5. No response. She just walked away and never talked to me again. We hadn’t talked all that much before, so the incident can be chalked up to the presumptuousness of my asking out a pencil-borrower.

4. “I’m dating someone. Okay. I’m not dating someone right now, but I want to be. Well, not a particular person, but… not you. At all, really. I’m sure that there is someone out there for me. But not you…” She went on for a few excruciating minutes. I give her points for wanting to be as kind as possible. Maybe she wanted to lie to protect my feelings and say that it was nothing person. But she couldn’t pull it off and instead kept correcting herself until she made it clear that it would take the two of us surviving a nuclear cataclysm for things to work out. Also, it was hard for us to talk even casually after that.

3. “I want to die.” My asking a girl out resulting in her desire for death ought to be number one, but I choose the most charitable explanation: she didn’t hear me ask the question. She started talking before I actually finished. So my assumption was that her general desire to die was not, per se, in direct response to my romantic advance. Even so, this makes the top five because at a moment that we were alone and I was thinking would be a good time to finally ask her out, she was thinking of death. So at best, it was like my presence there (and in her life in general) was without any positive effect.

2. “Not even!” Asking her out was a stupid move. I had no particular reason to believe that she would say yes except that I knew that she liked tall guys. She ended up going to a dance with my best friend and she acted afterward like nothing ever happened. I chalk it up to her being an extremely direct person. Even so, the notion that going out would be laughable caused me not insignificant distress.

1. “Oh my god, that’s so sad!” Never decide to ask out a pretty girl you don’t know very well for a frivolous reason. You might get a response like this. I had just broken up with Julie and things with Evangeline were in flux, so I asked out a girl that was in one of my classes because, of all reasons, I liked her shoes. From her perspective, though, I was a guy that had spent all semester in a class with her, never really talked to her, and then suddenly as the semester was drawing to a close decided to take a shot in the dark. I guess from that perspective, it is sad. Had the circumstances been different, I might have tried to butter her up and got to know her. She wouldn’t have said yes, but maybe she wouldn’t have thought me pathetic. Ah, dare to dream…

I got a phone call over the weekend. It was Newt Gingrich and he was trying to organize (or lend his support to some people attempting to organize) a little get-together for tea. The weird thing is that when I tried to talk back to Newt, he just kept talking as though he couldn’t hear me.

I’m not sure how I ended up on Newt’s Rolodex. He’s probably giving me calls for the same reason that Steve Forbes is sending me mail. Mr. Forbes apparently thinks very highly of me. On course to discussing some previous get-together for tea, he gave a glowing appraisal of me as a “patriot”.

So I’m not sure why I’m getting the sudden interest from former Republican Party big-wigs. I suspect that it has to do with my donation to Jim Murali’s GOP primary compaign. The odd thing is, though, that I made that donation while living in Estacado. Mr Murali used to send me regular updates on his campaign but if they got forwarded after the move, I’ve never received any of them even as the election was growing extremely close (during a period in which other mail was being forwarded).

Somehow, though, Gingrich and Forbes have only become aware of my patriotism and love of tea up here in Cascadia after the election was had and lost by their compatriots. I figure that it just took them a while to catch up with me. I’m a little impressed that they did.

I haven’t been officially registered with a political party since I left Delosa. Mostly related to laziness on my part. Delosa doesn’t make you register. You vote in the primary and you’re automatically registered. I wouldn’t even know how to register in Cascadia. If they have the same methodology as Delosa, then voting in the a primary could put me on some lists, but I don’t know that I was here in time to vote in any primaries and I didn’t bother in Estacado.

I haven’t received any nice letter or phone calls from the Democratic Party. The last time I ended up on some list, it was at least a bipartisan list. I think that one was related to a subscription to The New Republic. That subscription got me an “autographed” photo of the President as well as letters asking my help to unseat him. I guess the overall liberalism but hawkishness of TNR gave both sides the idea that I was interested in their causes.

I also received pretty regular dispatches from the Democratic Party in Estacado, but they were rather impersonal. Instead of calling me a fellow proud American and a patriot, they called me “Current Resident”. I’m not sure, but I suspect that they might have just assumed that I was one of them because I lived in a primarily black neighborhood without much Republican presence. I got more of Mr Resident’s mail up here, for the same reason. Oh, and shortly before the election I got a call from the now-first lady. She didn’t bother to tell me to vote for her husband, since there was not any doubt he was going to win Cascadia. She was pretty jazzed about getting me to vote for Cascadia’s current government. It was awkward to hear Mrs. Obama talk about the importance of change while encouraging me to vote for an incumbent.

As with Mr. Gingrich, she just kept talking regardless of what I was saying. I told her it was a pleasure to hear from her, but she just kept talking. How rude.

There was a flap a couple weeks back when Barack Obama ordered dijon mustard at a historic burger joint in Virginia. This was considered indicative of Obama’s elitism because he can’t eat ketchup on his burger like reg’lar folks. “What kind of man orders a cheeseburger without ketchup, but Dijon mustard?” Laura Ingraham asks. The answer, David Frum unearths, are those effete coastal elites in Texas. Actually, the Texans prefer regular mustard, but no ketchup.

So how ridiculous is it that these right-wing blowhards are trying to mock Obama for liking Dijon mustard? Republicans have indeed made an art out of criticizing the culinary choice of Democratic politicians. Remember John Kerry’s infamous preference for swiss cheese on his Philly Cheesesteak instead of Cheez Whiz. Yet as much as we might want to chalk this up to the intellectual bankrupcy of conservatism, does anyone doubt for a moment that certain corners on the left would take swipes at a Republican candidate with a soft spot for Spam or, for that matter, Cheez Whiz? In fact, in a post ridiculing Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and others, Jason Linkins goes out of his way to denigrate people that eat ketchup:

What kind of man orders a cheeseburger without ketchup? Uhm, how about a FULL GROWN ONE? Ketchup, and it’s cousin “catsup,” doesn’t come near my food, because I am no longer a small child.

Ahhh, so ludicrous as it is to ridicule a mustard-eater as an elitist, calling ketchup lovers immature is just calling a spade a spade, I guess.

One funny aspect in all this is that in Obama’s second book, a guy named Aaron reminds us that his preference for Dijon mustard makes an appearance in his second book:

He was at a restaurant with his campaign consultant who had been coaching him on how to behave in rural Illinois. He asked the waitress for Dijon mustard, and the consultant waved him off: “He doesn’t want Dijon.” The consultant then shook at him a bottle of French’s already on the table. “Here’s some mustard right here.”

The moral of the story was that the waitress, an actual Real American, was puzzled by the consultant’s Old Politics assumptions, not Obama’s mustard preference. The suggestion, seemingly, was that our nation is not as sharply divided over mustard as pundits would have you believe, and as a result it is possible to solve real problems. Story on p 49.

Everyone’s mileage on this varies. I come from a pretty red part of the country but it wouldn’t occur to me to mock someone for wanting Dijon mustard on a burger. Maybe it’s cause I was raised all wealthy and stuff. Nor would it occur to me to denigrate someone that likes ketchup (or, for that matter, Swiss cheese or Cheez Whiz).

For my part, I am not a big fan of ketchup. Whatever appreciation for it I once had I lost when I had a roommate (a Republican… ooooooh) that put gobs of the stuff on everything. It made me so sick of the smell I avoid it whenever I can. In Deseret they have this stuff called Fry Sauce that is a mixture of ketchup and mayo that tastes pretty good. And I’ll put ketchup on black-eyed peas because God intended ketchup to go there. But that’s about the extent of it. I eat Dijon mustard on Subway sandwiches, but that’s about it. I used to eat regular mustard on burgers, but I didn’t like the way it mixed with the cheese and so I stopped. Now I put mayo or salad dressing, if anything. In solidarity with our president, though, as well as a desire to consume less fatty mayo, I will start putting mustard on my burger. I may even go all coastal and go with Dijon.

-{Ed note: I wrote this post a loooooooooong time ago. Over a year ago, in fact. I know this because when I think I want to spike a post I forward-date it a month or a year. Well, a year later and it was still sitting in my queue and it slipped by me. So anyway, this was mostly a venting session aimed at the failings of democracy. Not sure how interesting you will find it. Click “More” to see the content of the post.}-
(more…)

I’ve written before about the sometimes-troubled friendship I’ve had with my ex-roommate Hubert Graham. Hugh and I had a lot of the wrong things in common and I really disliked in him what I disliked in myself. He was who I feared that I would become if I didn’t watch myself. Short-tempered, self-centered, awkwardly social, and more. None of this is to say that I saw him as a bad person. Even when I reviled him, I could at least recognize that he was a decent guy. But living with him for four years, working at Parallax Productions with him, and more proved too much for the longest time.

Also standing in between us was a sort of rivalry. A need to one-up one another. To prove that we could get the better girls, be more successful, prove our superior intelligence, and invade one another’s turf. He is smarter than me, so I had to try to be smarter than him. I am more creative than him, and so he had to try to prove his creative mettle. The rivalry extended to everything, at one point getting so ridiculous that I was hurling expletives at my Epson printer because it had the nerve to be worse than Hugh’s HP.

The mend came in part when we had nothing to compete over. With the rivalry dead and the overextended intimacy of living together passed, we were free to approach one another on the grounds that made us friends in the first place with a lot of shared memories to boot.

He got the better job, but I have excuses for mine and it’s not something I care about. He has integrated himself better socially in the world, too, but I’ve never needed that as much. Our wives are too different to stack up against one another. I’ll be more comfortably financially in the long term. He’s won, I’ve won, and we’ve more or less settled in our respective places.

Anyway, he called me yesterday and we talked for a while. This is the first call since the whole Dead Babies incident, so I was glad to hear from him. For those of you that don’t keep track of my castlist-in-the-dozens, his wife gave birth to twin girls about fifteen weeks ago. So as we were talking he was raving about how insanely brilliant his little girls are and how they’re exceeding all of the charts of baby progress.

I am of course thrilled for him, but an ugly little part of me started creeping back. I had visions of trying to convince Clancy to undergo IVF so I can one-up him with triplets. And I have visions of talking to my young daughter, saying, “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up, sweetie… as long as you’re better than Lucinda and Emmilou Graham.”

I’m pretty much kidding, by the way.

About the triplets.

And maybe the other thing.

Maybe.

A post by Will regarding a MamaPundit outburst brought up an old memory.

My experience with abortion, in a “firsthand” sense, stems around my aunt. She and my uncle were overjoyed the first time they found out she was pregnant, as was the rest of the family. I, my siblings, and my cousins were told (just as we had each time before) about how wonderful it was. We were about to get a new cousin. Somebody new to be around for Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving at my grandparents’ place, someone for me to (eventually) babysit for, someone to play with, someone to show our world to as they learned about theirs.

Unfortunately, my aunt then ran into a nightmare of a problem - 5 months in, doctors determined that my unborn cousin was either going to be stillborn or not going to live for more than a few days. Part of his brain had not formed, and he would have been born with an “open” (e.g. lacking partial bone structure) skull. (I’m sure Clancy could fill in more “medical” terminology but that’s how it was explained to us).

Between that, and the various hormonal complications the pregnancy was causing, it was determined to “terminate” (e.g. abort) my aunt’s pregnancy. From the perspective of my relatives, there was no doubt that this had ended a human life, but it was better to stop the pregnancy than to risk taking my aunt’s life as well. My stillborn cousin was baptized and buried in a small, private family funeral; I did not attend as most of us cousins were deemed “too young” to attend or fully understand the circumstances at the time.

For much of my family, the thought was that this was a heinous necessity. This was, to them, “the taking of a life.” The fact that my cousin would be born essentially already dead or “brain dead” and only kept alive with machinery didn’t matter to them - they wouldn’t have aborted a detected Down Syndrome baby, or missing a limb, or any other congenital condition. The single fact that made it acceptable and not a “sin” to them was the life of my aunt, who (had the pregnancy been carried to either “birth” or natural miscarriage) would have had to endure pain, suffering, possible internal organ damage, possibly even the loss of her ability to try again, and as an outside but not “insignificant” risk, perhaps even death. From my perspective, I can’t say that I was (or am today) as severe as they were on it, but I can understand where they were coming from.

I also have to wonder - how much of the ongoing abortion debate is medical, how much is pragmatic, how much religious, and how much the functional argument between those who want and cannot have, want and can have, and don’t want but do have, children? The difference between my aunt and uncle - who had been trying and trying to get pregnant - and someone who is “surprised” pregnant and doesn’t even know who the father is (or knows full well that the father will only be so in a “sperm donor” sense) may be a vast gulf to bridge indeed.

I wanted to have some short post up tonight since Web is going to be posting tomorrow, but twice I’ve tried to write a short post and twice I’ve found myself starting a longer post. I suppose this is why I will never migrate entirely to Twitter.

Speaking of Web, you may have noticed that he is no longer Webmaster. Well, he is still the webmaster, but he has finally been given a name. It’s not much of a departure. I think we lack imagination.

I paid $1.69 each for two half-gallon cardboard cartons of milk.

Milk seems to be cheaper out west than it is in Delosa. I remember when I first moved to Deseret I kept reading articles about how much milk prices have risen and didn’t know what they were talking about. I’d paid the same that I’d always paid. I came to find out that milk prices had spiked right about at the time of the move and that if I’d still been in Delosa I would be paying 50c more. I don’t know how well prices in Cascadia match up, though, which is why I am asking for your input:

How much did you pay for milk last time you bought some?

Prior to meeting Clancy, I was extremely judicious with my use of shampoo. Shampoo does a number on my thick hair, making it all poofy and unmanageable. I could put shampoo and then gel in there, but nothing was as good as just putting in neither. For very long stretches. It was one of those things that was probably hurting me socially in ways that I didn’t realize because apparently that sort of thing can make hair smell, but it was always helpful in getting my hair to look like I wanted it to. Then I met Clancy with her super-smell and I’ve finally found the right portions of shampoo, conditioner, and gel to put in my hair to make it work for me.

Anyway, little did I know, but I wasn’t being careless or dirty when I was not shampooing my hair. I was being environmentally correct!

Of course, they’re talking about shampooing every third or fourth day and I was doing it every third of fourth week.

The problem is that I’ve gotten spoiled with the whole shampoo thing. Back when I wasn’t using it regularly, my hair required a lot of maintenance. I had to have a brush by the sink and a comb with me at all times. These days? I get it acceptable with a minimum of fuss and other than tossing my fingers through it once it’s dried, I don’t have to do anything more than that. And I’ve found a way to place it that looks as good as it used to. But all of that requires that I do put some shampoo in every day. The days where I miss it, the deterioration is immediately noticeable. I think it’s cause the gel has stuck around. Anyway, the result is that it goes all curly. And it looks as unclean as it used to when I never shampooed.

It’s such a tragedy because I was being green with my hair before it was cool and now that it’s cool I can’t really do it anymore.

Can’t win for losing.

-{Other than the Nashville stars, I can’t really get into the artists within the movement because a lot of them are Colosseans or sing songs about Delosa specifically. I thought about nixing the post entirely, but I suspect the rise and fall of a local musical revolution is something that has happened more times than can be counted, so I’m not sure the specifics are relevant. In any case, to give you a feel for the music, I’ve temporarily included a selection of songs at the end of the post. If you would like to know more about the music, shoot me an email with my 8-letter account name @gmail.}-

It’s always hard for me to answer what kind of music I’m in to. My tastes are mildly eclectic since sound doesn’t matter to me nearly as much as lyrics do. But a big stumbling point is that a lot of my favorite music hails from a subgenre that most people have never heard of. I can almost guarantee you that none of you have heard of at least 5 of my favorite ten artists. And if I try to explain that one of my favorite genres is Independent Country or Alternative Country, a lot of people don’t know what I’m talking about or get the wrong idea. They’ll tell me jokes about what you get if you play a country song backwards. If I tell them I’m in to “Gulf Country Rock”, of course, they have no idea what I’m talking about. Particularly out here, but even in Colosse, where the movement was once strong, I’ll get blank stares. Unfortunately, the movement that was once building steam so powerfully faded away.

I actually stumbled onto the Gulf Country Rock scene by accident. I’d downloaded a single song from an artist named Troy Thomason from a free MP3 site that has since folded. Kyle, Clint, and I went to a local music show and happened to see a poster for the guy. We went to his show and he introduced me to the style. Then Thomason announced that he was leaving Delosa and relocating to Nashville and a whole was filled. So I started following some links on Thomason’s site to other artists. I had an overnight job at the time that consisted of starting a number of processes at 10pm and then doing nothing until 3am. So one night I decided to walk over to the nearby bar where a musician mentioned on Thomason’s site was doing an act. I enjoyed it immensely and so I started going to a lot of shows (though rarely on my employer’s time).

In a world where musical tastes are expected to say something about you, there is something powerful to the psyche about following a kind of music nobody else listens to. You feel like you’re in on the ground floor and if they ever become big, you can say “I knew of them first!” And of course it feeds that little part of us that likes to think that we cut against the grain.

In any case, before long I was going to anywhere between one and four shows a week. Most of my disposable income was spent at The Stockpile, a local bar that showcased a lot of Gulf Country Rock music. The GCR revolution was, like a lot of artistic genres, about more than just the music. One of the focal points of the whole thing was a strong disdain for the music coming out of Nashville at the time. GCR musicians were the true successors to Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson and Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney were just poseurs. McGraw and Chesney were by far the most frequent targets. First it was McGraw because he was such a big singer, but then he went and bought to rights to a GCR song and made it a Billboard hit and so Chesney was anointed the new symbol of everything that was wrong with country music.

Secretly, I always liked Chesney. It was a sign of the times and the crowd that I found myself in that I had to deny my appreciation for his music so thoroughly that I faked it until I felt it. So synonymous was Chesney with artistic fraud that even while I liked his songs, I couldn’t help but hate him. That I had his Greatest Hits CD became one of my most closely guarded secrets. More closely guarded than even the Air Supply CD I have stashed away. As the movement grew, it really became an us-vs-them affair. Nashville was the enemy.

I had indeed gotten on the ground floor of a growing movement. One of the struggling local radio stations, WREB Wrebel FM, in an act of desperation actually played nothing but GCR from 5-10pm and suddenly we were hearing loads of our favorite artists on the radio. It garnered a lot of interest. They were singing the national anthem at Colosse Hurricane baseball games and placing pretty high at the local Livestock Show and Rodeo (one of the biggest in the country).

It was, of course, bound not to last. Wrebel went back to a slightly more conventional playlist and eventually folded entirely. More and more me-too acts started popping up and exposed the limitations of the genre by making it into yet another formula. But the true death knell was ironically the headway it made into Nashville. A few of the top artists got picked off by Nashville record labels. Having gone national, they weren’t there to draw the same crowds and garner the same attention locally. Worse yet, instead of changing Nashville, in some cases Nashville changed them. They had to change the things that made them successful locally in order to make it on the national stage. That wasn’t the case with all of them, but it was the case with one too many of them. He became indistinguishable from Chesney and when the local artists would go over the list of Nashville Singers We Must Hate, they all but had to glide over him. He became the sort of elephant in the room. And even Chesney had joined McGraw in making a local songwriter (who had previously called him out by name as a hack) rich by turning his song into a radio hit.

The movement was still going strong when I left Delosa to move to Deseret with Clancy. It had in fact expanded beyond its Ocania-Delosa-Louisiana base all the way out to Texas and Estacado. One of the reasons I was looking forward to moving to Estacado was getting to see some of these guys. And fortunately I did. But something had changed. Even on trips back to Colosse, The Stockpile had gone from too-crowded-to-be-comfortable to two-thirds empty much of the time. Wrebel Radio had folded by this point and gone to an All-Kenny-G-and-John-Tesh smooth Jazz format.

At least, one GCR artist said, they’ve finally stopped playing Darryl Worley.

An interesting thing comes up when designing/maintaining a website’s “community” - how it will address newcomers and meltdowns. Why Do Work describes this problem in the most modern parlance, that of the Eternal September, a term coined in remembrance of the 1993 addition of millions of AOL users to the growing population using, at the time, Usenet messaging groups.

Prior to 1993, Usenet had been a pretty humdrum affair. September had been deemed the worst time to be on, simply because of the influx of new college students discovering it for the first time. Fortunately, the “experienced” Usenet denizens were usually able to teach their new charges the social norms, and things went back to normal fairly quickly.

With Eternal September, and the addition of not just many more new people, but people whose current goal in life was not an education, that flew right out the window. As Clay Shirky describes it, “a group is its own worst enemy..

In modern parlance, website “communities” have come up with all sorts of governance, but they can pretty easily be categorized as follows:

#1 - Outright Anarchy - no rules. No restrictions. No deletions/bannings. In other words, just a mob. See also: 4Chan (or don’t, it’s scary there).

#2 - The Quiet Oligarchy - there are rules, but they’re relatively respected. For the most part, a single person or a few people handle the necessary duties (blockings, comment deletion, etc) as needed. Hit Coffee falls into this category.

#3 - The Loud Oligarchy - Get onto a larger forum (such as an MMORPG’s forum space, or a large scale internet forum) and the moderators become a bit more… active. Threats and “repeat warnings” become commonplace.

#4 - The Totalitarian - Here we get to Wikipedia. The best way to imagine this is the following: imagine if your entire “police force” consisted of 20-year veteran paranoid cocaine users with a badge, a gun, and orders to shoot first and ask questions later only if anything was still moving.

#5 - The Karma Fest - Sites like Digg and Slashdot. “Users”, either in their entirety or via random selection, are given the ability to “moderate” posts up and down on a point scale. The goal is that “good” posts get moderated up to the top, and “bad” posts down to oblivion and unseen. The actual result? Utter and complete enforcement of community-ingrained groupthink. Slashdot created “karma whores”, Digg gave us the “bury brigade.” Why the difference? Slashdot only allows pushing a post up or down so far (up to 5, down to -1, with 1 being the starting point), while Diggs and Buries moderate what’s seen on the front page of Digg. And of course, even Slashdot is still gamed; the latest trends are to either (a) find someone that they really dislike, mod them down, and then go back and moderate any other posts by the same user they can find down till mod points are exhausted or (b) to tag-team with someone else, modding “+1 Funny” (which mods up, but doesn’t actually add Karma points) and then have the tag-team partner mod down again, adding more negative karma.

As for sites that follow #2 through #4, usually in an evolutionary state (the number of admins rises with number of users and noise in the system, until the number of bad-but-entrenched admins begins driving away users and eventually more admins than users remain), little can be done once critical mass is hit. The most one can do is hope that growth is slow enough to identify bad admins before entrenchment occurs.

On the last, I believe that the overall flaw is in allowing karma to flow both ways. While it’s true that partisan upmodding happens, there’s probably less ill feeling if that is the only partisan behavior; the problems for Digg, and Slashdot to a point, come in from the partisan downmodding that allows a subset of the population to not just decide that something should be seen, but to actively censor things they think shouldn’t be seen.

Several months ago I decided to listen to Scott Turow’s Kindle County series, starting with Presumed Innocence. The book was partially spoiled by the fact that I knew how it ended because I’d seen the end (and only the end) of the movie. I knew who committed the crime, where the missing glass went, and how the characters fared. I still enjoyed the book, though.

Now here I am in a remarkably similar spot. I’m listening to John Grisham’s The Chamber. It took me less than an hour’s listening to realize that once again, I’ve seen part of this movie. Once again, I’ve seen the end of it. So once again, I know how it ends. Unfortunately, this time around I am not enjoying the book. Not yet, anyway. Last time around, I also knew too much about the main plot of the story because they read the dust jacket. This time I don’t have those spoilers, but it doesn’t matter because the book seems to be doing much at all with the first half of the book. Other than to convey the message that Grisham, like all Right-Thinking People (as evidenced by all right-thinking people in the book), opposes the death penalty. And racism.

Looks like they’re finally going to move me out of The Vault, the lab where I currently work. I haven’t had a bonafide office in four or five jobs. I usually get put in a cubicle or inside a lab. For the most part, I’m actually okay with this. Cubicles, provided that they’re big enough to work, give me enough space to work without separating me from everybody. I’m not the most social person, so it’s good to force me to be with people. In the case of the proposed office for me at Mindstorm, I’d be moving there with another guy who is pretty much the only person I talk to regularly except people who come by explicitly to see either me or him, so that wouldn’t be an issue.

Despite appreciation the general openness of The Vault (and of cubicles in general), I think I’ll be glad to be moving out. My situation lately has been somewhat distracting. The team lead of the group the next aisle over is both social and a self-described right-winger. This presents a bit of a problem because not because of his views, per se, but that his views put him at odds with just about everybody else in the lab. And since he’s social, politics are discussed non-stop. Being a politically-minded individual myself, part of me wants to step in, correct areas where somebody is clearly wrong, and so on. But despite the fact that he is an aisle over and on a different team and all that, I generally don’t discuss politics at work. But boy am I tempted. It’s hard to tune out.

The other issue with being an aisle over from the guy is that he doesn’t pull anybody into a private office or conference room to give them there review. So last week I got to hear a rather devastating review (abrasive… don’t communicate… can’t count of you to get the job done…) of one of his team members. The nosy part of me wants to listen in. The part of me that doesn’t like watching train wrecks wants me to tune out. And though it doesn’t have any detrimental effect on my performance, it’s still a supremely uncomfortable thing to overhear. My hearing impairment forgets itself at the most inopportune times.

The reason given for the move is that they need to make more room in the lab for an army of systems for some automated tests. Some of the IT people look at me and the other guy with a weird sort of passive anger that we’re taking up such valuable real estate. As though our existence there is solely to be in between them and their illustrious set-up. So I saw the move coming. Except oddly, my old boss (who technically isn’t my boss but since I have yet to speak to the guy who is my boss after several months I still consider to be my boss) says that we can stay in the lab or use the office and that we weren’t handing over our space to the IT people. I suspect that when this is all said and done, we will in fact be in the office.

I would be more welcoming of this move if I had more than two or three months left on my contract. The prospect of picking everything up and moving it is wholly unappealing. It’s similar to the computer problems I’ve been having, where I’m close enough to the end that I am unenthusiastic about doing a full format-and-restore, and yet still have long enough to go that if I don’t do something about it, the managers are going to get tired of hearing about delays because my computer is malfunctioning somethin’ fierce.

If I had more time, I could personalize the office with the Watchmen posters I bought and all that and fully take advantage of the new space. Alas, with this much time left I will probably leave the office be with the tacks stuck into the bare wall and all that.

So as I glide into the end of my contract, it doesn’t really feel like I’m gliding at all. Since people are always going in and out of the turnstile and its mandatory 3-month vacations, there is generally the expectation that you will want to be coming back and therefore there isn’t much of a wind-down. The guy who will be taking your place has probably done the job before you, so there’s not much need to train him. It does make one feel like quite the cog.

I don’t have any goals remaining other than the preference not to get transferred somewhere else. I would like my de-facto boss to become my official boss again. He gave me the most positive review I have gotten in my entire life, suggesting I go back to the contracting agency and angle for a raise (three weeks later I got a pay cut). I want him to be the guy that fills out whatever paperwork for job performance. The nicest thing my actual boss can say about me would be something to the effect of “I didn’t really know he was there, which means that he must not have been any trouble.” Maybe new boss will have old boss fill out the forms. Not that any of this matters since it’s vanishingly unlikely that I’ll be doing another tour with Mindstorm since we’ll be leaving the area. But since I can’t have potential future employers contact Old Boss, the only record of how well I did will be in the offices of my contractor (and, presumably, filed away with Mindstorm never to see the light of day unless I try to get another job with the company). I have a stellar letter of recommendation from my ex-boss Willard (Thanks, Willard!), but since that was a couple jobs ago it would be great to be able to tell employers to contact my rep at the contracting agency.

A while back I wrote about wedding invites and social intrigue. That was a case of a young woman dedicating her wedding to the memory of her mother to spite her father and his girlfriend.

I’ve never seen anything like that happen, but it is not infrequently the case where people will refuse to attend a wedding if so-and-so is going to be there. My own wedding was pretty scandal-free with the exception of my ex-girlfriend’s decision not to attend because her ex-boyfriend was going to be there with his fiance. I actually have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about that, actually. Actually, the bigger problem I had was that she wouldn’t come out and say that. Instead, she was “too busy”. Frankly, I find a broken heart to be much more understandable than I do the relative indifference of being too busy.

The only time I was keenly aware of invitational intrigue was when it came to Evangeline. Her father left her mother for a younger model and her mother refused to attend any wedding that the step-mother was going to be attending. Eva and I rarely discussed marriage, but to the extent that we did her parents were a rather central part. Her father wouldn’t attend if the step-mother was not invited and her mother would not attend otherwise. So she was going to be forced to choose. In the alternate history I wrote there were two weddings so that each could attend one, but that was an unsatisfying prospect. When Eva did marry, her father won. But it was streamed over the Internet so her mother got to see.

To me, protesting a wedding is one of the most arrogant and selfish things that a person can do. The decision not to attend someone’s wedding says quite a bit about your relationship with them. If it is a casual acquaintance, that’s one thing. The relationship is casual. There were people that didn’t come to my wedding that I was perfectly cool with. There was only one person who didn’t attend that I felt hurt by even though I would have really loved it if my ex-roommate Dennis had shown up as well as others. But that’s life. But to refuse to attend a daughter’s wedding because someone that you don’t like is going to be there says more about your relationship with your daughter than it does about the actions of the person that you refuse to be within a hundred yards of. It’s their day. I actually got a lot more irate about all of this than did Evangeline.

It’s of course spottier when it comes to friends. My ex-roommate Dennis initially refused to go to my ex-roommate Hubert’s wedding because of the Might Ducks Three Debacle and Karl was going to be at the wedding. Fortunately, good sense won out. Dennis didn’t attend, allegedly because of a broken down car, but at least he was self-aware enough to come up with a good and credible excuse rather than to be all self-important and to suggest that his feud with Karl touched off by that awful movie was more important than his friendship with Hubert.

I myself only barely attended Hubert’s wedding. I had a good excuse, but it was as much an excuse as anything else. Our relationship had not yet repaired and the idea of seeing the attention-domineering ex-roommate actually be the center of attention was not something I was looking forward to. As it turned out, though, he was already getting the attention he craved so he was as happy as a junebug and when he is genuinely happy he is at his best. And since our relationship has since repaired, I’m glad that I could be a part of a very special day for him.

A while back I asked a hypothetical question geared towards determining whether punishment in the pursuit of justice is a good even if it does not deter crime (or indeed, makes it more likely). It’s tempting (and perhaps accurate) to argue that tough sentencing and just punishment acts as an effective deterrent, but would we still support if that weren’t the case? If rewarding crime worked, would it be a policy worth pursuing even if it offends our sense of justice? My hypothetical question was in pretty extreme form where the price for just punishment in terms of recidivism rates was exceptionally steep. So steep that nobody thought it was worth it, though Phi said that he was willing to accept some additional crime for the sake of justice being done.

Econoholic, on the other hand, argued that punishment is a necessary evil and should not be applied at all absent some practical motivation. The need for justice - for society to see that evil is punished - is something that ought to be resisted:

[Trumwill] is asking whether the behavior of punishment is a good in itself. It is not. Punishment is an action taken to achieve a good. A safe society has social value. Punishment has no intrinsic value. It is only valuable inasmuch as it helps us achieve a safe society.

As far as punishment for the sake of punishment, I agree. But after spending a few weeks thinking about it I have come to the conclusion that punishment as it relates to justice, on the other hand, is a good in itself. Even if it has no deterrence value. Even if there are no external negatives: no vigilante injustice, no increase in minor misbehavior resulting from disrespect of the law. Nothing negative beyond the emotional frustration of being watching justice fail to be done.

It is Holic’s position (as best I understand it) that the thirst for punishment/justice was imbued in us primarily for utilitarian reasons and that without the utilitarian aspects of it, it is an inclination that ought to be resisted. So then we’re left with a choice. Either everybody is happy or the just are happy at the expense of the unjust. This assumes, however, that (a) the thirst for justice is something that can be successfully held off or (b) that unhappiness derived from this desire being unmet is illegitimate.

I agree with Holic that the thirst for vengeance ought to be resisted to a degree. I oppose the death penalty on this basis (as well as others) and believe that we should not take delight in, for instance, prison rape even when it comes at the expense of someone convicted of something far worse. The Constitutional blockade on cruel and unusual punishment is another marker of good resistence. Our need for justice must be tempered.

But I don’t believe that it can be wholly disregarded. I don’t believe that the choice is between a happy population that resists a thirst for justice with happy criminals that learn from compassion bestowed upon them (or are otherwise receptive to bribery) or a happy population and unhappy criminals. I don’t believe that everybody can be happy.

So the question is whom we choose to make unhappy. Holic seems to be placing that burden on the vengeful just. They are the ones that need to change their attitudes if it’s the case that their attitudes fail to prevent (or perhaps increase the likelihood) of crime. And maybe there is something to the notion that these people are best equipped to resist their negative impulses. It’s hard to expect criminals to since resisting negative impulses is not exactly their specialty.

To me, however, I see no reason (absent negative results) why we should place a burden on the just and not place a burden on the unjust to simply accept their punishment as having been deserved. If we’re going to be placing the burden of changing attitudes, that burden ought to be placed on those that have done bad things. No, I hold no illusions that criminals are going to actually decide that being imprisoned is a-okay because they had it coming.

But I don’t think that it’s much more likely that you will convince people that coddling criminals and forsaking justice is a-okay, either. People who have had wrong done to them want to know that the person caught will pay a price for it. After all, they paid a price for the criminal behavior because now they have to replace their car stereo. Even if you could convince them that institutional compassion (or bribery) lead to the same or better objective results, it’s too much to ask them to feel good about it.
So with everybody being happy not being possible, all other things being equal make the criminals unhappy.

Of course, that assumes that all other things are equal. In the case of my hypothetical where coddlinng and educating and being super-duper nice to the criminals makes it far less likely that they will commit crimes in the future, I am willing to dispense with justice for the sake of preventing crime. That guy whose stereo was lifted will be upset, but those whose stereos were not lifted when that guy got out won’t be as upset and everybody would enjoy safer streets*.

Even so, I do feel strongly enough about the need for justice that I would accept some measurable increase in crime for the sake of the sense among the public that justice is being done. I am not a particularly vengeful person (anymore), but do think that if I had the choice between having my car broken into 4 times and knowing that each and every time the criminal was caught and punished and having my car being broken in thrice but knowing that if caught the bad guy is going to attend some Positive Mental Attitude classes and be on his way. I don’t know how much crime I would be willing to tolerate for justice, though. It’s not much (it’s not 50%, despite my example), but it’s something.

In addition to a few more crimes being committed, I would also be willing to pay more in tax money for the sake of punishment being landed on the unjust. Of all of the arguments against the death penalty, I consider the weakest to be that it costs more. So what if it does? It could be worth it. It obviously isn’t worth it to me or people who oppose the death penalty anyway, but we all know that even if the death penalty were cheaper than housing criminals for the rest of their lives that it wouldn’t change our perspective. I’ve simply never met anyone whose support of or opposition to the death penalty really, actually came down to dollars and cents.

On the other hand, if it cost a million zillion dollars to execute people or to house them without executing them, that might get people’s attention. I’m not sure how much tax money I would be willing to spend just as I am not sure how much more crime I would be willing to tolerate.

These are all very hypothetical questions. All other things are never equal. But I think that these hypothetical questions are important because they prevent people from coming up with alternate ways to justify their personal preference. Non-hypotheticals often get bogged down in details and speculation as to what other things would happen with everybody believing most of the bad things that could happen if their preference denied and disbelieving the bad things that would happen if they were implemented. Then, before you know it, everybody is citing the statistics that prove that their moral and philosophical preferences are also the most practical.

So the good thing about hypothetical questions is that they clear through all that. It helps us know why we really believe what we do believe. It’s useful to know, for instance, that even if I could be assured that an innocent man has been and could not be executed that I would still oppose the death penalty. Similarly, it’s useful to know that even if a utilitarian case can’t be made for punishment that I would still support it at some level.

* - This is assuming that there is no substantial increase in first-time offenses and that the lower recidivism rates do actually result in less crime in the long run. Web maintains that recidivism is a poor measure for such things. Maybe it is. That’s not the point of this discussion, though.

My computer at work is sick. Real sick. Office doesn’t open. IE doesn’t open half of the time and is non-responsive half of the time it is open. Opening Task Manager does nothing.

And Notepad.exe took more than five minutes to load yesterday.

I don’t know what’s more sad… that it took notepad.exe more than five minutes to load… or that this is the second straight job where I’ve had a computer reach that level of disrepair… with an oddly reluctant notepad.exe (among other things) in both cases.

Trumwill: Hey Clancy, if someone was born on October 18, 1990, how old would they be?

Himmclan: It’s not October yet, so 18.

Trumwill: That’s what I thought…

Himmclan: Did the rules of mathematics change?

Trumwill: No, I was just wondering if I suddenly got stupid.

Himmclan: I don’t think you have, sweetie.

Trumwill: Next question: When you graduated high school, you were 18, right?

Himmclan: Yeah.

Trumwill: Aren’t most people 18 when they graduate high school?

Himmclan: Pretty much. Unless they turned 18 over the summer…

Trumwill: Or they were placed early, skipped a grade, or were held back. But other than that, 18 right?

Himmclan: Right.

Trumwill: That’s what I thought…

Himmclan: Why are you asking these questions, dear?

Trumwill: Half Sigma has a post accusing Sarah Palin’s daughter of graduating late because she’s 19. But the date he gives for her birth seems like 18 to me. But then he says that people graduate when they’re 17 and not when they’re 18. Absolutely none of this post seems right. None of it. And not in the way that Half Sigma is usually wrong.

Himmclan: He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Trumwill: Yeah. Hey, wait, I just hit response and the post disappeared. Did he delete the post? He must have deleted the post.

Himmclan: Maybe he realized that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Trumwill: That would be a first.

Even though I seem to be one of the last people to jump on the “texting” bandwagon, I was actually one of the first. Not so much on the actual sending of text. It was an onerous task with 9-key typing (hit 2 twice for “b”, 6 three times for “o”). But what I did do was rig my old beeper up to have my emails forwarded to the texting service on that. Then, when I got a cell phone, that was of course one of the first things that I did. The pager was actually better than the cell phone, interestingly enough. The pager would give you the first 256 characters of an email and that was it. What I most wanted to know was whether or not I had an email. I could check it in due time. The phone, though, would break the message up into up to 6 256 character messages. I could now read more of the email (or the entire thing if it was short), but now my phone would go off repeatedly.

I decided that if I ever wanted to really get back on someone, I would take someone that didn’t have a text plan and sign them up with some listserv bound to repulse them (for instance, if they were a Democrat I’d sign them up for Rush Limbaugh’s listserv). Then they would get inundated with texts. That they weren’t on the plan did not mean that they wouldn’t be sent, but that they would be charged 5c per message. So they’d have their phone going off every 30 seconds getting messages that they don’t want but were paying a pretty penny for. It was beautiful and vicious. Too vicious to ever actually use, though. So my grand plans of revenge against unnamed individuals aside, I had to settle on paying for my texting plan and getting one-to-six alarm emails.

My mother and I were out on the back porch smoking cigarettes talking at sometime after 1am. We were once again commisurating my brother Mitch’s marriage to Brynne. She made the comment that if they weren’t going to have children, she wasn’t sure when she would ever get them. My brother Ollie was gun-shy about getting married after getting burned his first time around. Mitch married a woman that didn’t want kids. I didn’t have anything coming down the pipe. What was she going to do about grandchildren?

I tried to comfort her by telling her about a woman that I had met the week before. This was a mistake. I knew at the time that I wasn’t going to have a relationship with her, but at least it gave me the opportunity to say that there were people out there for me and maybe one of them would work out and maybe there’d be someone else out there for me and maybe there’d be grandchildren on the horizon. And I was just charged at having met someone so awesome that even if there wasn’t a future I was hair-trigger about sharing the experience with somebody, even Mom would do. But Mom fixated on this woman that I had actually mentioned to her (I wasn’t in the habit of talking about my love life). “Well tell me about her.”

“Well, not a whole lot to say. We met at that party I went to last week in Wurzburg. She and I got along extremely well. Unfortunately, she’s going to school in Delianapolis and after that she’s probably moving much father away for residency. She’s mentioned Deseret.”

“Residency?”

“Medical residency.”

“She a nurse?” she asked. She stopped for a minute, realizing that didn’t sound right. “A doctor?”

“She’s a medical student in Delianapolis. So it’s a no-go. I’m not moving to Deseret. But…”

“You should move to Deseret!”

“I barely know her, Mom.”

Even if I could determine her level of interest and could be assured of its presence, there really wasn’t any clear path for us between here and there. After we met, I had tried to find some sort of way to contact her in a non-obvious way to keep that line of communication open. As it turned out, she wrote an email to everyone attending the party thanking them for a great time. It was a good opening. So I wrote her a few sentences giving her a link to a post on my blog about the trip that had mentioned her. She wrote back with a paragraph saying that she had read the post and “of course was hooting and howling the whole time” as well as a comment on something else that I had written. I then, in my ever-subtle manner, wrote an eight paragraph response extrapolating on the post. Then nothing. That made sense, of course. It was a one-weekend nicety that we met and that weekend was over and she had 10,000 things that she needed to be doing and I started feeling a little bad for wasting her time trying to keep such a dead-end alive. And so it was over. And I was fine with that. Then my mother was telling me that I needed to move to Deseret. And I’d rehashed everything and was going to have to let it all go again.

The following weekend was another anime convention in Charlton. I attended with Hubert, Kyle, and Clint. Together we were Parallax Productions and we were showing off some of our new material at the con. It was a really good escape from thoughts about the medical student across town. There were real live girls at this thing and while the gender ratio ran against me, I’d always done surprisingly well at these sorts of things because I shower and know how to talk to people with breasts without making a complete fool of myself. While I was there I met a young woman in a costume and was being friendly and engaging and outgoing. She lived in Tarsus and so there wasn’t much going to come of it, but that was becoming a pattern, wasn’t it? Then she made some offhand comment that told me a little bit too much about the cute young woman behind the costume. She made a reference to something school related and used the term “last six-weeks”. High school. Moving on, now…

That night the Parallax crew went to a high-end regional fast food chain. While we were eating, I got text.

I could barely catch my excitement when it went off again. I got another text.

Then another. And another. And two more times. A glorious six-alarm email. Her email actually went beyond that, but the limit was the limit. That was just as well as my friends were getting tired of the phone going off. For my part, while I didn’t know what the rest of the marriage said, I knew the important part. It’s not over.

-{Previously on “How Clancy And I Became Us”}-

In the first part of this discussion, I come to the following conclusion:

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.

I go on to mention that one example of the “best interest of the child” taking a back seat is sperm donation.

According to Estacado state law, a sperm donor is not considered a legal parent unless he is married to the mother at the time of conception. I choose Estacado state law because that’s the state that I know because Clancy had to take a jurisprudence exam in an effort to get medical licensure there. I assume that to the extent that state law has caught up with fertility practice, most laws are probably along those lines. In some states it may be the case that as long as the father is known (at the time of conception) then the father is responsible. In no state that I am aware of are anonymous donors (even if later unveiled) expected to pay child support.

In the case of a traditional (”live”) conception, the law (as far as I am aware) takes the view that it does not matter what the circumstances were prior to conception, the father is the father and has all of the rights and responsibilities accorded to him. If a man and a woman signed a contract stating otherwise, that contract can be (always is?) declared void. If she takes the sperm from a spent condom, it doesn’t matter. I’ve even heard of cases where the woman was technically committing an illegal act when the child was conceived (he was not of the legal age of consent) and the father is still left on the hook (and oftenly I’m not sure that’s wrong since I frequently disagree with the underlying AOC law anyway).

The legal idea (as I understand it) behind contract nullification is that the child was not a party to the contract but was an interested party and therefore it is not valid. The other circumstances are probably in part for simplification (a man can always claim it was a stolen condom and how can she prove otherwise?) and in part the idea that the child did not get to choose the circumstances in which he or she was conceived and therefore his rights trump those of whatever agreement the parents reached.

Except for sperm donation. In that case, the child had no say in how he or she was conceived. He or she had no more say in what kind of home or financial situation he or she was brought into than any other child. But even setting aside financial support, we legally shield the kid from knowing who one of his parents even is.

From a practical standpoint, this is necessary. If the anonymity of donation is not preserved, the market for donors will dry up. The fear of a child rolling up on his doorstep in twenty years would scare the vast majority of them off. It would make finding a wife of their own harder if he came clean or cause damage to his marriage if he did not and the child found him. Though no jurisdiction has said so to date, the mere possibility that a donor could even theoretically be left on the hook for child support would scare men off. I personally think that men should be worried about these things anyway because I do think that at some point down the line a judge will declare that knowing one’s parentage is a civil right Even though it’s unlikely that child support would be an issue, the havoc wreaked would be significant.

So knowing that we cannot have a robust artificial insemination industry - and believing that having this is a good thing - without preserved anonymity and/or indemnity from child support payments, we treat this as different. This can lead to some tragic circumstances wherein after having donated the sperm a man might reconsider whether or not he wants to be involved (or simply know that it has been used), he does not have the ability to do so (again, as far as I know). A man that donates his sperm to a nice lesbian couple he knows would have no right to claim paternity in the future without the mother’s consent. He could come to regret that decision and it would be heartbreaking for him. But all in all, I think that the law has it right on this one. Men need to think long and careful before donating their sperm before assuming with certainty that they will want nothing to do with the results.

But there isn’t any good reason that I can think of as to why the law should, in the case of live conception, take one stance pretty consistently because it’s in the best interest of the child… then, in another circumstances, argue that a woman’s right to become pregnant by alternative means should trump the best interest of the potential child, which would include two parents and the financial support of them.

I am personally not in favor of the concept of “male abortion”, supported by some, which is that a man should have the right to forfeit all rights and responsibilities of a child that he doesn’t want. I can’t really get into why without discussing the abortion issue at length, and I would like to avoid getting into that mucky terrain. It does seem to me, however, that there ought to be an opt-out that two parents can agree to for live conceptions the same way that they they currently do so for artificial conception.

Sidenote: Much of this post could be moot if such provisions do exist, but I’ve never heard of it and I have pretty frequently heard the inverse. I’ve heard of cases where parental rights were waived but obligations remained in-tact. If I’m wrong about this, please cite where I am wrong and I apologize for wasting everyone’s time.

The most immediate problem with this waiver, from a government’s point of view (as well as a taxpayer’s), is that it’s possible that the government will have to pick up where the extant father left off. This does become less of an issue with artificial insemination because presumably if they have the money for that, then they have the money to take care of the child. But as Octomom has recently demonstrated, this is not necessarily so. Further, any parents aware enough to be drafting paternity-waiver contracts are also more likely to be more educated and have more resources than the average unenthusiastic set of parents.

I do see, however, some good to come out of such laws. It runs against stereotypes, but there are cases where women don’t want a man to wear a condom because it’s uncomfortable for her or otherwise impedes her enjoyment. Or maybe cases where he has difficulty performing with a condom and doesn’t want to risk conception (with the attendant obligations) and she wants to allay those because she is on the pill or is infertile. Some sort of waiver in that regard could be helpful. Right now he has no choice but to trust her or to abstain.

But I came upon this idea not as a way for men to opt out, but as a way for women to. I recently read an article from the perspective of a woman that took the adoption option and she mentioned that one of the hardships was that the father was reluctant to sign off. So my first thought was that he shouldn’t have to (if it’s the difference between abortion and adoption), but on second thought I do think that he should have a say. The problem with the status quo is that if you give him a say, then you are saddling her with responsibilities and in that sense encouraging women like her to abort. So I was thinking that it would be good if there were a way that the baby’s father could get dibs on his child before sending him to an agency and to absolve the woman of responsibility to disuade her from either aborting or putting the child up for adoption without his knowledge.

Several years ago I had a conversation with a young woman that had an abortion over the father’s objections. He offered to take full custody and after birth would require nothing from her (they weren’t a couple). She said that she would have carried to to term, but that he couldn’t make good on his promise. As it happens, I didn’t believe her protestations, but such things could happen. I know that if I had impregnated someone that wanted to abort, I would want to make whatever offer I legally could to prevent the abortion from happening. If her reasoning is that she can’t simply have the child and walk away, legally speaking, I’d like her to not be able to hide behind that rationale.

It’s possible to divorce the mother waiver from the father waiver, if that would be required. We could allow women to give the baby up to the father with no obligations while not giving men an “out” when they get a woman pregnant. The rationale would be breathtakingly simple: She carried the baby and she gave birth to it; she did her part.

When it comes to most things that are toxic or otherwise unhealthy in anything but small quantities, people build up a tolerance. You drink caffeine and you start needing more and more of it to achieve the same effects. Of course, tolerance for drugs is an extremely big deal as junkies consume more and more to try to get that same high. Generally speaking, people with a vice try to acquire stronger and stronger variations of that vice to keep going.

Two exceptions that I’ve noticed, though. In my experience, it seems like the more regular a drinker and the more regular a smoker is, the more likely it is that they consume notably inferior product. Instead of building up a tolerance, there is a sort of reverse tolerance where it the quality matters less and less so long as you’re going through the motions.

Very, very few veteran smokers I know still smoke brand name cigarettes. Obviously, if you’re a full-time smoker, cost becomes more of an issue so you don’t want to waste your money on a premium brand if you can get something cheaper that’s almost as good. That’s just common sense.

It goes beyond that, though. First, even those that do smoke brand names seem to smoke lights instead of regulars. And those that go off-brand typically do not gravitate towards brands that produce a similar taste. They instead move towards blandness. Sometimes even light variations where the flagship product is relatively tasteless.

I’m not sure why it’s different for cigarettes and alcohol (where the people I know that drink the most beer frequently drink light beer). Maybe because these products are relatively cheap and accessible compared to drugs. You never have to worry about where you’re going to get your next one from.

A bigger issue, though, I would be that both cigarettes and alcohol serve a cause beyond the infiltration of chemicals into the system. Despite the hit that it’s taken in recent years, smoking remains something of a social activity (outside Deseret, anyway). Drinking, of course, is social as well. They’re also both things that you do while doing something else. I honestly don’t care for the taste of beer, but I enjoy beer as part of a beer-and-football or beer-and-music-show combo.

Because of this, if you partake in the heavier stuff, you can’t do as much of it. One of my favored brands of cigarettes, Maverick, simply can’t be taken in large quantities. It’ll make you sick. Meanwhile I could smoke Cheapo Lights all day (though really, that crosses a threshold of pointlessness for me).

On the whole, I really haven’t fallen prey to the reverse tolerance. In fact, I wonder if I’ve built up real tolerance.

When I started smoking, I started with Marlboros. It’s pretty much the default brand. When I became cost-conscious, like many smokers I started going for discount brands. I settled on Doral at first, though made the shift to Pall Mall. Doral was always pretty inexpensive and the difference in taste was mild enough that it was worth it. Pall Malls had the advantage of often being quite cheap and tasting similar to Doral but with much slower burn times, allowing a smoke to take closer to 10 minutes than 5. I would also smoke Mavericks, though as I mention earlier they act as their own deterrent sometimes.

At some point, though, Pall Malls changed or my taste buds have. My former brand-of-choice may have changed their formulas. They taste like Light cigarettes now and so the main point of buying them anymore is that I enjoy them less and will smoke less. Mostly, though, they taste like the ultra-cheap cigarettes that I could never really get in to. I find that I mildly prefer to get Maverick cigarettes now. Mavericks have a similar benefit in that you can’t smoke too many of them without getting sick and that acts as its own deterrent. When I’m not in the mood to make myself ill, I get USA Gold, which is a sweet spot in between the two.