1. My thumb drive, which I had been using for my work on last year’s novel, did not survive a dance with my washing machine.
2. I am an idiot that does not check the pockets of pants he puts in the washing machine.
3. My commute is almost exactly 40 minutes. However, if I leave for work at 7:20 it is 50 minutes. Traffic accounts for a little bit of that, but it’s mostly the city’s timed lights are always, always red when I leave right on time to arrive to work right on time.
4. The best quesadillas in town have been replaced on the menu by these onion-drenched things.
5. My coworker has very annoying political views and he is very loud about them. Listening to him talk is bad for my blood pressure.
6. We have to bring in certain supplies for work from home. They constantly disappear and I have to keep re-buying them. I’m talking about items that cost $10-20 a piece, which adds up after a while.
7. Politicians.
8. Every time I learn to accept some sort of dysfunction on my Pocket PC, it immediately gets worse.
9. I had to send my Pocket PC in for repair on a week where I could really, really use it at work.
10. I have commissioned someone to do something for me, which I can’t really go into detail about. Anyhow, he handed the job over to someone else, which is fine, but the guy he handed it over to has been trying to email me for the past week. I didn’t know the guy’s name that was going to do it. Turns out he’s been emailing me for the past week and I’ve been ignoring it because his name really, really sounds like the sort of name that is usually on spam and the titles happened to sound like spam titles (”Contact me about your commission!” “Hey, sorry about the delay!” “Your business proposition”)
11. I wanted a thing of queso at lunch, which is clearly marked on the menu as “queso”. I asked for queso and got a confused expression. I pointed to the queso on the menu and said “I want that!”. She got another waitress to translate for me. I ended up getting something other than queso.
12. My project manager Mal is on vacation the final two weeks of testing before the big release. Turns out he’s just as annoying in email correspondence as he is in person.
13. I am not learning to be ambivalent at work nearly fast enough. I still care and it, like my coworkers political views, is bad for my blood pressure.

Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Walter Dellinger pre-emptively discuss the possibility that racial “preferences” used by Louisville and Seattle to enforce a “minimum” and “maximum” African-American presence in each school (while conveniently neglecting to watch other races) might be struck down as unconstitutional. Both opposed the idea.

The eventual decision (by 5-4 ruling, as most of this term’s have been) was that opponents were right. I think Justice Kennedy’s line was the best: “Crude measures of this sort [as illustrated in this case] threaten to reduce children to racial chits valued and traded according to one school’s supply and another’s demand.”

Where I grew up, there was a forced busing system actually worse than Louisville’s. Instead of being limited to within ISD districts, it actually was an “exchange” system; students from certain districts with high minority populations were bussed out to less-populated suburban districts. The results were staggering, and I’m confident in saying not helpful.

But I don’t think the results actually had anything to do with race.

The actual results of the program, which may or may not still exist (and hopefully will die with this decision if it does still exist) were the following:

- Increase in violence and gang activity in the suburban schools.
- Decreased involvement by parents and bussed kids alike in school programs.

By the time I was of high school age, these were bad enough for the local high school that my parents sent me to a private school (another 7 miles away). The high school had had at least one violent incident involving a weapon every week.

However, I believe that neither of these complaints has a direct relation to race. For the first, if a majority of kids were from any low-income area (”white trash”, latino, asian, black) there would likely be a larger number of latchkey kids, bad parents, violent behavior, and yes, crime and gangs and drugs.

For the second, I believe the primary problem was partially the income of parents, but also partially the onerous nature of the busing program. When kids are near a school, or “nearer” compared to a 3-hour bus ride, it’s not as far for parents to pick them up after school events. It’s not as far for parents to drop them off early. And it’s an extra amount of time for parents to drive to make it to games and cheer their kids on, and then bring them home again.

Even if the 3-hour bus trip equates to a normal 30-minute ride (and my parents usually dropped me off rather than have me have to sit and wait for a bus that took 2 hours to make what would have been a 30-minute bicycle ride, 15 in the car), that’s an hour lost from someone’s day trying to participate in these extra things. It’s harder for them to make it to parent-teacher conference night, harder for them to be there for band practice or sports programs, harder for them to be there even for a school dance. It’s also an hour of lost sleep, or lost potential study time, for the child.

And that’s setting aside the fact that school buses, even more than the school building themselves, are havens for a Lord of the Flies mentality - bored kids sitting in a confined space, with nothing to do but cause trouble and the only “supervision” an adult whose primary point of attention is not the kids, but the road. A lot of damage can be done to kids on a bus, and the longer the bus trip, the worse it gets.

The end result is a net loss for the kids on both sides of the equation. The school attendance numbers may not change, but the school community numbers do.

The English language needs a word for generally non-hateful unfair discrimination on the basis of something other race and sex.

A while back Kevin Drum wrote a post about how the self-pitying the south can be in regards to how the rest of the country views it:

I can’t begin to tell you how tired I am of the South’s victim complex. Five of our last seven presidents have been from the South and the other two have been from the Southwest — and the reason, as near as I can tell, is that most Southerners just flatly refuse to vote for anyone who comes from north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And yet, somehow, it’s the rest of us who are supposedly intolerant of Southern culture.

I can honestly sympathize. It’s pretty ridiculous of the south to complain about a lack of power and the whole “the south is the only group that it’s okay to disrespect anymore” whine is reminiscent of the ludicrous “white men are the only group it’s okay to disrespect anymore.”

That being said, hoooooooo-boy do the commenters make the redneck’s case for him. They actually do go on to say things about southerners that you couldn’t get away with saying about most groups without being called something nasty. What’s hilarious to me is that they make almost the exact same case against southerners that the folks over at Half Sigma make about blacks and Hispanics: our blind disdain is based on fact, thankyouverymuch. Some of them don’t even make the cursory “You’re okay, it’s the rest of the rednecks I hate” when a few southern liberals speak up.

I have a particular loathing of the Confederate Battle Flag, but it’s almost enough to make me want to go buy one so that I can wave it and say “screw you”.

But before I get into that, I’d like to note one of life’s great ironies. Rural southern culture is set up almost in direct contrast to urban black culture. Humorously enough, they have a whole lot in common. In fact, the roots of cultural weaknesses of the most dead-end of them all are in many ways identical. The worst of both groups have a suspicion of the educated. The worst of both value “authenticity” over achievement. Both view education and articulation as a form of sell-out.

And both groups are unfortunately frequently defined by the weakest amongst them.

To be clear, I have a lot of problems with aspects of the southern culture. I don’t like their approach to gays, I think their reading of the Civil War is ridiculous, they seek their own form of hyphenated citizenship while decrying other groups that seek the same, and the approach that many have towards people of color leaves quite a bit desired (though the claimed difference between white southerners and whites in other parts of the country is overstated and usually skewed). It bothers me to no end that when confronted with their shortcomings they often retreat into proud backwardness (though, on the other hand, no region is America so frequently has its perceived shortcomings so frequently waved in its face).

But in all honesty these are the parts of the south that stick out not because they’re the most dominant aspects but rather because they’re the parts that are different from other regions. The ways that a larger number of the citizenry fall short than elsewhere. It’s a natural phenomenon to notice the differences in like groups, but it’s not helpful to define people by those differences. The ratio may differ, but we have good schools and bad schools just like they do in Massachusetts. The percentages will differ, but some of us go to church and others of us do not, just as in California. They differ in degree, but we have liberals and conservatives just like Pennsylvania else does.

It seems that this ought to go without saying, but reading over the comment section one might think that we are an entirely different species. Had we not moved where we did, there was a city in upstate New York that we were strongly considering. It’s distressing to me that people might view me mostly through the prism of where I was raised. I certainly wouldn’t trust most of the commenters on Drum’s blog not to dismiss my college degree as a freebie given by a cow college that’s impressed that I can read and spell real good.

The problem with the such blatant stereotyping is that it so frequently brings out the worst kind of reaction. I mean seriously, how do you respond when someone tells you that you come from an inferior culture? Does telling you that you’re a “credit to your people” make it okay? Not really when they’re basically telling you that a lot of your friends were screwed up. And aggrieved people stick together, even when the aggrieving is as shallow as simple name-calling.

I’m serious when I say that my visceral response is to find a confederate flag and wave it. I’m not going to defend most of the jackasses that decide to wave the banner of an oppressive, anti-American regime proudly and even worse use it to identify our proud heritage (the most anti-southern yankee couldn’t draw up a better image if he tried). But it does seem that a number of people that defend it do so because they don’t want to give in to people that quite frankly don’t like them and use their inferiority to feel better about themselves. It’s hard to convince the statehouse to take down the Confederate Jack when it pleases people that don’t like you and everyone knows that they will still be calling you a bunch of racists even if you do.

Mingle² - Online Dating

It looks like it was primarily my post on the death penalty that did me in. Benoit and the Internet posts didn’t help, either.

To those who knew who he was, the death of Chris Benoit is old news, and to those who didn’t probably don’t care. It was just a sad little story of another dead wrestler until the gristly details of how he murdered his wife and children before taking his life (all without the use of a gun). Details are still forthcoming, but there is no way I can piece all that together without it being awfully an harrowing tale.

Benoit was on the periphery of things back when I was following the WWF/WWE, but he was a sight to see in the ring. Political blogger Marc Armbister calls him “one of the reasons why professional wrestling, despite its ridiculous pretenses and bewilderingly predictable storylines, remains popular, profitable and culturally relevant.”

The WWE apparently pre-empted their usual show to do a Benoit special, bringing WWE president Vince McMahon back from the dead (his character was in a limo that blew up not long ago) to give a eulogy. Some people are wondering why they were doing that, but I figured that they must not have known the grisly details surrounding the death. Never mind the tastelessness of it, it exemplifies every negative stereotype about wrestling except the fakery. McMahon may be a bastard, but he’s not stupid.

Unfortunately, Benoit (and his wife, who was involved in wrestling) joins a long list of wrestlers that died before their time. What’s particularly remarkable about that list is that there are a lot of very familiar names on that list, so it’s not populated with amateurs or the product of their being more wrestlers out there than we knew. Presumably Benoit won’t be mourned as the rest. The question is whether or not this will get the authorities to take a closer look at what’s going on the wide world of wrestling. It won’t be a pretty sight.

Far out, man…

I was just down at the Post Office sending off a couple of packages when I swore I could recognize the guy behind the counter. I sat there and tried to figure it out the entire time that I was in line. He looked vaguely like my friend Tony, but he was like thirty years too old to be. The name Mike Nelson kept running through my head. Or Matt Nelson or Mark Nelson or something like that. But I couldn’t think of any Mike/Matt/Mark Nelson that I knew even though I did know the name. When I walked up to the counter I saw the name Mark Nielson. At that point I knew that I knew him from somewhere.

Then it hit me. “Did you marry into the Douglas family?”

He looked at me and said, without any intonation, “Yes.”

“I knew that I knew you! I dated Julie for almost five years.”

“Right,” he replied.

“Interesting to meet you way out here,” I said.

“I’ve lived here for ten years,” he told me without an ounce of enthusiasm.

What was funny was that up until I identified myself, he was unusually warm and friendly for a customer service civil servant. He made jokes with the guy before me and with me. But the second I said that I used to date Julie, his face just clammed up.

I can’t figure out if it’s because when I left Julie I became a villain in the Bernard/Douglas household or if it’s because at some point after I left he became a villain. He was a knight in shining armor when he first started dating Julie’s aunt. Julie had just been left by her husband, whom nobody liked, for a younger woman. In came Mark and all was right with the world. Then, at some point everything flipped and they all liked the ex-husband and Mark was the bad guy.

I figured that even if he knew that Julie’s family didn’t like her one bit that we were on similar ground there. An estrangement to bond over!

As soon as I got back to work I IMed Julie and asked what the state of Mark’s marriage with her aunt was. Pretty lousy, it turned out. He still does nothing but drink and smoke when he gets home (one of the reasons I had such trouble placing him was that he looked twenty years older than the last time I saw him seven or so years ago). They sleep in separate rooms.

I guess I can’t blame him for being less than warm to a former would-have-been in-law of a family that he got that kind of marriage from.

One day when I was driving through Colosse, I saw a sign that said “Tattoos & Piercing”. My most immediate thought was that was a rather odd name for a lawfirm. Piercing I could see, but who in the world had the last name of Tattoos. What nationality would that be? How is it pronounced? Of course, once I figured out how it was pronounced I felt like the dumbest person on the face of the earth.

When I was in college I nearly made the fatal mistake of changing my universal password to reflect the name of the new love of my life, Evangeline. Considering that things fell apart (albeit not for good) a couple weeks later, it was fortunate that I didn’t put myself in the position of remembering that heartbreaker every time I needed to access anything. I think about that every time I see a tattoo with a partner’s name on it.

—

My brother Mitch is more-or-less the All-American guy. Blond hair and blue eyes, solidly built, degreed, and outgoing. Among the Truman boys he is the only one that continues to go to church week in and week out. He’s also the only Truman boy that has a tattoo (a lightning bolt on his shoulder).

When I was in Deseret I knew this girl named Judy. Judy was one of the most prudish, scoldish people I never met. She had a really Betty Bowers quality to her except with a Mormon twist. Nothing got her going on the morally decadent nature of Democrats, non-Mormons, not-exactly-like-her-Mormons, people that engage in non-procreative forms of sex, and on and on and on. On the subject of rape, she pricelessly exasperatedly said, “Don’t they know that you don’t have sex with people you aren’t married to?” (presumably she gave the raped woman a pass, though it was interesting that she felt that non-marital sex was his primary moral error).

But despite all this Judy the Prudie was not the most conservative dresser. Enough so that we could see the small of her back and see a tattoo that she had there. The day I saw that was the day that I determined that the butt-cleavage tattoos had lost any of the edginess they may once had possessed. If Judy was wearing them, they were by definition non-edgy.

A little while back the New York Times had an article on the newly tentative nature of tattoos:

Removing tattoos is costly, uncomfortable and time-consuming, but the
affinity for body art is so strong that some people say they do it to
clear space to tattoo all over again. {…}

On the horizon is a development that could change the very nature of
tattooing: a type of ink encapsulated in beads and designed to break
up after one treatment with a special laser.

The technology for the ink, called Freedom-2, was developed by
scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital, and Brown and Duke
Universities. It is to go on sale this fall.

Part of the very notion of a tattoo, in my mind, has always been the permanency. It’s actually hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of an impermanent tattoo. Maybe it’s because it’s the permanency that made me decide never to get one. I am always at my worst when making life-altering decisions. I left Julie only once I was contemplating an irreversible lifetime commitment to her. Clancy and I survived that leap, for which I am grateful, but only barely. I almost transferred out of Southern Tech a year and a half in and less than a year of going into computers I decided (too late) that I didn’t want to. There really was no doubt in my mind that if I chose to get a tattoo, I would regret the decision the next day.

But is a tattoo that is removable still even a tattoo? It used to be that the reason for a tattoo was a marker of rebellion, but Judy and my brother put the final nail in that coffin. Mark Morford and others lament that once tattoos are easily removed, it won’t be the same.

Then again, I suppose that once the technology is there for easy removal and application, there’s nothing to stop it from becoming a long-term accessory. I remember I was at an outdoor music show many years ago and saw a woman with the old logo of Colosse’s professional football team. “Why would she get that?” I asked a friend, “didn’t she know that there was a pretty good chance that the logo would change in her lifetime?” Easy removal, I guess, allows for such frivolity without the consequences of becoming outdated.

The tattoo industry is excited about it for just that reason:

“We think the fence-sitters who always wanted a tattoo but have been afraid of the permanence will jump in and get tattoos,” said Martin Schmieg, the chief executive of Freedom-2. “But as your life changes from young to middle-aged to older, from single to married to divorced, you get tattoo regret, so we think the tattoo removal market
will increase as well.”

Be that as it may, I don’t think I will be among those getting a tattoo. The most immediate obstacle is that I would like my arms to be a little more toned before I do something like that. There’s nothing that makes a little chub more unattractive than tattoo decoration. Then again, if I ever get a toned arm, why in the world would I want to besmirch it?

The permanency of a tattoo is both one of the most appealing and least appealing aspects of a tattoo for me. I’m a pretty wishy-washy guy

Last week I complained about the dashboard light requesting that I get the car serviced less than a week after I had a full diagnostics check.

Well maybe it knew something I didn’t.

I was driving home from work on Friday and before I knew it there was smoke coming out of my car.

$350 later and we’re rolling again. That’s the third repair in six weeks. My desire for the car to make it past the 200,000 mile marker is starting to look like a very expensive proposition.

The upshot, I guess, is that my car breaking down managed to land my mother a Ford Mustang convertible. A post for another time…

Even though I don’t see him, I know that he’s always there. Lurking in the shadows. Sometimes I feel him brush against me on the street. Everything is fine, and then the next moment it’s not anymore. The first time me made his introduction, I was sad, all of my defenses were worn down. It’s usually his strategy to stalk around and take potshots when he can. His goal is to wait until you’re defenseless. Then he doesn’t need to be sneaky. Like a vulture, he sees you down and he swoops in. The damage is done. And as he bites in, you’re almost glad for the company.

Thankfully, it’s been years since he’s had the opportunity to do so.

It was Spring of 2000 when he came out of the darkness. Or should I say he cast the darkness upon me? That’s his power, after all. He casts darkness around you so that you can see no one else. You cannot see your family that loves you. You cannot see your friends that care. Everything you have is gone. Everything you’ve done is insignificant and invisible. At that point, you’re in his web. A captive audience for the show he plans to put on.

The spotlight flipped on and there was a mirror. That’s the embodiment he seems most prone to take. I looked in the mirror and saw my reflection, but it didn’t look quite right. It was distorted somehow. I knew that it was, but it was the only frame of reference that I had. It was the only thing in the room of otherwise complete darkness. “There is nothing left,” he told me. Again.

There was no witty retort. By that point I was too tired to fight back even verbally. There was nothing that he could say that I didn’t already know. That’s why he could be so brazen. So taunting. “What do you want?” I asked.

“I’m your own ghost of Christmas present,” he told me. “Except that it’s not Christmas. I do come bearing a gift.” He handed me a painting. It was wrapped in a brown garbage back. “Open it.”

I declined. I didn’t want to see what the painting was of. I knew it was of something dark. “I know everything there is that you can tell me,” I told him.

“It’s not what I am here to tell you. It’s what I’m here to take from you.”

“The light?”

“To take your lies. This darkness around you is not something I have imposed. It is merely everything you see, minus every lie you are telling yourself to get through the day. You’ll notice without the lies there isn’t much else. You spend so much time lying to yourself, you don’t know what the truth is anymore. Pull the lies and the darkness will rip away like a curtain and you’ll see again. Then you finally reached out to someone. You finally wanted to make things better. But before that can happen you have to get through me. I am here because you invited me here. I am here because you need me here.”

He was, of course, right. I had ripped a tear in the fabric of the tapestry I had created. I was four years into my relationship with Julie and I had finally told someone the incredible numbness I felt towards her and towards everything. The entire future I was building was being built around her. Without her and without that, I was left with nothing but a void. But there was nothing between us anymore except a formality. The darkness was self-imposed.

Bit by bit, with my mind, I began reconstruction the world as I could best understand it without Julie there. The Shadowman watched. He no longer took my form, but was instead this shapeless black figure. A soft clay or congealed fog of sorts. I would turn around periodically and ask, “Is this right?”

He never answered.

Suddenly, before I was complete, a young woman walked into my half-darkness. We stood there and looked at one another. Suddenly everything around me began to turn dark again until it was only her, myself, and the Shadowman. “Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Evangeline,” she told me.

“My name is Will,” I told her. I looked around at the re-instituted darkness. I wasn’t worried about it this time. I knew that I could re-draw it. “And you are the only thing in my world.”

As we walked towards one another, the world began to take shape again. This time it was different. It was colorful. A little too colorful. It was almost a cartoon with all sorts of colors put in to add balance. The world had been black and white until the Shadowman re-introduced me to the darkness. Now it was as colorful as it was before I first met him. Evangeline and I were a foot apart with our hands outstretched. I hesitated for a moment and then she was jerked away. The Shadowman had her wrist and pulled her away.

The Shadowman looked at me and hissed, “It’s her turn now,” and with that was replaced with the world around me coming back into shape.

And there I was, alone, in the world that I had built with Evangeline. I tried with all of my might to rearrange things as they were taking shape before I met her. But I couldn’t do it. Instead I was alone in her and my world, only without her in it.

I walked out of my dorm room and down the hall. I looked around in amazement as if I were seeing everything for the first time. Vivid color. I no longer cared that it wasn’t quite right. When I stepped outside it felt like I was in a giant painting. A very bright one.

“I need some sunglasses,” I told myself. I was getting a headache.

According to a new study, young people spend a lot of their online conversation talking about sex and drugs:

A new study by Caron Treatment Centers finds 1 in 10 messages analyzed involved teens seeking advice from their peers on how to take illicit drugs “safely” and without getting caught. {…}

In the messages, teens confessed to destructive behavior while they were under the influence.

“It’s very, very frightening,” said Dr. Harris Stratyner of the Caron Treatment Center.

In the messages, while few teens expressed any regret, many chalked it up to having a good time.

The basic premise behind the article is that online talking is potentially unhealthy and dangerous.

You want to know what’s potentially unhealthy and dangerous? Doing ecstacy and cocaine, and engaging in indiscriminate sex. That’s what’s dangerous, not chatting via instant messenger. The worst that can be said of instant messaging is that it is enabling anti-social behavior. But it does that the same way that a phone does and a car does. By the time the kid is online trolling for cocaine, you’re no longer in prevention mode, you’re in damage control mode. Their unmonitored access to IM is the least of your problems.

I could go on and on about the media’s portrayal that all sorts of problematic behavior also exist online and treat it as a threatening new discovery, but I’ve been doing that for over ten years now. It’s gotten kind of old.

More broadly, I’m tired of parenting culture simultaneously abdicating the uncool portion of their parenting responsibilities and then complaining about what a dangerous world it is out there. If your kid is using cocaine and you don’t realize that something is wrong, that’s not the Internet’s fault. If you realize that something is wrong (even if you don’t know that it’s cocaine) and you do nothing to reign your kid in, that’s not the Internet’s fault.

It seems that the easiest course of action for parents is to give their kids ulimited leeway and then complain about what they do with it while never actually trying to get a handle on the situation. Baby boomer parents have an almost pathalogical aversion to being considered uncool by their kids and a faction of Generation X parents have apparently fallen into that trap. So instead of tightening the screws of a loose, rattling young adult, they complain. Society is forcing them to be the bad guy (to say “no”) and they don’t wanna.

This is all remarkably easy for me to say seeing as how I don’t have any kids and may not ever have them. To be honest, I really can see the other side of the story. I know that if my wife and I did have kids I would almost certainly be the permissive one. I am on the “cool parent” side of every disagreement we’ve had thus far, excluding daughters and nail polish and dating. (a subject for another time)

But my sense of what freedoms a kid should have requires more rather than less monitoring. It means letting them do things that I don’t like, but making sure that they’re still on top of their lives. It means watching them fall even when I can prevent it from happening, but making sure that they’re nowhere near the cliff. Instead, parents seem to want to prevent them from falling when within sight and then giving them unlimited freedom out of sight. A desire to prevent them from hurt but not at the expense of preventing them from getting into situations where they can really hurt themselves.

I’m definitely not saying that it’s the parents fault whenever something bad happens to the kids. That actually represents another cultural problem, in that parents consider themselves absolutely responsible but then render themselves helpless with permissiveness, which creates insanity-inducing anxiety, making them irritating as all heck to backseat driving non-parents such as myself.

An absolutely fascinating map of where there are excesses of young single men and young single women.

A while back Capella wondered if the seeming lack of men was a function of geography and it looks like it might be! Boston, where she is, is about as red as can be.

The most obvious feature is the excess of women east of the Mississippi and the excess of men west of it.

Unfortunately I can’t talk about Colosse, except to say that I found the result a bit surprising.

One other observation: Nearly everyone I know that believes there is a “woman shortage” is either from Chicago or the northeast, where they statistically appear to have an advantage.

All of the major tech sectors are blue, as you might expect. Particularly the Bay Area and Seattle along the west coast. But does anyone have any idea why Los Angeles is so male? Spungen?

People in the comment section of Pharyngula are wanting to attribute the blue of southern California to immigrants. That doesn’t make sense though since the only red regions in the west are south Texas and New Mexico, both of which have substantial Hispanic populations.

The other red western areas are Sacramento (state employees?) and Tulsa (????).

Late last week I found myself knee-deep in a series of posts revolving around how worthless men, as a group are. I’ve been pondering a respond to that but the more I think about it the more pissed off I get and the more I realize that whatever I post is likely to end up as an overly broad negative characterization of women that is patently unfair, an apology that I don’t mean, or some sort of post about how I’m not like most guys even through really I don’t consider myself such. Suffice it to say none of these approaches would be helpful to the dialogue.

But something occurred to me that might be.

It’s a common complaint that men don’t pull their weight around the house and ignore pleas for help. Indeed, a lot of men for whatever reason are pretty worthless when it comes to certain (most?) housemaking tasks that have historically been considered “women’s work”. But often guys, even guys that have historically ignored pleas for help in the past, can be convinced if you can approach it a certain way and avoid making some very understandable errors.

1. Remember (and inform him) this is a negotiation and not a vent

Guys often don’t know when a woman is complaining because she honestly wants something done about it or when she is explaining to vent. If you really want him to do more of the work, be very upfront that that’s what you’re looking for. Some guys will call any woman’s critique a nag, but sometimes honest complaints can come across as nags by well-intentioned guys who don’t entirely understand where she’s coming from.

Since this is a negotiation, it’s best to come prepared. If you can, have a list of the things that you do around the house and the things that he does. Be sure to include everything he does even if it’s traditional male work. Not listing everything that he does makes it easier for him to make the case that you forget the things that he does, too.

Give him a little time to consider your request. If he feels like he has to answer right away he might feel like he’s being pressured. Sometimes he’ll argue back out of obstinance. Speaking for myself I am much less likely to admit that I am wrong in the middle of a discussion/debate/negotiation than I am after I’ve had time to consider it. A lot of guys are this way sometimes, we get into the mindset that the discussion is a competition rather than something that can, in the end, make everyone happy.

2. Be As Specific As Possible

The biggest thing when trying to help around the house is to be specific. Sometimes women make the mistake of simply saying “Could I get some more help around the house?” and if they give examples they’re a vague listing of ways that he could possibly help. This is the sort of conversation that most guys often genuinely forget about and it’s hard to call them on it. How much help were you asking for? How frequently? He may think he’s doing what you ask simply by putting the dishes in the sink when he’s done eating and wiping off the toilet seat after he’s urinated on it.

It is much better to outline what precisely you would like him to do. Ask him to do the dishes every day or every other day. Ask him to rub down the shower once a month. Give him specific domains to take care of and give him an idea of what you would like done and how often.

The guy’s job in this is to be fair-minded about what all she does around the house and look at it from that perspective. He might have a tendency to approach the issue as “Before I was doing X, but now I have to do W,X,Y and Z.” and that seems unfair. At the outset of the conversation, if you can, point out to him that you are already taking care of A-H and that you’re not asking more of him than you’re doing (of, if you’re are, give a reason for it like you’re working more hours in the week or whatever). He may respond with a list of things he does (”I already mow the lawn and pay the bills!” or whatever). Do factor that in to your equitable solution.

3. Ask if he needs to be shown how to do it.

Until I got married I hadn’t the slightest clue about how to work the dishwasher. A lot of guys don’t and guys being guys they’re going to be reluctant to ask for help. Try to pre-emptively offer it. Sometimes guys would rather come across lazy than ignorant and so they’ll come up with other reasons not to do it to avoid admitting they don’t know how to do something they know that they should already know how to do.

4. Remind him if he forgets.

Some women complain that a guys behavior changes for a couple weeks and then it returns to normal. Often that’s what happens. Sometimes it’s because a guy wants to do as little as he can get away with, but sometimes once the urgency has passed he honestly forgets about it. There is no harm in saying “Remember you said that you would sweep the garage once a month”. That’s much better than expecting him to remember, getting mad when he doesn’t, and assuming that he is being lazy because he doesn’t care.

Eventually it will stop dropping from his consciousness because he knows it won’t go away.

5. Express appreciation

A lot of guys want a parade every time they do something that they’re supposed to do. That’s certainly not necessary. But a little bit of thanks go a long way. Saying “thank you!” when he does the dishes costs you absolutely nothing and will help motivate him to do it next time. Or at the very least he won’t privately fume about the lack of appreciation, which is a good thing as well.

The guy, on the other hand, needs to understand that sometimes she’s not going to notice and that is not sufficient reason for him to sit there quietly and fume about it.

6. Remember that the goal is getting the desired behavior, not proving your superiority.

Sometimes we (men and women) find ourselves entrenched in arguments wherein we almost want the other person to fail so that we can feel vindicated. Or we don’t want to have to ask for things. It’s worth it to make some rather small concessions (such as reminding them or thanking them) even if we don’t think that we should have to. Sometimes we set other people up to fail and that helps no one.

So there ya go. These are things that I have found to work with me and have found to work on my male roommates. Some women are going to do these things and the guy’s behavior will never change. Some guys you may not have to do any of these things for in order to get his help. I am not accusing women who have not gotten what they have wanted of making the mistakes listed above! These are the things that I have found get the maximum results and tips to avoid things that have caused blow-ups later on because of misunderstandings.

Will offers up his experience with beggars and bums below; I maintain a normally steadfast refusal to give money. My refusal is based partly on the behavior of those in Colosse.

When I was still a student at Southern Tech, we had experience with the bums. Generally they didn’t come onto campus (or campus cops did a good job herding them off), but they sat (and sit to this day) at the entrances to campus by the freeway, hounding people for money. Absurdly, they take shifts, and you can see them switching if you know what times they do it; one time we even followed one as he got “off shift” and went to a rather nice and well-maintained sports car to drive off.

The other thing that’s always a lark is their shifting stories. A couple summers back, there were some rather rough hurricanes; the local bums (whose signs had previously indicated out of work status) quickly shifted, all claiming to be refugees or that their places of work were destroyed by the hurricanes. When the second hurricane came by, that name went up on their begging signs, replacing the previous hurricane’s name; as if we wouldn’t notice that they were the same bum who’d claimed to be an evacuee of the previous weather the week before.

There is, however, one person I’ve given to in the past few months. I consider him the exception that proves my case. Driving home late on a wednesday night, I had the misfortune to hit one of the miscellaneous pieces of debris that inevitably come up in Colosse’s roads. It punctured a tire, and a mile down the road I was stopped.

Colosse’s freeways, alas, are severely lacking in proper-width breakdown lanes/shoulders, so when my can of Fix-A-Flat didn’t work, I got out my jack, set up to swap the tire… and realized it would be a VERY dangerous operation by myself.

A couple minutes later, a car pulled over and a gentleman got out and walked up; he asked if I needed any help, and aided me, keeping an eye out so that I didn’t get hit by anyone while the tire was switched. My spare was a bit low, but I was confident I could reach a gas station on it; I gave him what I had in cash ($20) and thanked him for his help.

I got to a nearby gas station, but my spare didn’t quite manage; the old thing had popped on the way up. Called my roommate for assistance, and as I was waiting for him, my earlier benefactor came by; he’d come back to check and make sure I got to safety.

As we were waiting, I got to know him a bit better; he was a military veteran who was a bit down on his luck, had his apartment and a car, but an expired drivers’ license and a job interview with UPS to become a driver later that week. He showed me his documents - they matched. I didn’t have any more money to give him, but my roommate had a few bucks, and we both thanked him - for his military service, for the help, for coming back - and then wished him good luck with his interview and getting the license renewed in the morning.

I refuse to give to a bum - but I also believe that my benefactor that night wasn’t a bum, and he was absolutely welcome to all the help I was able to give him.

-{Alms for the Poor}-

Southern Tech, my alma mater, is not in the best part of the city of Colosse. In fact, if you go across the Interstate or South Boulevard, you’re going to find yourself in the worst part of town. I’ve been approached by pimps* in the six times in my life, four times across the street or Interstate from the university. While there I got used to being approached by people looking for money. When I was younger and a bleeding heart, I was sometimes inclined to help them out. You get tired of it after a while.

Once I left the university I only found myself in the city when a lot of suburbanites are in the city, namely on weekends or when a professional sports team (or the Southern Tech Wolf Pack) were playing a game. Back then I had the perfect rejection: I don’t carry cash with me into the city. It was amazingly effective.
I wish that I could impress upon Santomas’s considerable homeless and panhandling population, it would be that none of the following are solicitations for solicitations:

• Smoking a cigarette outside a gas station.
• Going into or out of a convenience store.
• Having the porch light on at my home.
• Walking anywhere within the city.
• Filling up my gas tank.
• Waiting in my car going through drive-through.

Ironically, the only real safe place in Santomas is waiting at a red light, which was the surest way that you would get approached back in Colosse. Santomas is something of a liberal haven that is very kind to its homeless population, but I gather that’s the one thing that the local PD does not put up with (probably for congestion reasons). They’ll be out there on the corners, but they do not get on the street unless you signal for them. Interestingly, they’re a much more industrious lot here than in Colosse. There are a lot of curbside entrepreneurs, selling everything from fake flowers to (very practically) cold water out of a cooler. But again, they won’t approach you unless you signal for them to. The only time I’ve been approached has been by firemen with their boots or the occasional church collecting funds for something.

But with the exception of that, as you can probably gather from above, they are everywhere and not the least bit shy. So much so that I now consider it something of a downtown tax. If I smoke a cigarette outside of a convenience store, I am going to get approached. When that happens I have two options: I can either pay them to go away, I can snuff my cigarette early, or I can be pestered until I am done with it. The same goes for filling gas or waiting in line at a drive-through.

If you flatly tell them no, they don’t go away. Instead, they politely say “that’s cool” and continue to chat with you. Their chatter will almost always be how hard up they are and how rough it is in George Bush’s America or since 9/11 or whatever. They won’t ask for money again until the end. In the meantime, you will find no peace. If you tell them to go away, they’ll say that they understand, that they won’t ask again, and give you the sob story and eventually go back on their word and ask again.

I keep two wallets on me at all times. The first is my cash-and-cards wallet and the second is a glorified key-holder that typically was a wallet but has become ruined one way or another (typically it won’t hold change anymore). I have a driver’s license in each (my Deseret license in my keyholder and my Estacadoan license in my cash-and-cards wallet. I’ve taken to keeping a dollar or so in my cash-and-cards wallet. I’ll pay them to go their marry way and tell them that’s all the money I have. If I don’t have any money in there I will show them my empty wallet. The reason I don’t always do the latter is some of them will say that since I don’t have any cash would I mind going into the store and using my card to buy them something, anything, cause they’re so hard-up.

I’ve now actually factored that into the expense of doing anything in the city. Since I don’t work in Santomas I usually fill up outside of the city unless the dollar-or-two I’ll likely be hit up for is compensated for by cheaper gas (which is actually not infrequently the case, as Santomas gas is cheaper than outside the city). I’ve even taken to going to the suburbs if I want a drive-through burger or whatnot, though sometimes it’s worth an extra buck or two for the convenience.

(I kid you not, I was solicited while I was writing this email. A doorbell ring at 6:30 in the morning.)

Addendum: On an interesting sidenote, Santomas is a Hispanic-heavy city (though certainly less so than other parts of the state). And yet almost none of the panhandlers I see appear to be Hispanic. Most of the ones around my black-dominated neighborhood are black, downtown is mixed between black and white, and most by the freeway and in the suburbs are white. This is in contrast to the charity hospital where my wife works, wherein most of her patients primarily speak Spanish.

* - I never actually saw all that many prostitutes and was never approached by one. For some reason the standard solicitation is from a man informing me that he can “hook me up” for a certain price.

Right now at work I am alternating between episodes of My Name Is Earl and Friends. I’m not entirely sold on either of them, but since they have two different kinds of humor I find that I can switch back and forth as I get tired of one or the other.

Today I switched over from Friends right before watching an episode called “The One With the Evil Orthodontist.” In the episode of Earl that I switched to involved Earl and Randy going to an ecological commune wherein some characters re-enact an episode of Friends called… The One With The Evil Orthodontist.

My original thought was that it was a funny coincidence. But then the punchline involves Randy giving away what happens in the episode. So apparently I found a spoiler on an episode of an entirely different sitcom made some twelve years after the episode being spoiled. That takes talent.

Clancy delivered triplets yesterday. Kinda hard to wrap a head around that, I guess, unless you’re there.

The Supreme Court has made it a tad easier to send people to death row by ruling that people that object to the death penalty when there is a Life Without Possibility of Parole option can be disqualified from serving. The concern is that once you remove those people from the jury pool, you’re not only more likely to get a jury that will execute (which would be the goal) but you’re likely to get a jury that is more predisposed to find the defendant guilty.

Several years ago I was a death penalty opponent that was a candidate for a capital crime jury.

It was shortly before I left Colosse for Deseret and the whole process lasted longer than the eventual trial did. I was unemployed and really had nothing better to do than go to the county courthouse and spent a day or two listening to some traffic complaint. When my number was called out along with 119 others and I was given a packet of 160 questions I figured that this might not be some piddly traffic violation. Particularly when it started asking about my views on the death penalty, my political affiliations, any “radical” organizations I belong to, opposition to government actions, opposition to law enforcement behavior, and so on and so on. By the time I was done I knew it was the real deal. I also figured that there was no way in the world I would get on that jury because I put down clear as day that I am against the death penalty.

It turns out that it’s not quite that simple. There are some idiosyncrasies in Delosian law wherein the jury does not actually sentence someone to die. Rather they answer four or five questions about whether or not a particular murder meets the minimum requirements for the death penalty to be applied (was the murder an attempt at covering up or evading arrest for another crime, is the person a threat to human life in the future, and a couple other things along those lines, is there any mitigating reason why this particular defendant should be spared the death penalty). If any two of the five are int he affirmative and if the death penalty is being sought, the convicted goes to death row.

Had the question been put any other way I almost certainly would have had to recuse myself from the jury. I could not, in good conscience, tell a judge to have a prison guard kill a person. But my mind draws a clear distinction between that and answering the questions that I was asked. The only question that went to the heart of moral feelings about the death penalty was the one about mitigating circumstances. Truth be told, though, if we’re going to have a death penalty it should be as fairly applied as possible. As such it would not be fair of me say that there were mitigating circumstances when there weren’t. So despite my opposition to capital punishment, I was good to go.

What followed afterwards was a pointed attempt by the prosecution to demonstrate that I was not, in fact, good to go at all. I got a battery of extremely harsh questions. The prosecution tried paint me as a lilly-livered bleading heart, an American-hating peacenik (the questionnaire had asked if I had opposed any American military action in my lifetime, which I had), and an anarchist. After he was done to me, the defense attorney got up and asked if I had a problem with people with long hair. I answered in the negative and he was done with me.

The prosecution was trying to get the judge to disqualify me as prejudicial without having to waste a strike on me. The goal I think was to rattle me or maybe get me to indicate that I really didn’t like the prosecution (or prosecutors in general). But I never rattled. The closest I got was when he likened the “war on crime” to an actual war overseas and I was sorely tempted to say something to the effect of “If this is war then why are we wasting our time on trials?” I bit my tongue, though. He had succeeded in getting me to not like him, but at some point I realized that the biggest way I could be a pain in his arse was to force him to use a strike on me.

As luck would have it, the judge absolutely loved me. I’m really not sure why considering that the first thing he learned about me was that I was a softy on capital crimes (he wasn’t). In any case, either he really wanted to keep me around or I convinced him pretty thoroughly that I could be impartial. but he shot down all the prosecution’s objections.

The outcome was never in doubt. Colosse County is pretty Republican (even if the city isn’t) and a hotbed of law and order conservatism. I was an outlier and surely the prosecution had enough strikes to kick by bum to the curb. There was no doubt that the guy did it along with a number of other awful things and I didn’t figure that the jury would have any problem sending him to his chemical death. Sure enough, just a few weeks after I was shown the door he was sentenced to death.

Doing a quick google, he has apparently found Jesus and taken to writing poetry (in English and German) as he awaits execution.

I learned that:

• Even when well-sealed, ham in the refrigerator does go bad eventually and if your nose is telling you not to take a bite, don’t take a bite. You would have thought that I would have learned this when I ate that lemon-yellow horseradish.
• A little flan goes a very, very long way.
• A distressing number of people don’t know what flan is.
• A surprising number of people never even heard of the movie Wag The Dog.
• Real-world Utah was the second state in the US to give women the right to vote.
• Real-world Rhode Island actually formally named State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
• Seeing a “Service engine” light appear on the display of your car a week after having a full inspection and repair makes you more likely to disregard said message in the future.

-{Thank You For Calling I}-
-{Thank You For Calling II}-

Agent: Thank you for calling Dentex Dental Insurance Group, can I have your name, account number?

Me: William Sherwood Truman, 9941-1219-64

Agent: How may I help you today?

Me: I’m confused about my latest “Explanation of Benefits”

Agent: Okay, sir, please let me bring it up. Alright, what seems to be the trouble?

Me: Well, it says that you’re going to pay for 80% of my periodontal grouting.

Agent: Well yes, sir, as per the contract you are expected to kick in 20%.

Me: No, that’s not what I am confused about.

Agent: I’m sorry?

Me: You’re paying 80%.

Agent: Yes, sir, we can’t pay more than that. It’s in the contract.

Me: Yes. You’re abiding by the contract. This has be baffled and confused.

Agent: Baffled and confused mean the same thing, sir.

Me: Yes, you have me so baffled, confused, and befuddled that I am losing track of my adjectives.

Agent: I’m sorry, I don’t follow as to why you are confused, sir.

Me: The contract says 80% and you’re going to pay 80%.

Agent: Yes, sir.

Me: Well, I’m confused.

Agent: Why are you confused?

Me: Because this is the first time you have ever done that.

Agent: This is your first claim with us? Your record says…

Me: Wait! Don’t look at my record! Don’t look anymore at my account. I’m going to quit while I’m ahead. Thank you and good night.

Agent: Thank you for calling Dentex and have a nice evening, sir.