Faith Fighter

Mohammad is one bad mofo. Invisibility is a hard power to fight against. I want to play this game some more, but I don’t want to screw up my laptop keyboard. I’ll have to remember this for later.

In relation to Will’s Father to Son post about “the talk”, there’s a great example getting a lot of media attention these days.

I’m speaking, of course, of the swirling Levi Johnston/Bristol Palin/Sarah Palin brouhaha.

All politics aside, Levi Johnston is the perfect sort of kid you’d think that Will’s hypothetical “Father to Son” talk should have been given. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. The politics - specifically, the politics of Sarah Palin - seem to be more or less immaterial.

What is relevant is the following:
#1 - Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin had sex, which resulted in a pregnancy.
#2 - After the baby was born, Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin had some form of a falling-out. This may or may not have to do with Bristol’s parents, their position, national media attention, or anything else.
#3 - As a result of the falling-out, it is very uncomfortable for Levi Johnston to try to go visit his son and be around the Palins.
#4 - for some reason or other, the Palins are also preventing Levi Johnston from taking on an equal, or even sub-equal, share of “custody” time.

Will tells his hypothetical male offspring the following:

You may have visions of the two of you settling down together for the long haul. And maybe it will work out that way. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe she will leave you and suddenly your access to the child is restricted. Maybe you will decide that for whatever reason you just can’t stand her. But you will have to. She will be a part of your life for the rest of it, whether you want her to be or not. If you’re worth your grain of salt, you will be involved in your child’s life above and beyond what is required by the courts. If she falls and moves away, depending on what a judge has to say you will have to follow her. If you want to move away, you won’t because you want to continue to be a central part of your child’s life. For the next 18 years, you are tied to her because she is as likely as not to be the gatekeeper of your child. When you’re wondering whether or not to sleep with a woman, keep that in mind. When you’re wondering whether or not you want to trade a little more pleasure for a little less protection, keep that in mind.

Levi Johnston is irrevocably tied to Bristol Palin now. Due to her family’s wealth and power, he’s pretty much at their mercy. A short exchange is very telling:

King: OK. So are you afraid that saying you have a lawyer might anger the Palins?
Johnston: I don’t want to stir anything up …

Bristol Palin’s mother is wealthy. She is politically powerful. More to the point, the legal system is tilted against dads at pretty much every turn. Levi Johnston will have to fight tooth and nail, legally speaking, to have even an equal share of custody. He will have to be ready to fight in the legal arena against the dirtiest, most rotten shysters Sarah Palin can dig up in the courtroom, and he will have to manage to somehow do this without (a) ever speaking of such things around his son (which can be construed as “trying to poison the child against a parent”) and (b) angering the Palins to the point where they simply ignore the courts, cut him off, and dare the courts to try to enforce any custody ruling at all.

It will be interesting to see how this eventually plays out, but more likely than not, the kid will suffer for it as a result. And if nothing else, Levi Johnston will have to live with that.

A little while back Phi pointed to a fellow pointing to two studies suggesting that attractive people make better violinists. Assortive mating is mentioned as the culprit. Assortive mating, of course, is the notion that more desirable people reproduce with more desirable people and less with less. This creates a convergence of beauty and talent. I wouldn’t be surprised if that did play a significant role in the correlation between violin-playing ability and attractiveness, but I have another idea as to what might be the cause.

It seems to me that becoming an accomplished violin player requires a great deal of discipline and a lot of focus. It’s not something that I would expect slobs to become very good at. While I know that a degree of natural talent is required, I don’t think that violining is more meritocratic than is, for example, singing. People are born with better and worse singing voices whether they get any formal training or not. Two people that have never received any sort of training will have vastly different abilities by the time they’re 20. Two people never trained on the violin will have the same ability.

So I expect that the discipline required to become a great violinist would carry over into diet and other things. I would also expect that the same parents that are more demanding of their children in regards to the violin would be more likely to police diet as well. So I would think that those, along perhaps with assortive mating, would be factors.

The fact that the same is true with singers throws me off, though. First, because much of my rationale with violins is not true of song. The second is because it runs contrary to stereotypes that seem to hold up in my personal life.

I remember a while back Clint met someone online and talked to them on the phone. He commented that she had a very attractive voice. This was, actually, a point of concern. He didn’t even have to tell me that because I knew. Heavy women, we had long since discovered, have the more attractive voices. We guessed - correctly, as it turned out - that his new online friend was overweight.

Maybe this is just the difference between speaking voices and singing voices, but we do carry images in our mind of the fat lady singing, don’t we?

But apparently this is not the case. Or maybe the listeners were tailoring their appraisals based on what they thought the person looked like. But that doesn’t realy make a whole lot of sense. Nobody is going to say “that nasally voice sounded great” because they internally associate nasality with attractiveness. So maybe assortive mating plays a bigger role than I’ve given it credit for.

The last thought is in response to Phi’s tangent about the island that his parents live on where there are many more women than then. It reminds me a bit of Episcopal Youth Church, where me and this other guy were in the youth group with a dozen or so females. You’d think that would be an ideal situation… but it really wasn’t. Instead the result was that there was a lot of girls talk that we were shut out of. They were nothing but nice to me, but there was a pretty obvious line that I was on the other side of this.

It also reminds me of a particular private university in Colosse, Gulf Christian University, known for its snobby women who only date rich men. There’s an email joke that makes the rounds every couple of years that lists jokey complaints from attendees of all of the local universities in the form of “What I want to know is…”. GCU’s entry was something along the lines of “What I want to know is why in a university that is 75% female it’s the other 25% that can never get laid!”

I read here and there that one of the dangers of drinks with sugar is that they give you calories without actually filling you up. So they’re as empty as empty calories can be. I don’t doubt that much. Refined sugar and corn syrup and all that are definitely among the worst ways to spend one’s calories.

The claim, though, isn’t that they consume too many calories for too little in return. It’s that they do not satisfy hunger at all. That doesn’t seem to be true in my experience.

Whenever I’ve given up soft drinks in the past, one thing that I’ve noticed is that there is usually an uptick in my hunger. I don’t mean substituting sugar for sugar. That would make sense. Stop drinking coke, want candy bar. But stop drinking cokes, want any food you can get your hands on? I thought that maybe it had something to do with oral activity (the weight gain that often comes after quitting smoking gets attributed to that), but the hunger seems to come more from the stomach rather than the mouth. I do know the difference. Then I thought maybe it was psychosomatic, and maybe that’s part of it, but it’s usually something I notice in retrospect. I notice that I’ve been hungry for the last few days… then I look back and notice the soft drinks. False attribution, maybe. I also thought that it might be that I substitute soft drinks for diet soft drinks which contain antacids with can make you feel more hungry. Maybe that’s the case, though I’ve never noticed any difference based on whether or not I’m replacing the soft drinks with diet soft drinks or otherwise.

Then there was today. Today at around 6:30 or so I started getting hungry. I had half a Subway sandwich in the fridge, but I didn’t want to spoil my planned dinner for the night. So I decided to go to the vending machine and get a bit of beef jerky to tide me over. Except inexplicably there was a line at the vending machine six people long. So, realizing that I hadn’t consumed my daily quota of soft drinks for the day, I decided to go ahead and get a Mountain Dew and come back to the vending machine later.

Except that later I wasn’t hungry. Two hours later, I’m still not. This is not the first time that this sort of thing has happened to me. That I’ve been hungry, drank a coke, and then not been hungry anymore. That’s never happened with Diet Coke, and I didn’t drink the Mountain Dew with the expectation that it would fill me up, so it not really easy to chalk it up to my imagination.

So faced with the alleged fact that cokes do not satisfy hunger in any way, shape, or form… and faced with the alleged fact that Mountain Dew does seem to quench my hunger… I have no choice but to conclude that Mountain Dew has protein.

When I first read the Watchmen many years ago, some of the more frustrating aspects of the story involved Eddie Blake, the Comedian. Blake was an attempted rapist, the murderer of a woman bearing his child, Kennedy’s assassin and a ruthless plumber for Richard Nixon. Yet, throughout the entire story, all but two of the characters express some degree of admiration for him. Nobody calls him on it. The woman he tried to rape goes on to bear his child and becomes something of an apologist for him. Any reasonable reading of the character would paint him not as a hero but as a villain.

I don’t disagree with that, but as I’ve gotten older and repeatedly re-read and now watched the story unfold on screen, I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the character and an understanding of why he is viewed as he is.

The hardest aspect of the story to fully grasp is his exoneration at the hands of Sally Jupiter, the original Silk Spectre. The notion of a victim forgiving her would-be rapist is, on its face, abhorrant. How she could go on to bear his child and remember him fondly at his death is maddening. And, as I originally read it, seemingly unrealistic. But to understand their complex relationship means, in part, boiling it down to the relative simplicity of their characters.

Blake is the embodiment of unchecked masculinity. The prototypical “alpha male”, as powerful and forceful as anyone in the story whose skin isn’t blue. As morality and social propriety are primarily feminine contributions to society, he is naturally devoid of them. To his detriment, in the end.

Blake, in the end, loved Sally Jupiter. She is the only character throughout the entire work that he said even one positive thing about. The only person he allowed to emotionally injure him. As repulsive as the notion sounds and as much as it will sound like an apology that it is most definitely not meant to be, the attempted rape boiled down to a misunderstanding. He was sixteen (in the comic, 24 in the movie), intelligent but relatively uneducated and poorly socialized. In his way of thinking, if they both wanted sex (and he believed that they both did), the rest (such feminine things as morality and decency) were beside the point. When his initial move was rebutted, he flew into a rage and compounded the error.

This doesn’t make Blake an okay guy nor does it excuse what he did. More than nothing else, it exemplifies how dangerous he really is. A walking id with a mask and a gun. But with good looks and pure testosterone, a baser sort of woman could ask for little more.

Sally Jupiter, then, is exactly that baser woman. Whereas Blake embodies the dark sides of masculinity, she exemplifies that shallowness of femininity. Her beauty is her primary asset. Other than the ability to fight, her only asset. She becomes a hero not out of a desire to do good or instill justice, but out of self-interest and vanity. Whatever her physical strength, she displays almost no emotional strength whatsoever. Her sense of morality is based on little more than arbitrary rules built primarily to make herself look better and others (including her daughter) look worse. When she interceded on Eddie Blake’s attempts to introduce himself to their daughter, her primary motivation isn’t so much to protect her as it is to bury that which makes her look bad.

But just as Blake’s personality allows him to make a woman feel like a woman with his forcefulness, her (pre-bitterness) boisterousness and raw sexuality would almost certainly make a man feel like a man around her. He prized his masculinity; she prized her femininity. They brought it out in one another. The attempted rape is one of the darker scenes in a dark piece. But because it prevented these two people from being able to make the most of their shallow weaknesses, it was in its own way a tragic one.

If the love (and sexual tension) between Eddie and Sally was a case of two well-stacked people that should have been in love failing to partner up due to circumstances and their individual foibles, the romance between Dan Drieberg and Sally Jupiter’s daughter, Laurie Jespeczyk, was a case of two people only marginally compatible that partnered up mostly because circumstances allowed for it and neither was sufficiently flawed to blow it.

Neither the comic book nor the movie made a particularly convincing case for why Dan and Laurie were well matched. In fact, there is sort of the feeling you get when watching an action movie where the hero has a love interest mostly because he is supposed to and they run through the motions mostly because the genre requires it.

But I would argue that it was more significant than that. The complete lack of electricity in their relationship was indicative, in a way, of the situation that they were in.

It parallels the situation with Laurie’s mother a little bit. As far as the Minutemen were concerned, Eddie and Sally were the only two verified straight characters there were. Captain Metropolis, Hooded Justice, and the Silhouette were verified homosexuals. There were hints that Dollar Bill and Mothman were close enough that Bill’s death precipitated Mothman’s descent into madness. Hollis Mason was established as straight in a companion to the movie, but in the comic book he is a life-long bachelor with no mentioned romantic asperations. So there you had them, the man’s man and the woman’s woman in a room full of homosexuals and/or people without sexual conviction or success.

As far as the Watchmen/Crimebusters are concerned, you have gay Captain Metropolis (in the comic but not the movie), seemingly asexual Rorschach and Ozymandias, and four heterosexual characters (Eddie Blake, Dr Manhattan, Laurie, and Dan). Removing Blake from consideration because he is the only female character’s father, you have two straight males and a straight female. And in the course of the comic book (and the movie), you have the female (Laurie) leaving one male (Manhattan) for the other (Dan).

Whether or not there are heroes outside of the east coast is never fully established, but if there were they were never mentioned as being in contract with the main characters of the story. So there you are with three characters that spent much of their lives doing things that only a handful of people in the entire country ever do and as far as Laurie and Dan are concerned, those people are not potential romantic partners (except Dr Manhattan, whom Laurie is dissatisfied with at the start and whose sexuality is dissipating with his humanity at any rate).

So that Laurie and Dan would end up together by process of elimination is relatively significant. The only thing they have in common is their costumes, but when neither of them have that central part of their existence in common with anyone else, it’s enough to give one another a second and third look and however many looks it takes to fall in love.

It takes fewer looks for Dan because he is at the outset the classic beta male who, even if he were willing to put away his childish things, would probably have some trouble with women anyway. Even at the height of his career, during the Crimebusters meeting, Laurie comments that nobody but Dr Manhattan interested her. Dan was a relatively uncompelling fellow even before being washed up and overweight.

But that he was sidelined by the Keene Act was devestating to him. He was deprived of the one thing that gave him purpose. He only lit up when he was able to reach back into his glory days. While Hollis Mason and Veidt had careers to go to and Eddie Blake found an alternate outlet for his activities, Dan lacked the drive and motivation to do much with himself.

And socially speaking, he had the same sorts of problems that a lot of nerds do. His rich history of excitement and intrigue was somewhat off-limits due to his secret identity. His amazing inventions are geek toys. Everything that he does have to offer, intelligence and physical prowess, had been spent in service of something that was stripped from him and that he cannot talk about. He is probably the nicest guy in the whole story, but his only two friends are his predecessor and Laurie, who lives mostly in isolation with her big blue boyfriend.

In the comic (though not the movie), Laurie finds a signed picture of a vice queen that Dan busted wherein the queen expressed romantic interest. So remote was he prior to Laurie’s split with Manhattan that I had to wonder why precisely it was that he didn’t pursue that. She may have been a villain, but she was there and she probably understood his life better than most. It was a good thing he didn’t, of course, because he found Laurie, which given the givens is probably the best he could ever expect to do.

But what about Laurie? After having slept with the Most Powerful Man in the History of the World, why would she end up with an introverted gizmonerd? The romantic explanation would be that she left the powerful man that didn’t really care for her (in a way she could appreciate) for the sincere beta. As you’ve probably figured, I associate it mostly with his availability and her relative isolation.

Apart from her attractiveness, of course, she didn’t have much to offer. She’s somewhat like the unattractive girl in the Anime Club, where it doesn’t take much to get some sort of interest from somebody. Laurie is beautiful, of course, but she’s also obnoxious. In a sense, though, she is also a creature of the path of least resistance like Dan is. The main differences are that she was raised by her wildly extroverted mother and she has the striking looks that he lacks. If you’re going to be listless and pretty, it works out a lot better if you’re female.

It’s a sort of by-the-numbers thinking that lead her to completely overlook Dan at the Crimebusters/Watchmen meeting. She also had the perspective of a sixteen year old. But Manhattan was the biggest, most powerful thing around. It’s not surprising at all that she would gravitate towards that, blue skin or no. In the world in which she was raised, he was the biggest thing there was. It was only after years of emotional exhaustion that she gave up on that and figured that Dan would do.

In the action movies I mentioned where the romantic storylines are by-the-numbers and present only because of genreic requirements, when there is a sequel it’s often the case that the leading woman from that movie is conspicuously absent from the next so that they can start from scratch with another (usually uncompelling) romantic plot. Despite, or maybe because of, the somewhat electricity-free nature that Laurie transitioned from the powerful Manhattan to the meek Owl, I would suspect that ten years down the line that they would actually still be together.

Some people consider dreams to be insignificant and/or that analyzing dreams is a waste of time. Dreams are like abstract art by hacks. You find meanings in your dreams only because you’re looking for them.Others believe that dreams are inherently significant and are the subconscious’s way of tell you something or make you feel something. That’s the category I fall into.

At various points in my life, I’ve found dreams to have pretty direct relevance on what I’m thinking. No surprise that your thoughts would influence your dreams or vice-versa, but there have been times where dreams have brought up things that I had been avoiding. Walt’s death is a big example. Plus, once I tore away at a recent dream I discovered something that I had been reluctant to think too much about. This wasn’t a good revelation whereas what was mildly bothering me before is more formally bothering me now. But I’m hoping that it will have a happy result. Even if not, it’s not written anywhere that dreams are supposed to help.

I think that my view of dreams is supported by what I consider to be amazing things. XKCD had a great strip the other day:

As luck would have it, that’s the exact dream I had the night before this comic came up. That part is coincidence, but there are a lot of people that have this dream. I have it at least once a year. There are other universal dreams, too. The whole going to work without your pants (or any clothes) on dream. The dream about your teeth falling out.

Phenomenon like these feel truly magical to me. That thousands of people who’ve never met would have the same dream is amazing. Some of them, like the going to school/work with no pants on, could be considered dreams that have been passed on by hearing about it and then dreaming about it. Others, though, such as missing classes and loose teeth are dreams that I’ve had for years before I ever realized that anybody else was having that dream.

Dreams about missing classes correlate with feeling overwhelmed or like there’s something you’re forgetting. Dreams about teeth falling out can relate to vanity and self-maintenance. Dreams about being naked are I guess putting an exclamation point on fear of embarrassment. These are pretty human feelings, but that minds of people that have never met would symbolize these thoughts and fears in the same way is just miraculous to me. It makes me feel a sense of connectedness that’s too squishy for me to even articulate without sounding like a hippie communist or New Age Twerp. One of the harder lessons of my life is learning that most people out there don’t think the same way that I do neither in process nor conclusion. They don’t feel the same way, either.

But that many of us can share the same dreams makes me feel a little less isolated from people that I already don’t share an intimate connection.

-{The following is a speech that I might give my future daughter. It hasn’t been run by my wife, so in the intervening decade or so before giving it, it would be subject to change on that basis (as well as others). I also use some abstract ideas here, which presents a big of a problem as to when exactly I would give this speech. I would like to give it before boys even become a serious consideration, but I may need to simplify it if I’m going to give it to a twelve year girl and then give her the more high-falutin’ version when it becomes more pertinent. Given that any daughter of mine will have my wife and I as her parents, I figure that will be around 26 15 or 16.}-

The funny thing about money is that, in the end, it’s pieces of carefully crafted paper. It used to represent gold that you could withdraw from Fort Knox, but now it doesn’t represent anything except what we believe it represents. That doesn’t make it worthless. It’s value, though, is in the meaning that we attach to it. We mostly give it out only when we need to or when someone is willing to give us something in return for it. We mostly only get it when we contribute something. But the paper itself only represents the values that we attach to it and the difficulty required in obtaining it. If there were more green paper and fewer things, the money would become less valuable. You would need more money to do less. Money and the things that you can buy with them are valuable only insofar as they are not easily obtained.

Sex is sort of like this. Or at least it is for boys. The physical gratification of sex is something that a guy can simulate on his own if that was what he was mostly after. Even setting aside what he can accomplish on his own, the physical stimulation that comes with sex is largely the same whether a boy is having sex with a girl that he finds desirable or someone that he doesn’t even want to look at. And yet many boys will scour the earth to find the most attractive and popular and desirable women to have sex with. And most will refuse to have sex with someone that repulses them despite the physical pleasure they could get. The reason for this is that most of the value in sex - for boys and girls - is in the meaning and value that we attribute to it. Like money.

For a variety of reasons, boys are less discriminating than girls when it comes to sex. How pleasurable sex is varies far less from encounter to encounter for boys than it does for girls. Boys don’t face nearly the social penalties for being sexually indiscriminate that girls do. They don’t get pregnant and they’re less likely to catch an STD. And for whatever reason, boys are less likely to believe that they need to have any romantic attachment to the person that they are having sex with than do girls. And, of course, his hormones are rapidly approaching their peak. Girls, on the other hand, are more discriminating. They face penalties and repercussions that men don’t. Whether due to social custom or evolutionary psychology, they overtly assign more romantic meaning to sex.

So what this creates is a situation where for boys, there is a natural scarcity of girls that are willing to have sex with them. Sex is harder to get, so it’s more valuable. So when a boy is bragging about how much sex he has, he is sort of saying to the other boys that he has easy access to something that they don’t. He is valuable. He is impressive. He is awesome. Guys sort themselves out from first to worst a number of different ways, but one of the big ways they do as they get into adolescence is by whether or not they can get sex, how frequently they can, and how impressive the person they are having sex with is. This isn’t something reserved for horndog jocks. Guys all up and down the popularity spectrum know that they’re being judged this way. Most of the time they’re judging themselves this way. Some ignore it and come up with alternative ways that they think they should be measured, but it’s pretty rare that he is oblivious to how other people are looking at him and it’s not at all rare that he would incorporate these measures into how he sees himself.

You don’t just have to worry about the horndog jock that’s bragging about all the girls he’s sleeping with. He’s the most loud about this because it presents him in the best light. But there’s as good a chance as not that the quiet kid in the back of the class doodling on his notebook is measuring his worth in the same way. Smart boys will get some solace in their intelligence and the doodling kid - if he’s good - will take some solace in that. But they will also know that in a rather important way - important because their peers believe it is important - they are coming up short.

In fact, in some ways you may have less to fear from the popular kids - unless they are overtly pointing to their sexual desirability as their selling point - than you do those for whom sexual desirability is a source of insecurity. It’s like how money is most important to two groups of people: Those that don’t have it and those that have money but little else going for them except what money can buy. Similarly, sex is most important to the guys that have a lot of trouble getting it and those that don’t have much else going for them. Some guys are so insecure about it that they are like vampires, seeking out sex as a natural urge and a way to try to fill the black hole within their self-esteem. That, like the horndog braggart, is an extreme case, though. Even for guys where it’s not an overriding factor, it still clouds their vision and warps their judgment.

I’m not saying that the only reason a boy would want to sleep with you is to feed his ego. His motives may be as pure as the driven snow. Or they may be questionable. You won’t really know which. Even seeing a side of guys that girls don’t usually see, I’ve been surprised sometimes. I am saying, though, that the younger you are and the younger the guy is, the more likely it is that he doesn’t have a clear idea of his place in the world and the more likely he will desperately seek validation any way that he can find it. As you get older, it will become less of an issue. Some men never really work past these warped priorities, but as time passes more and more of them will gain the perspective of experience and will have more worthwhile ways to establish their identity. Unfortunately, before they’ve established themselves and figured out who they are and what’s really important to them, they are much more likely to be emotionally dangerous.

I wish I had better advice on how to spot the guy with good motives and the guy with bad ones. It’s tough. The more of them you choose to share yourself with, the more likely it is that you will get burned. Even if you’re cautious, though, unless your judgment is flawless, you will probably still get burned. I’m sure what advice I do have will spill out when as I say here and there, “Not that guy!” Beware most those that believe that the world owes them something because they believe either that they are just that special or because they’re unhappy. Take note of how they treat people that they don’t need something from. Don’t waste your time on someone that can’t even pretend to be as interested in you as they are interested in themselves. And beware the person whose self-description is too far at odds with the person you see doing to talking.

Over the years, I’ve had a lot of friends tell me about some first sexual experience that they’ve had with someone I know or have met. Often, at the end, they’ll say something to the effect of “She told me not to tell anyone, so keep tight-lipped.” When they do this, it’s important to take note that they had sex, she told him not to tell anybody, and he told someone anyway. This happens even when he values her a great deal. This happens even when he is generally a pretty honest guy. If a guy lies to a girl about nothing else, he will lie to her about that.

Remember that.

Remember that partly because it reinforces what I’m trying to tell you. He will tell because part of the value of sex is to be able to tell someone. He may even tell it because he wants to share something very special that happened with him and a girl that he cares about a great deal. But also remember that he’ll tell because you will have to live with the consequences of his sharing your most intimate moments. He may share it only with his trusted friends or he may share it with anybody that will listen. It will tell you a lot about him that you will hopefully - but not necessarily - have figured out ahead of time. But the friend that he trusts may be more casual with the information than the guy. Word may get out.

You want to ask yourself some questions before you get intimate with a guy. Are you only willing to do it if absolutely nobody finds out? Would you be surprised if he turns around and tells a lot of people? If the answers are yes and no, think twice. If it does get out, though, will you have the strength of your conviction that you did nothing wrong or will you wonder what the hell you were thinking? If word gets back to us, exactly how horrified will you be that we find out that this is the guy you chose to share yourself with? If you think about these questions beforehand, I think you’ll find that you have more judgment and foresight than you think.

One other thing I want you to ask yourself before moving forward is whether or not you will regret what you did even if things don’t work out. I don’t mean that you’ll regret it the same way that you might regret that expensive birthday gift you got him for your 9-month anniversary. I mean will you regret it in a more fundamental way. Will you feel used. Will you feel like you were a point on his scoreboard. I had a friend who was saving herself for marriage once ask my advice about whether or not she should have sex her boyfriend since she really wanted to marry him but couldn’t at that time in her life. I told her to only do it if she would not regret having done so if they don’t get married. She said that it was a moot question because of course they were going to get married. When he dumped her six months later, she was twice-devastated.

The thing about this game that boys play with themselves and one another is that you are not an active participant. You can’t play and win. If a girl tries to use it to her advantage, to give a guy sex so that his ego will be fed and that she is the one that fed it, he will tire and move on. If she withholds it on the basis that it will become more valuable to him, he will aim for some lower-hanging fruit that he can grab. She is not a partner or a player. She is the ball being batted around in the course of the game.

You are not a ball. You are not currency. You are not a notch in someone’s belt or a point on their scorecard. Don’t willingly allow yourself to be reduced to that. You were not put on this planet to feed the egos of men. You were not put here to please them. Your value is not dependent on your willingness and ability to do that. You have your own wants and your own needs. If you demand that they be met, then you will share yourself on your own terms and in ways far less likely to leave you feeling spent and used.

When you meet the right guy, you won’t be “giving” him anything. You’ll be sharing it. Sharing yourself. It will be mutual. He won’t have to beg, guilt, or needle you into doing something that you don’t want to do. The right guy won’t necessarily be exempt from the urges and psychology of the game, but he will consider being with you, being loved by you, and your happiness to be more important than the scorecard. He will be willing to work with you and your needs, not to the exemption of his own, but in accordance.

Waiting for this, and even knowing that it’s out there, won’t make you any less lonely when you’re being ignored while the boys are off playing their games. But remember that not all attention is good attention and mistakes not made can be as valuable as opportunities missed are frustrating. On the other hand, don’t let your fear shut the rest of the world out. You’ll need to make mistakes so that you can learn from them. But whatever you choose to engage in, make sure that it is in at least equal parts for your benefit, your education, and your self-esteem. If that’s not your aim and if you decide you’ll settle for less than that, you will end up with a lot less than you think.

I’m not going to tell you not to have sex. Your mother and I want you to wait until you are absolutely ready. Ideally, we would like you to only move forward with a man that you love and treasure who feels the same about you. But I’m not going to tell you what to do because we’re not going to be with you when you make that decision. Except to the extent that we deny you the opportunity we won’t be there to stop you from making the wrong one. We are not going to be able to force you to see things how we see them. Besides, your mother and I may not even see things the same way between ourselves. Whatever you do, though, we will hope that it was the right thing. Right by us, of course, but also right by you.

If you don’t have any plans for dinner, consider eating at Subway tonight. There’s apparently a movement on to get as many people as possible to eat at Subway today in an effort to save the NBC show Chuck, which just keeps getting better and better. So if you like the show or are amenable to eating there for those of us that do, I recomment it.

I meant to say something earlier. I heard about this last week. I decided that I haven’t eaten at Subway in forever and it sounded good. One of the main reasons I haven’t eaten at Subway recently is that it’s rarely convenient to. The one that exists on my drive home from work often doesn’t have any parking available.

So wouldn’t you know it, since deciding that I was going to eat at Subway today, I have had one opportunity after another to eat there thrown at me. Every chore I went on over the weekend, there’s been one right there. And the one on my drive home actually had parking available when I stopped at a nearby gas station. But each time I had to forego so that I would be sure to eat there today.

Makes me wonder if Subway isn’t losing money on the deal.

Update: I decided to get two subs. Considering that my current eating habits only allow me to eat 6″ at a time, I know what I’m going to be eating for the next couple of days. That, combined with the left-overs from the Mexican restaurant we ate on Sunday night, will prevent me from eating much in the way of ravioli and Spam for a while.

Over at Least I Could Do (a webcomic as well as a blog), a post about the abysmal education numbers recently announced from Washington DC:

They’re telling us that only 12% of DC’s 14 year olds can read proficiently.

That’s insane, that’s ludicrous. Hell, it’s bloody criminal.

That statistic keeps rattling around in my head, and I admit I’m having a hard time accepting it. In a day and age when media, the internet and literature are so freely distributed, how can this be the case? This is a statistic I would expect in a developing country, and not in the United States of America, not the nation’s capital for Christ’s sake.

These kids need to put the drugs away, lay down their right to bear arms, leave their gang, stop going to war and pick up a book.

Can someone honestly tell me what we’re teaching our kids in school, if not how to read?

I really want to know.

As the thread goes on, there’s a lot of left-wing “Evil Dubya Bush and the No Child Left Behind program” attacks, but very little substance beyond that. A few teachers have weighed in, to point out inherent problems in the national education system, some of which are connected to NCLB and some of which have other causes.

I’d like to offer up a few points from my perspective - having gone through public schools and private schools, and in my current employment with an entity that tries to train the next generation of teachers.

#1 - Teachers really don’t get the support they need.
#2 - Regional and social factors aren’t helping.
#3 - Insistence on “self-esteem” hurts the system.
#4 - Insistence on keeping all kids together hurts the system.

In my mind, the last is the worst portion of the problem - (public) schools in America have largely done away with the idea of having more-advanced and less-advanced classes, except for the required “remedial ed” courses based on teaching kids with severe mental handicaps or psychiatrically determined learning/behavioral disorders. If you see a grade school with 3 classes per grade (small, I know), you will never see them arranged by previous academic achievement, with the smartest kids all in one class. No, you’ll see them arranged by random lot, with the smartest kids in each class bored stiff while the teacher desperately tries to educate the idiots who don’t even want to be there and whose parents don’t care about their kids’ education. Add in the socially promoted kids (those whose parents threatened to sue the school district for daring to suggest Johnny repeat a grade or three), and pretty soon you have an entire 8th grade class that’s reading on a 3rd grade level - the idiots because they’re idiots, the rest because they’ve never been given anything better as each successive teacher simply taught to the idiots’ level. Just to cap it off, a teacher who actually fails a kid is to be punished, and no thought ever given to culpability on the part of the kid (who goofs off, doesn’t do homework, makes spitwads with his books, etc) or parents (who, blissfully clueless, insist that the teacher “just hates our little Johnny” when his conduct and lack of study are brought up in conferences).

This is a system that completely fails kids on a psychological level, trying to force-feed “knowledge” without experience or learning. For the kids who respond best to being challenged, being stuck in a “pace of the slowest idiot” class is the surest way to teach them that school is worthless - why should they explore and learn and experiment, when they’re spending 8 hours a day being re-taught something they already absorbed years ago? In the current system, the overachiever will soon learn that going above and beyond is going to be punished; the rest of the kids in the class will see them as a “showoff”, teachers will peg them “disruptive” for getting off the lesson plan, and independent thought… well let’s face it, in the edjamacashun factery, that’s just not to be tolerated. The lesson to the overachiever is simple: overachievers are not the good little drones the system wants.

For the kids who are naturally competitive, they completely lack a reason to compete and a proper metric by which to measure it; grades are quickly noticed to be meaningless, and class ranking means nothing either. Since the overachievers are being beaten into submission, they don’t have anyone in a “top tier” to compete with anyways. When half of the school system are “honor students,” and the other half don’t care about it, competition loses its meaning. And of course, in the name of “self-esteem”, direct competition between students is to be avoided.

For the kids who are natural underachievers, the unstratified system provides no notice whatsoever; quite the contrary, there is a complete lack of attention to them. There is no “congratulations, you’re in the dummies class” shock that might wake a few up and make them realize that they should work harder. There is no definitive attention on how they got where they are. There is no drive, however small, to get out of the “dummies class.” The system assumes every kid is just like them, and makes everyone else wait for them to catch up. If that weren’t enough, the system specifically (in the name of “self-esteem” again) denies all but the barest identification of just which kids it is that are holding the class up.

Stratify the system, and you can get some marvelous results. Yes, you have a whole class of kids who are moving at the slow pace… but you also have classes that aren’t. A class full of geniuses, semi-geniuses, and just average-but-competitive-natured kids will do wonders, the geniuses and semi-geniuses with their natural love of learning and exploration, the competitive ones in trying to keep up with their peers. The teacher in the class with the remedial kids will have a more solid reason to urge that a kid be held back (they’re already underperforming), and won’t have to deal with the disruptions caused by bored-out-of-their-skulls kids who already learned today’s lesson three years ago. It’s a win-win situation.

Just to be clear on this point: when most kids were sneaking in comic books to read during class behind their real books, I was sneaking in the works of Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Anne McCaffrey. Did any of my schools support this? Far from it. I was actually told at one point by a school counselor that if I deliberately scored poorly on a couple tests, so as not to be on the top of the GPA list, my classmates would probably like me more. It seems the school system had decided to “grade on a curve”, in that they took the top score of the class on each test (and the aggregate homework grades) and “recentered” it so that the top score was the “new 100.” If the top score was an 80? Everyone got a free 20 points to add in. Unfortunately for the school, each class had 1-2 kids who threw the system off; we were scoring consistent 99-100’s while everyone else got 85 or less.

-{2001}-

A couple years out of college, I had a friend named Silke who was nineteen or so and dating a guy named Vernon. They were sort of an odd pairing. He was sort of a party guy and she was a would-be crusader wanting to save the world. His father was a Church of Christ pastor that thought that Catholics, of which Silke was one, were basically Mary-worshiping heathens. He was also startlingly good looking. She wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t anything physically special. But for whatever reason, they got along well. A case of opposites attracting, I figured.

They were together for about a year or so when Silke told me that she was considering having sex with him, foregoing her previous desire to save herself for marriage. I wrote about the incident a while back:

I actually had to think hard about how to answer. In most circumstances, I would be encouraging provided that he or she was comfortable with it. But I also knew that when we first met she had intended to save herself for marriage and I hated to see her give up something that was once so important to her for a guy that I viewed as a non-permanent fixture in her life. Yet it would have been hypocritical for me to tell her not to when I certainly never waited for marriage, even though at some point I intended to.

I wasn’t in a position to tell her not to and yet that was my advice. It got me thinking a lot about the subject.

I eventually posited it as a what-if. The question I asked her was whether or not she would regret having had sex with him if the relationship doesn’t work out. That way, if it was part of some effort to hold on to him (though their relationship wasn’t in trouble) or if she was just getting impatient, it would at least expose those motives for what they were (even if it didn’t change her course of action).

She didn’t take my advice very well. She told me that she was in love and he was in love and that they were definitely going to get married. No matter how much I tried to tell her that I wasn’t saying that their relationship wouldn’t work, I still felt it was important for her to contemplate the possibility so that she’s not blind-sided by “wasting” her virginity on something impermanent. If she felt that it would have been wasted by virtue of the fact they never got married, then she shouldn’t do it. If it was something that she wanted to do and found morally acceptable to do, then she should go forward with it. But only if she was comfortable with the notion that it might not be a prelude to marriage.

As I knew she would, she slept with him.

And, for a while, all was well.

Then cracks started to appear.

When she first started saying that she was worried about things, I was actually a bit dismissive. I thought that she was being paranoid. A new semester had started up and it was probably nothing. I didn’t know this to be the case, but I figured that she was mostly looking for reassurance.

A month or so later, the concerns started coming back. I started going back to my previous routine of reassurance, but then she told me something that stopped me in my tracks. I can’t remember what it was, but whatever it was I remember thinking to myself “Oh. It’s over.” All I really remember about it was that it was one of those innocuous things that have a hundred thousand benign explanations and yet whenever you hear about it (or have said or done it) you know it’s the beginning of the end.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” I said. He had apparently said or done whatever it was a month ago. It was the thing that had gotten her worrying in the first place. She didn’t tell me because, as I had suspected, she wanted me to be reassuring. She could see the look on my face and knew that I knew it was over. Always the contrarian, she then turned a 180 explaining why {whatever it was} didn’t really mean anything and how I just wanted them to break up because I was hired of her talking about it and on and on. Whenever she was upset, she had the twelve-year-old fallback of accusing whoever is giving her bad news just doesn’t want her to be happy. I didn’t hear much about it for a couple weeks after that and figured that things were holding steady.

Then… Vernon was caught on film… kissing a guy.

But he was drunk. It was a party. He lost his senses. He didn’t rememember doing it. That’s how drunk he was. It didn’t mean anything. At all. He convinced her and she convinced herself that this was true in relatively short order. I was too exasperated to really have an opinion. I’m not one of those that believes that people do drunk what they want to do sober, but… “He did what, now?” I asked.

She described to me the situation. Vernon had this friend Kalin Harper. Kalin was bisexual. Kalin was throwing a party and passing around the booze like it was candy. Then, on a dare, Kalin told Vernon to kiss Marco. Vernon was too drunk to realize that was a stupid bet.

Well, if there’s anything other than alcohol that would pursuade a man to do something, it would be a dare. I started smoking on a dare, after all (I lost). So okay, maybe it was a fluke.

A month or so after that, he was caught doing something more salacious than kissing a guy.

But he as drunk. Maybe someone stuck something in his drink. Whatever. He’s not gay. He can’t be gay. He loves Silke and had sex with her and once had sex with another girl and he wouldn’t do that if he was gay. “Another girl? Only one?”

“Well, you know him, he’s religious.”

“How many girlfriends has he had before you?”

“Two. I told you that.”

She had, but I had forgotten. I always thought that was strange about him, being as good-looking and fun-loving as he was. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it explained a lot of things. Things I had mostly attributed to sexual repression but that homosexuality could explain a lot better.

Once again, she could see the look on my face. “He’s not gay.”

Truth is, other than filling in the blanks of a guy I didn’t know very well and of course two situations that straight guys rarely find themselves in. The way that she explained him and his relationship with Kalin, though, told me all I needed to know. “I don’t know whether he’s gay or not, Silke, but he’s being flipped.”

“Flipped?”

-{1990’s}-

Flash back nearly a decade to my days on the Camelot BBS.

There was a guy on there named Vertigo. Vertigo was a kid of 14 or 15 when I met him that believed that deep down, everybody is bisexual. For a kid his age, he was remarkably charismatic and manipulative. I’m not sure I’ve seen anybody as adept at manipulation before or since I knew him. His crusade to prove the bisexuality of the world was basically to turn earstwhile straight people bisexual one at a time.

He was remarkably good. He had a really good eye for emotional vulnerability. He got the help of the more attractive people in his arsenal to seduce guys and girls not used to getting much (positive) attention. He took the confusion of puberty and adolescence and worked it for his own benefit. And perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that he didn’t really do all this for his own sexual pleasure. He was perhaps most convincing because he was not trying to seduce them personally. He had romantic partners (male and female - mostly male), but it wasn’t all about him getting laid.

He got some people turned around real good. I remember one young lady confess to me that she was bisexual but she thought that there was something wrong with her because she didn’t find girls sexually attractive. One guy made a pass at me. I, like Vernon many years later, was totally drunk. Unlike Vernon, I wasn’t that drunk. Anyway, I remember when it happened and after it happened and how completely and utterly sorry I felt for the guy. Maybe he was gay, but I thought more than anything else he was just desperately lonely and Vertigo had convinced him that if girls wouldn’t touch him then maybe guys would.

So we came to call Vertigo’s little games “flipping”. Maybe that is a term in the gay community. I don’t know. Since he was using the Camelot BBS to do this, the whole thing of course became of great interest to its system administrators, Excalibur, Cyclone, Gallahad, and me. particularly as he was targeting young boys and girls that were too young by any standard. The last straw was when he started work on Cyclone’s thirteen year old daughter.

None of the four of us had any moral problems with homosexuality. We were all pretty liberal, socially speaking. We all had friends or acquaintances that were gay. So (other than Cyclone, who was rampageous) we had a little difficulty with the concept of taking any sort of action. We were also liberal when it came to guys trying to pick up thirteen year olds on the board, depending on the circumstances. Cyclone herself had allowed her 13 year old daughter to spend alone time with boys of 16 or 17 years old.

But there was something about Vertigo’s tactics that was just beyond what we were willing to tolerate. Something about taking a thirteen year old guy or girl, confused about all things sex, and try to seduce them not just for yourself but for a cause. Reducing them to data points in proving a theory. I say “we” even though I voted against banishing him. Even though I was against banishing him (and really against the way that we did it), I didn’t like Vertigo and was glad to see him go if not for the howls of protests of his supporters after we did it.

I did what I was really good at, which was straddling a line and trying to take both sides. I voted against Vertigo’s banishment, but nonetheless enforced it. Except when I didn’t enforce it, when I’d catch him on as someone else and leave him be as long as he wasn’t there to flip anybody. Loudly, he and I were enemies and privately we didn’t like one another, and yet when he needed someone to reach out to a guy at my high school that was feeling isolated due to his sexuality, he chose me and I put aside my initial skepticism that he was trying to flip me and agreed to do it.

-{2001}-

“You really think that someone can be turned gay?” Silke asked me.

“That wasn’t the point of the story,” I explained. The point was that there are some people that have the ability to get into other people’s head and make them question things. That Kalin, from everything she’s said, is a guy that gets some sort of joy in doing things like that the same way that Vertigo did.

“So do you think he’s gay or not?”

“I’m not sure that it really matters.”

“Of course it really matters. I’m not going to be able to stay with a gay man!”

The sad truth was that she was not going to stay with him under any circumstances. Or, rather, that he wasn’t going to stay with her. She was insistent that he wasn’t gay. Maybe he wasn’t. But he twice committed romantic or sexual acts with other guys while he was sleeping with her. Whether men do it for him or not, she obviously doesn’t.

In fact, when I considered Vertigo’s MO, it made me even sadder for her. Vertigo preyed on insecurities and doubts. He found people that were desperately unhappy and gave them a boulevard to happiness. For Kalin to be working so effectively on Vernon, he had to be pretty desperately unhappy. If he had been living in the closet, that would explain his existential woe. Otherwise, as she was one of the most important things in his like, she was a part of the formula of his unhappiness.

I tried to explain to her that it didn’t really matter because he had a long and difficult road and that there was absolutely, positively no way that if he came out of it all in tact that he would want to go back to a key figure that existed exclusively in the unhappy life that came before.

She tried to explain that she wanted to be there for him through this tough time because she loved him. I told her that the problem is that while she’s there with him, she wants him to be there with her. She needs something in return that he can’t give her.

That, of course, brought us right back to the great point of division between us. In her world of Carebears and sunsets, love can conquer all. As long as she loves somebody with enough volume, he cannot help but hear and understand and obey and reciprocate. In my world at the time of Stratego and poker faces, love expressed was a liability that was conquered by pollen in a light breeze.

She held in there for another month or so while he drifted away. It took two weeks of him dodging her calls before she left a message on is machine saying “So I guess we’re broken up?” He IMed her at four in the morning, saying “ya”.

Every Friday morning the office buys us donuts. I appreciate the regularity of it. At Monmark-Soyokaze, they would surprise us with them. That was nice, except that it invariably happened on mornings that I already ate breakfast before coming in. This way, I can plan around it.

These days, though, it’s a moot point because they’re in at 9 and gone by 9:30 and I don’t get into the office and settled in until 10:00 usually.

I took yesterday off because I had an eye appointment, so I have some time to make up. So I came in at 7am. I’m not sure why, but for some reason I started getting really hungry. So hungry that I was considering having more cereal. Then lo and behold, what do I get? An email informing us that the donuts have arrived.

I’m never this lucky.

Then again, given the health content of the donuts I eat, maybe this isn’t really luck.

They’re here by 9 and gone by 10. Since I typically don’t get in and settled in until 10 or so, I almost never get any. Even so, I appreciate the

When determining things like child custody and child support payments, the law generally considers what is in in the best interest of the child. I wrote a post on the late Bobvis blog about how the law should approach cases where the husband of the mother turns out not to be the father. Generally speaking, the law doesn’t care. At least not past a certain point. As far as the law in concerned, if he’s been acting as the child’s father, he becomes the legal father. This means in the event of a divorce that he can’t cease making child support payments and it means that she can’t use his lack of paternity as a reason to deny him custody or access to the child.

This strikes a lot of men as being unfair. If we find out ten years after the fact that a child is ours, we’re told that biology is destiny. If we find out ten years later that it isn’t, well biology isn’t so important after all. The counterargument is that fairness to the father (real or purported) is not the issue so much as the welfare of the child. The child did not choose to be born into that situation, after all. And it’s possible that the non-father knew. In the discussion, guys were taken to task for even considering that his rights might trump that of a child, his or otherwise. The welfare of the child trumps all (within reason, which this is).

My general sense of the issue is that both sides do have valid points. The attachment between an adopted child and adopted parent is real. If the law were to state that upon finding out that the child is not biologically his that he loses all custody rights would strike me as fundamentally unfair. The notion that, upon discovering non-paternity, the entirety of the choice of the non-father as to whether to continue or sever the relationship does seem fundamentally unfair to the child, who (support payments aside) has probably grown attached to two parents. It makes what would already be a traumatic experience even worse. All for the sake of allowing a man to save some money.

I should also say that in a good portion of the cases, a man put into this situation would gladly trade support payments for access to his putative son or daughter. Except in particular cases, I strongly believe that is the moral thing to do. Finding out that the child isn’t yours has to be heartbreaking, but your love for him or her should not be fundamentally changed by that fact. Parents love their adopted children all the time.

If I were king, I would probably still like to give the non-father more discretion than he currently has, though. I wouldn’t put all of the responsibility on the purported father to determine whether or not he is the biological dad in a timely fashion or else say that he has lost any right to object being held legally responsible for the mother’s deceit. I’m not sure that I could sign on with automatic paternity testing at birth. I don’t like the idea because of the disruption it would cause when the vast majority of the time there is nothing to be concerned about, but the arguments against it are pretty thin. It would have the benefit of giving the non-father the right, early on, to decide whether or not he wants the role and if he does then he could adopt.

The alternative might be a paternity test requirement prior to payments having to be made in the event of a divorce. In that case, the question of whether or not he knew he was not the biological father and usurped that role anyway (thus making him a party to the lie) could be brought up and if the mother could prove that was the case then he could be left on the hook. But all of that could make a traumatic time in the kid’s life even moreso. “Your father and mother are splitting up. Oh, and your father ain’t your father.”

An argument I reject, though, is the notion that the child support payments should be required on the basis not of fairness (it’s hard to argue that the cuckolded fellow deserves it… though some do make that argument), but rather because that’s what’s in the best interest of the child. It’s an argument that sounds solid (bulletproof, even) at the base of it, but it’s an argument that is frequently jettisoned in the name of practicality. In fact, rather than being based in the moral conviction it’s often clothed in, I think it’s mostly based on pragmatism. Somebody has to help the mother take care of the child. Might as well be this guy.

So when do we ignore the Best Interest of the Child arguments in favor of the rights of the parents? Sperm donation, primarily. And I mostly agree with that. In fact, I think that some of the fundamentals there ought to be expanded to cover other areas, as well. That’s going to be another post.

Addendum: In the comments, Phi points to another conundrum: What if the birth father, kept in the dark, comes back to claim what’s biologically his? This tilts me slightly more in favor of mandatory DNA testing. Ironically, the more I think about it the more the strongest argument in favor of it is “the best interest of the child”. To disrupt these sorts of things from happening down the line, test early. And maybe, at least in cases that don’t involve anonymous adoption and/or sperm donation, the right of the child to know who his or her father is.

Addendum II: Here is a good rundown of the laws in Illinois regarding paternity, custody, and a slew of other issues. I found it very instructive.

I can’t find the post (I held on to the quote below when I found it but stupidly did not save a link), but Capella wrote the following a while back:

I will never see the train people again and therefore will not have to participate in endless debates about whether “a couple hours” is or is not much less than four, the obvious answer being that “a couple” is “two”, and that if you are going to tell someone you will call them and not do so you should be prepared for towering rage.

A “couple” for me actually isn’t two. I mean, I realize that’s the definition, but I consider it an approximation wherein it is more than one, but could be more. In fact, I used to think that couple, except when specifically referencing a male-female paring, did explicitly allow for three. Here are some other definitions I tend to go by:

Couple = 2 or 3 (maybe four)
Few = 3 to 5 (maybe six)
Handful = 4 to 6
Bunch = 6-15 (maybe more, depending on the scope of the reference)
Several = 7 to 9
Ten = 10
Dozen = 11 to 13

What do you guys think when you hear someone make a reference to these quantities?

Some of you may have read a while back about contractors at my employer getting a paycut. Yes, I was among those that did. What basically happened was that Mindstorm, my employer, told its contracting agencies that they were going to be getting an x% cut in how much they were getting for their people (ie me). So the agencies then were put in the position of having to make cuts from the payroll (without, of course, any sort of reduction in personnel).

One of my earliest friends at Mindstorm was part of the same orientation that I went to prior to jumping on. He and I have the same start date and the same complete date. We have different positions, though, and he gets paid on the order of two or three times what I do. But he complains relentlessly about how much he’s getting paid. He feels that our agency is taking advantage of us by trying to get him to work for the minimum amount possible. My response is “Yeah? And? If you can find something better, go for it.”

When we got the email announcing our cuts, I thought of this guy. Holy cow was he going to be pissed. Turned out he was.

My take on it is that times are tough and Mindstorm, like a lot of employers, is making cuts where they can. I would much rather take an x% paycut than face an x% chance of being let go. Easy for me to say because I have a breadwinner. Those that have families to support do have my sympathy. That doesn’t describe my friend, though, nor does it describe any of the American contractors that I am aware of. Most of those guys are in a separate group of contractors that didn’t get any sort of cuts. But while those I am overlooking here do have my sympathy, I’ll still take this over the alternative.

But I find that the petty things of this arrangement bother me. For instance, I’ve built up not-insignificant vacation time at the old wage that’s going to be paid out here forward at the new wage. To my agency’s credit, they’re giving us a one-time buy-out on accrued vacation time, but after that we don’t get any vacation time anymore (though we get paid more per-hour to compensate for that). So I’m in the position of having to decide between being able to take vacations in the future for a paycut or forsaking future vacation for some change now. It seems to me that the more straightforward solution to this is to pay us the difference on the vacation time that we’ve accrued. But they didn’t give us that option.

The second thing is that while we have the option not to accept the new contract, they’re not being particularly fair-minded about that. To say “Hey, these are the new terms, take them or leaving.” is fair. Though we agreed to $Y per hour and now we’re being offered $Y*(1-x) per hour, there is less money to go around. However, the agency has made it clear that if you choose not to accept this contract, it will go in your file that you left mid-contract, which is a no-no and makes it harder to get a new position later. But we wouldn’t be leaving mid-contract. The contract that we signed on for was terminated by the agency. This is supposed to be a new contract. But of course they don’t see it that way.

I’m not positive why my sense of understanding at the position everybody is in ends when it comes to parlor tricks like this. I guess it’s sort of an attitude thing. It’s one thing to ask us to take a pay cut. That much is fair in this economy. It’s something else entirely to start making threats if we don’t go along as they would like us to.

In the end, none of this changes a thing for me. I am still making more than the minimum that I told the agency that I would be willing to work for. And my complaining friend needs to stop complaining. Maybe I’m just looking for things to be irritated about.

Dear Fresh Step people:

Thank you SO much for eliminating your best-working product (Fresh Step Cedar) in favor of perfume-laden monstrosities that work maybe half as well, smell like butt even when not freshly used (”lavender valley” and “mountain forest”? More like “Soap” and “Really Annoying Soap”) and are highly likely to set off anyone with perfume allergies, like my roommate. Really.

Dear Makers of the Generic Cedar Stuff:

Thank you for continuing to make your product, even though I can’t find it because Petsmart refuses to stock it and it usually sells out from Kroger within 12 hours of their getting a shipment, forcing me to look for alternatives or risk a “protest pee” over a not-clean-enough litter box.

Dear Makers of “Feline Pine Clumping”

Thank you for trying. I tried your product on the idea that pine, being at least wood, would work somewhat similar to the cedar in combating the aromatic assault of the litterbox. Cedar does a very good job at this. Unfortunately, you advertise on your product that “Ammonia is naturally neutralized by Pine.” Ammonia is also naturally neutralized by a number of other substances used by other clay clumping litter products, products which also clump and dry far faster than your product.

I also need to inform you that “Feline Pine Clumping”, after use, does not smell like “pine.” It rather smells like “pine-scented cat pee.”

A lot of people have commented on George Will’s recent commentary on Blue Jeans and the Fall of Western Society. Will was taking points from Daniel Akst’s Down With Denim. No reason I shouldn’t join in, too.

Akst and Will both try to make aesthetic, practical, and cultural points against jeans as the flashpoint of our culture’s inability to dress itself. The problem with this is that aesthetics are valid but subjective, they’re wrong on practicality, and the cultural significance of jeans is no longer what it once was and it doesn’t so much matter what it once was as it does what it presently is.

The real problem with jeans, from a culturally conservative perspective, is their ubiquity. Akst does a pretty good job of pointing this out, but Will mostly misses the boat on it because he just dislikes them so too much to bother coming up with good reasons why. The ubiquity is a problem, though, for the same reason that cultural history is not.

The main point of dressing in particular clothes is that they are signifiers. They tell us something about us and how we view an occasion. If we’re dressing in a suit and tie we are declaring that this is important and that we expect that. If we go to something where a suit and tie is significant, refusing to wear such, we are signaling a rebellion against the code. Or laziness or clueless. How we perceive these clothes clothes are the main cultural point. That jeans used to be an act of rebellion is somewhat irrelevant when it comes to their current application. Jeans currently signal comfort and casualness over formality.

We can expect a conservative like Will to be horrified as such mass displays of casualness. And I’m not unsympathetic. Whether this truly represents a cultural problem is a matter of what we think that culture should be. Those who would prefer a greater degree of formality understandably detest this trend. Similarly, I am discomforted by the increasing trend of girls and young women wearing what seem to be pajama bottoms out in public. Or people that wear sweats everywhere. On the other hand, if 40 years down the line (God help us) everybody is doing these things, the future arguments I have with my future daughter turn to mud.

But we’ve reached the point where jeans’ ubiquity don’t really represent anything at all. We have jeans that are so tight as to be uncomfortable and others that are made too large. Jeans make so little of a statement that you have to sub-signal. The kinds of jeans you make are the statement. Will admits as much when he talks about those jeans that come out 0f the factory looking like they have already been worn. Those are now what represent casualness. Jeans, ironically, now more represent conformity than anything else.

I say this as that guy that never wore jeans in school up until I forced myself in late junior high. For some of the same reasons that Akst gives. They are hot and uncomfortable in the long Delosian summers (spanning from April to October) where I was raised. They always seemed itchy. So when we were banned from wearing shorts to school, I wore slacks. At this point, I was being the rebel. Unfortunately, the kind of rebellion that you pay a social cost for. Will should approve of the fact that I paid a price for bucking convention.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve come around on the jeans front as they pertain to me. In the cool weather up here, they provide a little extra warmth compared to most of the slacks and cargos I wear. Some of the discomfort I experienced when I was younger is gone now, probably due in part to “relaxed fit” jeans that fit my legs better. And I think I got used to the way that they rub against my legs. Now I see the upsides of jeans. They don’t significantly wrinkle. They’re flexible to go with whatever shirt you happen to have handy. Even if it weren’t the norm, it’s probably what I would wear when appropriate.

Of course, some of the things that I like about them are the things that people like Will and Akst don’t. The fact that they’re easy and don’t need to be ironed means that I don’t have to put much effort into it and are thus inferior. It’s the male equivalent to the female need to make dressing as complicated (and uncomfortable) as possible. It shows effort. And, of course, that they go well with anything could be turned around to say that they don’t really go with anything.

I’m sort of sympathetic to that last part. The problem with jeans is the ubiquity. Or at least how jeans symbolize the ubiquity of modern dress. In my perfect world, we would have one type of clothes to wear on our downtime, another to work, another to church, and so on. When I was a kid, I had to dress nicely for church. I objected strenuously. Ties have always been particularly uncomfortable around my big neck, who the heck wants to wear a jacket in the southern heat, and so on. By the time I was graduating from high school and when I would go to church afterward, this custom had relaxed and young people were coming to church in jeans and later {gasp} shorts. I welcomed the development at the time, but now I see what Mom was talking about.

Now we can wear the same clothes to work and church that we might want to wear on the weekend. I feel sort of robbed of the chance to dress like an adult. I don’t dress exactly as I did when I was younger (worse, back then I didn’t wear jeans!), I rarely wear t-shirts, for instance. But I usually dress within a comfortable range. I dress for work wearing the same sorts of things that the janitor wears and the auto guy wears. My employer wouldn’t fire me for wearing a suit-and-tie to work, but the symbols of my progression in life have become pretense. I share with Will and Akst a sense of loss in that.

That is where I do feel a sense of common cause with those scolds. Dressing up and dressing down may be arbitrary cultural dictates, but I do think that such things are important. There’s a reason we don’t dress in togas or African robes, after all. I think that targeting jeans is a big misguided, particularly on the grounds that they do.

On the other hand, if I really want differentiation-in-dress, I guess we do still see that. Most offices (my current withstanding) don’t yet allow employees to show up in shorts and flip-flops. The young girls wearing pajama pants are doing some differentiation of their own, however-much I disapprove and will forbid my future daughters from doing the same. Somehow, I doubt that Akst will approve of this any more than I do. So I guess in that sense I am trapped in the same sort of thinking that they are. A preference for a more classical look losing, day-by-day, in the face of modern culture.

-{As Clancy and I move forward with plans to have children, we’ve talked a lot about how we’re going to raise them and the lessons we will try to impart. I’ve decided to turn this into a series of posts. The first involves “the sex talk” or at least a portion of it. Clancy will be involved with the sex talk whether we have a son or a daughter. If we have a daughter, she will do most of the talking and my main contribution will be informing her about how atrocious young men are. If we have a son, Clancy will impart the medical portion but I will impart a good share of the psychological, moral, and practical wisdom. Below is a portion of what I will tell him about the risks of premarital sex.}-

You might find yourself thinking, at some point prior to having sex, that concerns over pregnancy and STDs are primarily her responsibility because she will be most affected by them. There is some truth to this. She is more likely to get an STD from any particular sexual encounter than you are. She is the one that will have to undergo nine months of pregnancy and labor or the alternatively an abortion. These are all things that your mother will go over with you sister when they have this same talk.

But there is another side to the story. There are things that you will go through that she won’t. There are options that she will have available to her that you won’t have available to you. There will be people that defend her decisions and behavior - whatever it is - and fewer who will defend yours. While she will have to live with the consequences of a decision that she has to make, you will have to live with a decision that is not yours to make.

Whatever your views on abortion right now are, know that they are subject to change. What you think at 17 is different than what you will think at 27. What you think you believed about abortion will change, maybe by solidifying and strenghtening your view but maybe by changing it completely. You may think of a fetus as a clump of cells right until it is your DNA in that clump. You may think that life is sacred until you’re confronted with bringing a child into a world that isn’t ready for it. But the most important thing to remember about your views on abortion is that they are, insofar as your flesh, semen, and potential offspring are concerned, utterly irrelevent.

If you decide, either at or before it becomes central to your life, that abortion is morally acceptable and desirable, you had better hope that she is on the same page. Or you had better keep your thoughts on what she should do with her body to yourself. If you urge her to have an abortion and she chooses not to, your view of what she should have done won’t help with the child support payments. More than that, though, you will be on record as having wished your future child had never been born. Courts may use that to limit your access to him or her. But more importantly, every time you look into the eyes of a son or daughter that you are certain to come to love and treasure, you will remember that you wished that they had been taken out of this world before ever having been allowed into it.

Whether you embrace her decision to carry the child to term or not, you need to realize what you have to look forward to. You may have visions of the two of you settling down together for the long haul. And maybe it will work out that way. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe she will leave you and suddenly your access to the child is restricted. Maybe you will decide that for whatever reason you just can’t stand her. But you will have to. She will be a part of your life for the rest of it, whether you want her to be or not. If you’re worth your grain of salt, you will be involved in your child’s life above and beyond what is required by the courts. If she falls and moves away, depending on what a judge has to say you will have to follow her. If you want to move away, you won’t because you want to continue to be a central part of your child’s life. For the next 18 years, you are tied to her because she is as likely as not to be the gatekeeper of your child. When you’re wondering whether or not to sleep with a woman, keep that in mind. When you’re wondering whether or not you want to trade a little more pleasure for a little less protection, keep that in mind.

It doesn’t get any easier if you decide that the conception constitutes a human life and that abortion is murder. Even if you are enthusiastic about bringing the child into the world and if she decides to do so, most of what I’ve said will apply. If she decides not to carry the child to term, however, you are in for something very different. You have no choice but to stand by while she murders your child. Not only will you have no legal options, very few people will be understanding or accomodating of the situation that you are in. Pro-choice people will tell you that you are trying to control her body and that you should have thought of that before you lowered your zipper. Pro-life people, who have worn their lungs raw arguing that her “choice” occurred when she chose to have sex, are going to be hard-pressed to say that it’s any different for you. And you will know that they are right.

But all of this is what occurs after she has made her decision. The part before is important, too. You may think that you are exempt from all of this because you know that she is as pro-choice as you are. Unfortunately for you, her views are as subject to change as yours are. Women who say that they could never have an abortion but believe it should be legal very frequently believe it should be legal because somewhere in the recesses of their mind they know that they might take advantage of that option. Or she may be against abortion right up until she is carrying a child that she is not ready for. Or with a guy - you - she is not ready to have a child with. Many women will make their choice responsibly. Others, however, may make it in the middle of a three-day argument. Likewise, the opposite may occur. She may think that abortion is fine in the abstract until suddenly its growing in her body. Or she may run the calculations in her mind and determine that she wants to be with you and the best way to do that is to hold on to this permanent connection. Permanent. Always keep that word in mind whenever you’re thinking that the risk of pregnancy is an acceptable one.

A woman doesn’t have to be lying or mind-changing for you not to know what she’s going to do. She may be among the large contingent of women where the decision as to whether or not to keep an unwanted pregnancy active depends on the circumstances. It depends on timing. It depends on how she feels about you.

When this is the case, I have to stress again that what you think and what you want are completely irrelevent. Short of a doctor with a medical chart and a sad look, there is nothing that will create a greater feeling of powerless in your life than the little blue dot or pink bar on a pregnancy test indicating a pregnancy that you are not ready for. She will have the burdens of the pregnancy and/or its disposal and she will have to answer to self-appointed moral guardians for whatever decision she makes, and however unenviable that is, you will nonetheless envy the measure of control over her destiny that you do not have over yours. Your life will be dictated by her judgment, her morals, and her priorities. You gave her that power that power when you impregnated her and nobody is going to give it back to you.

And then there’s the possibility that you won’t even know about it. If you choose to have sex with women you don’t know very well, they could become pregnant without you ever even knowing about it until a child rolls up at your doorstep fifteen years down the line or until after she’s put it up for adoption. Or you may be fooled into thinking that you participated in a conception that you didn’t. Only she knows for sure and she may have some pretty good (and self-serving) reasons not to say. And if you’re in a position where you don’t know, you’re left in the position of potentially supporting a child that isn’t yours or obliterating your relationship with her by demanding a paternity test. Even if your relationship is only that of co-parents, that’s a valuable thing to have lost.

The point of all of this is not to scare the hell of you. Never sleeping with anyone for these fears is likely to be just as big a mistake as ignoring the realities behind the fears. My advice to you is to manage your risks. With contraception, you can make these risks far less pronounced. Your mother will tell you that two forms of contraception is ideal. One is better than none. But know also that contraception does fail. Condoms burst. Spermicide misses its target. She may not be as devout about taking the pill as she tells you she is or she may just decide that she wants your (or somebody’s) baby. She can take your condom, impregnate herself with it, and the law will still approach the situation as though you had worn no protection at all. The law won’t care if you were deceived. You won’t ask your child to excuse you on the grounds that he was a mistake.

In addition to contraception, the best way to manage your risk is through partner-selection and sex-reduction. Every time you have sex, you are running a risk. How much of a risk depends on contraception, but there is always a risk. The more partners you have, the more possible it is that you’re bringing a child into this world with a woman that you don’t know very well. But the better you know the person and the more you trust her, the more likely it is that you will avoid impregnating her to begin with and the better able to handle it you will be if it does happen. The question to ask yourself is whether or not you would trust this person with your child. Because, if you’re not careful (and maybe even if you are), that’s exactly what you’re doing.

My usual car has fallen a little ill recently. It doesn’t like the uphill climb in downtown Soundview on my drive home and falters a bit on the Interstate. So Clancy and I have decided to switch cars for a spell. As tragic as it is for my little green guy, I was actually looking forward to spending a little time driving Clancy’s nicer automobile. It’s almost certain that for most of our marriage she will be driving the nicer, bigger car. Mostly because I don’t care. But I figured it would be nice to drive the alpha car.

So it stands to reason that the first morning I go out to take over her car and open it, the hatch comes right off the car into my hand. So now I have to get in on the passenger’s side. I had to do this sort of thing on my old Escort because the driver’s side lock didn’t work. I managed to work out a way that I could kind of spin around into the driver’s side seat. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to do it in her car. I keep running into the gearshift. and my leg keeps kicking the faceplate off the radio.

This is not optimal.

Since my original post on the Watchmen movie, I’ve seen it three more times. Twice on a regular screen and once on an eye-popping IMAX. I haven’t re-watched a movie this much since Memento. I’m putting the bulk of this post below the fold since I know interest is waning. (more…)

-{2003}-

I had been maintaining an online relationship with Pandora77 for nearly a year. It started when she responded to an outdated personals ad I’d posted online. I was in a relationship when she did so, but we exchanged IM handles and she had the tendency to be up after 2am on weekends, so whenever I’d come back from a music show or something and get online, she and I would chat. I didn’t have much of a sense of her, despite our conversations. She seemed intelligent, but in a sort of dark way that prevented me from initiating any sort of meeting. About four months before our first meet, she had started making noise about it. It shifted from offhanded comments about whether I had ever thought about it to proposals that I could never really say yes to because I always had some sort of music show I was going to whatever night she would propose. She got tired of this and asked what I was doing after the music show.

I was going to see Nick Byers that night. Byers was, at the time, my favorite artist on the country end of the Gulf Country Rock scene. The thing about his shows was that any time I ever did anything after them, nothing remotely good ever came of it. I never had that problem with any other artist, so it wasn’t a case of nothing good happening after 2am. Just him. I tried to explain this to her, but she thought I was just trying to duck out. So I agreed. What was the worse that could happen? So we set a date at 2am at Murdoch’s, an all-night eatery within walking distance of the bar. It would allow me to drink a little more than usual because I’d have an hour or two at Murdoch’s to dry out, so it was perfect. The whole bit about a first meeting occurring while being a slight bit intoxicated was actually a feature rather than a bug. I was always a little better that way.

When I arrived at Murdoch’s, she was sitting alone at a booth in the corner, sipping on a soft drink. I recognized her through a scanned picture she kept on her IM profile. It was one of those pictures that looks a little weird. You hope that it’s just a bad picture, but it is also the sort of picture someone would put up if they had something to hide. It turned out that it was just an unimpressive picture. She didn’t look better or worse than in the photograph, just different. The thing that jumped out at me the most were her intense brown eyes. They almost had their own pulse. You could look into them indefinitely because, even when she wasn’t moving them, they seemed move on their own. Optic pulsation.

She was reading through a magazine. Except, on closer inspection, it wasn’t a magazine at all. It was a store catalog. She immediately closed it and shuffled it off to the side the second I sat down. We make our introductions.

Pandora: So who are you?

Trumwill: I am Will. Didn’t we just establish this?

Pandora: Well yes, but who is Will? And don’t say that Will is you. As you say, we’ve established this.

Trumwill: Then I’m not sure what you’re asking.

Pandora: Okay, so do you do this sort of thing often?

Trumwill: Meet people after music shows? Never with good results. Not after Nick Byers. That wasn’t an excuse.

Pandora: A likely story.

Trumwill: Very likely. Certainly.

Pandora: I was being facetious.

Trumwill: I was going along.

Pandora: No, you weren’t. You were taking my facetiousness as seriousness.

Trumwill: Facetiously, though.

Pandora: Oh. Well that makes it okay, then.

She cracked a smile, but the way she looked at me is almost accusatory. Like I was trying to pull something over on her. I’d later learn that this is just the sort of look that she has. She had a mind that is always at work. I learned that pretty early on in our conversation.

Pandora: So what do you do for a living?

Trumwill: Database administration. I’ve told you that, haven’t I?

Pandora: I thought I must have been thinking of someone else.

Trumwill: Why is that?

Pandora: You’re just not like I expected at all. I knew you worked with computers and you were smart so I figured you would be socially inept and that I’d have to drag you into conversation. You know how to talk. That’s impressive to me.

Trumwill: You date mutes?

Pandora: I might as well. I date nerds.

Trumwill: Why is that?

Pandora: Because they date me. Things always seem to happen.

Trumwill: What?

Pandora: You ever find that your life just shuffles itself into certain patterns. Things that you never decided on. It’s sort of like certain situations are termites that are attracted to your wood. Things that never seem to happen to anyone else happen to you with astonishing regularity?

Trumwill: I know exactly what you mean.

Pandora: That’s sexy.

Trumwill: What?

Pandora: I like being understood. you seem to understand me.

Trumwill: So you date nerds? That’s the termite up your crawl.

Pandora: Biting my wood, if you want to stick to my analogy. So yeah, nerds tend to ask me out. So I date nerds. I’m used to periods of prolonged silence interrupted by spurts of talk specifically engineered so that I won’t be able to understand what the hell they’re talking about. I think they think it means that I will think that they’re smart. But if they weren’t smart, I wouldn’t say yes when they asked me out. So it’s a pointless exercise.

Trumwill: I tend to talk complicated.

Pandora: Oh, yeah?

Trumwill: Yeah. I have a tendency to use 10-letter words when five-letter words will suffice.

Pandora: That’s okay. Just don’t start talking about PCMCIA slots.

Trumwill: What about them?

Pandora: I don’t know what they are. So don’t talk to me about them.

Trumwill: Would you like me to explain what they are?

Pandora: Do you not understand the meaning of the word “Don’t”?

Trumwill: No, I don’t.

Pandora: But…

Trumwill: Facetious.

Pandora: Jinks. You owe me a coke.

Trumwill: But you didn’t say facetious.

Pandora: I was thinking it. Besides, you should buy me a coke anyway because I’m cute.

Trumwill: Oh, is that all that’s required for a free coke these days?

We worked up a momentum pretty quickly. I tell her one of my stock stories about a Free Beer Band Competition. It’s a silly little story, but I had found the story is a good way to flush out someone’s personality. If they think it’s stupid and don’t hide that fact, it’s typically not a good sign. She got it.

Trumwill: I like your shoes.

Pandora: Oh, yeah?

Trumwill: Yeah. Boots look good on a woman.

Pandora: I see. I didn’t realize footwear was important.

Trumwill: It is to me. I once asked out a girl because I liked her shoes.

Pandora: Oh? How did that go?

Trumwill: The second most humiliating rejection I ever got. No, actually, the first. The other first doesn’t count because I don’t think she heard me ask the question. That one is really third.

Pandora: Do you catalog your rejections and sort them out by levels of humiliation?

Trumwill: Yeah.

Pandora: Outstanding.

Trumwill: You also have a nice belt.

Pandora: I do?

Trumwill: You do.

Pandora: What’s nice about it?

Trumwill: It’s there.

Pandora: Say what?

Trumwill: You wear a belt. It seems almost nobody does. It’s one of those lamentable things that modern fashion has thrust upon us. No belt. Belt loops, no belt.

She lit up. Once again, she knew exactly where I was coming from.

Pandora: No s**t, right? What the hell are beltloops for if you’re not going to wear a belt. they just hang out there, saying “Hey-looooo there, I am where a belt ought to be and yet is not!” Tell me, do you have any opinions on tucked and untucked shirts. I can’t help but notice that your shirt is tucked in.

Trumwill: I always tuck in my shirts. Having a shirt just flowing free feels wrong.

Pandora: Exactly! Everything you wear needs to be tucked in, belted, and tied.

Trumwill: Exactly!

-{later}-

Trumwill: So what’s with the sports catalog?

Pandora: Oh, I thought you might want to see.

Trumwill: See what?

Pandora: My pictures. From the modelling.

Up until that moment I had forgotten that tidbit. In a former life she had done some modelling. It’s not necessarily as impressive as it sounds. She had a friend who had a father who knew somebody and a couple Saturdays over a couple months she showed off some sporting goods. She and her friend had a(n apparently) very dramatic falling out and she never did it again.

She shot forward to a page which had a picture of her in catching gear, minus the helmet. It looked like her, but only sort of. In person she had a tired look. At the time I figured that had to do with the fact that we were approaching three in the morning, but that really wasn’t the case. She looked really young in the photographs even though it was a couple years ago. I didn’t know if it was photographical magic or whether she’d just aged in the meantime. She explained that they did photoshop away the scar on her face. She had a little scar that ran from her left eyebrow to the earflap. Glasses almost concealed it when she wore them, though she stuck mostly to contacts. She expected that I would be impressed that they could just remove the scar like that, but I think that she thought the scar was more prominent than it actually was.

As she showed me the pictures, she seemed to be baiting me to be impressed so that she could say that it was no big deal.

Pandora: So… you’re on a date with a model. Do you find that interesting?

Trumwill: I guess.

Pandora: Do you think the pictures are cute?

Trumwill: Well I think that any woman in catcher’s gear is sexy.

Pandora: Glad to know I’m “any woman”.

Trumwill: Oh, well I didn’t mean it like that.

Pandora: I know. I was trying to be cute. Speaking of that, I worry that you’re only dating me because I’m cute.

I hadn’t realized that we were dating.

Trumwill: Not really.

Pandora: Good. Wait, you do think I’m cute, right? People tell me all the time that I’m cute. I think it’s important to me that you agree.

Trumwill: I… hadn’t really thought about it.

Pandora: You agreed to meet me, though, right? You wouldn’t have if I weren’t cute, would you?

Trumwill: Oh, I probably would have.

Dead silence.

Trumwill: Yes, you’re cute.

Pandora: Well then why didn’t you say so?

Trumwill: Didn’t I?

What I apparently needed was a time machine so that I could go back in time and tell her that I thought so without being prodded. We rebounded in relatively short order, though. We got into the muck again a little bit later when I proved to be insufficiently liberal on the subject of homosexuality. To her credit, though, she accepted my explanations as they came and I met enough of her criteria that she didn’t mind a little dissent.

Pandora: So what now?

Trumwill: Well, I probably need to get home.

Pandora: You’re not going home.

Trumwill: What?

Pandora: You’ve had too much to drink.

Trumwill: I’ve had four beers in five hours. Whatever buzz I was feeling is gone now.

Pandora: No, you ate an omelette afterwards. That soaks the beer up and keeps you intoxicated longer.

Trumwill: I’ll be fine.

Pandora: Look, I’d feel a lot more comfortable if you came home with me.

When she said that, I suddenly felt a lot more intoxicated.

Trumwill: Okay, fine. I can sleep anywhere. How’s your couch?

Pandora: You’re so cute. You’re too tall for it.

Trumwill: Trust me. I can sleep anywhere.

Pandora: If you say so.

She made a big point out of helping me out to her car. When someone treats you as though you are fall-down drunk and is walking you to the car accordingly, you begin to wonder if you were slurring the whole night long or something. And maybe you need her help more than you realize. But actually, that wasn’t the case at all. The problem was that she was trying to semi-carry me and I was tripping over her. Every time I did so, I lent credence to her “Will is drunk and I need to take care of him” theory. Awkward as it as, I did think it was sort of sweet.

When I woke up the next morning, I thought that I would call a cab and leave her a note. I was feeling hung over, not so much from the alcohol but from some of the subtle events from our conversation the night before that had left me oddly ill-at-ease. Strangely, though, I couldn’t find my wallet. Nor my keys. I thought that I would go into her bedroom and give her a shove to ask if she knew where it was, but she wasn’t there. When I heard some noise in the bathroom, I realized that she was awake.

Trumwill: Hey Libby, have you seen my wallet and keys?

She came out.

Pandora: You didn’t think I was going to let you get away that easy, did you?

Trumwill: What?

Pandora: Nothing.

Trumwill: Have you seen my wallet?

Pandora: Don’t worry. You’ll get your wallet back. Minus twenty dollars, though, for actually choosing to sleep on the couch.

Trumwill: Facetious?

Pandora: We’ll see.

When I got my wallet back the following afternoon, it was $20 light.