Many states in the US have banned smoking in the car when there is a minor present. I don’t have strong opinions one way or the other on the subject, but probably lean towards the law being more of a good idea than a bad one. India, on the other hand, has gone a step further and banned smoking in cars at all:

Declaring “New Delhi roads dangerous to human life,” the city’s High Court on Monday imposed a slew of new measures aimed at deterring habitually bad drivers, including the smoking ban and a prohibition on using a mobile phone while at the wheel.

“Anything that distracts the attention of driver is dangerous. The human mind cannot do two things simultaneously,” said New Delhi’s traffic commissioner Qamar Ahmed…

Fortunately for car-smokers in America, this law originated in India. Had it originated in Europe, a bunch of anti-American Europhilic snobs would be aching for it in the US so that we can catch up to Europe in maturity or whatever. Had it originated in Japan, a bunch of anime geeks would be agitating it… which might not actually be such a bad thing because where they lead no one else will follow. If it were Singapore, conservatives would have eyebrow cocked. But I don’t think there’s any demographic in the US that wants us to emulate India, so we’re probably okay.

Honestly, I think that a safety case could be made for smoking. I have not been a car-smoker in quite some time, but when I was there were times that it proved hazardous when a cigarette was dropped or a cherry came flying off (into my ear, once!). But that’s generally pretty rare. Contrary to the article, it’s not comparable to being on a cell phone or even, in my opinion, listening intently to the radio.

But no doubt the moral scolds* will seize on this opportunity to portray smokers as the scum of the earth. Not only do they have that filthy habit, but they’re also worse drivers. So, ha! But they will do this while assuring us that they’re not targeting smokers specifically except insofar as smoking in the car is dangerous so they’re just targeting dangerous behavior. And they have a point.

But only if they propose to ban eating in the car, too. Eating is a much, much, much more distracting activity by just about any measure. But that will almost certainly never happen because nobody thinks that they can’t eat and drive at the same time. People that have absolutely no experience with smoking in a car will tell you that’s much more dangerous.

It’s not a debate that I look forward to as the smokers’ losing streak continues.

* - I have recently been informed that “scold” is an offensive word to use as a noun because its roots are somewhat sexist. I’ve been using the word most of my whole life and not any more at women than men, as far as I know, so I’m not going to stop using using it. Suffice it to say, however, that I am using the term to describe moral nannies of both genders.

I took a trip to the dentist last week for another unsubsidized cleaning. Unfortunately my mouth is not doing as well as we would like it to be, so she had to put in some anti-bachterial powder in between my teeth and gums. I managed to surpress my smile when she told me that it meant that I couldn’t floss for a couple weeks. She also told me to avoid certain foods, namely crackers and chips.
I had absolutely no idea how much I eat in the way of crackers and chips until the past few days:

• I bought three 10-packs (with six a piece inside) of those sandwich cracker snacks just the other day. Now they sit in my desk and taunt me.
• I ordered soup that I couldn’t eat crackers with.
• I declined to order salad cause I would have wanted crackers with them.
• No Mexican restaurants cause they come with chips and salsa.
• No chips from the vending machine.
• I have to get cookies instead of chips at Subway with the combo meal (okay, so that’s not such a sacrifice…)
• Not mentioned by the dentist but implied was hard candy. I’m a sucker for hard candy that gets rooted deep into your teeth. Hence my dental problems.

I’d almost rather them tell me to give up refined sugar.

As part of an ongoing series on Memoirs at Slate, Edmund White recalls how how his memoir cost him an ex-lover as a friend:

Then the book came out in England and was about to come out here when he told me that I had betrayed him, and he no longer wanted to see me. Over the last 20 months I’ve sent him two or three little e-mails to see if he’d like to resume our friendship, but he doesn’t. The funny thing is that I liked him as much as I loved him, and his absence weighs heavily on me. After 60, it’s hard to make friends and he occupied a big place in my affections.

I’ve not written a memoir, though I’ve written at least the rough draft of four books (though I need some pretty fundamental revision on the fourth) and the first and third mirrored my own experiences somewhat.

The first mirrored my relationship/nonrelationship with Tracy and the third Eva. Both inspirations read their counterpart novels and I didn’t have a whole lot to hide in that regard. They were in the dedication and I made it clear that I wanted the best for them and that writing is simply a way to help me move on. But even aside from those grand swipes from my own experiences, a lot of people I know in real life will find themselves somewhere in my writing. You write what you know, and sometimes who you know, though none of my characters are actually real people inserted into fiction and that’s true of the major characters and the minor ones. Sometimes there will even be multiple people based off the same person within a novel and the reader wouldn’t really know it because the characters don’t seem to have much in common.

The third novel contains a character that is more than slightly based off of my ex-roommate Hubert. And it’s a pretty devestating portrayal. Hugh never got around to reading to novel, as far as I know, but I was a bit worried that he would and the fallout that might then occur. The character isn’t malicious or incompetent, but throughout the novel he fails to move beyond his shortcomings (which are, of course, Hugh’s shortcomings) and his failed attempts continue to make things worse than if he would just admit to not being what he’s not. His failures are actually an exaggeration and alteration of the male lead’s failures (which were my own, at the time) and that’s partially the role that the character plays. Except unlike the male lead, the Hugh character’s stronger points are never really displayed.

I have a follow-up in mind to that novel wherein the character will return in a much more benign capacity. I hope to have that written before Hugh does get around to reading #3. I did something similar with #4, wherein one of the plot threads is sort of an apology for some of the events in #1, though it mostly involves a different set of characters (1,3 and 4 all overlap somewhat, though #2 is completely separate).

Reuters has an article on “cyber-bullies” of a particular sort:

“Girls might send [a topless picture] to their boyfriend and she is pressured to do it thinking he’s just going to see it. So she gives in and the next thing you know it’s all over (the place).”

The images are even more likely to be passed on if the couple breaks up, said Mishna who headed a research team that held focus groups with 47 students in grades 5-12.

An interesting article, but I have two problems with it.

First:

Preliminary results from the research show so-called computer geeks are becoming the new schoolyard bullies.

As a so-called “computer geek” I’m sayin’ I don’t think we’re to blame. For better and worse, he advances in technology have made it so that you don’t have to be a computer geek in order to do the things described in the article.

Second:

Students also thought it was pointless to tell parents about cyber bullies because they could not identify the culprits.

If it’s a case of a bitter exboyfriend (or reckless current-boyfriend) letting the picture get out, there’s no anonymity protecting the primary culprit. If we’re talking about online boyfriends that the reluctant strippers don’t know the real name of… well I could only suggest that you don’t do such a thing for a guy whose real name you don’t know.

When I was twelve or so we took a trip to Great Britain, wherein we ate at some of Britain’s finest restaurants. And everywhere we went that offered it, I ordered a hamburger. I probably get it from my father, who knows the Landlover Special at just about every seafood joint in Mayne.

I really wish I could go back to Britain and do it right, restaurant-wise. I wish that I’d understood that you don’t tailor a restaurants menu to what you want, you try to find the best thing that the menu has to offer at the place that you’re eating. You can get a better hamburger at the average hamburger joint than you can the most upscale restaurant in town that prefers to serve duck… and there aren’t many places you can get good duck.

During my conversation the other day with Pat, I mentioned that El Taco Patio, a very prevalent Mexican food chain in the area, apparently does not exist in 47 of the 50 states. In talking about the chain Pat commented that Californians were in her experience more into burritos so a place called El Taco Patio (that makes a pretty mediocre burrito) may not do as well there. A lot of the state’s California immigrants that go there order burritos and come out disappointed that a place with “taco” n the name serves substandard burritos.

It reminded me a bit of my former roommate Hubert. There was a little Mexican restaurant that we absolutely loved because of their Macho Burrito. The thing was absolutely huge and only $4. Just about everything else on the menu was smaller and more expensive. Hubert, who was a bit of a tagalong because he (correctly) thought that my group hadn’t really accepted him as one of us, insisted on coming with us to the burrito dive… and order something else. We tried to explain to him that burritos were the only reason to go to this place, but he said he didn’t like burritos and after a few times started insisting that we go somewhere else and insinuated that we lacked his taste in food. When he realized that we were happier going to the burrito dive without him than we were somewhere else with him, he started coming along and eventually found something else on the menu he liked, even if it was overpriced.

The conversation with Pat actually started on Asian food and her brother’s tendency to order Chinese food at any restaurant that served Asian food, even if it was a Thai or Japanese restaurant. And whenever he was eating at a Thai or Japanese restaurant, he would complain that the Chinese food was subpar.

There is a restaurant in northern Santomas that bills itself as “The best in Salvadoran and Mexican cuisine.”

I can guarantee you what happened. They opened what they thought was going to be a restaurant serving Salvadoran food and after being asked for the umpteenth time why Enchiladas weren’t on the menu, they caved to market demand. The Onion had a great article on how an American family went into a Spanish restaurant and were upset that their favorite Mexican offerings weren’t on the menu.

Apparently, It is not customary in Mexico to offer free chips and salsa before the meal. However, if you go to certain tourist towns down there a lot of them will offer it because they got tired of angry American customers feeling that they were being slighted. As a fan of chips and salsa, that’s one kind of American cultural imperalism that I can get behind.

My best friend Clint is a very bright guy, though he always had trouble applying himself. He went to his mother’s alma mater Southern Cross University, a conservative Christian university in my home state of Delosa and initially majored in Music Education to become a music teacher. Despite his smarts, he struggled a bit to balance his newfound freedom (his parents were a little too protective of him at home) with his academic responsibilities, but the former usually won out. But all was not lost until he decided that he was going to change his majors from Music Education to Music Composition. The reason he gave was that he would do better following his passion rather than being forced to take classes that he didn’t want to take.

The results were disastrous. His grades never improved. It took him eight years to get through and he ended up nearly $75,000 in debt, despite the fact that his first four years were paid for. Clint is certainly to blame for his own failures, but I believe a lot of it could have been avoided had his parents prevented him from changing majors in the first place. He may have graduated, he may have dropped out, but he would not have a financially worthless degree with several years worth of earnings to pay back.

Capella wrote a great post on a New York Times article on parents subsidizing their kids’ fancy New York lives and a spectacular discussion ensued in her comments. There are at least three areas of interest in the post, but first I want to tackle the main subject of Capella’s post: how appropriate is it for parents to attach conditions to the financial support they give their children. Most of the commenters lean towards it being inappropriate most if not all the time. I disagree.

I think back on Clint and my other friends where the parents did and did not intervene at crucial points and with only a couple of exceptions the ones where parents did intervene ended up much better off for it. And I honestly believe that all of the parents had the moral right to intervene, even when they did so wrongly. As long as they’re footing the bill I believe that they get to call the shots.

If Clancy and I have children*, they’re not going to get $100k from us (or whatever college costs 20 years from now) to major in basket-weaving or comparative literature. I believe that we’d be doing them a disservice by subsidizing a degree that will take them out of the economy for five years and give them a degree that is completely unmarketable. If they want to major in computer science or engineering or business, they’ve got my blessing.

Some degree of flexibility is important in all aspects of parenting. Parents that have a pre-determined that they will insist their kids will follow are likely to have a lot of problems. Though within their rights as parents, withholding money unless their kid goes to their college and chooses their major is almost certain to backfire even if that’s what they otherwise might do. I might have gotten a military economics degree from the University of Delosa like my father did, if given the choice, but it would have a bitter pill to swallow and the chance that I might have failed there where I would otherwise succeed.

I don’t mind an English degree so long as it’s a double-major with an education degree so that they can teach or involves a masters degree in something marketable. If they want to major in philosophy or political science or psychology in order to get into medical or law school, then that’s fine provided that they continue to make the kinds of grades that will get them accepted. If they major in something like physics and plan to go to graduate school, it’s possible that we can come to some sort of arrangement. One way or another, though, I’m going to know how they intend to make a living majoring in whatever they’re going to major in or they’re going to pay for it themselves. That’s not blackmail, that’s responsible parenting.

Beyond college, I think that the same is true if they’re going to live life in The Big City on our dime. Life requires making tough decisions and one of those decisions will be to accept the conditions of our support or decline our support. I’ll love and support them (emotionally, if not financially) either way. We will love them if they choose to to cohabitate with a lover over our objections, but we’re (probably) not going to pay for it. But to allow them to accept money and then demand autonomy is to give them a sense of entitlement that would do them more ill in life than good.

When she was working her way through high school, Clancy wanted nothing more than to escape the influence of her father. This motivated her to make sure that she did well enough in school to get a full-ride scholarship out-of-state (despite being ineligible for need-based financial aid). Her parents were happy to help, but she knew that taking their money meant that they could exert a degree of unwanted influence in her life (as it did with her sister, wherein they insisted that she major in finance in addition to French, her preferred line of study) and that propelled her to be self-reliant well ahead of most college students and independence she achieved ultimately helped her relationship with her dad, which is now rock-solid.

Autonomy is earned, and that’s one of the most important lessons parents can teach their children.

* - always a risky hypothetical as she and I discuss the issue of having children.

-{Note 1: None of this post was run by my wife, who may have some… uhhh… different ideas about this. Really, though, she’s more the stickler about much of this than I am.}-

-{Note 2: I’m not talking about attaching strings to every bit of money given and I only consider big gifts, not a sofa or even an old, used car, as being worthy of attaching conditions}-

When Clancy was young, she was infatuated with the town of Reading, Pennsylvania, because she thought that it sounded like a place that would have a lot of books. She was disappointed to hear that it was pronounced “redding”.

I, too, was familiar with the town of Reading at an unusually young age, because it was on the back of baseball cards because of the stats various players had from the farm team they had/have for the Phillies baseball team.

That says a lot about our respective childhoods.

trumwill: I’ve been getting error messages the last day or two where I’m sending files and the “specified folder” suddenly becomes “unavailable”… boy do I hate moving files in Windows.

quinkyle: Is this with your Egyptian copy of Windows?

trumwill: No, with the plain jane version. On the Egyptian copy, though, I do have this message popping up in Arabic every time I boot up my computer and I have no idea what it means. I need to know what “die infidel” is in Arabic and make sure that’s not on the message anywhere.

I have to confess, I’m a little bit skeptical of this story. Not that such sexism does not exist within parents, just that it’s an odd way to manifest itself and there’s just something “neat and tidy” about the story as a parable to our sexist nation tryin’ to keep a young girl down. Stranger things have happened, though, and I wouldn’t doubt that some variations of it has happened somewhere in the country.

Anyway, supposing that the story did happen, I found the woman’s assumptions to be interesting. From a social standpoint I’d probably be more worried about my son carrying around a lot of big books. Reading, like learning, is considered a feminine or even vaguely homosexual activity in testosterone environments. Maybe the girls faced similar prohibitions, though, and I didn’t realize it because I was a young boy rather than a young girl.

Books actually can be a bit off-putting to an interested guy, but generally only in the sense that an iPod with headphones would be: it makes it harder to start up a conversation. Of course, for many women this is a feature rather than a bug!

Spungen said something in a post that resonated, though not quite to the situation she refers:

But maybe a man still needs to think that, if circumstances were appropriate, a woman would sleep with him. Or at least not know that she wouldn’t. If he somehow finds out definitively that she wouldn’t, he won’t like her anymore. He’ll lose that basic feeling of goodwill toward her. Some guys will even hate her guts.

One of the things that I found so off-putting about Paige (other than the obvious) though I don’t think I’ve mentioned it to date, is the flirtation. And it was a weird flirtation insofar as it didn’t come across as idle flirtation (she did it with absolutely no one else) nor did I get the sense that she was anxious to start something with me.

She would say these things in passing. Things like how I was the kind of guy that she always wanted to date (and sometimes did, but fate usually stepped in the way) before meeting Simon (her boyfriend and my best friend at the company), that I was her perfect type. She never said that it was a shame that we didn’t meet before I got married and she hooked up with Simon, but I got that vibe ten kinds of ways. She’d comment that I understood her in ways nobody else, even Simon sometimes, did. Sometimes she’d say these things with a light flirtatious look, sometimes almost with a sober sigh.

She knew that she had a really good thing going with Simon and I could tell that she was not at all interested in wrecking that. Her kids had the father they never had otherwise, he was a stabling influence in an otherwise very unstable life, and he was nice to her in ways that most of her previous boyfriends weren’t. So fortunately I was never worried about her doing anything and wasn’t worried about being alone with her except for the conversation that she would periodically strike up.

It did lead to some rather disturbing dreams, though I think they had more to do with a previous friend and her girlfriend that I won’t go into at this juncture.

Anyhow, it felt like she was baiting me to tell her that I felt the same, that if things had been different and that we met under different circumstances that things could have worked out. Even if I didn’t revile her and even if things could have worked out otherwise, it’s still not something I would say just because it strikes me as inappropriate. I have consoled an ex or two that things might have turned out differently under different circumstances, but that’s different in my eyes. The most I could ever say in that regard was that I’d dated girls like her before and decline to mention how much I loathed that.

In any case, as much as I absolutely hated the fact that her relationship with Simon forced me to distance myself from him somewhat (because she was so obnoxious, not because of her passive come-ons), I was still nonetheless glad that she had someone. I would have been even more uncomfortable around her otherwise if that were even possible.

-{At the Tumbleweed Anime Convention, Santomas, Estacado, 1999}-

As I was talking to the bartender, I thought of a shirt that was filed away in my clothes drawer back at home. It was a take-off of a shirt from a series called Neon Genesis Evangelion, which had a red leaf, the letters NERV, and the series motto “God is in His Heaven and all is right with the world”. My shirt said NERD, with a calculator in place of the leaf, and the words “Teenage girls in tight suits, My God this is heaven.”

The shirt isn’t funny if you haven’t been to a convention before because you don’t know what the heck it’s talking about. It isn’t funny after the second or third convention because you start noticing certain behavior and it becomes more than a little creepy.

The oddest thing about these conventions, I told the bartender, is the abundance of inappropriate sexual energy. You have a bunch of thirteen year old girls dressed up in Sailor Moon outfits and a bunch of hefty, poorly groomed thirty year olds that have never been kissed. And if you ever actually stand between any two of them, you can feel the sexual energy and almost immediately want to take a shower. And put away your NERD shirt.

The bartender commented that it didn’t appear that many of the guests felt that they needed a shower. Ever.

I laughed. I didn’t know what was funnier: that the conventions had to emphasize and re-emphasize the need of convention-goers to take a shower… or that the convention goers consistently thought that they were only kidding. About an hour before my conversation with the bartender I remember listening to this obese guy on a pay phone say, with a resigned and defeated tone, “okay, I guess I’m just going to go take a shower.” Presumably he was feeling down about something unrelated, but I like the visual of a guy being told over the phone how bad he smells and only relucantly agreeing to take a shower, so I choose that interpretation.

Make of this what you will, but until I worked at a phonebank job in Deseret that employed a lot of very heavy people, seven of the ten heaviest guys I’d ever seen in my life I’d seen at anime conventions.

But the good news about all of these conventions is that it’s easy to stand out as a guy and look good in comparison. Despite the 4-to-1 male/female ration, most of the guys in my clan managed to meet someone at a convention at some point, sometimes more than once. We’re less socially adept than most people, but compared to the competition we were practically Pierce Brosnan.

Because of an amateur production company I was involved in, I was going to these conventions long after I had enough to do. They had taken me to Florida, Texas, Kingsland, and in this case, Estacado. I was too old for the young fans and too well-adjusted for the older fans. Not that there weren’t plenty of people my age, there, but we comprised of less than a quarter of conventions where attendance ran somewhere in the thousands and walking amongst the general population would become, after a while, very de-energizing.

The first oasis that I had was the smoker’s balcony. As with many other places, you can meet the more interested subset of a group at the smoker’s den. It helped that there existed an age limit of 18. Unfortunately, the smoker’s den would get invaded by some onbnoxious types. Particularly annoying young woman that often dominated the smoking den that for some reason thought that I cared to hear her resentment towards the rest of the world and her frustration with her hen-pecked boyfriend.

It was then that I found the best escape I could possibly ask for: the hotel bar. The young were too young and the old were generally too poor for $5 beer. I’m not a particularly heavy drinker, but I drink at conventions if only so that I can get a ticket to the bar.

A lot of people dress up for conventions. A lot of people use this as an example of how stupid conventions are, but honestly I think it adds charm. A lot of people put a whole lot of time and effort into their costumes and it’s really quite neat to see personal representations of characters that you otherwise only see in anime form. But it also adds a sense of surreality to the affair. One guy you’re talking to is wearing a black T-shirt expressing his support for anarchy, another is wearing a polo shirt, and another is a flashy blue robe with white trim and a turbin with pig-tails.

One night I was at the bar on my nigh-hourly escape and I was talking to the bartender. He asked me what exactly the convention was for. I explained to him about anime and the conventions and what they were for. I told him that it must appear odd to him to see all these people in such strange costumes. He said that it wasn’t that abnormal. A couple weeks ago, to the shock and dismay of the other guests, they’d had an S&M conventions and so they had guys walking around the lobby in leather costumers with zipper-mouths with their date on a leash and collar.

Until that moment I had not realized that there was anything that could make anime conventions look normal by comparison.

-{The above picture brought to you by my then-new digital camera. The picture was taken at the Tumbleweed Convention here in Estacado about seven years before I ended up moving here. The hotel where the convention took place is actually within walking distance of where I live now. You can get a full-size, unfiltered image by clicking on it. I found the site of a young girl sitting on the lawn reading amidst all the abnormality going on around her to be an interesting image. At first, I didn’t want the wizard in the picture but then decided that it worked and actually shifted my position to get him visible.}-

-{This blog brought to you by the Letter X, which always Marks The Spot}-

The Netflix queue program is generally quite impressive. It does a fantastic job of balancing waiting discs that are hard to get with making sure that I’m not discless. If I’m trying to get a series with high demand or low supply, such as The Commish, and I send in four discs it’ll hold back on one of them to wait for the next disc of The Commish to come in and then keep going down the list so that I’ve always got something to watch.

The problem, though, is sometimes I am perfectly willing to wait for something, but I have no way to communicate to Netflix that I want something when it first becomes available and am willing to go discless until that happens. They recently released the fifth season of NewsRadio, but it’s either long on demand or short on supply. If I knew that sending in one at a time would result in it holding back and waiting for it, I’d do that, but I really don’t know how exactly it’s going to prioritize and fear that I might just keep getting the next one. I don’t want to send in all four three times just to get that series cause that might put me on Netflix’s “naughty” list of customers that they lose money on for turning around discs too quickly.

Speaking of NewsRadio DVDs, I made an interesting discovery. They have one episode, The Injury, on the collections for both Season Two and Season Three. Apparently they filmed it to appear early in Season Two but for some reason didn’t air it until Season Three. Odd that they would put it on both DVD collections, though.

My family became close to another family, The Charleses, through church. We go vacation together annually and they’re almost like family. The second-youngest Charles daughter was getting married and the Charleses were stunned to discover that our pastor, Father Shelby, refused to marry them in the church during lent. “But we’re Episcopalians! We don’t let things like that get in between us and what we want and we want a spring wedding!”

It eventually became such a big deal that it contributed to Father Shelby’s ouster a couple years later. The new pastor wisely did not follow Shelby’s policy.

I’d always thought of Lent as primarily a Catholic thing, I’m not sure why. All I really knew about it growing up was that it began right after the Pancake Supper and before the Easter Eggs. Looking back I remember fish on Friday, but I didn’t know that there was a connection except that it was something that the Pope told us to do, even though we were dissidents from the Pope’s command. It’s all kind of a haze.

Anyhow, Estacado has a relatively high proportion of Catholics due to its significant immigration population and those fast food positions that are not taken up by high school (and some college) students are generally filled with Latinos. Often Catholic Latinos.

My coworker Pat has resorted to planning where she eats on Fridays based on Lent-based customer traffic. Long John Silvers, for instance, is a very poor place to eat lunch on a Friday in Estacado for Lent. Taco Bell has special Lent meat-free offerings that I’d never seen before arriving here, though maybe I missed it, as does this other regional chain. Pat even has to avoid those places or find meatless entres because they will often put the order through without meat either because they assume she wants it that way or she ought to want it that way. She has apparently resorted to going to burger places cause, obnoxious in-your-face vegetarians aside, it’s a safe bet that you don’t order a Big Mac without the actual meat so it’s impossible for anyone to assume that’s what you ordered.

It reminds me of the whole debate regarding pharmacists that object to dispensing birth control pills and the like. One proposed solution was to allow individual pharmacists to decline to fill the prescription but require that each pharmacy be required to have at least one pharmacist under their employ that will fill it out. Maybe local restaurants can do the same, “Hey Mike, this guy wants to order meat, can you take over the register for a minute?”

There’s a heated discussion going on over at Half Sigma about the appropriateness of statutory rape laws regarding sex and minors. I’m not going to touch that with a ten-foot cattle prod at the moment, but I thought I would comment on one of “Gannon’s” arguments in opposition to the laws: Some girls are really mature for their age.

As it turns out I got involved in a certain social circle growing up where relationships between older guys and younger girls was not at all uncommon. In fact, the guy that Tracy jilted me for was 23 and she was sixteen and the age gap was barely on the periphery of the circle’s discussion. I knew a 19/14 couple in which age was the least of the issues between them. One guy I knew dated a 33 year old when he was 18 and then married a 17 year old girl when he was 23. And that’s excluding the DJ, who was one of the few that manage to escape our very wide range of acceptability. And even then only barely.

The argument went like this: we all mature at different rates. Girls, on average, mature faster than boys. Some girls, as though touched by the scepter of the mighty Jove, are considerably more mature than their peers. When this is the case, it makes more sense for her to be with a more “mature” (read: older) guy than for her to waste time with her “immature” friends.

Looking back over ten years later, I can safely say that was a hot, heapin’ helpin’ of crap. But it was a feast in which we all have incentive to dine. It allowed guys to go after younger women with moral impugnity. Some were guys that could not get girls there own age, some were genuinely more comfortable about the younger set, others simply enjoyed the malleability of the younger ones, and the particularly odious ones (who were relatively few) enjoyed tainting innocence. And it allowed the girls the self-esteem boost of feeling superior to the guys around it and a chance to feel outright womanly at the tender age of 15.

If we were serious about pursuing this theory to its logical conclusion, we would have to have admitted that the opposite was true as well: if a 15 year old girl that dates a 23 year old guy is mature for her age, a 23 year old guy that dates a 15 year old girl is immature. But we never thought of it that way. That was a bummer and we were all about empowerment! In reality we used a certain circular logic that any 15 year old that’s willing to date a 23 year old must be mature for her age because… well because she’s willing to date a 23 year old.

I remember a late-night conversation I had with my best friend Clint, wherein we were talking about a younger, pretty girl that had at one point or another been interested in each of us. We were talking about the maturity theory and that girls can be mature for their age. I can’t remember which one of us came out with it, but one of us said “But she’s not, really. Is she.” It wasn’t really a question. “No. She’s not.”

That sent a ripple through our perspective on the matter. The truth is we weren’t even looking for sex. We were so inexperienced that we only had a vague idea of what sex was (in addition to celibate, we were insufficiently familiar with pornography). But we did want a girlfriend in a dopey John Hughes kind of way. And we’d moved heaven and earth to convince ourselves it that the ends would justify the means if we broadened our horizons just enough. But at some point we were able to take a step back and admit to ourselves that no matter how much we wanted to, we had nothing in common with these younger girls. We considered it a shame, though of course looking back it was actually a sign that we weren’t as warped as we thought we were and that good things would catch up with us in time.

Maturity is not something that magically happens. It is something that occurs with growth and growth occurs in conjunction with responsibility. Most sixteen year olds, boys and girls, have relatively similar sets of responsibilities. Even responsible teenagers have very limited responsibilities from the perspective of an adult. They have varying degrees of fake responsibilities wherein if they don’t live up to them the consequences are minor and/or are not immediate. Whether or not we consider this a good thing is open for debate, but right now it is what it is. And as long as expectations don’t vary too greatly, neither will maturity vary outside of certain parameters too often.

With that in mind, I have known some young ladies that were mature for their age. I was vaguely involved with one significantly younger girl that at least acted more mature than most women my own age. But that was because her father ditched her, her mother was never sober, and she was more-or-less taking care of herself since she was 14. Far from being an accomplishment her maturity was instead a sign of tragedy. And even then we had come by our maturity in such different ways that it was hard for us to break through. Even then, she needed someone that could relate to her experiences, not just her maturity level.

So as such, I am generally pretty suspicious of relationships where the age gap is too wide, particularly in the younger years. Looking back at those relationships I saw with the 19 year old guys and 14 year old girls, the only reason their years didn’t matter was because there was hidden in the tall grass of all their other problems. I do think that sometimes two wrongs make a right and such relationships can work out in the long run, but I think when it does it’s usually as much a sign of personal, familial, or cultural failure as it is true love finding its way against all odds.

On a side-note, a slight touch of irony is that as much as I’d flirted with the idea of dating younger, almost all of my successful relationships have been with people very close to my own age or slightly older.

I remember in high school my friend Clint’s girlfriend Bethy was writing for the school paper. I’m not sure how, but the subject of affirmative action came up. She didn’t really know what it was so we explained it to her. She was incensed. The newspaper’s next publication contained a point/counterpoint on the issue in which Bethy wrote the “anti” argument. The rather bland article contained two of the strangest sentences I’d seen printed: “By promoting affirmative action, public officials and educators are promoting their own affirmative action” and “Affirmative action is simply affirmative action by another name.”

As it turned out, that made it in there because an editor took offense at her original wording, which suggested that proponents of affirmative action were engaging in some racial preferences of their own. He didn’t like the the term “racial preferences”, which she used repeatedly, so he did a mass-replace with “affirmative action” and never looked back.

I thought of that whole incident while watching the 80’s British comedy Yes, Minister. The serial’s villain is one Sir Humphrey Appleby, the bureaucrat extraordinaire whose primary function is to try to thwart the idealistic (if more than a little vain) Minister of Administrative Affairs, Jim Hacker. Appleby’s entire philosophy can be summed up with, “Sir, you can’t just go in and change things, and if you keep trying then things might change and that would be utterly unacceptable!”

In the third season he gives a stirring defense of being a moral vacuum. If he believed in all of the policies that he was ordered to do, he would be on both sides of every issue (depending on who is in power) and ultimately schizophrenic, so he takes no side ever. This would be one thing if it meant he dutifully carried out the will of his Minister without regard to his personal feelings, but instead it is his reason to thwart whatever it is that the minister is trying to accomplish in five simple steps. A man without a party, his interests begin and end in perpetuating the bureaucracy.

You wouldn’t think that a show about bureaucratic struggle could be so funny, but Yes, Minister succeeds admirably. Though Jim Hacker is the protagonist, it’s Appleby that’s really the star. His rationalizations, his sophistry, and his the genius of his manipulations are so funny because they are so familiar. It’s like watching Richard III and finding yourself sometimes more eager to congratulate the manipulative villain rather than the dupe in charge.

And Appleby isn’t always wrong. And even when he is wrong, I found myself understanding his need to guard his own interest, his very way of life in the face of those that would go needlessly upheaving everything. William F. Buckley famously characterized conservatism as “standing athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” and in that vein Appleby is very definition of conservatism. There is much to protect about the British way of life and he is there to protect it. Forever, in amber.

But of course Appleby goes too far and views any and all change as a threat to the very Kingdom. And he makes the classic mistake of viewing his own needs as intertwined with the needs of the Kingdom. Many a mistake has been prevented by those that live and die by protecting the status quo, but government is serious business and it is people like Appleby that fiddle while levees deteriorate.

A free and democratic people simply cannot accept that the bureaucracy is and always will be and the status quo cannot change. The biggest case and point in the United States is Louisiana. They came to accept the corruption in their state and it actually became a marker of perverse pride as ego prevailed over self-esteem. They did make some attempts to change things as Edwin Edwards got shipped off to jail and, believe it or not, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was elected on a platform of competence and honesty. And indeed, prior to Katrina, Nagin was the most honest and competent mayor they’d had in decades. Think about that.

The seriousness of the stakes make us need to be careful before we laugh too hard. Yes, Minister, like our own The Daily Show, lives and breathes by our own cynicism. And as strange as it sounds I wonder if laughter is a form of acceptance. Forrest Gump once said if you can’t sing good, sing loud. AA has the prayer about changing the things you can and accepting the things you can’t. Shows like Yes, Minister and The Daily Show simply subtly tell us to skip the whole try to change part and have a good, sneering laugh.

of course, how does one try to affect change without being an obnoxious outrage generator? Right now liberals are purely outraged every time The President sneezes. Eight years ago Republicans were the same. And I absolutely hate those damn bumper stickers about “If you aren’t outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Oh, spare me. And while you’re at it, don’t mistake outrage for conscientiousness or conviction. Which then makes me wonder if I’ve just become cynical about cynicism.

So I really can’t tell you whether this post is a review of Yes, Minister, an obnoxious Public Service Announcement, or a simultaneous expression and disdain of cynicism.

Anyhow, Yes, Minister is a great show. Because pits unrealistic idealism against cynical realism and political arrogance against defensive institutionalism, it’s as relevant twenty years later as it was then. Though this is a series that probably couldn’t be Americanized very well, any American that can appreciate dry, sophistical (as opposed to necessarily sophisticated) humor, could laugh as I did. I just hope we don’t laugh too long.

It reminded me a bit of a Superbowl ad that changed vending machines forever. Most of my readership (that I know about) is either my age or a little bit older, so you probably remember how absolutely dreadful vending machines used to be at accepting the dollar. Back then most didn’t, but those that did would seemingly spit out any dollar bill that wasn’t fresh off the mint. If you had a dollar bill and you saw a vending machine that you wanted to take advantage of, you genuinely had to ask yourself if the dollar was in good enough shape to use. These days you only have to worry about it if the dollar is in particularly bad shape. I remember precisely when this started changing.

I can’t remember what Superbowl it was, but there was an ad that took place in a desert landscape with a little wooden building. It slid around the landscape and you heard this “vreeemp… vrooomp” sound. Eventually the camera slid to the other side of the wooden building and it was a guy trying to get a damn vending machine to accept a damn dollar bill. It was hilarious because it was so true. I think the ad served as a wake-up call to the vending machine industry that their failures have been noticed and within a year it started accepting used dollar bills without too much hassle.

Slate has a good piece up about the government’s meek and ineffectual attempts to shift the dollar to coinage rather than paperage, including a good history of the attempts it has made and why they have failed. It includes an interesting bit about vending machines with a rather similar ad:

According to the GAO, “an informal Treasury restriction” prohibited the Mint from suggesting that a coin was superior to a bill—it could say only that a coin was also available. One TV spot showcasing a frustrating vending-machine moment (vvmp-vvvvmp, vvmp-vvvvmp) was scotched, after a combative meeting at the Treasury, on the grounds that it “negatively portrayed the dollar bill.”

Other than the flashback to the aforementioned ad, it brings to light what I’d considered one of the biggest stumbling blocks to a new $1 coin: vending machines. I find it very odd that they would use vending machines since none of them, you know, actually accept dollar coins.

Anyone that’s had to deal with a $50 bill will tell you that no one wants currency that you can only spend in particular places. Okay, granted, if someone handed me a $50 bill I would take it for sure, but not at the expense of two twenties and a ten or five tens. So I figured that the key to getting the $1 coin in circulation would be to make sure that machines, as well as people, accept them. Apparently it’s a little more difficult than even that:

Shoppers won’t use dollar coins till they see businesses taking them; businesses won’t use them until banks give them out routinely; and the banks aren’t going to invest in infrastructure changes, like new coin-counting machines, until they see the public using the coins. Everyone’s waiting for someone else to move first.

The Slate article suggests that the only way to do this is to get rid of the dollar bill, which is probably right. Dollar bills are more convenient and I’d miss them, but I think on the whole he’s probably right and it is time to make the change.

As you probably know, they’re about to try again with the dollar coin and they’re going to put the face of each dead president on it. It’s a gimmick, but whatever it takes to get James K. Polk’s face on a coin is alright by me.

The screensavers on all my computers are slideshows. The slideshow that I’ve traditionally used has been a bunch of 3D-generated landscape images. But for my last job I decided to grab a bunch of wallpapers for favorite TV shows, anime, comic books, pictures I’ve taken, and childhood pictures of me. Then, at some point, I downloaded a bunch of anime wallpapers and that’s my third option.

The anime wallpapers are on one of my laptops. Some are from serials that I’ve seen, which is cool because it’s familiar, and some are not, which is cool because I learn about different serials that way. Some, however, are actually somewhat elicit. I’m not sure if there are any that out-and-out show nudity, but they’re generally inappropriate.

For the record, I’ve never been particularly into anime erotica.

At some point I’ll go through all 3000 images and knock out the inappropriate ones, probably before my parents next visit.

In the meantime, periodically Clancy will clear her throat and look at my monitor, and I’ve sorta put myself in the same situation that my best friend and I talked about putting his stepfather in.

The conversation about the TV show Frasier got me thinking about a couple of opportunities in my life where I could really relate to what happened to Niles, who missed a very small opportunity to express his devotion for Daphne.

In the mid-nineties the girl was Tracy. Tracy was the first girl for whom things like getting married and having children even entered my mind. She had expressed some interest before, but I deferred because of another girl whose name I can no longer even remember. But I’d left the door open and sure enough, within a couple of weeks I’d decided that not only was it something worth pursuing, it was the only thing work pursuing. It was all coming to ahead when I was going to drive up there and we were going to go out. I was going to tell her how I felt and everything would work out marvelously.

Unfortunately I got held up before I could leave. I was helping a melodramatic friend work through her most recent melodrama. Her phone line was busy each time that I tried to call. When I finally got up there, her father told me that the line had been busy because she’d been talking on the phone with some guy who eventually came to pick her up since I hadn’t showed.

They ended up in the park and that very night she lost her virginity to him. She’d intended to save herself for marriage (indeed, her consent to the sex was dubious at best) and she got her mind wrapped around the idea that the only way that she could make what happened okay was if things worked out between them. Any chance she had of actually ending up with him was dashed by her subsequent obsessive behavior. All of this was complicated by fact that the sex was unprotected and she was convinced that she was pregnant. And just as she’d dashed her chances with him, I’d dashed my chances with her with my dramatic outbursts and anger over the sudden turn of events. Just as he’d understandably become uncomfortable with her, she’d understandably become uncomfortable with me

It would have been easier to take if it had simply been a matter of her losing interest or never having had interest. I won’t go too much further into it except to say that the story did not end there. We had opportunities later on, but none of them bore fruit because of a really bad night she had in late autumn 1995.

Several years later the girl was Evangeline. Eva and I met before we were out of relationships that we both knew we were getting out of (it was the first serious conversation that we’d had, actually). There were midnight meetings, days in when we pretended to be sick from work, and we even went shopping together for gifts for the last Christmas together with our respective partners. Though we’d both intended to wait until the new year before getting out of our respective relationships, circumstance played a hand and pushed that date up (a subject for another post) to mid-December.

She ended hers on a Tuesday and it took the next two nights for me to end mine. We were going to meet up that Friday night, but her father decided to throw a party so we couldn’t. But, she told me, I could come to the party if I wanted to. We went back and forth on it and decided that we’d go ahead and postpone until Saturday night since we were both free to make our own plans.

I didn’t hear from her again for two days. Two excruciatingly long days. While I was watching some television that night, her ex-boyfriend (not the one she’d just dumped) made an appearance. He’d always had this magical hold on her. She denied that what was obviously happening was actually happening, but it was like watching a car wreck in slow motion. From the point of view of the driver of the Pinto running into the SUV.

Nothing was the same after that even after it became apparent that he, as with Tracy’s beau, was more-or-less using her for sex. By the time she got over him, I was brimming with so much anger that our relationship (the first of three) was doomed from the start.

Both of these cases haunted me a great deal until I finally met Clancy. It’s one thing when something doesn’t work out because it can’t. It’s not even really that bad when a relationship doesn’t work out because you screwed up big-time. But another thing entirely when you can look back and say if it weren’t for that particular crossroads that you didn’t even realize you were at, you could have married them. That’s the case with both Tracy and Evangeline. We never recovered from that initial stumble where some other guy showed up when I was supposed to.

I guess you could say that it taught me some lessons, but I’m not sure that they were all good ones. Mostly, they just left me overeager to nail things down earlier than it is right to start trying to do that. But it had an upshot: if I hadn’t gotten very serious with Clancy very early on, there’s no way that we would have made it.

Is it me or has the record industry been more successful than usual at shutting down song-lyric sites?

In interesting but irrelevent fact about myself. When I was in grade school I wrote a song called “The Arkansaw Rivers of Spring” even though I’d never been to Arkansas.

Anyhow, the state of Arkansas has designated an official spelling of the possessive. It is now Arkansas’s rather than Arkansas’. This has left Arkansan HDC unhappy:

In my experience, most grammar teachers use the possessive rules as described in the Associated Press Handbook, which would have the correct possessive spelling for Arkansas as Arkansas’. Just because there is a silent ‘s’ at the end of Arkansas, does not entitle you to add another for enunciation’s sake. It looks funny in written text, and causes people to stumble over the word. Naturally, your brain will look at the spelling and try to pronounce it as “Ar-kan-sass-es” which is far from the correct pronunciation of “Ar-kan-saws”.

Even discounting the pronounciation issue, it’s not as clear-cut as HDC suggests. When I was in grade school I was indeed taught that singular nouns (and proper names) ending in “s” are accompanied only by an apostrophe, but that changed sometime in high school or college when I was told to put the “s” on after all. The latter always made more sense to me, so that’s what I do. But HDC’s adamance got me curious, so I consulted some university websites to see what they have say. Surprisingly, I got five answers and one punt from six universities on what I thought was a pretty binary question:

Meredith College says that there is “generally” no “s” added in a singular nouns that end in “s”. But strangely, they say that the same applies to words that end in “x” and “z” and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a word end in either x’ or z’. Example given: Dr. Seuss’.

Purdue, on the other hand, says that there is always an “s” following the apostrophe after a singular word ending in “s”. Examples given: James’s.

The University of Oregon sites a rule that I have never heard: a singular noun ending in “s” is followed by an apostrophe-s except when the object referred to begins with “s”. Examples: Boss’s car, boss’ sister.

Emory, on the other hand, says that it depends on pronounciation, which is consistent with Arkansas’s position. Kind of. It says that it’s apostrophe-s unless adding the “s” makes it sound strange, in which case it can go either way. Example given: Pardes’, Pardes’s.

The University of Calgary does not care.

Anyway, I can agree with HDC that it doesn’t seem like a particular good use of the legislature’s time. But if he or she is worried that Arkansas codified it incorrectly and is thus making itself look stupid, he or she shouldn’t sweat it.

Addendum: Even the Stylebooks can’t agree! As HDC points out the AP Stylebook veers towards simply adding an apostrophe, but the Chicago Manual of Style veers towards apostrophe-s (except in words of two or more syllables ending in an ‘eez’ sound, which is where Emory was coming from.

-{found by way of Dustbury}-