. They can ill afford to pay for the insurance. The insurance is supposed to help them buy drugs they're not taking right now because they're too expensive. Plus, they have to make the assumption that their health is going to deteriorate so significantly that they must find a way to obtain the prescription, or die.

Getting those enrollment forms may be more difficult than the analysts predict. Just a hunch.

The decoupling of drug coverage and health coverage for Medicare insureds is the primary and fatal flaw in the MMA drug coverage legislation. When you try to pretend that drugs will not regularly and routinely form an integral part of a patient’s treatment, you set yourself up for asynchronous benefit administration. Sometimes treatment is covered, but the prescription is not. Sometimes a regular prescription is covered, but the therapy is not. Sometimes the drug is denied while the treatments continue and the patient has to appeal – a time-consuming process which may require the patient to pay up front beyond their financial ability to do so. Meanwhile the patient’s treatment suffers, with the unhappy parallel effect of reduced effectiveness – which may require an extension of treatment, or precipitate a relapse.

The very fact that there is a Part A, Part B, Part C and now a Part D encourages the kind of red tape, inefficiency, excessive administrative costs and lack of common sense for which Medicare has become so well known. (for the curious, Part C is an alternate to Part A plus Part B).

So Medicare Part D is a poorly planned benefit tacked onto several already incomprehensible benefit packages, designed to help the confused, ailing and disabled elderly.

The only consolation here is that everyone responsible for the Medicare Modernization Act will one day have to submit claims and obtain health care under the rules and benefits they designed.

And with that I will share one last gem,

When Medicare was passed in 1965, it was also hotly contested and debated, said Leslie Norwalk, deputy administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Over time, people have grown to love their Medicare program, and I suspect people will grow to love their drug benefit. It just may take a while for the political waters to calm.

Love their Medicare program? What is she smoking? ... and is it covered by Part D? Ms. Norwalk clearly mistakes resignation and practicality for something warmer. It makes you wonder about her home life, doesn’t it?

Old Neighborhoods, New Values

2006-07-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

Gentrification. It’s an interesting concept, isn’t it? Living in a neighborhood that is periodically accused of being gentrified, I have a window onto the gritty realities behind that term – so beloved of realtors and survivors of urban decay.

It’s a lot more than park benches and paint jobs.

Wikipedia defines "gentrification" as a process in which low-cost, deteriorated neighborhoods experience urban restoration and an increase in property values, along with an influx of wealthier residents who displace the neighborhood's original inhabitants.

Low cost? In Los Angeles? Don’t make me laugh. Deteriorated? Now that we have: large stretches of construction lacking paint, functional plumbing, or anything resembling a landscape plan. For sale at prices affordable only to individuals with a six figure income.

While gentrification is primarily an urban phenomenon, it does on occasion descend upon ex-towns absorbed by urban sprawl and old support districts tacked onto commercial inner cities. It’s all part of the lifecycle of neighborhoods. At one point they’re all new and spotless. Whether they age gracefully or not depends primarily on how much money was invested in the original construction – first because affluence tends to maintain, both from habit and because the cash is on hand. Secondly, expensive materials last longer and as they lapse into vintage-dom, and finally antique-hood, are more likely to be prized and protected simply for their quality.

So if you’re building a new home, look around and notice whether the materials being used in your home and your neighbors' looks more likely to become an heirloom, or landfill. Are you contributing to history, or the sucking vacuum of planned obsolescence and the consumption lifestyle?

Although inner cities have been the most likely candidates in decades past, this does seem to be changing. Take my neighborhood for example. There is, in point of fact, not much to "restore". When it was built, it was middle income rental housing, with a fringe of functional commercial zoning. That’s it. The intervening years appear to have offered no bursts of prosperity: not if the architecture is anything to go by. Here we have boxes. Boxes in which to live. Boxes in which to house merchandise until someone purchases it. Boxes from which to practice one’s trade. It’s not a neighborhood of cornices, undiscovered hardwood floors, or beveled glass.

It is however, a neighborhood: one with residences, restaurants, a post office, grocery store, dry cleaners, a bank, and even our own little hardware store. This, I am convinced, is the most important criteria for the resuscitation of any aging outpost of modern man. It must offer a sense of community, of self-sufficiency, and of singular identity: which our neighborhood, for all its smelly bars and junk stores, most definitely has. Don’t get me wrong, my neighborhood isn’t just dried sperm, malt liquor and mothballs. The ocean is less than three miles to the west, guaranteeing balmy weather year round. There are three major freeways wrapped around the area. The main roads are large enough to convey a significant amount of traffic, and we boast not just a new post office, but a new library and fire station. Oddly enough the library and fire station are lofty post-modern structures with exotic paint jobs, tinted glass, and high ceilings – fitting into the neighborhood like a magenta Mohawk on a very old poodle.

Most importantly (in Los Angeles at least), it is a run down little pocket surrounded by far more affluent neighborhoods. It is, in short, the cheapest property to be found in one of the most expensive 5 square miles in the United States.

This, is one reason for the encroachment of healing centers, childcare boutiques, gift shops and the ubiquitous haute-urbane watering hole of our era – a not-Starbucks-coffee shop. What was once a slightly over-priced, beach-proximate retreat for working stiffs servicing the health and well-being of the mansions, lofts, and beach houses of Venice, Marina del Rey and Santa Monica - is now a bargain and as everyone knows, gentrification is all about money. Well, cleanliness and money. Cleanliness is both a requirement for, and a byproduct of gentrification. But you don’t get cleanliness without money… or time and a cultural obsessive-compulsive streak several kilometers thick - like (for example) the Swiss.

Although it’s been argued that the creative class (artists, musicians, young architects and the like) are responsible for the first stages of gentrification, I question this assumption. I think the presence of the creative class is largely coincidental. Artists are drawn to places where the rent is cheap. Period. Their general lack of day jobs, children and similar accoutrements of the more traditional life, makes it feasible to live in locations where the services are unpredictable, and access to stores is limited. While most of us throw money at problems, the creative class resorts to time, ingenuity, and a general contempt for predictability and convenience.

So the pre-cursor to gentrification is often an eclectic hodgepodge of unkempt and optimistic-but-underfunded. Artists tend to renovate on their own schedule, and according to each individual’s distinctive aesthetic – making for interesting neighborhood upgrades like political graffitti, hand-painted signage, and community gardens featuring sculpture composed of dozens of stolen shopping carts. Personally, I rather like the look, but in general it has a limited impact on property values.

Property values increase in leaps and bounds when an inexpensive area is inundated by creative types, developers, and young couples (of the hetero and homo type) who have accrued enough cash to invest – either in the roof over their head, or by taking a risk that that bargain basement property can be buffed and polished into a revenue generator. Just as you can’t have gentrification without money, you must have the motivating factor of greed. (More generously stated, the desire to make intelligent financial decisions that will lead to a more prosperous future.) Either way, you have to have cash, and the hunger to make more cash with the cash at hand.

Which leads me to the third reason a neighborhood is gentrified: determination. A better term might be "charisma". Basically, a neighborhood begins the slow climb up the economic scale from somewhere below tolerable to hot-trendy-pricey because someone has decided it will. This is usually because they’re long-time residents or because they’ve sunk their wad into the area, and for that investment to pay off, the area has to improve. These are the people who set up neighborhood watches, nag the city into shutting down crack houses and pave streets, and chase prostitutes and street punks into new havens for mischief. They create neighborhood associations, gathering merchants and sundry interested parties into coalitions that promote change. A few restaurants and stores add a coat of paint, start regularly updating their window displays and sweeping the sidewalk. Economic competition forces surrounding merchants to follow suit. A small amount of money has been invested, and yet the neighborhood is already cleaner. People living in the area notice the window displays and discover the convenience of running out to a store half a block away for last minute gifts, cards, and the odd bottle of dinner party wine. The coffee shop draws in a regular crowd of early morning commuters, lovers-on-the-outs, and friends just hanging out. This is supplemented by strangers to the neighborhood, attracted to the not-a-Starbucks allure and the scent of handmade empanadas. They tell friends, who tell friends, who tell friends.

And buzz happens.

Realtors are a major factor in buzz generation. So are single twenty-somethings in their endless search for the next hot place to get drunk and find mates (not necessarily in that order). An attractive bar liberally sprinkled with sexy bartenders is a mandatory element to the gentrification process. So is a great dinner restaurant. More are better, but at least one is a minimum requirement.

While it seems probable that my neighborhood is going to "pop" (a term I loathe, reminiscent as it is of acne, blisters dot.com bubbles and other ailments) I’m not convinced it’s doing so in the immediate future. Why?

Well, there are a couple of factors holding it back.

1) an abundance of uninteresting low-income rental units in the immediate area
2) a lack of cleanliness
3) a scarcity of local investors. Most of the people who actually do own property in the area are either absentee, or actually like the thrift-store-and-porno motif
4) lack of an upscale restaurant or bar

In short, the "shithole" bar and the B grade restaurant are as good as we get. The grafitti, trash strewn alleys, and cheap signage sends a very clear message that the people living here don’t care, inviting more of the same. The multitude of apartment buildings in the area are never going to be anything more than low income housing because they weren’t built to be anything else. They’re small, poorly insulated, and constructed of the cheapest materials available at the time. They have minimal upside potential as rentals, and risky upside potential as condominiums. Worse, they presently represent a concentration of a particular ethnicity. It’s not a problem, but it does present a neighborhood identity that is contrary to the homogeneity of a gentrified urban area.

Of course, there is some hope. One of the apartment buildings could be sold to a couple of gay men, who would upgrade the construction, refine the exterior design, and encourage more gay men to rent units in the building. I may be prejudiced, but gay men are a consistent factor in every gentrified neighborhood I’ve ever seen. They move in, work like dogs, and pour money into anything they deem interesting enough to salvage and update. Their taste is generally refined, and the sub-culture contains enough of the ego-driven "keeping up with the joneses" factor to keep them working to make wherever they are, just a tiny bit better.

Regardless of what happens in the near future, I’m happy to live where I live. It may pop. It may not. Right now it’s just my home. That’s motivation enough for me to pick up the empty beer cans and chip bags, plant a garden, and paint over the grafitti. It would be great if that was enough for everyone, but I'll go on doing my bit anyhow. Who knows? It might make a difference.

Recalls and Outrage (Hummers - Part II)

2006-07-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

Apparently I was wrong when I said there wasn't a recall in an earlier blog on the 2003-2004 H2 Hummers.

Very, very wrong.

Oddly enough, not every web site that claims to list motor vehicle recalls indicates the H2 recalls I found on Edmunds and Lemonauto.com. Lacking the necessary umbrella policy for slander suits and such I won’t even speculate as to the reasons therefore.

None of the recalls listed however, have anything to do with the untimely loss of ones' wheel.

Brakes? Yes. Steering? Yep. Reduced visibility due to failure of windshield wiper blades? You betcha. Ability to leave 6,000 pounds of oversizeduglyassedmotorvehicle in drive, or better yet, neutral when removing the key? Check!

It just gets better and better doesn’t it?

In a country where several thousand much loved electric automobiles are crushed and dumped in the desert, the very existence of Hummers offends my sensibilities. The fact they’re actively on the roads is purely inflammatory. Every time I see one of those gas-sucking visually-offensive crimes against modern engineering I feel a wistful urge to revoke the rights of the driver’s progeny to attend public school. Why waste the space? This person clearly represents a rapidly evaporating tidewater in the great gene pool of life.

No, I’m sorry. There is no defense. I cannot conceive of an explanation that would serve to justify driving one of those metal monstrosities, and "But they’re so much fun to drive." is an outrage against humanity. I’m not generally an advocate of legislation governing behavior that is economically self-defeating. Really I’m not. It’s a waste of our lawmaker’s time and energy. But I could be persuaded of the need to outlaw Hummers.

It wouldn’t even take much talking.

And the News Today - NPR and Power

2006-07-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

Listening to the news is not healthy for me. My blood pressure goes up. I laugh at inappropriate times. Worse, I ask questions. It seems to me that what gets published as "news" is only a minor subset of the truth, carefully crafted to present the issues according to the view of the reporter.

Oh wait. That would be biased reporting. On NPR? I shudder in my Birkenstocks.

On the other hand, the alternative is to assume that some of the people responsible for governing, um… the world, are just plain stupid. What is really distressing is the possibility that both are true. National Public Radio reports the "facts" according to it’s own particular bias, and the world is being run into the ground by raving lunatics and completeanduttermorons.

The Privileges of Power
The Getty Museum has agreed to return two antiquities to which the Getty owns dubious title to Greece. (Out of fifty in question. That’s 4% of all the allegedly stolen goods. The rest aren’t mentioned in this article. Is it just me or do you smell a token gesture? )

The Power of a Good Story
Ralph Horowitz, one time owner of the 14 acres that eventually became known as the South Central Community Garden, is under fire for the money he received in this years’ sale of the property for development. Outraged immigrants that farmed plots in the community garden feel Horowitz has no right to the money. (Oddly enough the whole complicated fact that the city acquired the property in the early eighties from nine private landowners, of which Horowitz and his partner owned the largest share, in order to build a trash incineration plant… and that Horowitz was eventually able to force the city to re-sell the property back to him… and that Horowitz was paying property taxes and general maintenance for the property to a tune of $30,000 a month out of his own pocket…well, all that is lost in the mists of time… not to mention the fact that it’s a damned inconvenient set of details if you’re trying to make this a black and white case of capitalistic greed versus earnest selfless hard-working gardeners.

Ooops. Did I say that out loud?

I'm not necessarily on Mr. Horowitz's side. It sounds like there was enough name calling, mud slinging and general hostility on both sides of that negotiation table to resemble the Middle East So-Called-Peace-Talks. Still and all, it's so blatantly obvious that NPR wants to take the side of the farmers that I have to point out the other side of the story. In the interest of fairness. Truth. Justice. A right to a fair hearing. You know... the American Way?

Or has George Bush made us all so ashamed of being Americans that we're willing to turn our backs on everything that made this country a source of pride to it's citizens?)

Magical Thinking by those in Power
Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice says that a return of the Palestine – Israel situation to earlier status quo is unacceptable. (Acceptable? No. Probable. Yep. Also, one might add, a damned sight better than all-out war ... though obviously Condee and I are not on the same page about that.)

The Power of Pregnancy?
The Senate has approved a bill prohibiting the transport of a minor across state lines for the purpose of obtaining an abortion. The bill was sponsored by Nevada Republican John Ensign, who said it is meant to increase the "effectiveness of state laws designed to protect parents and their young daughters from the health and safety risks associated with secret abortions." Lawmakers also defeated a proposal to provide federal funds for sex-education courses and abstinence programs, offered as potential ways to avoid teen pregnancies. (So basically, we don’t want to prevent teenage pregnancies and we don’t want to stop teenagers from having babies. The obvious question here is, "What is it about teenage pregnancy that makes so many people hot?" - and why are parents all over America so blissfully oblivious to the sub-text of all this happy law-making? )

Power Napping
Research shows a 15-40 minute afternoon nap improves moods, mental acuity, and productivity. (Or so claims NPR. - The napping public everywhere feels vindicated and my personal theory about the relationship between napping and world peace gains the faintest glimmer of legitimacy.)

In related sidebars, Yard Metals offers a variety of health-promoting, stress-reducing benefits to its 650 workers that include a napping room, and napping boutique, "Metronaps" provides bankers, brokers, cops and anyone else on Wall Street who can afford the $14 fee with a quiet place to catch up on the sleep they’re not getting at night. (Which leads one to ask, "Is napping the new BMW?")

The American Lifestyle

2006-07-25T13:00:00.000-07:00

The president of our neighborhood association tells us he wants to take over the “shit hole” bar across the street and establish a ritzier wine and martini venue. He’d like to reduce the number of junk stores, and promote a couple of decent restaurants within the three block area radiating out from his property on a busy Los Angeles thoroughfare. He scoffs at people who argue over decisions like the color of the bus signs, and claims that his brainchild, a small farmers’ market will make the area “pop”. He wants this to be a place where people feel comfortable walking from local coffee shop to gift store, with a stop at the Post Office on the way home.

I would take him a lot more seriously if I hadn’t seen him tossing an empty beer can out the window of his gigantic shiny new pickup truck.

When I suggest comparisons to a nearby neighborhood that has been gentrified all out of recognition to the kids who grew up there, he disagrees vehemently. “No! Not like that. I want to retain the flavor of the neighborhood.”

This too I might take more seriously if he didn’t simultaneously comment on the predominance of a specific ethnicity, and the neighborhood’s signature-but-less-than-immaculate restaurant. On one hand he wants to clean up the area where he has chosen to invest his money. On the other hand, he waxes nostalgic for the days when crack cocaine could be purchased on the street corner.

If you ask me, this is a person struggling with his value system.

I’m not judging the man. It’s not worth the bother. He’s ordinary: indistinguishable from the rest of us in our modern culture of hypocrisy-laden-spirituality and myopic priorities.

I’ve noticed that it’s much easier to recognize the signs in someone else’s coffee grounds.

Consider the fact that most Americans sympathize with people who have an illegal immigrant taking care of their children, but can’t bear to think through the pros and cons of licensing them to drive a car in the U.S. Consider the very fact that we have so many “illegal” immigrants that we have to develop programs and assign funding to manage all the administrative and humanitarian issues associated with the undocumented influx.

We advocate use of biodegradable soap, newspaper recycling, and organic produce, while driving an automobile to the gym. Most of our vacations revolve around consuming large quantities of alcohol and gasoline, while we sign petitions and push for laws to make our roads safer and cleaner and healthier.

Heaven save us from what we believe we want!

We refuse to accept the fact that there are unsafe, unhealthy, filthy things that bring us pleasure. We justify or even ignore our own habits while criticizing other people for theirs. Church socials across America are crammed with people consuming unhealthy volumes of salt, fat, nitrates, and refined sugar while piously criticizing the beer drinker at the picnic table across the green. Pot smokers claim their habit doesn’t damage the lungs like cigarette smoking does. Winos pity the urban professional shackled to their mindless jobs and mortgage. There are pet owners complaining about the stench of cigars and incense, and cigarette smokers whining about the stench of cat piss in the alley way.

I know of no American willing to sacrifice his or her pleasures and priorities because someone else considers them addictions, indulgences, and generally extrinsic to the greater good. No doubt there exist a few out there who have been raised, trained, or otherwise formed in such a way as to think past his/her immediate wants. I just haven’t met them. We’re Americans. We’re not built that way. We are a culture committed to the pursuit of individual happiness – and this conviction that the empowered individual was the most stable unit on which to found a society, has served us – as a country, reasonably well.

At least, the argument could be made for that.

It simply did not occur to our founding fathers to leaven this pursuit of happiness with consideration for a larger, communal good. They were escaping that very prison – submission to the good of the village, the society, the kingdom. The rights of the individual had been subordinated too long.

And so we have a country founded on an unspoken conviction that it is impossible to pursue personal gratification while serving the larger good of the planet, the species, the community. Oh sure, we give it lip service, but the idea that one not only could, but should walk to work, church, the grocery store, the dry cleaner, and 99% of our other personal destinations has been so eradicated from our thinking that just imagining a world where that is possible is beyond our ability. Small wonder we don’t design our shopping districts, neighborhoods, and business centers with this possibility in mind.

Why? Obviously, it’s impractical. Arrange our lives so that our extended families and careers were located in close physical proximity to our dwelling of choice? What an absurd notion. How many of us could be happy trapped in the streets of our childhood? How could we achieve career satisfaction if we were stuck working at whatever employment was available within a few miles of our house? Could we even afford to live in the home we have right now if we had to find a job within easy reach of our two legs?

It is, very much indeed, the chicken-and-egg conundrum without even the clear cut sense of what is most desirable. Perhaps we gain something as a culture or a species from this new willingness to break away from the known and predictable, from this relatively new willingness to take risks with our careers, our living arrangements, our very lives.

This is all very blahblahblahblah. I have no point… simply a series of random thoughts floating through my head. I personally would love to eliminate driving from my daily life. I don’t mind the occasional drive to the countryside or the outlet mall, but in general, I’d be content to ride a clean, regularly running bus to local places of interest, and walk everywhere else. This would, no doubt, have an impact on my personal shopping habits. After all, one is a lot less likely to bring home impulse purchases when you have to haul them in a string bag on the cross-town bus. I’m certain I’d be a lot less likely to buy in bulk or stock up. Not such a bad thing really.

I’d love to live within walking or at least biking distance from my job. In fact, as a “knowledge worker”, I could very easily use my existing home network, multi-function printer/fax/copier and wireless phone (with headset) to conduct the teleconferences and email conversations I conduct today from a desk 16 miles away from the home for which I pay more than 50% of my monthly net income. It would save my employer and me money. I’ve done it before. I would miss lunch with my associates, but then I usually go to the gym anyhow.

Speaking of gyms, would I need one if I carried my groceries several blocks and walked everywhere?

Our culture is dedicated to the automobile – the purchase and maintenance thereof, and the consumption of gasoline. This is true in spite of the certain knowledge that this way of living cannot be sustained. The planet will run out of easily refinable metals and crude oil within the foreseeable future. Yet we don’t seem to be planning for a world in which these things are not affordable, accessible… acceptable. This is the curse of modern society: short-sightedness. Even when we know that what we choose is wrong for us, harmful to our children, potentially detrimental to the survival of our species – we do it anyhow. We do it because everyone else is doing it. We do it because it seems futile to take positive action when the result is hardship on our part with no discernable benefit.

I can’t help but wonder what the world would look like if we all walked and talked our beliefs. Every day. Every minute. If we believe the planet is gradually being saturated in toxins, what would we have to stop using in order to stop the process? If we believe our grandchildren will not have sophisticated health care because of today’s consumption practices, what would we refuse to buy?

What if it all hinges on me? What would I do differently if my decision made all the difference? It’s certainly something to think about. For all of us.

Because it does: the future hinges on what each of us chooses to do… individually.

That’s an uncomfortable thought. I keep trying to find an ending to this endless blog that gives me some hope that it will all work out. What I’m realizing is that I don’t think it will work out. Either I (and billions of other human beings) will have to give up things we want to have, want to do… or the future of this planet and our species is in jeopardy. Not a very uplifting conclusion for this hot and sunny Tuesday afternoon.

Which reminds me of a t-shirt someone was wearing the other day: Global Warming: Fun at First

Hummers: Bad Joke or a Disaster Waiting to Happen?

2006-07-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

Is this new news? I swear I heard a reference on NPR this morning (July 21st, 2006) to a Hummer design defect that results in a wheel falling off. It made me snarf. Seriously. Faux no-caf coffee up my nose and onto the steering wheel. The wild irony of this cannot possibly be lost on anyone. Here you have some poor soul (obviously not literally), buying a motor vehicle designed to give him or her a feeling of invulnerability. Sure they get 6MPG. Sure they’re a pain in the posterior region to park. Sure they’re ugly and simply not designed for ferrying the kids to soccer practice. But they’re built for War! Driving one will keep me safe.

Apparently not. The disappointment must be shattering. Perhaps now all those Hummer owners will return to their senses and dump those oversized mobile road warts like the mechanical equivalent of a broken mirror they are. Unlikely, but a woman can dream.

Sweeping the Net for more, all I can find are some 2004 references. How could I possibly have missed this?

December 7, 2004

Federal regulators investigating Hummer H2 after three reports of wheels falling off the vehicle (Three? WTF?! One is bad luck. Two is a coincidence. Three is Recall City. Especially when it’s a defect that sends 3+ tons of metal and high density plastic hurtling into nearby traffic. What? No recall? Why is that?)

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration probes H2s from the 2003 and 2004 model years (not a proctoscopy I’d care to be responsible for)

General Motors states nearly 60,000 of them on the road (the idea of that many psychologically defective drivers on US roads frightens me)

H2 starts at around $50,000, weighs 6,400 pounds and is one of the largest sport-utility vehicles on the road ("No shit?" says anyone whose ever tried to see around one on the highway)

GM says it's cooperating with federal investigators. (they get a choice?)

Okay. Whatever. It’s still funny, even if it didn’t result in a sudden rush of oxygen to the brain of every Hummer owner. Of course, it wouldn’t be funny if it happened next to me on the freeway some fine summer afternoon. Or next to my significant other. Then it would be a tragic disaster. And the 2003 and 2004 models are aging. Every single day. Not all that comforting a thought. Remind me to give Hummers a very wide berth in the future. If it’s going to lose a tire in my vicinity, I want to be well clear when the crunching metal and screeching starts.

Net Neutrality, Greed & Fair Market Politics

2006-07-19T09:51:00.000-07:00

Americans are finally starting to think of access to the Internet like they think of electricity - as an essential. We used to feel the same way about a telephone line. Then came cell phones, and now we have internet telephony with Vonage and Skype. So I suppose Internet access has become the new telephone service: only better (obviously), since the Internet gives us so much more than the ability to chat with mom and call for pizza. What this means is there are finally enough customers to drive the cost per household downward. It happened with dial-up, and it’s happening with broadband (DSL or cable – take your pick). This has been a good thing for everyone, customers saving money, ISPs making money – all of which creates a bigger demand for Internet content. Profits. Bargains. Jobs. Goodness all around.

But this is digital Eden, and we know how that story worked out.

Now that there are so many customers out there, all the nice folks that spend their lives thinking of new ways for you to spend whatever passes for discretionary income in your household, are busy developing cool little peripheral services (think photo albums, file sharing utilities, online bill pay, reminder services, and the like), and creative billing schemes. Everyone has been watching the free online services for years with the intention of figuring out which ones are useful and trendy enough for people to actually shell out money to keep on using. Yahoo has a winner with LaunchCast and quite a few customers are paying a hefty $149.99 a year to hear from the bright folks at MotleyFool.com. Some companies are saving so much money offering online self-service that it’s worth it to them to cover the expenses of developing the content and piping it out to all those fine customers no longer clogging their brick and mortar doorway. Wells Fargo and the United States Postal Service are just a few examples there.

Which brings us to “Net Neutrality” and why people who used to blanch and shudder at the idea of government legislation of the Internet are now advocating precisely that.

I’ll boil it down for those of you who find detailed analyses of anything technological or political a potent anodyne for insomnia.

The people who build and maintain the roads want to charge some drivers more than others. The extra charges would depend on what the driver is carrying in their trunk or truckbed. Mind you, as any trucker will tell you, this isn’t a new idea. Truckers shell out special taxes to pay for the extra wear and tear from their vehicles.

The folks who build and maintain the “roads” of the Internet are already charging both the trucker, and the customer purchasing merchandise for the same net traffic (what is being “trucked in”). Now that these companies (Cingular, Alcatel, and sundry cable companies) have decided they want to get into the business of selling content as well as maintaining the roads, the cost of using the roads is going to develop a decidedly uneven nature. They'll charge themselves nothing, and guarantee the content flows quickly to everyone. Meanwhile, they'll charge other content providers a hefty sum, plus additional fees to guarantee delivery. They’ll be making money charging tolls to cover road development and maintenance, plus charging consumers for online services, plus charging other content providers (think Amazon.com, Ebay, and the like) extra fees to guarantee their customers get to use the big eight lane data freeways instead of being shunted off onto little dirt road detours. If the content provider is offering a service that competes with the company controlling the roads, we-the-consumer may not even be able to get to it. It's already happening. A few small telephone companies have been blocking Vonage to force customers to keep their old fashioned land lines going.

What the people fighting “net neutrality” legislation want, is to be allowed to go along their merry way, scooping cash out of everyone’s pockets, often several times for the same bits and bytes, and controlling who will get what content.

Net neutrality legislation is designed with the same objectives as laws that protect us from being force-switched from one long distance provider to another without our knowledge. These are laws drafted by committees in the House and Senate with the intention of mandating that internet infrastructure companies (telecommunications, domain name registrars, cable companies, internet service providers, and any other businesses dipping their paw into the Internet pool of money) treat end customers (including content providers large and small… which means everyone from their own Internet content development divisions to Microsoft Corp to yours truly) with a hefty measure of equality. This is pretty much what we’ve had so far in the history of the Internet, and in my amateur analysis of such things, the level of innovation and the profits being made have been sufficiently healthy to generate more of the same.

So when the alarmists wave the red flags and whine about taxes, invasion of privacy, and preferential treatment of the “big guys”, I have to wonder which briefs they’ve been reading. Or if they’ve been reading them at all. I think they just don’t want the general public to think too hard about what our legally elected representatives are doing. If we did, we might forget how pissed off we are with our “government” for dragging us into wars and trillion dollar debt, and remember that some of those legislators are actively working on our behalf… which is why we um… voted for them in the first place.

Skin Deep - Fashion, Beauty, and Self-Esteem

2006-07-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

A radio review of this summer's popcorn movie, The Devil Wears Prada, grabbed me by the neurochemical connections and I haven't been able to shake it. As an artist, a polemicist, and (in the spirit of full disclosure) a woman who loves a well structured jacket - the whole idea that the fashion industry "epitomizes" something base and superficial in human nature and modern society, stuck in my craw. (Or it would have, if I were a bird.)

I mean, this isn't a comment that would be made about sculpture, or a summer concert series on the Santa Monica pier. No one on National Public Radio disparages the fine arts as a waste of time, resources and attention. Shakespearean productions aren't ridiculed for their lack of relevance to city services and employment rates. Yet this is a mindset that seems to run rampant through a certain segment of the U.S.: a sub-culture I like to refer to as the Too-Smart-To-Care-About-Prada-ites. These are "serious" people who focus on meaningful issues like health care reform, gay marriages, and the price of gasoline. They write letters (not email), read newspapers articles about NAFTA, circulate petitions to save the sperm whale, make charitable contributions to clean up the rain forests somewhere, and strongly agree with the sentiment that fashion, glamour and the entertainment industry in general, are superficial pursuits fit only for the illiterati of America.

Why do they care? What is it about fashion that causes the “Too Smarts” such magisterial heartburn?

Okay, I'll cede the fact that the fashion industry focuses on issues that seem irrelevant to a world facing starvation, violent vendettas, ideological dictatorships, and train wrecks of the non-metaphorical kind. It doesn't even try to address the most pressing human needs of air, clean water, food, safety and protection from the elements.

It does something else. Fashion allows everyone to be creative - even people who claim they can't sing a note, draw a straight line, and have terminal stage fright. Fashion is the wide-open doorway into a world of color and texture and drama many of us have been convinced we're not even qualified to watch from the stands - much less play the game. Art can be confusing and music may be complicated, but everyone needs clothing.

Clothing involves choice... and choice involves judgments, personal priorities, and preferences... and preferences are all about an individual's personal aesthetic... and therein lays the realm of art and beauty.

In all fairness, the reviewer did not say that the pursuit of beauty for the sake of beauty is superficial. He simply said that an industry founded on the pursuit of beauty for the sake of beauty - is superficial. He sneered at Hollywood, the fashion industry, and sniffed dismissively over their superficial value system, and value. I'm filling in the rest of the story from my own stock. This isn't the first time I've heard some random ill-considered comment that betrays an underlying assumption that there are Things of Value, and Things Without Value: two universes with clear borders and easily identified denizens.

Speaking of swimming in the shallow end.

Is it just me, or is there a whiff of sour grapes about the Anti-Superficiality League? Ever notice how bitter some people seem over the fact that they aren't one of the Rich and Pretty People? They don't get to earn their living picking out color swatches, fretting over a millimeter curve to the right or left, and test marketing a new-old-new design that may or may not become the next trendy thing to purchase with America's collective Gold Cards. So instead of serving slavishly at the alter of superficial beauty, attempting to conform to an ideal they know they can never meet, they denigrate the whole concept.

I mean, I recognize the pressure to look different, wear more expensive clothing, and be more conscious of what other people think of me. I also recognize the trap in that latent hunger for approval. After all, if I'm dressing to impress, what else am I doing to impress others? So I don’t. I don’t do anything to impress others. Or at least I make a valiant effort not to live my life according to the will of the masses. I love cozy, well cut, slightly radical clothing not because it's in style, but in spite of the fact that a similar item can be found in closets from coast to coast. If it pleases others, great. It's also fine if it doesn't meet with general approval.

But that's me, and while I enjoy periodically observing the Rich and Pretty people from an assured clear distance, I have no illusions about the magic in their lives. Being photographed regularly wearing clothing that cost more than my car is no guarantee of personal satisfaction. Of course I'm also content to be considered beautiful by my oh-so-significant other - which has been known to happen even when I'm wearing a ratty old pair of pajamas with coffee breath and smeared eye-liner. This, needless to say, is one of the reasons I value my relationship so deeply. I'm appreciated just for being myself. My interest in fashion has no effect on the status quo one way or the other.

Perhaps this is the source of the heartburn. If my self-worth is based on what other people think of me, and I believe my apparel choices contribute to those opinions, where I get my clothes becomes a Very Big Deal. An even bigger deal is what shapes peoples’ opinions. So the whole tinsel and glitter world of fashion, style and fame is a source of a great deal of potential personal trauma. This is especially true if I have no interest in style… or worse, lack whatever qualities are necessary to be appreciated for the way I look.

Suddenly clothing becomes a source of emotional trauma akin to dropping a bowling ball on the metacarpals. One fairly normative response to this level of distress is to downplay the importance of whatever is causing it. Another common reaction is hostility. So it’s entirely possible that our movie reviewer is waxing snotty about couture’s anti-contribution to society because deep down he believes his valuation is in some way connected to his appearance.

Just a theory.

But it would explain a lot.

It’s not. His value, that is. Not connected to his looks. The bitter truth, as many lovely women and well-clad men have come to realize, is that we can’t rely on our surface presentation to compensate for deficiencies of character. It doesn’t stop some people from trying, but I’ve never kept a friend for her impeccable taste in window furnishings.

This is where the confusion starts. While it’s perfectly reasonable to honor the pursuit of beauty, it’s important to remember that ideals of beauty are not the sole criteria by which worth is measured. It is entirely possible to treasure a ratty old sweater simply because it was our Grandmother’s favorite. Work boots are chosen for their comfort, not their appeal. We cherish friends, family, and lovers primarily for reasons of the heart.

In fact, the things and people in our lives that give me the greatest happiness are those which have an intrinsic value completely separate from their appearance. In some cases, I even find things attractive, because I value them for what they are. My Volvo 240 sedan is a perfect example. When I look at her, I see a lovely classic. Much of what makes her lovely is the fact that for the past five years she has started each and every time I turned the key. She purrs steadily, corners easily, and is comfortable to drive - and all of this in spite of the fact that she’s 18 years old and carries over 200,000 miles on her sturdy little frame.

Is it possible that our society has come to emphasize surface qualities so heavily, that we’ve forgotten beauty is a product of our own private value system – not someone else’s?

I’m convinced that what distinguishes what is meaningful from what is less so - is our own personal estimation of the item (or person). Isn't that the way it should be? What stands out to me are things I find interesting: Interesting because they attract me for one reason or another. Their construction. A distinctive sense of humor. A sense of harmony, uniqueness, or general alignment with the rest of my life. In this, fashion, fashionistas, and the latest line of Yves St Laurent are the same as the labor union president, higher education, and a well-mended roof. If I am to judge wisely I must accept responsibility for evaluating solely for myself, on the basis of what I personally value. When I look in the mirror, the only opinion that matters is my own.

I haven't always felt this way. There have been times when I was gravely dissatisfied with my hair, my wardrobe, my career path, and the person with whom I shared my pots and pans. What I have discovered over time, is that when I stop judging hair, clothes, work and lover based on someone else's criteria, I arrive at what I really feel - what I really want. Suddenly I am free to change what no longer suits me, and appreciate what does. Suddenly I am free to accept life as it is... not as I would have it be.

It's like taking off a heavy coat, or cutting off six inches of hair. I feel lighter. Happier. More relaxed. When I am at ease in my own skin, I find that I enjoy beauty… innovation… craftsmanship… wherever it appears in my life. On the screen. On the wall. On the rack.

This isn't to say that I have all the answers to peace and contentment, and lead a life of endless tranquility and spiritual one-ness with the universe. What I do have, is the responsibility to make choices that lead me toward greater peace and contentment.

It's either that, or waste my life whining about the unbearable ugliness of argyle socks.

Angry in LA

2006-07-16T17:05:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been stumbling across a fragment of free floating hostility I would just as soon not admit to having. But I do. It pisses me off. Really it does. The very fact of it's existence. It's just there, like the jagged edge of a hangnail, waiting for some random event to kick it into high gear, like a barely street legal motorbike in all it's absurd irrationality.

People in the trajectory of all this petty low-mindedness are concerned. Mainly they're concerned because being around someone prone to bursts of anger scores high on the Smith-Wesson & Langley scale of Not Fun Experiences. I can't blame them. I feel the same way - when I'm in my right mind... which in all self-defense, is most of the time. They're also worried about me. I sympathize. I'd love to have a tidy little pre-packaged response to their slightly nervous questions about what's bothering me. I know I'm letting them down. I do... but it's still out there. And I have no answers, although I know lots of members of the psychiatric profession would be happy to help me dig my way down to the root cause of all this shadowed angst.

But, like the Dixie Chicks, I'm not ready to make nice. At least, when I'm "angry", I'm not. In fact, nothing is more certain to escalate the whole chain of unreason than some reasonable voice asking me what is wrong with me.

Because you see... I'd like to pretend that it's not me. It's everyone and everything else.

This is a lie. I know it. Even my hindbrain recognizes that truth. Unfortunately, this does nothing to alleviate the hot current weaving through my brain when all is not well with my view of the world. In times like those, I have a myriad of explanations as to what is wrong - none of which point in my direction.

So, knowing that these are all bullshit, I've compiled a list of "Reasons I'm Angry". Perhaps you too will feel they are just cause for hot fury. Don't be fooled. These are excuses. Justifications. These are the tiny hooks in the sky upon which I hang my refusal to inspect my innermost flaws for their sources. I know this. You know this. Now let us begin.

WHAT PISSES ME OFF

1) Graffiti

I know that the helpless fight the established governmental and administrative structures through unconventional means, but does it really have to be spray paint on the walls of the condo building in which three people are working their ass off to own a single unit? There it is... "Skool sux" - to which I want to paint my response, "Kids suck". Note my ability to spell the work suck correctly? Now there's an adult response. Mind you, I'm not of the school of art that refuses to recognize urban graffiti artists. I've seen work done with spray paint on cement block that I'd cheerfully incorporate into my home. Most of the crap I see is just the pathetic urban equivalent of carving one's initials on a tree trunk. It's some angry little teenager with a grudge against authority proclaiming his (or her) desire to be acknowledged for ... what? For existing? Yeah. We should all get acknowledged for existing.

Since that's not going to happen, why don't you take all that spare time and get a hobby that might actually turn into a career? If you want recognition, get a skill. If you want to paint on the walls of a building I pay to maintain, make it fucking ART. Make it something that makes me want to meet you and shake your hand and tell everyone about this amazing work in my neighborhood by an artist they should know about. If you can't make an effort, go scrawl your "tag" somewhere else - you infantile no-talent loser.

2) Traffic

Ah where to begin? Everything about traffic in Los Angeles pisses me off. There's the insufficiency of decent public transportation from ... oh, anywhere I am to anywhere I want to go. Sure L.A. has public transit. But not from the west Side to Pasadena on the north-east side in spite of the fact that the only route is directly through downtown, one of the most congested sections of freeway in the city. Why is this?

It pisses me off that we're planning to build more roads, turning yet more precious land into pavement, which in business-speak, is nothing but a cost center with a zero return. A fact, I might add, that irritates my tax-paying soul like cheap nylon stitching on a tee shirt label. Not only that, but this is land and money that could be far better invested to the greatest good of those of us living in Los Angeles as parks, community gardens, and distributed work centers (where you go to work in a location physically proximate to your home instead of commuting some pointless distance so you can sit in a cubicle and plug into the same phone system and network that is available to you all over the planet thanks to the advances of modern technology).

Every detail related to LA traffic annoys me beyond reason. It's the stupid people who have to slow down to watch the guy handing out a traffic ticket. It's the mysterious stoppages, like the one on the northbound 405 where 4 lanes of highway turn into EIGHT (yes, count them) LANES - in spite of which there is a chronic jam up on a whole chunk of the 405, including the lanes that aren't merging at all. Fifty feet beyond the 405/118 interchange... nothing. Traffic frees up like shit after a colonic.

3) War

War pisses me off. Not just the wars that my current President has dragged the whole of the United-States-of-America-Land-of-the-Free-Home-of-the-Embarrassed into. Even the petty neighborhood wars between a couple of African tribes no one has ever heard of until they started chopping off one another’s hands, and the long-lived vendetta between the House of the Palestine and the House of the Israel.

Mind you, I recognize the illogic of wanting to slap someone shitless because they’re slapping other people shitless. But there you have it. Every time I hear a Middle East war story, I have a visceral urge to vote every bedeviled soul living there Right Off The Show. Oh, I know it’s all very very complicated psychologically and practically, but if I were given unlimited power for a day, things would be different on the Gaza Strip. Just saying. Maybe a five year amnesia spell. Or a very large isolation booth with a uniform of fuzzy slippers and teddy bear pajamas.

Failing that, I’ll settle for a complete news blackout. It certainly wouldn’t be any different than what we have today – a repetition of the same news story over and over and over again. No news. The same news. Both are meaningless.

Differences Between the Species... er, Sexes

2006-07-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

I just read in a not-so-recent UCI (University of California - Irvine) study that intelligence in men and women is a gray and white matter.

Did we really need a study to tell us this? Apparently yes. It's human nature (and yes, I do believe there is... in an undifferentiated amorphous indefinable sense, such a thing) People are always looking for proof. Proof that what they believe is true. Proof that what someone else believes is wrong. Most importantly, we're constantly on the lookout for confirmation that what we suspect to be the case, is irrefutable truth.

In this case, I've always suspected that men and women really aren't so much inferior or superior to one another, as completely alien. Come on now. You know I'm right. We may look vaguely similar, but deep down we not only come from different planets we played different board games on our way here.

Men open the refrigerator and ask "Where did you hide the butter?"

Women open the refrigerator and think, "Butter. Hmmm. That's thirty-five calories per teaspoon, and better tasting than hydrogenated corn byproduct, so if I use butter and low fat Greek yogurt in the Alfredo sauce, I'll be able to brag to my dinner guests about how healthy it is, while simultaneously impressing them with my culinary prowess."

Oh, we do too.

In fact, from a woman's point of view, this kind of difference isn't even all that significant. What really causes problems between men and women, is that men just cannot believe that we actually think about all those things while peering with narrowed eyes at the butter dish. They see the frown line, notice the long pause, and try to figure out what they did wrong.

So back to the study, which demonstrates... while not conclusively, at least with enough data bits to persuade someone awarding doctorates to this year's crop of students, that there are differences between the male brain and the female brain. Not differences, they rush to point out, that make either sex less intelligent than the other (naturally not... how politically incorrect would that be?), but intelligent in different ways. Essentially, while each sex arrives at the same answer, we get there by following an entirely different path.

For this we needed a study?

Okay, I'll stop saying that. I did find it amusing to learn that men have 6.5 times more gray matter (related to general intelligence) than women, and women had (nearly) 10 times more white matter related to intelligence than men. How do they know? I mean... how do they know what parts of our gray or white matter is related to general intelligence? After all, it's all brain. Isn't it?

Okay. Clearly not a brain surgeon myself.

But that doesn't stop me from asking what we've really learned. If both sexes score equally well on general intelligence tests, does it really matter whether one sex scores better on questions related to math and the other excels at communication questions? It seems to me that all these studies, while tip-toeing delicately around the idea that one sex may be smarter than the other... are really designed to prove just that. Why else do we bother? To learn more about treating degenerative brain diseases?

I'm sure it looks good on the grant applications.

Call me skeptical. If you're looking at degenerative brain diseases, which by and large do not discriminate by sex, why the comparison studies? It seems to me that we are either going to follow the general rule that men and women possess similar qualities, skills and latent abilities, or not. If not, then we're going to keep on doing studies and asking questions designed to ferret out not just whether men and women are different, but precisely how. While I won't be so bold as to call it a complete-and-utter-fucking-waste-of-time-and-money, I will point in the direction of that town and tell you it will take you about 15 minutes to get there. Ultimately, the survival of the species requires the cooperation of men and women. The evolution of the species requires actual collaboration founded on mutual respect and a certain amount of genuine liking.

So enough already. The next time I read about some effort to figure out what makes men and women different (aside from the obvious) I'd like to hear that the objective is in figuring out how we can leverage those differences to the advancement of the whole species... say, past the stage of blowing things up, breaking kneecaps, and complaining about how someone's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was cheated out of a strip of untillable land no one wants except to piss off their neighbor.

Prisons, Crisis, and the Governator

2006-07-11T09:51:00.000-07:00

The Ahnold appears to have decided (or been advised) that prison reform is not the key to reelection. Having surrendered to the Political Powers That Be, he has sagely proclaimed his conclusion that the whole California-Industrial-Prison-Complex-Issue with its various constituent forces (police, state judicial system, immigrant (legal and illegal) population, employees of the prison system, and various other stakeholders) is a mess. A mess that he can't fix in spite of all potentially good intentions. So he's throwing a sop to the masses and hoping that his spin-doctors and speech writers can help him convince the voting public of something they want to believe: building more jails will fix the problem of California's over-populated prison system.

*Yaaaawn* Sorry. I don't think so.

Californians, naturally, feel that the Governator has let them down. After all, Arnold is the Hero of Hollywood, the superstar with oiled torso and biceps of steel. In spite of all common sense and the splashy failure of Governor Davis to wrangle the various issues of state into something resembling coherent administrative form, we continue to expect "our government" to address all the issues that we as voters don't even know how to spell, much less understand.

We didn't understand the whole energy crisis in spite of the Media's efforts to describe how the Enron scam and California's inability to obtain a reasonable volume of power for a fair market price - were related. We don't understand the issues of immigration policy in spite of living side-by-side with people deeply affected by those issues. We sure as hell don't understand why our prisons are over-populated, why the recidivism rate (people on parole who wind up back in jail in spite of the fact that it's a Very Not Fun Place to Be) is a whopping 70%, or why there is still rampant crime, gangs and other forms of law-breakage happening up and down the Golden Coast.

Isn't that what the threat of prison is supposed to stop?

Apparently it's not working.

We don't understand, and quite frankly I suspect we don't want to understand. To understand why the prisons are overcrowded in spite of spending billions of dollars in the 1990's to build prisons would require that we look at the reasons people are going to jail in the first place. It would require that we understand the people who wind up in jail, their background, their cultural beliefs, their financial circumstances, the pressures they face. It would require that we look at how our society defines crime, and criminals. It would require that we consider what we actually expect to happen inside our prisons, and after someone has been in a prison.

Or we can go on parking our inconvenient truths and failures somewhere we won't have to look at them every day.

Yeah, let's spend more money on prisons. Let's focus on the infrastructure rather than the reason we have the infrastructure. It's so much less complicated to create more room to store more bodies than it is to address the reasons why those bodies "need" to be stored.

This is not to say that I'm against incarceration. I've seen how the system works. It can be a powerful motivating factor for individuals lacking the complete lunch box of self-control. But it's not a stand-alone solution.

You can't stop people from breaking laws they don't understand or don't accept. You can't solve drug problems with the threat of jail time. If you can't protect people from one another, they will be forced to defend themselves either by attacking or joining the aggressors. People who are convinced they have no hope for a better future, have no reason to respect the status quo.

It's so simple to say "those people" are responsible for their own behavior and they know the consequences of breaking the law. Sure. They're criminals. Every single one of them consciously and deliberately plotted to violate the mores and codes of our culture and they should be slapped down until they stop that bad behavior.

Yeah. Well. It doesn't work with dogs either. Yet in spite of all the evidence that this approach doesn't solve the problem we're considering doing more of it.

I’m personally in favor of the objective to reduce over-crowding in the jails by reducing the number of criminals. We could try getting "at risk" men and women invested in a law-abiding, societally-rewarding, self-reinforcing way of living their life from day to day: work, relationships, hobbies. Instead of attending AA pity par....er, meetings we could engage parolees in building programs that benefit their neighborhoods and help others. Or we could continue to have them sit at home in front of the television where they get to see how great other peoples’ lives are – over and over and over and over and over – until their hostile parent/spouse/roomie comes home to tell them what utter worthless crap they are.

And we're puzzled over why they’re going back to jail?

Because they can’t Get A Job, and they don’t have anything meaningful to look forward to except the freedom to go back to their old lifestyle… which is how they wound up in jail the last time. We mandate involvement in programs that repeatedly reinforce how broken and bad they are, then wonder why their behavior fails to improve. In short, we accept no responsibility to support these “criminals” as members of our community.

Should we?

Logically, no. All of “us” decentlawabidingtaxpaying citizens are doing the right thing. Life isn’t easy for anyone. Even the most privileged child of wealth and power struggles with the pressures and frustrations of growing up. Successful actors and actresses have relationship drama and child custody battles just like the rest of us. So Mr. Peck is right, life is hard. Hard for everyone.

It’s tempting to say that we can’t carry the load for anyone else, and I’m not actually suggesting that we do so. I am not responsible for the choices that some young man makes while out with his buddies late on a Friday night.

Nonetheless I can be affected by them. We are all affected by the decisions our neighbors and family and friends make. So this turning a blind eye to the failings, fuck-ups and general bad attitudes of others… doesn’t keep our own life clean. We can go on closing our eyes and pretending that the problems out there will go away if we just continue to focus ourselves on the task of being “good” – or we can wake up and contribute some small bit of awareness, understanding, compassion, time, or money to the effort to reducing the prison population.

This is the problem of social good vs. law enforcement. Obviously I have no answers, just a gut level response to the status quo. What should we do with people who have repeatedly committed violent crimes, sexual offenses against children, or who clearly have no skills at functioning outside the structure of the “criminal justice system”. (I have to put that in quotations marks because the irony of the phrase just won’t let me use it all nekked and unacknowledged) Is capital punishment really wrong in the case of someone who genuinely places no value on human lives? Is it better for us as a society to warehouse a human being for fifty years than to find some other means of rendering him/her innocuous? How do we process each case as the individual situation it is, while ensuring equity and fairness in our judgments?

I have to admit, I lack sufficient data. The existing prison system, does not. Within the context of our state-funded privately-administered mechanism for penalizing rule breakers, we have the means of collecting volumes of data on each and every individual being processed as a criminal. As a community, we have the tools and technology it takes to find patterns in that data, and to analyze the factors that generate those patterns. As a society, we have the ability to mitigate those factors and reduce the number of individuals we process as criminals.

The Pareto Principle of data analysis states that 80% of all errors are caused by 20% of contributing factors. As a rule of thumb, this works pretty well in day to day business. Let me pretend for a moment that this same rule of thumb also applies to human factors. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that there are 100 social factors that lead to people violating laws and winding up in jail. That means that we wouldn’t have 80,000 out of every 100,000 warm bodies in our prisons if we could mitigate just 20 of those social factors. Maybe it’s impossible. Maybe those 20 factors are the ones least amenable to change.

Maybe.

But we don’t know what they are. So how do we know whether it’s possible to fix the problem?

We don’t. That’s the answer. We don’t know if it’s possible to easily reduce the number of people in our prison system at no significant cost to our society and our dearly held social values. We don’t know… and at the rate we going – we never will.

Online Answers for Life's Lighter Questions

2006-07-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

Fresh from the Well-Lookie-Here-Marge department is Yahoo's new service that ... well, it permits total strangers to communicate. Okay. So not so new. Here's how the service works.

Lost Soul #1 asks a question. (i.e. Yahoo! Answers - How can one wean themselves off of Paxil?)

Lost Soul #2, answers from his/her vast realm of knowledge of the topic of the moment. The questions range from the mundane, "How was the latest Pirates of the Carribean? flick." to the vacuous, "Where have all the nice women gone?"

Cool. Well, actually it’s kind of tired but we appreciate what Yahoo! is trying to do for us. Basically it's a friendly retread of the old Usenet groups and today's online forums - without the tiresome demands of a whole conversation. It's a further abbreviated version of an already fast-foodified approach to social networking - online discussion groups. We've shaved off a few more microns worth of connection and gotten just a bit closer to the objective at hand. Me jane have question. Answer please. Suddenly other people are just vending machines for information.

What did we do before there was a quick online fix for everything? How did we survive standing in lines to perform banking chores, buy music... and birthday cards? How did we suffer through the need to trudge off into the sunshine and actually physically access a library? Remember when messages involved paper and pencil?

The funny thing about all this is that most people still do remember these experiences: but fewer and fewer actually engage in them. As a culture, as a species... we're evolving before our own eyes. Well, evolving may be stretching it. After all, many of us are still throwing chunks of stone and metal at one another when we disagree.

Our habits are changing because there are new mechanisms for completing the activities of daily living we still find necessary. As the technology, the tools, the processes evolve... so do the underlying social rules. There are polite assumptions (for example) about how one should behave in a queue that are changing. In America at least. I'm assuming it's happening in other countries, but that varies no doubt.

A mere fifteen years ago we took standing in lines for granted. They were a necessary evil. We stood in lines to pay for groceries, gas, pick up prescriptions, transfer funds from our savings to our checking account. We camped out for days to get Super Bowl tickets. Lines were a part of life we took for granted. Lines and a reasonably consistent etiquette governing holding someone else's place, leaving and returning, and plain old butting in front of others.

Not so much these days. Now lines make us impatient. We're offended that there are lines in the first place. We're aggrieved if we have to stand in line and we suspect there might be something that could be done to get us on to our next chore a few seconds faster.

This is all a circuitous route to the topic at hand; getting advice. You see, before the wonderful world of digital communications completely subverted our social network... people used to ask friends for advice: friends, co-workers, and other trusted advisors. People who gave advice generally had some qualification - either by virtue of having known you personally, or because they were simply the local "expert" on one or more areas of human knowledge. Doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, accountants, our dry cleaners, and the woman who cut our hair every six weeks, were the people we turned to for information about balding, suing our neighbor, removing wine stains, and whether or not we really needed to go on taking medication after we started feeling better.

Two decades ago, we habitually depended on our relationships for information. We purposefully created a fabric of connections with individuals who explained things in terms we either understood, or found reassuring even if we didn't understand a thing they said.

Now we go to our home page, click a couple of links, and post our questions online. The information we get may be useful, or not. It will most certainly be delivered quickly. In this brave new age of content aggregation where the audience is the source of news, opinion, and wisdom, there's always someone to chip in their two cents.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm just concerned that, like remembering how to stand politely in line, we're going to discard the whole notion of relationship as a component of the search for answers that are appropriate for us as individuals.

America's Anti-Smoking League and the Fine Aroma of Fallacious Reasoning

2006-06-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

National Public Radio apparently is to blame for highlighting an unfortunate display of the kind of fallacious reasoning human beings consistently fall prey to whenever life is dishing up the sour stuff.

At least Brian Fies has the wisdom to note that his cartoon citing smokers as deserving cancer is more a product of his state of mind, than any rational perspective on the habit nominated as Most-Likely-To-Cause-Untimely-Death by the modern press.

I'm not really interested in why NPR (specifically) or Mr. Fies (as an individual) chose to wander down that thorny path. What I am interested in, is how this particular behavior seems to have become the poster child for What Not To Do If You Really Truly Care About Yourself or Others: so much so, that we heavily and righteously promote statements to the effect of "If you smoke, you deserve to suffer and die."

Naturally, the people who believe this, are largely oblivious to the irony of their position. (or at least I hope so) Most of them would never dream of claiming that a woman wearing revealing attire deserves to be raped, nor that American soldiers serving in military actions deserve to be tortured and killed, or that individuals who choose not to take psychiatric medication deserve to be homeless. In fact, I'm willing to bet a significant percentage of Americans are similarly heedless of the negative consequences of failing to meditate, eating red meat, imbibing caffeine,
consuming large quantities of refined sugar and even "refusing" to be social. In point of fact, the list of things that human beings can choose to do that damages our health, limits our capacity for happiness, and shortens our lives is so comprehensive that we could find ourselves questioning every impulse, every decision, every habit... until there simply wasn't time in the day to feed, clothe, and bath ourselves. Not a pretty thought, but you get the idea.

So the question du jour - "Why are Americans flocking in such large numbers to the hate fest for cigarettes?" should be pondered in this context. Sure cigarettes cause cancer. So do the ingredients of a Diet Coke. Sure they're a waste of money. I personally can include nail polish, potting soil, and the gasoline it takes to commute every day to a job I could perform perfectly adequately from my home office - in that category. Of course they stink. So does diesel fuel, dry cleaning fluid, cat pee, and (in IMHO) Nag Champa incense. The world is full of odors to get on our high horse about, dramatically declaring exposure to be the end of our personal universe. Sure they have a negative impact on the health of those around us. So does criticism, selfishness, and poor hygiene.

The point being, none of this is singular or distinctive. More importantly, none of it is something to which smokers and non-smokers couldn't work out mutually agreeable resolutions. We choose not to. We rage about the smell of cigarettes and beat the drum of negative health implications. We point to the cigarette butts discarded on the sidewalk, and step around the bottle caps and chip bags. Smokers these days are consistently portrayed as dirty, selfish, stupid addicts.

It's all very interesting.

... and it smells of the same fermenting human foibles as bigotry. It reeks of the kind of self-serving ignorance, indecency, and lack of grace that epitomized American acceptance of the institution of slavery for generations, World War II Nazi anti-semitism, and 1950's anti-gay intolerance. All this holier-than-thou disgust and opprobrium far exceeds the actual impact of the trigger. Smokers die. So does everyone else. Smokers have an increased likelihood of getting diseases of the lung. So do city dwellers when compared to the residents of our local countryside.

Please. Enough with the justifications. Let's face it. Our growing national distaste for smoking has nothing to do with "the facts about smoking". Even more important, the "facts about smoking" are no more alarming than the facts about global warming, the increasing level of toxic chemicals in our soils, and the waste of limited supplies fossil fuels for recreational purposes... all of which each of us as individuals can do a lot more about - to greater effect - than by whining about smokers and smoking.

It is in part, I suspect, a symptom of our growing guilt. We feel guilty over our failure to exercise, our poor eating habits, our extra holiday poundage, and the three beers we swill over burgers and fries, several nights a week. We feel guilty because we're not better informed about what is good for us, and what is not. Worse, we feel guilty because even if we know it's bad for us, we may go ahead and eat the last slice of chocolate silk pie, drink the extra shot of whiskey before the bar closes, and choose to stay up til 3am playing pool and flirting instead of going home to get a decent amount of sleep. We feel guilty for the one-night stands we engage in while looking for the perfect mate. We feel guilty for the mediocre job we perform for an employer we tolerate because it offers prescription coverage for our daughter's asthma. We feel guilty because we're more interested in whether there is a stain on the white silk sofa than we are in whether the twins are failing math. We feel guilty because we're angry and being angry is wrong, but we're still angry even though we know it's wrong, which makes us feel even guiltier.

Somehow this reminds me of the circular insanity of Israel and Palestine... and every single person, organization and country that supports either side in any way. Are human beings really this stupid?

The answer, unfortunately, is obvious.

So we run around like a bunch of animals, being angry at The Other. The other soldier. The other American/Terrorist/Sunni/Shiite/Christian... The rude person delaying the line. The bad driver cutting us off in traffic. The smoker. The alcoholic. blah, blah blah. Sure. It's a lot easier than accepting responsibility for the feelings that emerge from the primordial soup of our self-of-the-moment.

It's much easier to look outside than it is to look inside. At least I think so. I don't like going on inner journeys. Who knows what I might find? I mean, it's dark in there and no one has purchased light fixtures or ordered electric service. Worse, it's messy, and someone (certainly not me), has failed to dust since... well, birth. I could trip over things and bruise my shins. Or worse, my pride... and if my pride ... my sense of worthiness...my justification for acting like I'm the center of the universe and my feelings are the only ones that count... if that gets damaged. Well! I might die. I might. Die.

Or ... most dire of all possibilities... I might not.

I might have to live with everything I've ever done while laboring under the assumption that my beliefs are correct, my motives are pure, my cause is just, and everyone else's... are not.

She Gets Paid to Do That - The Amazing Ann Coulter

2006-06-28T14:28:00.000-07:00

I've been reading commentary today, and the ever popular Ms. Coulter seems to be fodder for the MSM (as our girl likes to call the mainstream media). If you're in need of some way to kill your time, I'd recommend Andy Borowitz or better yet, Meghan Daum ("imagine having a wit so dry that even you haven't yet realized you're a satirist")

*snerk* I couldn't help it. I sputtered water all over my keyboard. Meghan, you owe my employer one very cheap Dell keyboard.

Of course, Annie's critics have been catalyzed by her new book, out in spring of '06, which she's been flogging enthusiastically, much to the joy of her publisher. So Ann Coulter has published a book. Good for her. I saw the cover too, and must say that she looks darned cute in that little black frock with it's not-so-conservative-neckline. (never impede sex appeal with awkward conservative Christian considerations like modesty. Marketing 101 - sex sells to everyone, Christianity only works with a sub-set of your target demographic).

Better yet, her dark roots only show a little.

The thing with La Coulter is that the more she talks, the less she says. It's like mental cotton candy; all fluffy pink spun logic that melts in your brain the instant you stop reading. I think the reason she doesn't get stoned when she steps foot outside her limousine is that most Americans just can't be bothered trying to follow the tortured syllogisms of her average diatribe. Go ahead, give it a try here. I had to read it twice. She packs so many untruths and hypocrisy into each sentence that your average Joe's brain just clicks off, like a car bereft of fuel.

Well, I know mine certainly does.

I try to follow her ideas. Really I do. It's just so darned hard. I mean, not only are the strings of words she puts on paper unhappy playmates, but the underlying assumptions; moral, political, personal - are simply inaccessible. Yet she goes on featuring in headlines, just like a real producing participant in the American political scene. Why, is a mystery - a mystery like the circumstances of another famous bleached blonde's demise - one that is destined to puzzle future generations of human beings with too much time on their hands.

It doesn't have to. I have the answer. Well, to be honest, it's more like a pet theory. What fascinates us, is the idea that she can actually get paid to construct sentences like "Yes, the Democrats' pit bull, Rahm Emanuel, is a former ballerina".

Um... last I checked, the definition of "ballerina" was a principal woman dancer in a ballet company. But that's the magic of Annie. She can say stuff like that and people who don't like her target-of-the-moment will cackle with glee, and the rest of us... well, we just blink in vague confusion. I mean, if you think about it, it's not even insulting. I've taken a front row seat and watched ballet dancers work. I'm not sure about you, but if I had the power to leap four feet in the air, and convince everyone there's not a river of sweat running down the back of my costume, I wouldn't exactly be concerned about my "masculine" image.

I won't bother with the rest of her latest blog. It's just not that interesting - which is why I predict her book will fall short of its sales projections: by a considerable margin.

Of course, I could be wrong. After all, I still can't comprehend why people will actually slow down on the freeway to check out the construction of the latest retaining wall. It just goes to show, some of us are easily amused.

Disaster Planning

2006-06-28T11:03:00.000-07:00

The Internet is a wonderful thing. I mean, twenty years ago, storing my personal data digitally would never have occurred to me. My birth certificate was a dirty, much-folded piece of paper and, as far as I was concerned, that was how it was always going to be.

What is embarrassing is the fact that in spite of being in possession of most of the cool gadgets of the day, it has never occurred to me to scan the document so that I had some backup of the evidence that I was born, who my mother claimed my father to be, and sundry other not-so-interesting data points. I could claim modesty, but that would be a lie. It just happened to be one of the many blind spots scattered through my cogitative matter like so many moth holes. Okay, so the idea of taking all those Very Important Papers I've been carting around from home to home for the last *cough*thirtysomething*cough* years, and turning them into easily portable (and copyable) ones and zeros is new to me. It's true - in spite of the fact that I do occasionally back up all that personal datum on my harddrive-du-jour. Speaking of which, I need to do that again...it's been a while....and this is how my brain works - somewhat reactively I'm afraid.

(which makes Google's new blogger toolbar perfect for me)

On the other hand, if I actually did have all my personal information backed up somewhere safe and snug in case the next big quake hits dead in the middle of scenic downtown Culver City - where would it be? I have a certain sympathy for one person who told the story of his conscientious friend who reliably backed up his hard drive, but who lost both his laptop, and the backup drive when someone stole his briefcase.

I can see this happening to me. So the trick here appears to be not only setting up the plan (and carrying it out), but truly thinking through the procedure... past all the good advice about encryption and duplicates. If I encrypt my personal data on a USB drive, mail it to my sister in Wisconsin, and sit back feeling smug, I'm in trouble. Years pass. The big one hits. Then what happens? What happens when I need to retrieve it? First I have to get my sister to remember that I sent it to her. Then she has to figure out where exactly she put it. Then I have to remember what password I used to encrypt the data.

And those are just the potential pitfalls that occur to me offhand. I haven't begun to think through what could actually go awry should I find myself and my present state of disaster unpreparedness in the middle of a post-mudslide moment. So much of the success of this kind of activity relies on our never-reliable memories, and our ability to turn a vanishing low percentage of probability life event into a significant enough internal fear that we will persist in maintaining the appropriate back up protocols for the duration.

Right.

So how do we build a habit into our routine lives that acknowledges the possibility that a Very Bad Thing can happen, and yet doesn't create a neurosis from the fear that a Very Bad Thing could happen. If we're afraid enough, then the neurosis becomes The Very Bad Thing, lmiting our live and blurring our perceptions of reality.

I supposed, like a reminder to submit our taxes by April 15th of every year, we could just mark our calendars. We could consider the possiblity of a disaster from every angle, factor in all the dumb things human beings do, the frailties of our memories, and sheer bad luck, and develop contingency plans for all the things most likely to subvert our well-intended efforts to keep our lives and loved ones whole, no matter what.

At the same time, we can acknowledge that no matter what, we're going to die. Bad things are going to happen - regardless of whether we consider ourselves "good people" or "bad people". Disasters and sudden reversals of fortune can strike at improbable moments, and in spite of the best efforts to keep ourselves from any hint of inconvenience, shit will still happen. This is life too. Change will happen. Disasters are often followed by blessings, miracles, and wisdom. It's all a matter of seeing things, not with rose colored glasses, but without the goth-depressive-death-worship-self-pitying-defensive black tinting either. Just seeing things as they are can be a challenge, but it's the only route that makes sense.

Disasters can happen. Creating plans to cope is a good thing. Convincing ourselves that we should be able to plan for every possible disaster, or that the very fact that Bad Things do happen justifies angst and bitterness... not so much.

Lessons We Fail to Learn

2006-06-27T07:48:00.000-07:00

After reading the news blurb about a maid suing Naomi Campbell I really can't help myself. I had to blog.

Well, I could help myself, but this seems like a perfectly viable example of something I've been giving some thought of late.

Basically we have a 35 year old woman with every possible advantage - physical health, freedom, money, beauty, a glitzy career ... who repeatedly indulges in temper tantrums, making scenes, striking staff, and generally making a spectacle of her very fine, but obviously not terribly grounded self.

Mind you, I get the temper tantrum thing. I feel the same way after an hour of rush hour traffic on the 405 - which is why I avoid the 405 during rush hour like any rational 40-something avoids gingivitis. In other words, I know my trigger, and instead of facing whatever it is that "makes" me crazy about stop-and-go traffic, I just avoid it. This is not really a solution, and I learn nothing about myself. But it's working for me, so I have no real reason to change the practice. If my 405 issues were landing me in court, I might feel differently.

Clearly the misplacement of designer jeans is destined to continue to cause problems for Ms. Campbell's domestic arrangements. This being the case, I advocate her doing something about it. Perhaps she could have a special secured closet built to house both her denim, and a small laundry facility to treat special denim items. Of course, this would then require that she engage in the washing of her jeans, which I'm guessing would not be something Naomi wants to do. Failing this, she could look for someone licensed and bonded to work with precious items like designer jeans. Perhaps two such someones. They could monitor one another's behavior to ensure that no one was stealing a pair of jeans during the laundering process. We could have code keys and a special magnetic card to provide access... and security cameras. Yes. That's it!

Which is to assume that Naomi hasn't already indulged in a nanny cam or two. Maybe her maids are stealing her expensive designer jeans, and all the smacking with phones and loud discussions are post-observation of this alleged evidence.

Me? If I could afford cleaning staff, (which I can't, but let's pretend) I think that an instinct that prompted me to install security cameras would be justification for me to find a new maid. Even if someone else had already set up a nanny cam and I discovered said thievery, my first response would be along the lines of, "I won't be needing your services any longer. Please give me the keys."

But that's me. Some people fling mobile phones. I find a new maid. I suppose the phone flinging is more satisfying... and no doubt, in the event that the maid continued to be willing to work in such a situation, more convenient. But it doesn't really solve the problem.

Or does it? Because it seems to me that the problem may not be the maid. This being the case, perhaps phone flinging - like screaming, slamming doors, making snide remarks, and all the other temporarily-wacked things human beings do from day to day does serve a purpose.

It tells us we've Lost Our Mind.

When I've Lost My Mind, I generally find that I have a couple of choices... to figure out what the little voice in my head is saying that "Makes Me" so angry, or to continue to serve the crazy little voice. Mind you, knowing the lesson is there to be learned is no guarantee that we will learn it, but it's gets us a whole lot closer to the possibility that Someday... we will.

Style Sheets and All the Things I Don't Know

2006-06-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

While I've coded a page of HTML or two, it's been more than a few years since I bothered learning anything new. I have a vague idea of what CSS are about and why they were the Next Big Thing... oh, about eight years ago. What I don't know anything about is why the code is completely different than it used to be. This bothers me, because I can't even parse the template I've selected for this blog. Which means I'm not able to sustain even the faintest delusion of control, much less the Complete And Utter Control, I'd really like to have over everything ... well, in the world.

Neurotic? Moi?

Okay. I resemble that remark. But I digress.

What I was really whining about is the fact that I'm having to figure out how to incorporate an image into my style sheet for this blog. In theory, it should be simple. But it's not. I've tried all kinds of old timer coding, and let's face it. I was no ultradev champion even back in the day. Now? Well, I'm plain old out of date.

After wasting way too much time this lovely summer weekend tinkering with the style sheet, I decided there has to be a smarter way to get this done. Hence the image you see above.

This, I am hoping, will serve as the rosetta stone I need to figure out how to A) get the image onto the blogger server into the right directory, and B) how to call up that image wherever my little heart desires. (within the context of my blog. If this doesn't work and I still can't figure out how to get images into my blog layout, I'll have to resort to desperate measures... the online Help.

I really do hate reading directions. But I'll do it. If that's what it takes to get the job done... and return me to my previously airing delusion about control, the Universe, and my Blog.

Women's bodies

2006-06-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

Margaret Cho makes a living being funny. It sounds like a cool job, doesn't it? You get to say anything you want, talk about anything you want, and ... in theory, people laugh, and pay you money for the privilege of listening. Unfortunately, being funny is much harder than it looks. Worse, a lot of really funny people are talking about some pretty serious stuff. So you have to really think about what you're saying, as opposed to say... making fun of peoples' shoes.

Although, if you've read Manolo's Shoe Blog, you find that just making fun of peoples' shoe selection can also be pretty funny. But, in my opinion, Manolo is more the exception than the rule. The rule seems to be people like Margaret, who have taken a real life experience, and turned it 27 degrees sideways before dissecting how truly strange this thing is we all take for granted. Or worse, she takes something that we all think we agree is terriblehorribleunacceptable... and leads us deftly to a place where we see that there are but minor differences between this "thing", and some other theoretically socially acceptable practice. I mean, common ground between burquas and the American ideal of a female body? Now that's the kind of humor that sneaks up behind you while you're chuckling, and pokes you hard with your eyebrow tweezers.

I've always wanted to be a comedienne. Fortunately for me, I have friends. Friends will tell you - with all love and compassion - "No. That's not funny."

Margaret Cho, now... yes. Funny. Most of the time. I'm not sure she gets paid to write a blog for Yahoo, but I'd be willing to bet if she is, it's not much. So she's writing this funny stuff, all to help us non-famous women think harder, and smarter... and just more. I suppose this is a good thing. On the other hand, if you take a moment to go down to the bottom of Margaret's articulate, amiable, funny monologue, you see where Yahoo! has given the world a forum from which to comment on the blog. Being so empowered, a few good souls have posted their comments. What is seriously un-funny, is that it's perfectly clear that none of the people posting their comments either A)comprehended the blog, or B) even read it.

Now, that's just wrong. There should be some kind of coherence filter that sniffs random crap people are getting ready to post on public forums, and prevents the wack jobs, pendants, and mindless from embarrassing themselves.

Of course, if there was such a movement, or technology, or ... um, law... a lot of blogs wouldn't get published. So I guess freedom of speech is a good thing. Even when it's an incoherent rant about nothing in particular.

Yahoo! Avatars and Why SameTime Fails as a Business Tool

2006-06-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been killing time playing dress up with my online doll... er, avatar. I realize this must be a reasonably common phenomenon given the plethora of outfits, hair styles, and sundry add-ons I can select to represent my online self. The fact that these include a dragon, a stage (complete with adoring faceless audience), and tattooed goth-drag tells me that I'm not alone with my fascination with the possibilities.

Mind you, I'm tweaking my work avatar, so I don't indulge in the tats and audience. But I could, and that is the whole point. I don't have a polar bear, but I can play with the juxtaposition of a flirty dress and a very large smelly companion. Of course, one of the attractions is that I get to indulge my fantasies without dealing with the gritty realities of the outfit (or lifestyle) du jour.

Still, I don't really understand the fascination this exercise holds for me. After all, I'm middle-aged, and my life includes enough affluence, challenge and gratification that I don't really need to live in a fantasy world to wear cool clothes and hang out in interesting places. So ... what? Why do I spend time on this completely pointless exercise in non-real bit twitching?

I'm sure that one day I'll discover some kind of epiphany, revealing a connection between my childhood, and my propensity for denim on my avatars. Until then, I'm okay to let this minor personal mystery coast. It's not consuming my life. Yet.

I must admit, this one little feature totally explains my preference for Yahoo!Messenger over AOL's Instant Messenger. Well, that and the range of emoticons that actually emote; bat their lashes, chew their nails, roll on the floor laughing, and blow party favors. In fact, the more a text message environment allows me to replicate a bit of my normal facial expressions, body language, and general character twitches, the more likely I am to make use of it. The avatar is only the beginning. The emoticons and font controls are just as seductive.

So Yahoo! is, as usual, doing something right. I don't really have a brand loyalty to Yahoo! as a company. I say this in spite of the fact that I pay them for web mail, online radio (Launch Cast), and I prefer their instant messenger utility.

What I love about Yahoo! is the simple fact that they think too much - about subjects that most companies seem to believe are unimportant; like text messenging. Now, IBM sells a Lotus Notes compatible text messenging application called "SameTime". SameTime is the next best thing to useless. Why? No personalization. It forces the end-user to use the ASCII emoticons of 1995 to convey sarcasm, jokes, open-ended ideas. I believe IBM's logic is that SameTime is intended as a business application and therefore the less personality we invest in our tool, the more professional/competent/effective we will be as employees and end users.

What planet do they live on? The whole idea that our personalities should be wiped clean for the duration of time that we're engaged in performing the work for which we were hired, is so... well, 1990's. In fact, I've seen more misunderstandings and inter-departmental drama transpire for lack of a smile or a softer tone of voice, than I care to have in any department or company I run. In fact, if SameTime were the only text messenging tool available, I'd outlaw it in my organization. Pick up a phone. Walk over to the person's desk. Write a proper email.

Simple text messenging is both too casual and too personally sterile to serve adults well in a setting that requires nuance and civility. If you're going to be casual in a business setting, you need to be able to bring your individual allotment of humor, compassion, and humanity to the interaction.

The Absurdity of Parental Approval

2006-06-16T15:17:00.000-07:00

It’s Fathers Day this weekend and I’ll admit that I do wax a bit nostalgiac about my pater familias, his Marlboros, his sense of humor, his love of model airplanes and murder mysteries. Dad has been gone 24 years, but I still get misty-eyed when I hear music he used to play, or see a small private plane coming in for a landing at local Santa Monica Airport. This isn’t to say that we were close. I loved him dearly, but let’s face it, he was a parent.

And I was a child.

And those facts put us on opposite sides of a fairly large divide; one across which we bantered with good cheer, shouting daily news. The same divide however, also buffered both parties from quiet whispers of loss and shame and illicit pleasures.

This, strikes me as normal.

So many people seem to suffer from the fact that their parents don’t understand them, or don’t approve of their choices, their lives. As adults we continue to crave the approval of parents long after we’ve decided the rest of the world can go to hell if it doesn’t approve of who we have worked so hard to become.

Lately I’ve begun to question this impulse. I mean, seriously. Why do so many of us expect our parents to know anything about who we really are? Of all the people in our lives, from whom are we most likely to withhold bad news, doubts, or minor indiscretions? In some cases, we’re even afraid to share good news lest we rouse the subtly corrosive difficulties of comparison with more, or less, successful siblings.

This has very little to do with bad parenting or dysfunctional family dynamics. It has everything to do with human nature. Parents are in charge of socializing children. Children are in charge of becoming individuals. It is a rare family where both objectives are given equal weight and attention. Quite naturally our parents encouraged us to void our bowels and bladder at certain times and not at others, and in certain places over others. They discouraged us from doing things that might cause us harm like touching shiny hot surfaces, sliding down banisters, inhaling when we smoke marijuana, and having sex with random partners. Parenting is a series of approvals and rewards, combined with disapproval and punishments – with the primary objective of ensuring we will be happy productive members of society when we reach adulthood.

Nowhere in this scheme is the desire to make us … well, ourselves. How can there be? Regardless of how often they will pat themselves on the back and tell one another how well they know their children, our parents don’t know who we are going to be. We have to figure that out and construct it (not always in that order) ourselves. Some of becoming who we are going to be is a matter of trial and error, of making mistakes, of making discoveries. All of these are things most loving parents will attempt to protect us from doing.

So children and their parents are increasingly at odds. But the bonds and dependencies of human connection cause children to bury their necessarily rebellious nature and behaviors under layers of “good” behavior. As we grow up, those layers of good behavior solidify into a persona we wear for our parents, and selected other adults or authority figures. Underneath the persona… we’re, well, practicinglearninggrowingbeing.
It would be nice to say that we’re really close to our parents, but for most of us, that is a lie. Under the best of conditions, we love and honor our parents. I won’t even get into the worst. That doesn’t mean they have a clue who we are. They don’t, and in fact, the stability and tranquility of the whole parent-child relationship is predicated on everyone keeping things that way.

It isn’t until we stop being children with our parents, and they stop being parents with us, that we stand a chance of really getting to know one another. But that’s not what this blog is about.

What this blog is about, are the vast majority of adults out there who still think that there is something wrong because their parental units don’t approve of them, don’t respect them, don’t want for them what they want for themselves. This blog is for every single woman or man who has felt that sick feeling in the pit of their stomach when they go to dinner with Mom or Dad, or Step-Mom and Dad, or whatever the constellation may be.

What are you afraid of? These are the very people you have spent your whole life hiding from. They have NO IDEA WHO YOU ARE. How can their opinion about you possibly matter?

Poor Drivers, Ugly Traffic & People to Blame

2006-06-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

Hagerty, a boutique insurance company specializing in collectible automobiles, recently published a list of the top ten peeves of drivers everywhere. You can find it here...

It’s an interesting perspective. In fact, I’d venture to speculate that most people would feel it was a reasonably inclusive list of why we hate to drive in big city traffic.

Well, not exactly.

What stands out about the Hagerty article is the simple fact that They Are Missing The Point. Every single item on the list is about individuals and quote-unquote, bad driving.

That isn’t to say that every person who gets behind the wheel of 2+ tons of metal, resin and high impact plastic isn’t responsible for driving in a reasonably rational and informed fashion. But we’re human beings, which is to say, we fuck up - often for mere seconds, most of the time without any conscious thought whatsoever. Dealing with that is part of the package you sign up for when you drive a vehicle. So people are tired, distracted, overworked, stressed, and under pressure? What a surprise. Welcome to reality. Now get over it. You do your best and I’ll try to forgive you when you – inevitably – fuck up.

I hope you’ll do the same.

More importantly however, I believe that even if we were all perfect drivers, we would still have traffic jams, congestion, and road rage.

As an inhabitant of one of the worst cities in the US to drive in – Los Angeles – I have a thing or two to say about traffic jams, over-utilization of roads, and just plain stupid use of personal transportation. I’ll start with this. Hagerty’s members haven’t scratched the surface: which is damning evidence of how clueless Americans in general are about the actual problem. In fact, as long as we feel guilty about our own bad behavior behind the wheel (or upset by the stupid behavior of others) we will continue to ignore the obvious truth: You and I are just trying to get some place, and the means by which we do so have been deliberately and consistently mis-engineered to our disadvantage for the past fifty years or so.

Let’s start with this premise: Traffic problems have almost nothing to do with individual drivers.

In fact, let’s take it a step further. Almost every traffic jam and road hazard can be solidly attributed to poor city planning, ill-considered traffic management practices, and a general lust for political and financial gain on the part of a few individuals in positions of influence.

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION:
Shall we talk about public transit – like they have in downtown Portland? Clean. Safe. Free.

While I love the bumper sticker asking, "What would Jesus drive?", the one I’m still waiting to see while cruising-the-southbound-405-standing-still, is "Imagine quality public transportation." Seriously now. Close your eyes. Imagine being stuck behind some stinking old pickup with the sun beating down on you and the glare of the midday sun bouncing off the shiny trunks of several thousand cars… and realizing that for all the money you spend on insurance and petrol and leases and taxes to maintain the road you’re not-moving on, you could be riding a tram down the hill at 120 MPH . Instead of a 75 minute commute, you’d have a 25 minute commute… and ten of that would be walking to and from the station? Talk about rage. Only this wouldn’t be misdirected at your fellow drivers and traffic generically: it would be more appropriately (and productively) directed at city management.

Of course, we do have to deal with the whole ego thing. I mean seriously. Ask yourself – “If the public transit service in the greater Los Angeles area was a regular, reliable, well-managed, and affordable way for me to get to and from my job, would I use it?” I know quite a few people who still think that buses and trains are for people who have either lost their license to drive, or are too poor to afford their own individual automobile. Are you one of them? If you’re not, why are you wasting your energy foaming at the mouth over “bad drivers” instead of demanding change from the people we voters hire to run our cities properly?

WALKING & BIKING
However, before we get all public transit now! on City Hall, we need to consider the fact that minimizing the use of cars means maximizing the use of our feet. Is that really feasible where you live or work? Are the sidewalks well maintained? Is it possible to cross the street legally without walking six blocks out of your way to the next pedestrian crossing?

I realize there is a whole shift in perspective required to make walking not just doable, but desirable. Do you drive to the post office four blocks away? Are your Saturday mornings consumed with a series of stops – bank, grocery store, drug store, dry cleaners? Do you even consider the effort involved in locating parking, parking, getting out of your car, locking your car, unlocking your car, getting into your car, and pulling out into traffic? Worse, have decades of driving actually made you a bit phobic about being out in crowds without the protection of your own personal metal box? Can you cope with the terrifying prospect of being physically proximate to other people living and working in your neighborhood? Does it just seem “preferable” to avoid eye contact and the risk of bumping into total strangers? Would you rather drive two blocks to the grocery store to buy two week’s worth of food than walk over and pick up the essentials every couple of days?

What are your reasons for driving places you could easily walk? Too tired? Too busy? It’s too late at night? I need something that’s too heavy to carry?

Really? Think it through. What if you used errands as a substitute for the gym, walking a bit further every day and carrying a bit more every week? What if you joined forces with a neighbor, your children, a roommate, a friend? What if you found a room to rent in a safer area of town? What stops you?

It’s not just “us” though. Think about all those areas of LA that are simply not designed for pedestrian traffic. Some engineer assumed that we would all drive down those boulevards with the median strips, and no place for someone to stand as they’re crossing the street. Many parts of Los Angeles are designed solely for the convenience of drivers – because heaven forbid we have to drive more slowly. We’re driving slow enough already in the morning gridlock. Get out of my way and rip out those damned stop signs!

This is great if we are going to continue to justify a lifestyle of addiction to foreign crude oil. It’s not so smart if we want to minimize gridlock by … mmmm, well – driving less.

TRAFFIC CONTROL
But more about ugly traffic and its sources. Let’s stop to make the distinction between control, and safety.

If everyone on the freeway is driving 80 MPH and the limit is 65, they’re all violating the law. The need to control dictates that they should be punished, all of them. Or failing that, a few of them. Now, if safety is paramount, then keeping traffic moving smoothly is top of the list. Do you accomplish this by stopping some cars and creating a distraction for the rest? The answer should be obvious.

Unhappily, a lot of behavior indulged in by the good folk responsible for the public welfare is far more focused on controlling and punishing than “Protecting and Serving”. I’m not sure why that is, but I’d guess there’s a certain psychological profile we should be eliminating from the police forces. Typical of human nature, those are exactly the kind of individuals drawn to the job.

THE YEAR 2010
Let’s review here. Bad driving will be inevitable as long as drivers are human beings. The more drivers on the road, the worse the traffic will be. Therefore, reducing the amount of bad driving will require either 1) fewer drivers on the road, or 2) transportation that isn’t run by human beings.

It’s entirely possible to simultaneously reduce the number of drivers on the road, and improve the quality of life for most of the inhabitants of the Los Angeles area. This would be done through the fairly obvious, but frequently ignored concepts of;

improving public transportation

encouraging telecommuting

making the city more convenient for pedestrians and cyclists, even at the cost of making it less convenient for individual motorists (that is the point isn’t it?)

spending tax dollars on the above three areas instead of on building more roads and maintaining all the surfaces we’ve already dedicated to transportation

prioritizing arriving over driving

Isn’t it about time we stop ego-identifying with large machines that consume a significant portion of our life and capital, gnashing our teeth over the behavior of our fellow men, and start planning for the day when we turn in our wheels for another hour of sleep every morning and 25 fewer pounds around the middle?

Dumb Business Practices and Sony's DRM Rootkit

2006-05-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

First, I don't believe that the great god Privacy has anything to do with the righteous fury being directed at Sony-BMG for their Digital Rights Management tactic utilizing a rootkit which, not incidentally, renders the customer's computer vulnerable to hostile virii, worms and other forms of computer mayhem.

Further, the crux of the whole Sony-BMG DRM affair isn't that Sony deployed Digital Rights Management software in the first place, or that it's protecting its property from theft.

What pisses the consumer off isn't even that this software hid itself from view in the operating system.

No. What makes this whole imbroglio such a heat-producing issue is the simple fact that the software goes one step further than prevention. In pursuit of its objective - to prevent theft - it will actively deprive the customer of the use of their own equipment for any other purpose as well.

It is the potent combination of Big Business arrogance and small-minded hostility involved that leaves me all breathless and sweaty. This software is more than a passive defense. When pushed, it transforms itself into aggressive malware, disabling the customer's CD burner. This is a deliberate decision on the part of the senior leadership of a huge multi-national conglomerate to indulge in a malicious act against individuals - many of whom have transgressed Sony's intellectual property rights out of sheer ignorance.

Mind you, Sony has a history of indulging in proprietary self-absorption. Think the betamax. Think the memory stick. It's a bit thick and you'd think they'd learn, but then look at how well the same practice has served Apple. But to take that anti-consumer attitude to the next level with no regard for the possibility that they may be alienating an entire generation of future customers, fairly boggles the mind.

In fact, it's flat out stupid. What the hell were they thinking?

This is where every business needs to stop and ask themself: "If my enemy is my customer, my potential customer, or the influencer of my customer, how profitable is my current customer philosophy going to be --- in the long run?"

Imagine a world where businesses routinely exact petty vengeance for shrinkage and customer carelessness. Which companies would thrive in this environment?

Well, that's obvious. The ones that don't. Companies that thrive are the ones wise enough to recognize the value of consumer good will over a precise balancing of accounts. In pursuit of profits and protection of their ability to generate more profits, they seek creative solutions that actually serve everyone.

I mean, I get that big business is going to address loss of revenue one way or the other. But there's a creative way... think I-Tunes, and there's a stupid way... like installing malware that messes up your customer's computer if they're careless or ignorant or whatever, enough to try to make more than three copies of a particular song in their pursuit of the perfect "mix".

Ultimately, the reason a company exists is to meet a need. If enough of us have the same need, there will be more than one company trying to sell me something to solve my problem. In a world where the price is about the same, why would I buy from a company that treats me like I'm a thief... before I've ever demonstrated any hint of an impulse to thievery?

I don't know about you, but the short form is, I wouldn't. Do you think Sony-BMG is going to get that any time soon? Because personally, I'm waiting for a big public apology... and not from some PR wonk. I want to see the folks that make the big money sitting in front of reporters admitting they were wrong, and that they recognize the error of their ways.

But I'm not holding my breath.