The first six weeks in Mr Colvin’s science class was a blast. The next six weeks changed my life.

I got my first report card in the second grade, and I don’t even have to be humble because it told everybody how much I rocked. I rocked so much that I didn’t need to worry so much about paying attention in class and doing homework. My next report card wasn’t quite as generous, but it was generous enough. The report cards became more and more sparse in their praise. That was okay, though, because I completely accepted mediocrity. Well, not even mediocrity. All that mattered was that I was passing. My parents, sensing that I wasn’t the sharpest academic tool in the shed, were okay as long as I was passing.

I got a lot of 70s in elementary school. In Delosa, 70 is passing and 69 is not. The mathematical probability that I got that many 70s was, to say the least, low. In retrospect, I was almost certainly being socially promoted. I was a good kid, after all, and I wasn’t stupid. I was just… different. Special. Every sentence that started off explaining how I wasn’t stupid ended with reasons why I was not capable of making the same grades as everyone else (or better).

When I got to Larkhill Intermediate, I intended to continue coasting as I always had. What I didn’t realize was that junior high is a completely different world from grade school. Few of my teachers knew my mother. Since my smart brother was in honors classes, I didn’t have his extended halo over my head. My other brother’s reputation wasn’t particularly helpful until I tried out for the basketball team. The guard rails were gone and I got two F’s on my first report card, one in reading and the other in science. The grade in reading was a 68, which I could bring up without much problem. The science grade was… a 60.

There are parts to this story, only one third am I going to share tonight. All you need to know about the other relevant third is that I went home so obviously devastated that my parents did not see fit to give me any sort of formal punishment. Mr Colvin, the science teacher, could tell that something was wrong the day after report cards came out. I could see him looking at my nearly dispondent self. He slipped a note to me to talk after class. I figured he was going to yell at me or something. No teacher had ever asked to speak with me after class.

Colvin gave me the schpeil about being a smart kid. He said he felt bad about the grade, but that he could tell that I wasn’t going to try to catch up if I didn’t appreciate how far behind I was. But he would make me a deal. If I made a B or better the next six weeks, he would raise the grade to a 65. The idea was preposterous. A B in science? From a teacher that had just destroyed me? Preposterous!

My best friend Clint was in that class with me and we were both the reason that we were doing so poorly in that class. The first six weeks had been so enjoyable because he and I were passing notes and doodling and screwing around. Obviously, that was going to have to change. He had gotten a 70 in the class and I had gotten a 60. He was confused when I was suddenly starting to pay attention in to Mr Colvin and doing my homework. But once I started, he didn’t have anything he could do but follow suit. When the next report card rolled around, my grade was a 95. My lowest grade had been my highest. Clint, in the remaining one third of the whole story that I will not today share, got a 100.

Improving my grades was startlingly easy. So easy, in fact, that I kept thinking that I was just getting lucky. When my parents praised me, I would lie awake some nights fearful of how disappointed they would be when my grades turned back to “normal”. Then, gradually, I learned that normal changed. I had help from my father, but for the most part I discovered that it was simply a matter of doing the homework. I read each chapter for science, but in most of the other classes where my grades were my grades were also improving I didn’t even have to read the chapters. I just did the homework, tried as hard as I could on the tests (which I only occasionally bothered to study for), and before I knew it my grades were getting pretty good. The last two six weeks of my Larkhill schooling, I got straight A’s.

I appreciate what the elementary school teachers were trying to do when they passed me when I didn’t deserve it, but the teacher that most stands out in my life was Mr Colvin, who not only did what needed to be done, but took the time and attention to try to help me undo it.

Mom and Dad were talking about some of the gossip from church. As word would have it, a married couple at church split up. That’s not the juicy part, though. The juicy part is that the husband was the week before going around and introducing everyone to his daughter. He had a couple little kids, but this girl was about eighteen.

There are two versions of the story. The version that Dad heard was that he didn’t know about the kid and she showed up on his doorstep because she’d wanted to meet her father all of her life. Mom’s version of the story was that he knew about her but had been keeping her existence a secret.

Seems to me that which version of the story is true makes all the difference in the world, though Mom didn’t think it mattered that much one way or the other. In both versions, he screwed up and she left him.

This lead to the inevitable conversation with Clancy aboud how she would react if it turned out that I had a son or daughter. She took the stance that I did that the bigger issue would be my keeping it from her (if I’d known about it). Sounded like she would be pretty irate if I sprung it on her out of nowhere.

This is one of those cases where there isn’t a good inverse. There’s no obvious scenario in which Clancy has a child that she doesn’t know about. So if I were to discover today that she has a 9 year old daughter or something, there isn’t any way that it could be as innocent as it may be with the dude from church. The closest is if she’d had a baby and adopted it out and it grew up and found her. In that case I don’t know that I would be irate, but I’d be concerned as to why she felt that she needed to keep it from me. I’d be worried that maybe I come off as more moralistic than I seem. If she could convince me that she didn’t tell me because she simply hated thinking about it and my fears were assuaged, life would go on.

It’s extremely unlikely that I am a father without realizing it. I’ve stayed in touch with almost all of women I’ve slept with (not an exceptionally high number). If any of them got pregnant, they miscarried or had an abortion. There was one that moved to another state shortly after we split, but she never mentioned having a kid by me or otherwise.

I was tempted to pontificate all this while Mom and Dad were telling the story, but realized that it contained a lot of information that they didn’t want to know.

Cassandra observes:

When I go out in jeans and sneakers people aren’t rude or unpleasant, but the sense of friendliness and niceness does drop. The difference is more noticeable in men than in women – when I’m decked out in full girlie regalia men actually go out of their way to do favors for me – but it’s there in women too. I used to have a job at which every time I wore a skirt at least 3 or 4 female co-workers would stop me in the corridor and compliment me. In all these scenarios it almost feels like I’m being approvingly patted on the head for conforming perfectly to what is expected of my gender, even though my personality remains as assertive and non-girly as ever.

Bob asks:

We do get rewarded for conforming to norms. That’s how they come to be norms. What are norms if not those things society pats us on the head for following? Is this bad though?

This actually opens the door for a fundamental difference in opinion that my wife and I have, but I’ll have to table that for the time being because this is going to be a long enough post as it is.

Cassandra’s point is broader than mere dress, and hers has more to do with gender norms than anything, but I think that dress is a good place to start since it is mostly voluntary.

Simply put, how we dress is a representation of who we are. We make minor changes because we think that a particular color or style looks better on us, but for the most part it’s a representation. Even if someone dresses based solely on comfort, their representation is that they don’t care about their representation. Even if we dress a particular way because our job requires it, the only difference being that we are making the representation that someone else wants us to make and that we’re willing to do so in exchange for food and shelter.

Everyone knows this, yet people frequently forget it (or at least forget the inevitability of it) when it’s convenient to. For instance, a mohawked, blue-haired punk might complain that store clerks watch them more closely because they falsely assume that everyone dressed that way is a shoplifter. The obvious solution is that if you don’t want to be treated like a punk, don’t dress like one. But that seems so unfair because people shouldn’t make judgments based on someone’s appearance. Poppycock. They dress that way in large part precisely so that people will make judgments. Maybe not the negative judgments of the store clerk but at least the positive judgment of those with similar sensibilities. You can’t have one without the other.

On a sidenote, I want to be clear that I do not endorse harassment of anybody based on how they dressed. A clerk looking a little bit closer at strangely dressed customers does not constitute harassment, in my opinion. I am merely using this as an example of negative behavior that some people complain about.

I’ll go even further and make what I don’t believe to be a controversial statement: in some sense, these people want the negative attention. If store clerks, as a proxy for society at large, approved of their fashion they would probably go out of their way to change into something else. Expressing one’s individuality requires differentiating yourself from others and you can’t expect people that you’re making a point of differentiating yourself from are less instinctively warm to you. You’re sending a signal. You can hardly be upset that they’re receiving it.

We might say that we dress this way or that based solely on how much we like it aesthetically. To a very limited extent, this is sometimes true. Some ladies genuinely look better in blue jeans and a shirt than they do in a dress. Some people look better may even look better with purple hair regardless of the social norms (though purple hair usually involves social context). Even when this is the case, however, we are choosing from the cafeteria of social conventions. I’m sure that by some objective criteria some guys would look best in a toga, but such a fellow would probably make do with a tanktop.

In the end, it always comes down to the baseline of social norms. Those that conform to the norms usually end up changing as the norms do (until we reach an age where we’re tired of changing) and those that deviate from the norm usually deviate in some familiar way. If you want to dress in true rebellion, but on that toga, a powdered wig, or heck a giant garbage sack. We don’t, though, because they (generally) make the same judgments about people that do that straight-laced folks make about them.

So having said all that, let me pull this post back to gender norms before wrapping it up. As with any other deviation from a norm, men and women suffer (though not equally) when they deviate from that norm. So why are the norms different and who does it benefit? I can’t explain why they are as they are, though who it benefits depends on one’s personal tastes.

A woman that dresses in men’s clothes without make-up makes off a whole lot better than a man that dresses as women do. A woman can enhance her appearance and detract from her flaws with make-up while men (generally) can’t. Women have all sorts of dresses and shirts and shirts and pants to choose from, men get only a select portion of those options. On the other hand, more is expected of women. They’re under more pressure to put make-up over their flaws. They’re looked at differently when they dress lazy. Some of their clothes seem deliberately designed to cause discomfort. Women have the freedom of options and more responsibility to match while men lack freedom and pressure.

Would the world be a better place if both genders had the exact same expectations and pressures? Maybe, but it’s sort of a moot question. Just as the punk needs Tommy Hilfiger to define who he isn’t, women will find ways to differentiate themselves from men and vice-versa. Further, with our bodies being different and all, we will almost certainly always want to accentuate different parts of our appearance.

Over at Dustbury, a discussion popped up about Apple’s bundling of the Safari web browser with the latest version of iTunes. As many of you know, it’s difficult to impossible to download Apple’s bundling of Quicktime with iTunes so that you can’t get the former without getting the latter. I never really objected to the latter bundling since iTunes is going to be a necessity when it comes to introducing my wife to our MP3 collection, but I have a suggestion for anyone that wants Quicktime but doesn’t want iTunes: don’t download Quicktime.

The Quicktime movie player is required to watch certain media types, which is really the only reason most non-Apple users download it to begin with. Fortunately, there is Quicktime Alternative. QTA allows you to view Quicktime files using most viewing software (including browsers).

Irony of ironies, it does come bundled with a viewer called Media Player Classic. However, MPC is so non-obtrusive as to even be a little inconvenient in a way. I wish it would hijack movie extensions (so that if you click on a movie in Windows Explorer MPC will come up instead of WMP or whatever software you have) because it would mean that I wouldn’t have to manually reassign them. It doesn’t take up any resources when you’re not running it and is extremely resource-conscious when it is (I have old computers that won’t run videos properly on anything except MPC). I think that there is an option to choose not to install MPC if that is your preference, though, and Quicktime files will run in most of the software you already have.

In addition to Quicktime Alternative is Real Alternative, which allows you to view RealPlayer files without needing RealPlayer. RealPlayer isn’t bundled with any software as far as I know, but they try to hook you into their pay service.

Quicktime Alternative, Real Alternative, and Media Player Classic are all completely free.

Clancy and I were driving down I-13 in Deseret to go to my cousin’s wedding and she was reacquainted with a driver that seemed to be collecting pet peeve of hers to toss out there and drive her blood pressure up.

The first thing he did was follow way too closely from behind. She kept slowing down so that he would pass, but he didn’t seem to want to do it. Then he finally did, driving right to the point that she was in his blind spot and then swerving back and forth.

We were pretty ruthless with our commentary. At first we thought he was drunk. Then I thought he was trying to read something, then Clancy suggested that it looks like he might be writing something. “Probably doing a crossword puzzle, I murmured as Clancy darted past him.

The next thing we knew the jerk had sped up too so that he could be right beside her. “What an ass!”

Then we saw what he was writing.

“You have a flat tire!!”

We looked at each other. “We do?” We asked. The car seemed to be pretty steady. Flat tires are generally something that you notice. But the car was a rental and we didn’t want to destroy it, so we waited for the next exit to get off on.

When we found it, the driver was getting off, too. This was an exit in the middle of nowhere. We started getting nervous that maybe he was jump us or something and take our car. Maybe he had someone with him laying in the back seat of the car. Heck, he didn’t even need that, really. A gun would have done the trick.

He was pulled over on the side of the road off the exit. Since we didn’t know when the next exit would be, we decided to risk it to check the tire. I got out my cell phone and dialed 911 so that if need-be I could just hit the “send” button in case of an emergency.

When we stopped, he walked over to the car and said “Sorry about that. I was really concerned about your tire. I guess it’s not entirely flat, but it’s pretty close.” I looked down and sure enough, it was pretty low. The guy we’d been cussing out for the previous half-hour was trying to do us a solid.

He said that he thought he’d had a tire pumper, which was why he pulled over, too, but that it must have been in his other car. So worst-case scenario, the guy was going to help us out looking for a tip. Once we were back on the road, we quietly apologized ourselves for all the bad things that we were saying about him.

My cousin Malcolm got married this past weekend and my wife and I were in attendance. For those of you that don’t recall, Malcolm is the younger son of my Aunt Evelyn, who at a young age decided that she would marry rich and did so in the form of her husband, insurance millionaire (and to be fair, great guy) Rich Wellington. Malcolm has an older brother named Gregory, neither turned out as prim and proper as Evelyn assumed they would.

Gregory has an apartment in Manhattan, which he got after getting bored with his apartment in downtown Boston. He’s a real estate agent and is making a lot of money selling residences in his new home city. He’s a high school drop out whose entire career was put into place by his father, but because he managed to spend Daddy’s money on a business rather than on drugs and guitars, he considers himself something of a tragedy-to-triumph success story.

To no great shock, Gregory is dating an actress in NYC and they seem on the road to a (possibly temporary, possibly permanent) marriage. She is quite attractive and seems really nice. Part of me mutters about how easily a worthless rich kid can get himself an actress, but it’s not quite that simple. I wouldn’t really want to marry a NYC actress and I’ve never had a lot of fun dating people that I knew I wasn’t going to marry. I’m not that kind of guy and he is, so that he could and I couldn’t is a moot issue.

The other thing is that from the outside looking in Gregory does have a lot to offer. He is incredibly charismatic. The guy could sell weevils to a flour factory. He failed in his brief stint as a stand-up comedian, but he is a funny and charming dude. He also has a job where he makes a whole lot of money. Yeah, he used his familial connections to do it, but I can’t say that I wouldn’t do that if I were my aunt’s kid. Why the heck not?

One of the things that impresses the Wellington’s about Gregory’s girlfriend is how nice she is to the family. On at least a couple of occasions they asked “So when are the try-outs for [some show that she mentioned interest in]” and she responded “Right now, actually”. They were touched that she skipped an audition to spend time with the family. True enough, though the thought occurs to me that getting a rich husband could probably do more for her career than any single audition.

She has an entry in IMDB having been in a couple movies and a couple TV shows. What’s really curious is that the keywords that IMDB supplies are:

Bisexual / High School / Interracial Relationship / Lesbian

Resentful as I am of Gregory, I have to hope she simply plays bisexual and lesbian characters an that Gregory isn’t a beard.

—

Rich’s brother Barry is a former neurosurgeon that retired from medicine because he was making more money in his other ventures. He has a daughter that is aiming to be the next Paris Hilton. It was my father that actually noticed it, which is interesting because he’s not nearly as snarky or cutting as Mom and I are. But once he said it, it stuck in our minds.

She was pouting throughout the entire wedding because her cousin had the gall to get married on the weekend of her 18th birthday.

—

The Wellington’s talked alot about how the importance of family is one of the longstanding traditions of their clan. It’s not hard to keep a disparate family together when it involves annual cruises and trips to Paris and various other resort islands.

—

I’ve not much negative to say about Malcolm, the groom. He doesn’t have Gregory’s ego and I have more an appreciation for kids using their money to become artists than to become a part-time real estate agent and full-time playboy. Interestingly enough, Malcolm is studying to become a real estate guy, too. His wife is a stage actress (in Deseret, no less), so somebody somewhere is going to have to make some money.

—

Malcolm and his bride bet when they played Jack Sparrow and Cruella De Vil at Walt Disney World, hence the title of this post.

—

I rip on the Wellingtons and I’m not sure why. Envy and resentment, I guess, combined with a seeming obliviousness to how much of their life (particlarly Mal and Greg) was bought by family money. By and large they are great people and manage to avoid some of the problems that a lot of wealthier families have. Though I see him only once every few years, Uncle Rich treats me as warmly he would a son whenever we do see him. Aunt Evelyn offered to take me in when it looked like the schools in Delosa (where I was raised) might not open on time.

—

The thought does occur to me that there are certain people who could have attended my wedding that might have had similar observations about the Truman and Himmelreich families.

—

Uncle Rich mentioned God more than a couple of times in his toast, which I found interesting. Rich informally converted from Catholicism to Episcopalianism we figured in part because the latter was so much less demanding. It doesn’t say great things about my religion that I get surprised when our members start talking about God where we don’t have to.

—

Of the last 10 weddings I have attended, including my own, only two have been in a church and both of those weddings were with families that we met through our church. This is the first wedding in a while wherein the Corinthian definition of what love is and is not was mentioned. I really, really wanted to keep that quote out of my wedding with Clancy, but we were not given a choice.

—

I had a really good time, but boy do large crowds tax my energy.

I met my little niece Sadie over the weekend. She is a cute little bundle of curiosity and awe. She has these really wide eyes through which she watches everything. Cute, cute, cute.

One of the things I noticed immediately after seeing my brother Ollie and sister-in-law Kelsey was that she appears not a pound heavier than she was when she was pregnant. She was a lot paler, but that was the only physical difference that I noticed. On the other hand, Ollie has noticeably gained weight.

I wasn’t going to say anything, obviously, but it came out in the course of the conversation. Kelsey mentioned how easy the weight was to lose because the baby was depriving her of any time to eat and sucking 500 calories of milk from her breast daily. Ollie mentioned that being a father’d had an opposite effect on him. He knows that he won’t have time to do anything when he gets home from work so he always stops by McDonald’s for a bite to eat.

A touch of irony. As far as my family knows, I ceased blogging about the time that Hit Coffee got started. The fact that my family read my old public blog was one of the reasons that I needed to go covert. In any case, in the course of the above discussion and again later in a discussion about The Wonder Years (which all three of us watched and I’m listening to at work right now) he said, “See, this is why you should start another blog, so you can post about my weight and about The Wonder Years. I smiled and said something about not having time… but here is the post about weight and coming soon will be a post about The Wonder Years.

When I was in high school I had a BBS friend named Charlie Langston that I got to know pretty well. Charlie was popular with guy and girl alike, the latter for sharing a beer or jam session and the later for more… private… pursuits. I learned a lot from him and simply knowing him has made me a much better person socially and romantically. I don’t mean that he taught me how to approach women or anything like that, but rather he taught me how to be well-liked and how to avoid making enemies. Despite never using his relative popularity to smite people that had negative things to say about him and despite his propensity to make girls (that we wanted) swoon and be unfaithful to the girls he got involved with, I don’t know a certain person that expressed any dislike for him for any prolonged period of time.

He had certain things going for him. For instance, he played a mean guitar. He never had any money (he was raised in a trailer) but he was as generous with what he had as he could be. He was also a pretty good-looking guy for the ladies and just all around cool enough for a guy. Mostly, though, he was relentlessly positive. I’ve never known such consistently upbeat person in my entire life and more importantly he was always sincere. I never even tried being as unshakably upbeat as him because I knew I could never pull it off sincerely, but I learned the real power of positivity through him. I could have told him that I was a big fan of Michael Bolton and he would have found some way to make that cool enough.

His positivity and go-along-get-along attitude came at a price, though. Firstly, he wasn’t the smartest guy that you’ll ever meet. Well, that’s not entirely fair. He had a strong sense of intuition when it came to people, music, and electronics, but actually setting out to learn about something the way that I learned about people from him was somewhat beyond his grasp. Bigger than his lack of grand intelligence, though, was his utter lack of ambition.

One of the main reasons that he remained so positive is that very little actually mattered to him. As long as he had his guitar and a computer, he was a pretty happy guy. It often made him a not-very-good friend (or boyfriend). He would frequently be late or never show up at all. He had a lot of difficulty holding out a job. The most immediate problem was that he was frequently without a car or license, but the fact that he could never seem to procure either was part of a larger concern. Nothing was worth planning ahead for because he was always so happy where he was at.

Charlie was popular with guys, not much more popular with the ladies. He was a pretty good looking guy, though a big short. His beard made him seem a lot more mature than he was and that helped a lot of otherwise smart young ladies attribute qualities to him that didn’t really fit. Mostly, though, he scored on the basis of his music and the fact that he was always so fun to be around. It’s amazing how far that can take you when you’re 23.

Time hasn’t treated Charlie particularly well in the romance department. What worked out brilliantly for him when he was 21 or 22. His annual Halloween tradition of dressing up like Jesus (with whom he had more than a passing resemblence) and going from bar to bar person after person buy him a free beer stops being so impressive. The fact that his working life has been a hodgepodge of working as a music store clerk or computer store tech, never able to hold on to a single job for any serious length of time. Tellingly, his girlfriends now are about the same age that he was then. More on this later.

I always adored Charlie and admired him more than just about anyone. He was always what I wasn’t. I was so uptight, he was so loose. I would compete for the honor of driving an hour out of my way to pick him up to take him to a party. Getting even a little bit of his time was always tough and often required doing something for him. That sounds self-serving on his part, but it wasn’t really. He was just surrounded by people and you got close to him by doing things that others didn’t want to. Even in that there was frequently competition.

Charlie’s luck with his guy friends has also been less than stellar. The guys that were once his peers have grown up. We’ve gotten married, gotten full time jobs that we can’t just quit whenever we want an extended holiday, and in many cases have families. Now I periodically get emails from him saying that next time I’m in Colosse he and I have absolutely got to hang out together. The 20 year old that knew him back then so passionately agrees, but then I step back and realize that we don’t have anything in common anymore (if we ever did). We don’t even have that many good times to look back on, both because it was so long ago and because his memory is awful.

“Remember when we had that party there and Sally was throwing up all over the balcony and Sherman accidentally got hit.”

Blank look. “No… was it funny?”

“Yeah.”

“Sweeeeeeet.”

I can remember all that stuff on my own and there’s an awkwardness regaling someone with funny stories that they were there for.

Mr. Langston came to mind as I thought about the relationship marketplace and how our value within it changes with time and circumstance. I usually think of it in terms of my friends that were unpopular in high school but now do alright despite having many of the same drawbacks that held them back way back when. Charlie went in the opposite direction. Once upon a time he had smart, witty, and ambitious young ladies swooning over him and girls of modelesque beauty competing for him and the last two girlfriends of his that I met were mediocre-looking art school dropouts crafting the lowest form of amateur adolescent/post-adolescent art… poetry.

Yet the last time I saw him there he was, as positive and upbeat and thrilled as can be to have a kewl girl to hang out with and have sex with. No sense of lost opportunity or that he’s almost at the exact same place now as he was then. All is well in the life of Charlie Langston. That, much moreso than talking to him or hanging out with him, makes me happy.

For some reason I’ve had my mind periodically stuck on… someone… I knew from… somewhere. I’m usually really good with faces and if I don’t recall where I saw it originally I remember once the librarian in the back of my mind searches the archives for a day or two. It’s one of those things where I can think myself to death about and get nowhere, then a day or two later it will magically come to me while I’m thinking about anyone else.

It’s been four days and I am still nowhere. She had brown hair that she usually kept in a pony tail. Brown eyes (I am usually not very good with eyes). She wore minimal make-up and was rather tomboyish. Not much in the way of breasts. She could mostly be described as being the friend of a friend or someone that was in some social circle I happened to be in for a while. I don’t remember ever having a long conversation with her. She smiled a lot, but it was a weak sort of smile. A silent serenity. It was a boy’s smile. Though she looked very much like a woman, there was a masculine quality about her. Particularly in her smile, which came across as “heeey buuuuddy!”. She was attractive enough, but I wasn’t specifically attracted to her.

I think I knew her from high school. For some reason “cross country” comes to mind or running of some sort. Maybe she ran in college, though. Or maybe she was just an avid jogger. I didn’t really have much of a social network at my high school, though, which makes the high school connection seem odd. Alternately I might have known her while I was in high school and she went to another one where she was a runner of some sort. Runner, runner, runner, that’s what I remember though I have no recollection of actually seeing her run.

My high school yearbook is stashed away in Colosse. If I had it handy, I’d be scanning the 800 or so people in my graduating class (and maybe the 850 people in the next lower graduating class). Part of me is glad I don’t have it handy because it would lead to the waste of some time. On the other hand, if it’s going to be bugging me for the next few days it might be quicker just to actually look it up.

Most frustrating of all I can’t remember why she has even crossed my mind or why it matters.

Does this happen to y’all?

Addendum: I’m definitely going to have to crack open the yearbook. This past weekend I saw some NCAA tournament basketball. Mom pointed out that one of the players for one of the big schools is a graduate from my own Mayne High School. Futher, his not-common last name is really familiar and matches or is close to the last name of a bully that I went to school with. While the age difference wouldn’t suggest that they are brothers, my classmate was extremely talented and could have made it a lot further if he weren’t so short.

I am looking for software that can do something rather specific. I would like to be able to save the contents of Windows directories into a text or (preferably) Excel file. What would be most awesome is if there were something that could take the file, file’s directory, and file’s size into different columns on a spreadsheet. Absent that, I would be cool with being able to save the files with their directories into a text file.

What I primarily want to be able to do is save these file names so that if I were to lose a hard drive or directory that has a bunch of images on it, I’d be able to look and see what all images I lost.

I’m aware that you can direct DOS actions to text files and that you can view directory contents through DOS, but I’m looking for a simpler way of going about that for more complex directory structures.

Does anyone have any software that can do that? Does anyone understand what I’m wanting it to do?

One of the things that I’ve just gotten used to working at Soyokaze America is that very, very little is written down. That’s the way smaller, freewheeling American companies are. It was the same way at Falstaff in Deseret even though that was a documentation company. Where that affects us in QA the most is that a lot of the things that we test do not have any specs or if they do, they’re pretty useless. It’s something that drives the Japanese crazy as they do things quite differently. I wrote about this a while back:

I’ve started working on some requests from Japan, which are a different bird entirely. Every expectation is documented in great detail. Everything from the patently obvious (”When Cancel is pressed, operation should cease”) to the unnecessary (”When they insert a letter on the order number, program should not crash and computer should not reboot”) to the gloriously specific (”Button should be moved 10-pixels off of the lower-right border. When pressed, button should take a slightly darker hue for one complete second before returning to normal color. If the operation has begun before the button returns to normal color, there is no need to complete the color alteration tasks”).

I’ve been shifted to backup on a project for the Japanese mother company. My boss’s colleague is the Project Manager for it and he is a thoroughly Japanese dude. The longest specs we’ve ever gotten (for an entirely new software release package!) are 15 pages. His are 92.

We complain a lot about the lack of specs that we have. QA complains. Software development complains. We just get on gettin’ on, though. If the new project has illustrated two things, though, it’s that (a) precise specs make life in QA ridiculously easy and (b) developers that aren’t used to precise specs don’t want them as much as they think that they do.

As far as QA goes, we simply compare the behavior of the application to the specs as written. If it doesn’t do what the documentation says it should, we fail it. Full stop. We don’t have to go to the Project Manager and find out if the odd behavior is acceptably or unacceptably odd. No prolonged debates with development over whether a system crash under certain circumstances is allowable or not. If it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, we just fail it and move on to the next feature to test. It is a good and joyful thing, it is.

For developers, they say they want specs because they get frustrated when they have to re-do something because they didn’t know precisely what was wanted. What they don’t realize, though, is that when there isn’t documentation they have a lot more latitude. One of our developers has been learning that this week big time. The conversations go like this:

Quality Assurance Professional: It failed. The spec called for A and you did B.

Software Developer: So the software doesn’t work?

QAP: The software works fine.

SD: So what’s the problem?

QAP: The software doesn’t work the way that the Project Manager wanted it to work.

SD: But it works.

QAP: Not like the specs said it should.

SD: The way that the specs had us doing it is less practical than the way that I did it.

In other words, they’ve gotten spoiled being not only the software developers, but in the vacuum of project leadership also being the software designers. Sometimes they used the power for ill (”If I do it this way it won’t work as well but it’ll be easier for me!”) and sometimes for good (”I know what’s really good for this software company and the thing that they discussed earlier isn’t it.”). We’ve had features cut by the developers, features changed, enhancements inserted, and on and on. Sometimes the Project Manager doesn’t realize that his authority his being circumvented. Sometimes when he sees the final product he likes the developer’s idea better than his own.

Not so with my Japanese PM. He wants things the way that he designed them and is simply outraged that anyone would consider doing anything else. Some of it is attributable I guess to American Ingenuity vs. Japanese Structure. While also a culture factor but not entirely, it’s easier to shrug off a deviation from an idea you discussed than it is when you directly told somebody to do something and they did something else because they thought it more prudent. There are degrees of disrespect, I suppose.

For what it’s worth, the developer’s ideas were better. I wrote a little note saying so below the FAIL stamp.

When my boss told me that he’d gotten some complaints about the fact that I listen to my Bluetooth at work, I immediately drew up a list of about four or five likely complainants. The more I thought about it, the more understanding I became of how they felt. I wished that I could communicate to them that I never try to listen to my Bluetooth and talk to someone at the same time, but for the most part the transition to taking it out when I’m not listening to it has proven to be remarkably smooth. I was actually starting to feel good about the whole thing… until yesterday, when I found out who it was that was doing the complaining.

Once my coworker Pat told me, it actually made a lot of sense. He’d ribbed me on wearing it before on a couple of occasions, saying that the thing was going to get grafted to my ear. A coworker or two mentioned a comment that he made, but I’d thought they were referring to one of the couple times he commented to me about it.

Lou is one of the software developers and I have to confess that I never cared for him very much. I didn’t actively dislike him, he just struck me as the kind who liked the sound of his own voice more than he liked putting particularly thoughtful or intelligent words in it. I’m honestly not too keen on any of the developers, but such is often the relationship between development and QA. As time has progressed, I’ve come to like the ones that I spend the most time dealing with even as we have our periodic eruptions. I never had that chance with Lou because he and I never worked on the same products.

That’s the part that sticks in my crawl. He and I don’t even work together. I’ve had to approach him no more than three times about his software and I honestly can’t even remember three times (I only remember once). He has never — not once — had to approach me about anything. Any time he and I have talked at work, it’s almost always been of a non-work nature and either involved us chatting in the break room or my joining a conversation that he was a part of (or vice versa, maybe, though I don’t remember it). I’d be surprised if we’ve talked a dozen times at work and maybe two or three times during lunch or sharing a beer after work (in a group). The only times he said something to me out of the blue was to make a joke about the Bluetooth, which happened a couple times (and I always acknowledged).

Yet his complaint is that I am somehow not approachable. Even leaving aside that he has little reason to need to talk to me, I’ve started more conversations (with the Bluetooth in my ear) with him than vice-versa. He sees me talking all the time with people with the thing in my ear. His second complaint is that I don’t listen when it’s in my ear, which is patently untrue because I never multitask my ears, not even with music. Besides, besides, he doesn’t really know whether I’m listening or not because he almost never talks to me! I’ve spoken more to the janitor, and he barely speaks English!

The most benign explanation that I can come up with is that he wants to talk to me more than he doesn’t, but refrains from doing so because I’m listening. Or that he’s tried to talk to me times I’m not aware of, but I just didn’t hear him and kept walking. Possible, I guess, but he’s made no effort when it’s not in my ear. More likely is that he just doesn’t like people wearing a Bluetooth while working and talking and made up reasons why it could be a problem and went to the trouble of going to my boss about it. The result being a permanent decline in the pleasantness of my job.

Ah, well. Like I said, I’m adjusting to it well. It’s really no big deal at the end of the day. Nonetheless, it makes me want to wear the thing in my ear at all times just so that it’ll annoy him as it so apparently does. I’m not going to, of course, because that’s not really the way that I work. It’s possible that somebody else said something to the boss about it, though Pat is sure that it’s just him (and Pat likes Lou well enough, so she’s got no personal motive). It’s also possible that it bugs more than just Lou and that they haven’t said anything and that I’m putting my generally benign boss in a tight spot, so I’ll remain compliant.

(Irony alert: just a couple days ago I commented about how men and women interact differently at the office. Both his complaint and my response to it certainly strike against the notion that this sort of intraoffice feuding is more common between female coworkers than male coworkers as has been my experience.)

Addendum: I forgot to mention the darts! He plays darts while trying to work through logistical problems that need to be solved within his project. Some people might look at a guy throwing darts on company time as problematic, but I don’t because what works is what works sometimes and if darts work for him that’s great. You can’t convince me, however, that darts look less unprofessional and and/or are less distracting than a bud in my ear.

I saw the movie Juno last weekend. With spoilers, here are some random observations and thoughts:

• Fingernails. One of the things that convinces Juno to have the baby is the revelation that fetuses have fingernails. I laughed out loud at that one. When we were living in our Deseret basement apartment, our LDS landlords upstairs had a never ending churn of grandchildren through their four daughters. I met one of the little ones very shortly after birth. I don’t think that I’d ever seen such a young infant and the thing that stood out at me most was her tiny, tiny little fingernails. “She has fingernails!” I exclaimed. I didn’t think that infants didn’t have fingernails. I just hadn’t thought about it.
• Lorings. The part that most stood out to me about the Lorings at the outset was the banishment of all of Mark’s things to a single room. Clancy and I go back and forth about what our future house will look like decoratively and one of her stock responses to some of my requests that she’s not fond of is that I will get a room where I will get to put anything I want. I’m a little concerned that we’ll end up in a situation where I get a room and she gets the rest of the house. We’ll probably be able to work something out, though. We’re pretty good at that. This probably deserves its own post.
• Parents. Unlike Spungen, I thought that the movie handled the parental (and adult) reaction about right. Not horror, but disappointment and a willingness to help guide her through it. I’d imagine a similar reaction from my parents and from the blue-collar parents of my ex-girlfriend Julie. Her mother might subtlely have pushed for an abortion, but once it became obvious that she wasn’t going to have one (if she wasn’t, of course), I figure they’d go along as Juno’s folks did.
• Music. Unlike Ethan, I loved the soundtrack.
• Dialogue. The dialogue was a little too cool for school at a couple points, but I thought it helped the movie along more than it irritated or detracted from authenticity.
• Mark Loring. I knew that he was going to have a downfall and be revealed to be the less admirable of the couple, but I didn’t know his unwillingness to grow up would culminate in an inappropriate affection for Juno. I interpreted his early actions to that of a stay-at-home wife… the loneliness of being at home and the latching on to an outside figure. As the movie went on I wasn’t too surprised about the dance scene where it all started to unravel. The line “How do you think of me?” was perfectly delivered. You can see the realization of his age on his face. Well done, Mr. Bateman.
• Mark Loring II. The similarities between Mark Loring and my friend Clint are eerie. When he and I talked about the movie, i was afraid of bringing it up, but he did. A love of music, the ability to write jingles, the attraction to a more dominating sort of partner… not the hitting on 15 year old pregnant girls, though.
• Vanessa Loring. I know that she totally wanted to be a mother and all that, but I’m not sure I buy her decision to still be in after the separation with Mark. She struck me very much as the type of person that needed everything to be “just so” and being a single mother, no matter how much she wanted to be a mother, would strike me as ruining it for her. Maybe I don’t fully understand a woman’s calling to be a mother or maybe I just didn’t buy the redemption of her that I was supposed to.
• Juno MacGuff. She’s entertaining on the screen, but I think she would be supremely annoying to deal with in real life.
• Paulie Bleaker. He’s the good guy on screen, but he too wouldn’t be nearly as interesting to know in real life.
• Mac MacGuff. He’s the kind of guy I wouldn’t mind knowing in real life. He reminded me a little bit of Evangeline’s father when I liked him before I started feeling sorry for him. Except that Mac was responsible.
• The Note. I couldn’t actually read what the Jiffy Lube said until I went back and saw it again after the movie ended. I caught the drift, though.
• Adoption. Even though I didn’t know at the outset whether she would keep the baby or not, I was totally taken in and thus surprised when she gave it away anyhow. Partially because of my above observation about Vanessa.
• Overall. I really enjoyed the movie. I don’t know that it was quite worthy of all the attention and praise, but I was thoroughly entertained.

Last month I donated to a political campaign for the first time in my life for my family’s congressional district back in Delosa. I made a deal with myself that I would never donate to the campaign of anyone that runs on border hawk positions front and center and of course I broke that deal with myself on my first political donation to Jim Murali a few weeks ago. The thing is that he’s running against “conservative” Republican* Bob Markam, who has represented the district since I was a kid and is one of the more despicable congresscritters in Washington. Murali may be indistinguishable from him politically, but I know people that know Murali personally (he went to my high school and grew up near where I live) and they all say glowing things about him. In the past I’ve tried to work on the campaigns of people running against Markam, which obviously isn’t possible living where I currently do.

One thing that makes me slightly uncomfortable is the disclosure aspect of it. I don’t mind being on record as making the donations that I have for anyone that really wants to know who I’ve donated to, but they made me disclose who my employer is. I’m not sure why I am so uncomfortable with that since I don’t expect to be reprimanded for donating to the wrong entity, but it doesn’t seem right that their name should be on a political donation that they had no say in and I can easily imagine situations where I wouldn’t want any trail to exist between my employer and myself for whenever I am at odds with the views of my employer.

On the other hand, I guess the reason that they do it is as an anti-corruption measure to make sure that employers aren’t pressuring employees to donate to campaigns or (more likely) making donations by proxy. As someone that doesn’t like the restrictions of free speech and whatnot of McCain-Feingold and thinks that transparency is a better mechanism, I shouldn’t be at all uncomfortable with this… but I guess I am, a little.

* - As far as I am concerned, he stands for nothing except his standing within the GOP and his own re-election. He is as sincere as a maggot in all that he says and does.

I held strong as long as I could, which wasn’t very long at all. In trying to be strong, I fear that I came across as unphased. When I first told Mom about what I did next, she was actually a little bit pleased because she was afraid that my outward reaction was my inward reaction.

Once I was able to excuse myself, I went to the back and did some serious Internet searching. Then Mom needed the Internet and I was going to give her anything she wanted at that point. I wasn’t sure how long she would be using it and I couldn’t face her, so I hopped the fence into the back yard of the vacant house next door. I made my way to the porch and sat there, staring out in to space, trying to maintain my composure. Since there was no one there, I didn’t know what I was trying for.

I called Clancy, who was doing a medical school rotation in New England. She was surprised to get my call. “They got the results back,” I told her. I was choking on tears before I could even continue. My silence was enough.

“Oh, no… what is it?”

Slowly the words started coming out. There was no grammatical sentence construction, but the point came across. “Abnormality… adren… adren… adrenal glands… more… tests… maybe… cancer.”

Mom had been joking about how sure she was that she had cancer, but it was as clear a defense mechanism as any. Waiting is always the hardest part and possibly the worst part of the response is that we have to wait all that much longer, except this time with more justifiable fears.

Our reactions were all pretty different. Mom called everyone she knew that might have some advice for doctors. She said “I tooooold y’all I had cancer!!” a few times. Outwardly, she took it exceedingly well. Of course, so did I outwardly until I had to utter the words on the phone to Clancy. Prior to that, it was running to get on the Internet and look up “adrenal gland” and “cancer.” Dad’s response was to look up on the Internet, too, though he more optomistically typed in “adrenal gland” and “abnormality,” though Google’s ads put the words “cancer treatment” everywhere.

Most of what I found is pretty positive. Abnormalities in the adrenal glands were frequently benign and even when not benign, if it was in the medulla rather than the cortex, survival rates were solid. It was mostly small comfort, but it was enough to get me through the next couple of weeks when we got the results from the later test that came back negative.

Ironically, because the tests came back negative our insurance company refuse to chip in a dime. It was the happiest medical bill we ever paid.

Monday Clancy had talked to her Mom, who was frustrated with the obstinance of Clancy’s father. Her Mom is one of the most patient people you would ever meet, but her patience was straining. What she wouldn’t say we could surmise. He always did this sort of thing. He’d refuse to take his stomach medication. Then he’d go out and each too much or too spicy of food. Then in addition to the pain that he was in, everyone around him would also have to bear the burden of a very ungracious patient. Clancy called me because she was frustrated with her dad and we had a good talk about it. I even considered writing a post on the conversation.

Tuesday Dr. Himmelreich was admitted into the hospital. There was some inflammation around the pancreas.

Wednesday they found the tumor.

Thursday the blood tests came back with high levels of certain proteins that might be indicative of pancreatic cancer.

Unlike adrenal cancer, survival rates for pancreatic cancer are dreadful. Only 15-20% are even candidates for surgery. 10-15% are alive after a year, 3% after 5. Even if it turned out to be non-malignant, the chances of it staying that way are not remarkably comforting. Surgery isn’t a last resort for a worst-case scenario, it’s a risky long pass play in a best-case scenario.

Friday some more test results came back. The bit of the tumor they tested was cancer free. This is good news, but false positives are frequent. And, of course, what’s not cancerous now might become cancerous tomorrow. There are so many ways for this to go bad. It has been a very, very long week, and as Clancy did for me five years ago, I’ve had to comfort her over the phone from a thousand miles away.

Clancy is handling it all remarkably well. Better than I did, for sure, and under tougher circumstances. Fortunately she has the medical background and is surrounded by people with medical backgrounds at work. She has a former brother-in-law that is also a doctor that she can talk to and together they can try to help guide Mrs. Himmelreich to get her husband the best care possible.

My first reactions to all of this were sadly quite selfish. I wanted to know what this meant for our marriage. Was this going to interfere with her trip back to Estacado later this month? Was she going to have to leave Sierra early putting us in a bit of a financial bind. I didn’t ask these things, but that’s what I was thinking. It was only after I got off the phone it started to sink in a lot more and I started becoming frustrated that I couldn’t do more for Clancy.

I am relatively close with my father-in-law, but right now most of my concern is aimed at Clancy and what this all means for her. If worse comes to worse, only after helping Clancy through her pain and loss will I be able to really confront my own loss, her mother’s loss, and everybody’s loss. I almost feel bad that I mostly feel bad from a vicarious perspective, but the real feelings will come soon enough if worse comes to worse.

One of my coping mechanisms when bad things may be looming is to imagine the worst-case scenario and figure out how I would deal with that in a way that is acceptable to me. Unfortunately, when it comes to a situation this grave, the worst case scenario is something that we can’t think about. Clancy and I are not good at that. Though obviously life will go on in the most literal sense, it’s hard find an acceptable spin on the death of a parent.

I write this all with the tone that the dye is cast, but it’s not. There are all sorts of reasons to be concerned, but Friday night we got a reason to be hopeful. Sometimes, though it must be guarded and cautious, hope is the only answer to keep sane.

I got my official review yesterday.

It was more than I had wanted and less than I hoped for.

I got a raise which they’ll be taking out of my next paycheck.

I didn’t get dinged at all on the various things I do when I’m goofing around and not working (surfing the net, talking to coworkers, etc), but got grief for the one thing that I do while doing my job.

—

Though I wasn’t particularly worried about losing my job or anything like that, I just finished a big-hole project at work. Experience has taught that if for some reason you are going to be targetted and let go, they’ll do it after a big project. I had a conversation with Clancy about it a week or so ago about what we would do if I did lose my job.

So two days ago I got a mysterious email from my boss saying that he wanted a private meeting with me for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes is about long enough to say “You’re fired, please sign here, here, here, and here.” It was also placed just late enough in the day that I’d have time to pack my things but not much more. As I watched my career pass before my eyes, my coworker Roberto asked if I’d gotten an email about a meeting with the boss. That clued me in that it might just be reviews, though the going theory for a while was that perhaps he was going back to Japan (there’d been rumors). I was very appreciative that he brought it up cause otherwise I would have gone home quite nervous. The “review” theory was confirmed when I brought it up with Pat.

I said to myself, “I don’t care how… ahem… slippy a review I get as long as they don’t try to get the bluetooth out of my ear. My ability to listen to things while I work is what keeps me sane day in and day out. There’d been a flap about it a few months ago which I intended to post about and still might, but I got by without losing Pocket PC privileges. Since I’m leaving the company in about three months, I don’t care so much what they think about me, but without the bluetooth in my ear I would have been looking at a long three months.

While I was prepared to get a slippy review in return for being able to listen to my shows, I ended up getting the opposite. I got an astonishingly positive review… and a request to stop listening while I work. Nothing about the internet surfing, nothing about excessive chattiness… instead targeted the thing that I do when I am most hard at work.

According to the boss, he’s been getting some comments and complaints by people outside the department. Product managers and whatnot don’t feel that I am as approachable when I have that thing in my ear. I take great, great care not to let it interfere with any office communication. I keep it on my belt precisely so that I have easy access to it in order to turn it off if they come up to me. I have not once said “Could you hold on a minute” to try to find a stopping point nor have I grimaced in irritation at being interrupted. I keep it purely in the background of doing my job. Unfortunately, it’s when I’m doing my job that I apparently look most like I am not doing my job… or something.

I guess maybe talking to someone with an earpiece can be a little off-putting. One of the reasons I’ve taken such great strides to keep it accessible to turn off and on was to try to alleviate that concern. I guess I’m not succeeding. Truth be told I listen to the thing for an average of maybe 2.5 hours a day. The rest of the time it’s in there and I’m not listening to anything. The most obvious solution is to take it out of my ear when I’m not using it and to stop listening to it except in the lab when I am working. Unfortunately, the boss strongly suggested that the desirable number of hours spent listening to things when I work is zero. He also said that he couldn’t tell me to stop listening, but suggested as strongly as he could that it would be a good idea if I wanted to be promoted or to get a good raise.

Since I’m leaving in three months, I don’t give a rat’s patoot about a promotion. Since he doesn’t know that I’m leaving, though, I have to at least pretend that I do. I also don’t want to put my boss in the position of having to defend me against outside detractors. I don’t want to make the department look bad. But I really, really don’t want to have to come to a job that I absolutely cannot stand for the next three months. I’ll find ways not to do my job. My productivity will suffer. I’ll get frustrated. He’ll get frustrated. Nobody wins.

The current plan is to draw down my usage to when I’m in the lab and hope that’s enough. I suspect that it will be at least for the short term.

So on to the raise and promotion.

The promotion is meaningless. It actually gives me a job title that I’ve been informally using anyway. The raise, on the other hand, was fairly significant. It’s also retroactive. Usually when this happens the next paycheck is very large. Unfortunately for me, I’ve been working a lot of overtime and have been making more hourly than I would have been if I was on my new higher salary. It’s an unusual circumstance, but I’m likely to end up with a bite taking out of my paycheck because I’ve been working overtime when I’ve been retroactively declared OT-exempt. As this is the first salary job I’ve ever had, it’s not a very good introduction. From this point forward it shouldn’t be so bad, though.

Interestingly enough, it seems like Roberto may not have gotten the same consideration that I did. When Pat asked him if he got bumped to salary, too, he just said “I’m glad to still work here, man!” Roberto is a good worker that has been stuck on some bum projects. I’d hate to think that he’s being penalized for that.

The good news about the raise and promotion is that it’ll go on my resume. It’ll sound like I’ve gotten things done here. The fact that I got promoted twice at my job in Deseret (thanks, Willard!) helped considerably. This will help, too.

-{Note: This post involves the mechanics of sexual intercourse contraception as well as relating some personal experiences. It’s hardly titillating or overly personal, but if this sort of thing bothers you, don’t read forward.}-

My wife doesn’t have Internet access where she’s currently working in Sierra, so now is the time to write up a post that I know she won’t agree with.

Ideally speaking, if a couple doesn’t want children they should take or wear contraception. The most successful method of doing so (other than sterilization) is through hormonal birth control. Hormonal birth control disagrees with many women and some young people don’t have access to it because it requires a prescription, so sometimes people have to look for alternatives.

The most popular alternative is having the man wear a condom. This presents its own difficulties. Some women get terribly uncomfortable with a condom. Men can experience a substantial decrease in sexual enjoyment when wearing a condom and some men have difficulty maintaining an erection while wearing one.

Confession time: I’m one of those guys. Given the hassle and difficulties that I sometimes (though don’t always have) and the lack of sensual enjoyment that I get, no sex is often preferable to condom sex. Keep in mind that I am not some guy trying to come up with some excuse not to wear rubber. I’m a happily married man with no vested interest in saying this, particularly since it’s always a bit embarrassing for a guy to admit that he ever has trouble with his equipment under any circumstances.

At least a couple of the women I’ve dated have had problems with the hormonal birth control either in terms of access of side-effects. So what were we to do? We employed the age-old method of withdrawal (sometimes with the assist of spermicide).

My wife is partial to the joke “What do you call a couple that use the withdrawal method?”… the answer… “parents.”

How true is that, really? It’s often true. How reckless were we? Not nearly as reckless as you might think.

I present to you The Summary Table of Contraception Efficacy

Even when performed perfectly, pre-ejaculate can cause pregnancy with the withdrawal method, but the primary reason that the withdrawal method so often fails is compliance. If a man is 100% compliant, failure rates fall considerably. In fact, no other form of contraception has as big a difference between typical and perfect use as withdrawal.

Take a look at the chart and you will see that the withdrawal method has a whopping 27% failure rate with typical use, but only a 4% failure rate when performed perfectly. Used perfectly, withdrawal is not much less effective than perfect-use condoms (2%), more effective than spermicide (18% perfect , 29% typical), and more effective than the sponge (9%/16%) or diaphram (6%/16%). Failure rate is defined by the likelihood of getting pregnant within one year with the baseline (no contraception) at 85%.

But how possible is it to withdrawal every time? I suspect that it depends a lot on the guy and how much control he has over that aspect of his sexual game. There are some guys, though, that simply don’t fail. I’m one of them. In the one year I used this method (six months or so with one person, six or so with another), I have not once failed. I’ve had four memorable pregnancy scares in my life, two involved condoms and two involved the pill. None involved withdrawal.

If a man has the ability to withdrawal and spermicide is added into the mix, if I understand statistics right failure rate falls to .7% with perfect use. That’s comparable with perfect use with hormonal birth control (.3%). If you’re not so good with the spermicide (which is more difficult), that number goes up to 1.2%. Even in a worst-case scenario with imperfect use in both cases, the failure rate would be 7.8%. I’m honestly not sure how these numbers hold up, but the point is that these two combineable methods create a pretty decent contraception.

Now, I would not recomment that women simply trust a guy that says that he can withdrawal 100% of the time. Skepticism is warranted. Guys have an incentive to lie both for pride and so that they can avoid wearing a condom. I would only employ this method if you trust this person explicitly. If trust is not an issue, though, I think that the shortfalls of withdrawal are seriously overstated, and in cases where condoms and hormonal birth control are not the answer, I would consider giving it a look.

A coworker has had a bad experience getting his car fixed. I recommended by car guy and we were talking about car care and budget concerns and the thought occurred to me… “Woah, I’m a grown-up!”

I get that feeling every now and again. It was particularly true when Clancy and I married. We used to say “Woah… we’re married!” Part of it was that it all happened so fast. Part of it was the idea of being married. Part of it was that being married is something that grown-ups do!

It’s been observed a number of times in a number of places that romantic relationships constitute a market like any other. You have something to offer and you need something in return. You try to get the best that you can with what you have. It can be as sturdy as the diamonds market or as loose as a futures market, but it’s something of a market all the same.

As with any other market, it is rife with inefficiencies. Some people benefit from these inefficiencies, though I suspect more people lose from them. One of the big causes for inefficiencies is the lack of a singular marketplace. If you want a house, you go to the real estate section of the paper. If you want a relationship… well, you can try to get that from the paper, too, but there are too many intangibles to fit into an ad and it is on the whole less successful the same way that housing ads are not as helpful as car ads (people need to see the house, they know ahead of time what they’re getting with the car and if they need to see it they are just verifying).

I have a friend that’s an investment banker in New York City (he commutes from Connecticut… probably driving Peter crazy on the train). He tells me that the real estate market in NYC is brutally efficient. There are so many people looking so intently at it that if there is any added value to a location it will be appraised and the price adjusted. The housing market in the Colosse area is not nearly so efficient. There are some places that you can get great deals on a four bedroom house going to the same schools and having the same degree of security as a guy that paid twice as much for his house in part because there are so many people that aren’t as familiar with it or don’t question their initial assumptions about what they want. On the other hand, the market does often play catch-up. My Midlerth apartment with Karl had rent go up 86% in a year and a half as more people discovered what a prime location that place was.

I’ve been talking a lot to my friends in Deseret and I am reminded of something that I noticed up there: the relationship markets for non-Mormons are much less efficient than they were in Colosse and seem to be here in Santomas.

The more people there are, the stiffer the competition becomes. That may sound like a bad thing, but it isn’t necessarily. You have more people to compete with, but you have more options to choose from. Deseret is not nearly so densely populated where I lived. Further, half of the population was Mormon and most of those were reluctant to seriously consider marriage outside the faith.

So now we’re dealing with a half of what would already be a small dating market. Being a non-Mormon covers a lot of ground, so you take that half and you have to further fracture it because the evangelical Christians that live out there (and yes, some do) would have a problem with the atheists for example. The Mormons have added efficiency in their market because they have singles groups and a strong sense of community. Non-Mormons have no such thing and have reason to worry that they are wasting their time with someone they just met because they might be a Mormon. The longer I was up there, the easier it was to tell, but it’s still guessing (particular with the females).

Even if you take out the Mormon factor, though, the population base makes quite a difference. In this case, it just exacerbates the problem for non-Mormons. It was a good thing that I was married while I was out there, because romantic options would have been practically nill. There were a handful of people I knew from Colosse out there. One of them had a minor crush on me. I wasn’t interested, but in the backdrop of Deseret she became a lot more appealing.

Ordinarily it’s unlikely that I would ever consider dating someone like Carol Goddard or she dating someone like me — in fact, it’s unlikely that she and I would have even gotten along — but we had more in common simply by being on the outside of the local culture and had either of us been single (and I older or she younger) I would have considered it all differently than I might have if we had met in Colosse. In fact, I knew people like her in Colosse. I had no use for them. In Deseret, she was one of the better friends I had in the office.

And on and on.

I remember seeing an engaged couple in a restaurant. while I was up there. Though I hadn’t seen the movie yet, they looked strikingly like Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen from Knocked Up. I still remember that couple because I remember thinking that such a coupling would never happen in Colosse. Often there is a difference in the level of attractiveness of couples, but you can usually see off-hand where the less attractive partner makes up for it. This guy seemed like a stoner and the ring was tiny. He didn’t seem particularly charismatic, though that sort of thing is difficult to tell without talking to him. Then I did talk to him at the video store where he worked and he reminded me a lot of me.

At the same time, I didn’t look at this couple and say “Why is she choosing such a loser?!” the same way that I might have in Colosse (ahem… particularly when I was single). Instead, I looked and saw exemplars of the observation about market inefficiencies in Deseret. It struck me that as a non-Mormon (which she seemed to be) living where she did, this guy may have really been the best that she could do. Or to put it more kindly, she gave him a longer look than she ever would have considered doing in Colosse and found something in him she otherwise would have missed.

There is one big exception to the population=efficiency argument: College. I saw a whole lot of mismatches in colleges and yet in college you are numerically barraged with options). I’d have to guess there that it comes down to insufficient information. When we’re in college, we don’t always have a clear idea of what we’re looking for, so we experiment. Also, when in college it’s extremely difficult to figure out with of the charming rogue sorts is going to use his charm and charisma to become a captain of cutting-edge industry and which one will be using his charm and charisma to convince his landlord not to evict him because he’s six months behind on rent or convince some girl to take him in if he is evicted.

Some people hate comparing the relationship world to a marketplace, but in some ways I like it. For one thing, it helps me understand why things are the way that they are sometimes. For instance, why was it so difficult for me to find dates when I was 23? It was because I was undervalued by the market because 21 year old girls were still in college and were more interested in college guys but 23 year old girls dating beyond college could just as easily date a 28 year old with a better job. When I got 25 or 26, things started to improve.

I could also see myself as somewhat undervalued because of my introversion. Sometimes introversion is something that legitimately decreases someone’s relationship value because they’re harder to talk to and are awkward around people. I’m a pretty good conversationalist and not bad with people, though I don’t seek them out so much. I don’t like crowds, which legitimately decreased my relationship value, but I’m good at dinner party kinds of situations, though since I didn’t often get the opportunity to demonstrate the latter it becomes an inefficiency.

Some folks believe that there are no inefficiencies in any marketplace because something is worth precisely what one will pay or barter for it and never more or less. That makes a lot of assumptions about consumers have all of the information and appropriately weighing it for how positive or negative an effect that it will have on their life. It also means that I can’t say that I was an undervalued commodity in the relationship marketplace and deprives me of a rationalization that was helpful to me in the more distressing periods of my former single life.

Addendum: Bob Vis writes a ridiculously better post on the subject.

In regards to a previous post, Peter commented:

Getting back to the original issue, one thing to keep in mind is that changing your behavior/appearance/whatever to eliminate undesirable characteristics might not do much in terms of attracting women so long as you’re in the same social environment. For example, if an overweight guy manages to lose a lot of weight his dating prospects may not really improve among the women who knew him when he was fat, as they’ll still think of him as the fat guy.

It can actually be more complicated than that sometimes.

One thing that heavy guys see a fair amount of that gives them hope is older married couples with a heavy guy and a slender wife. What they often don’t realize is that when they first got married, it’s often the case that he was in better shape. Whenever that’s not the case, though, in almost every single instance that I’ve known it to occur, the guy was at least in better shape before they met. That’s the kind of thing that when you think about it shouldn’t matter, yet it seems to and when you think about it, it makes a certain amount of sense.

Take a guy that was morbidly obese from ages 5 to 25 but lost it all by 30, more often than not you’re looking at a guy that is less successful with women than a guy that was in good shape from 5-25 that let himself go and became overweight by 30.

A guy that has been overweight for most of his life will often think of himself as such after he’s lost the weight. Even if he notices some improvement, instinctually he will think that women see him as they have seen him for most of his life. He’s less likely to ask girls out and even when he does, he is up against a pretty big learning curve never having been successful before. Once I learned to shower regularly and lost 70 pounds or so (and gained two inches in height) in high school, I was still way behind a whole lot of my peers. I didn’t know how to talk to girls, didn’t know how to ask them out, and didn’t know the 100,000 ways I could accidentally repel them.

That’s not to say that losing the weight didn’t make a difference. It did. But it didn’t make as much difference as one might expect. I was still the same awkward kid, just in a smaller frame. Eventually I got caught up somewhat on the socialities of girls and women and I began to improve considerably… though I was still behind a whole lot of my peers. Then, even when a fair amount of the weight came back on, the improvements actually stuck regardless of the fact that I was heavier than I needed to be.

It’s kind of depressing to think about it. It’s actually something of a demotivator when it comes to trying to get into shape a little later in life. If I were told at 15 that losing the weight would still leave me behind my peers, I might not have lost it. I’m certainly glad that I did, of course, but sometimes to lose weight you’ll have to think that it’ll make all the difference in the world. Particularly if you’re losing it for social rather than health reasons.

The same is often true for women. The one formerly fat girl that I dated was half-crazy with insecurity. I know a couple guys that managed to marry quite well for themselves (in the appearance department) because the girl they married used to have a serious weight problem.

And as mentioned at the top of this post, the inverse is also often in effect. Girls I know that started gaining weight well after college often project a confidence and social adeptness that helps guys overlook the excess baggage. The fat former frat boys that I know managed to marry some real hot women.

My family is close to another family named the Lamonts that was raised in a quite healthy household. No soft drinks around, little or no chocolate, all four food groups at every meal, no fast food, and so on. Once the girls left the house, though, they all started putting on the Freshman Fifteen and beyond. Some lost the weight, one didn’t until very recently. I remember thinking to myself that one can really go overboard with raising health-conscious kids because they can rebel as soon as they leave the house. As I get older, I see that to matter less and less. The fact that they were thin and attractive in high school mattered more than I would have expected.