squidbag

Seven

Yesterday was my daughter's seventh birthday. So she's like, all seven and stuff now.

Yesterday was also her last (half) day of the first grade (they had a class luau), and she got picked up by her BFFs mom and taken to see the movie Epic. They then went to see her friend dance, at which point she and the friend were dropped off for sleepover. Then, every other little girl in the world showed up. Okay, just four more and two older ones, but the noise was tremendous. A good time was had. Cake and homemade pizzas were consumed. A pinata happening spewed candy and wrappers can be found everywhere today. Gifts were opened and played with, and then sleeping over occurred, with the last ones not crashing until sometime in the 1 to 2am slot. So - a good solid birthday, I think, mostly put together by Abby's mom, though parts were played by all. Some questions and observations:

• Nerds candy should be a contraband item. (Peggy Guy, your curse on me has come to fruition!)
• So should blue cake frosting.
• I think girls in close quarters are louder than boys in close quarters. Both of my kids are pretty loud, and I haven't done the research with controls and all, but still.
• I'm not sure what it means when a party where there's crying, icepacks, throwing up, insomnia, slamming doors and blood (though not a lot of any of this) is still a unanimously agreed-upon success. An adaptability of children' thing? Practice for college parties?
• This new Play-Doh "Plus" is weird.
• Small people playing "zombie attack" in my backyard makes me smile.
• Girls share stuff better than boys do. Mostly.
• My daughter takes up about twice as much space when she sleeps as does the rest of the time. 

Abby at 7 loves art and math. She gets really attached to some people, loves hugs and hates good-byes. She still has what I identify as my temperment, which makes her sometimes appear short-tempered and moody, but that's only because you haven't been following the story. She has really strong and stubborn opinions about things and definite ideas about how things should work. She still likes it when I dry her hair. She wants to help with chores. She loves cute and fuzzy things - her favorite new TV show is Too Cute, which sometimes makes her cry. She cried a little when C got her Master's because she was "so proud." Her favorite books are the Judy Moody and Stink books, and we're getting through the Goddess Girl series right now, taking turns reading. She has better relationships with our neighbors than anyone else in our house.

I think she's awesome. And tall, with big monster feet, because it makes her laugh when I say that. For a little while longer.

Don't Come Around Much Anymore

Those of you who have been reading me since 2004 (masochists, to be sure) may have noticed the extreme drop-off in posting that has, of late, occurred. My habitual ranting about shit in print has taken a backseat to paper writing for school, with dual downsides: once I'm done writing papers, I don't want to be anywhere near a keyboard for a while, and the poisons hang about in my brain, burning the top layers. 

Regardless, if you're here, you have come here to read, and due to a small but not completely ignorable number of requests, I have decided to upload some of my school work here, for your perusal. You will perhaps notice that the quality of my writing doesn't have to be much better than it is here to earn an A. Surely this says something deplorable about the nature of public education. Enjoy, and as always, everything here is copyright me.

Book Review - Making Schools Work

Book Review - The World Is Flat

Comic Books & Cultural Evolution

Faith, Support and Rationality

Focus on Focus on the Family

Frederick Douglass and Christianity

Max's Room

New Urbanism

Nixon Ab Chao - the US Presidential Election 1968

Out of Our Depth - Americans in the Meuse-Argonne 1918

Processing Process Theism

Reality Television

Research Project Design - Religiosity and Party

The Changing State of War

The Heart of New York

Thomas Paine & Edmund Burke

Human Nature

Except that really, humans, for the most part, don't act naturally at all. When we do our best, we tend to behave against nature. Even giving into desire (of any kind) often requires a rejection of self-preservation. What's our deal?

Part of it is striving to be civilized - we resist our lizard brain impulses and such so that we can live as a part of a community in a society which has its own benefits; this is the argument that you hear murderers & rapists & pathological whatevers simply throw away when they talk about "not being able to control themselves." Bullshit. You can, you just didn't. You may want to do things all the time that you don't, and it is the not punching deserving fucks in the back of their heads that makes us people and not animals. But we do the best we can, most of us (the ones not featured on local news coverage), and I'm certainly not advocating for Rousseau's completely natural people - who'd want to share a meal or be trapped on an elevator with them? Naked, squalid, farting self-centered savage people - like attending a biker rally, NASCAR infield or large hippie gathering. Disgusting.

Another part of it (that thing I'm talking about - keep up with the stream) is getting bound up in our own expectations, and then leaping the chasm into other people's expectations - as if those were ever fully understandable. Trying to measure what's happening by one set of (probably unrealistic) expectations is crazy failure-making enough, but then compounding the problem by adding in another set that you've only interpreted and not fully understood, no matter what you think? Well. That's just asking for unhappiness, isn't it? I expect you to answer. Heh.

Do we have a duty as people to make each other happy? Probably not, but it seems like a good idea anyway, especially if you can quantify happiness as the removal - even for a short time - of suffering. If we're built to suffer, and suffering causes change, progress and development; if the grain of suffering under the shell of our skin causes the eventual pearl of evolution, then using our powers to bring happiness occasionally seems like a pretty good idea, since it can be interpreted as bringing vigor to the process and improving the morale of those involved. It's good for the race, character building stuff. And we know this - that's why there's so much rich food and different sex and chemical engineering and entertainment and diversion. Fuck it, let's be happy for a while. Go nuts with it and you're a fat sexaholic drug-addict, or some other permutation of excess, but that's really all about motivation, yeah?

Motivations and artifice are a deadly combination - some of us have no poker faces, so we start with hope and then become immediately cynical, disenchanted and untrusting when we realize just exactly to what degree others suck. What is a person doing, really, when they regale you with stories about themself? Painting an accurate picture, or the one they want you to see? Are they hiding? Is there a reason to hide? Where do they hide when they hide from you? What does a person's mask say about them? Analyzing this causes you to see the world through a version of Terminator or Robocop's onboard display, with a list of optional responses to the situation. Pick the one most genuine, and find yourself at 90 degrees to humanity forever.

I personally don't really understand, for the most part, what motivates the largest mass of people, and you can see that in the beats I miss in conversation, the courses I take in school, in entries like this one, in the way that I build a relationship based on loyalty and commonality and value and love and only dissolve them when the tools for maintaining them elude me - when the other person seems to be operating outside of what I understood our interactions to be. Not an expectation, an understanding. I'm fond of talking stuff to death, and this is why - too often, I'm not only not on the same page as everyone else, I'm in a different fucking library.

Where am I going with this? I don't know. I'm weary of second-guessing. Tired of masks and controls and stories and endless parsing through the muck of words that describe emotions without being emotions. It's time to drop shit that doesn't matter and channel zero my brain into happiness, allowing others to do likewise.

Feed the feedback loop on this one, folks, if you dare.

The American Hopeless Problem

If you're like me, (and you know you are, secretly, down in places you'd rather not acknowledge) you find yourself frequently in observation of others and thinking "Man, this guy is completely hopeless."

Whether it be some talking head floundering around for ersatz points on his conspiracy monsters map in the media or hapless motorists who seem not to understand physics, vehicles, or indeed, sitting up, you've seen them. Unspeakably rude bastards who have jaws that unhingedly jack in the hot air that spews incessantly from their putrid noise holes or morally superior pricks who wield their sceptre-cocks of half-baked ideology over anyone who is unfortunate enough to be caught in their headlight gaze, you know who they are. Ever encountered someone who is obviously in the wrong, but assumes instead that it is everyone else? Liars? Thieves? Shouting driveway shitheads? Pious and necktied doorstep religion peddlers? A person who doesn't seem to grasp societal norms of speaking, relating to others or wearing clothes? People who act like sit-com characters? Anyone who is still blowing their nose in restaurants? Reason-free martinets? Vacuous bureaucrats? Anyone with 1000 piercings? Like they walked into Blind Jack's Needle Hut and just said, "Here's money. Fuck me up." White people with dreads? Stank-ass dreads? Gibbering fuckheads just on the wander? Someone who is just extraordinarily bad at their one job; people who are essentially doorknobs, with one thing they can do, and it just means they go back and forth all fucking day? People who make you say, "Jumping Jesus at this hopeless bastard; kids, don't look." The hopeless. They are a problem for all Americans, and all of us have seen this chronic hopelessness problem. If you're like me, then you're tired of this shit.

I know what you're thinking: "Sure, there's a problem in this country and I *hate* that, but what I can I do - the situation is, by definition, hopeless. I mean, have you seen these fucking people?!?" Yes, I've seen them, and I've heard the sounds they make, and you sound like one of those hopeless bastards now, with your gibbery whine noises and blibbity blabbery. Shut your mouth, grow a spine and help me confront the problem before the big guns of the War On Hopelessness are pointed at your ass. 

That's right; the War on Hopelessness. It's very patriotic. We're going to stop having no hope, and have fucking hope instead. In fact, that's our slogan: HAVE FUCKING HOPE. We're going to hope things turn out okay, we're going to hope not to run into any desperate shitheads during our days, we're going to hope not to run out of money. We're going to have hope and fight the hopeless, bringing them around, and if they can't be brought around, we'll wade through the oceans of their gibbering froth to the islands of their incapacitated, lying drunken on bathroom floors & watching reality TV. We're going to work to make the things we hope for, and then hope for whatever the next shit on the horizon is, too. We're actually going to hope for the future, because you know why? The alternative is to end up among the hopeless, taking up space and wasting time and fucking with others.

Even if the hope turns out to be unjustified, it'll be worth it not to have been down there with the likes of them.