Berk Ozler has a piece about a new study suggesting that the effects of the Pill (and perhaps contraception) may be overstated as a contributor to pre-marital fertility reduction:

When discussing the plausibility of the finding that the pill may not have decreased the likelihood of giving birth by age X, the author provides some evidence that while the pill likely decreased the pregnancy rates conditional on being sexually active (some women substituted away from condoms but the pill is more effective in preventing unwanted births), this effect may have been offset by the increased likelihood of having sex as a teenager among those cohorts who had access to the pill. While not completely persuasive, I find this demonstration plausible. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the pill led to a large reduction in marital fertility (where this offsetting effect was absent). The author also discusses the plausibility of legal access to abortions causing these same changes, but this part remains more speculative.

To those with minimal moral objections to abortions, this is a rallying call for access to abortions. For those who have moral objections to abortion, this actually has some relatively disturbing repercussions. If The Pill is not enough, and indeed ineffective in the types of pregnancies we are arguably most interested in preventing, then… what?

I have previously commented that I believe the sex-ed debate to be relatively overstated in importance by both sides of the debate. I support comprehensive sex education, and my future children will be receiving it with or without the help of whatever school district they end up in. The entire debate hinges on the belief that we have more influence over childhood culture than we think we do. Or alternately, that sex ed in schools is ultimately going to inform their worldview as much as Beverly Hills 90210 and its successors. I nonetheless believe that more information is better than less information and so support either comprehensive sex-ed or Abstinence Plus.

This muddies the water at least somewhat on the availability of contraception, however. If true, of course. A lot of people scoff at the notion that contraception leads to more sex, but if you have ever refrained from having sex due to the lack of availability of contraception, your biography indicates that it does have some effect. If not on whether one is having sex at all, then at least on the frequency. Which, when it comes to pregnancy, frequency matters. The efficacy of The Pill (and, for that matter, abortion) is a calculation wherein you measure up the failure rates against the increased frequency of instances and it is not at all clear that the latter doesn’t outweigh the former.

Where it gets tricky, though, is that to some extent there has to be a broader cultural component that simply removing access to contraception to one group simply leaves them at a comparative disadvantage if their sexual behaviors are still influenced by those that have access to the contraception. Which is to say, if you have two islands and on one of these islands contraception is widely available and on the other island it isn’t, it’s entirely possible that the lack of access will result in fewer instances and increased caution with regard to alternative methods of contraception (withdrawal, cycle, etc.) that the result in unwanted, premarital pregnancies is reduced. However, we increasingly do not live on islands. The parents in Red America are affected by 90210 as well. The ability of households, individual churches, and individual communities to dictate sexual norms is limited.

That has been my thinking, though this paper calls that into question. It’s focusing primarily on dated data (which you have to be, in order to be looking at the availability of things that are widely available now), but it is looking at the US. There are questions, though, of the influence of popular media back then compared to now. Back then, churches and families arguably had considerably more influence. Without that influence, withholding sexual education or contraception might lose any or all effectiveness. Insisting on abstinence may be more futile. None of it may matter, in the end.

Of course, when it comes to teens and sex, we have to almost be as neurotic as the kids themselves are. We assume it all matters, when it’s far from clear that it does outside of the margins. To review a couple tidbits from that linked post of mine, evangelical kids are not that much less likely to have sex than heathen kids. Nor are they much less likely to actually use contraception. Comparing one part of the country to another is tempting, though very often leaves out some rather significant side-factors.

ThinkProgress cites a study that points out that Evangelical kids have premarital sex in similar numbers to everybody else: 80% for Evangelicals, 88% for heathens.

Both ED Kain and Russell Saunders, along with TP itself, cite the study as a case against Abstinence-Only education (AOE). As a practical matter, I am not a big fan of AOE. My wife Clancy and I do not intend to go that route and if our local school does, we will fill in the gaps ourselves. The only real area of disagreement between us, really, is how in depth we want to get (do we stop at the mot proven methods, or do we go over everything?). The clinical stuff will be hers; the psychological stuff will be mine.

Having said all of this, I don’t see this report as necessarily being more than just a poke in the eye of the self-righteous. There is also the assumption among many that we can count on the religious folks to forgo contraception either due to (a) lack of sex-ed and (b) the religious implications. It’s an assumption that is not foreign to me. Putting my mind in that of a religious person (I am a half-lapsed Episcopalian, a weak version of weak sauce), I can easily imagine an aversion to bringing a condom along or taking contraception because that makes the sex worse than just sex, it makes it premeditated sex. It might be easier to ask God for forgiveness for the heat of the moment, but might be harder to explain to God why you were so prepared for it. Also, Catholics and contraception (though the more Catholics I get to know, the less I find that this is really an issue - even among the devout).

However, the data doesn’t necessarily support that conclusion. According to the Add Health Study, very religious teens are within 10% of being as likely as the irreligious when it comes to using contraception (58% to 65%). If we consider the 8% difference between those who have sex and do not have sex to be on the irrelevant side of things, we have to view the 7% differential on contraception in the same light. The difference between those who use contraception the first time is only 1% different.

Now, the Add Health numbers and the numbers in the original article are not exactly measuring the same thing. For one thing, Add Health is looking at religiosity more than what the brand of religion is. So a self-described Evangelical who only attends church once a week would count as irreligious but a Unitarian who attends every week would be considered very religious. From the perspective of what we’re looking at, though, neither source is much more valuable than the other. Anybody can call themselves an Evangelical. The numbers for self-described Evangelicals is not necessarily indicative of the devout ones that keep their children sheltered. The TNC numbers are also looking at young adults while the Add Health numbers are looking at teenagers. If the discussion is sex ed, I think the latter numbers (which show a 15% differential in sex among whites) are probably more valuable.

However, even if we assume that there is relative parity between the religious freaks and the heathens, whether sex has occurred is really only part of the story. When did it occur? With what frequency? It’s entirely possible (and reasonable to believe, given the two sets of numbers we’re looking at) that the religious folks are starting later. It’s also not necessarily unreasonable to believe that they might have fewer partners are fewer instances, which can have other benefits down the line.

Sex is not necessarily a switch that one turns on, inviting a torrent of potential negative repercussions all at once once flipped. Just as contraception reduces the risk of pregnancy, so do partner reduction and instance reduction. Now, maybe this reduction is not occurring at all. Maybe they’re just a bunch of hypocrites. But the TNC numbers do not shed might light on this. Instead, we (and my initial response was no different) look at the numbers and assume a sort of boolean variable with all other things being equal (except contraception, which we assume is not equal because we know how those religious freaks are about contraception).

None of this is to say that Abstinence-Only education is a good idea. I am rather skeptical of the notion that a middle-aged teacher putting a condom on a banana is going to make teenagers all hot and bothered (I actually question the degree to which kids would listen in any event, because they are much more savvy than we, the ones who “just don’t get it”). I do think that an opt-out is reasonable, and I think the resistance to Abstinence-Plus is based more on philosophical tribalism rather than real pragmatism.

One of the reasons I do think that AOE is a losing battle, though, is because whether sex is in the classroom or not, it’s virtually everywhere else in as public a spectacle as the FCC will allow. This is one of the reasons that devout Christians often try to pull a curtain to the rest of the world. When I lived in Mormonland, I sort of rolled my eyes at the cottage industry of avoid-secular-society movies and entertainment that they lined up for their kids. But really, that has as much to do with my religious inclinations than good parenting or bad. Evangelicals and Mormons have a sub-culture to retreat to. We don’t. If we did, it might not be all that unattractive an option.

I had a dream last night that I got some random girl pregnant. When I had to confess this to my wife, I started with, “I have some good news and some bad news. The good news… it’s official: I’m fertile. We shouldn’t have any reproduction problems on my end.”

In the same way that when you have dreams about falling you always wake up before you hit the ground, I woke up before she responded to the bad news.

The New York Times has an article about snoring:

Scientists say there are two types of snorers: those who snore only when they sleep on their backs, and those who do it regardless of their position. After sleep researchers in Israel examined more than 2,000 sleep apnea patients, for example, they found that 54 percent were “positional,” meaning they snored only when asleep on their backs. The rest were “nonpositional.”

Other studies have shown that weight plays a major role. In one large study, published in 1997, patients who snored or had breathing abnormalities only while sleeping on their backs were typically thinner, while their nonpositional counterparts usually were heavier. The latter group, wrote the authors, consequently suffered worse sleep and more daytime fatigue.

But that study also found that patients who were overweight saw reductions in the severity of their apnea when they lost weight. According to the National Sleep Foundation, in people who are overweight, slimming down is generally the best way to cure sleep apnea and end snoring for good.

I fall into the “positional” category - or at least I did before I lost weight. It’s very frustrating because I am a back sleeper. Put me on my back and I can sleep longways on a chair. On my side? It’s just not comfortable for me. It’s become a lot less of an issue as I lost the weight. What used to be pretty regular getting-woken-up-to-be-informed-I’m-snoring has become pretty rare.

It was actually one of the two main things that allowed us not to set up the bed in the guest room until my sister-in-law came to visit. It was a frequent destination whenever I was snoring and didn’t want a notification wake-up again. The other main thing is the comfortable couch downstairs, which I simply allow myself to fall asleep in if I’m stuffed up and worried that I am going to snore.

Though I don’t remember the plot, I remember that my dream last night included Phi (we were working in the same office), Lindsey Lohan (can’t remember how she fit), and a hit song by Air Supply (and, contrary to what is usually the case when a song makes its way into my dream, there’s no way it was playing in the background while I was sleeping). My mind is going to waste some time trying to fit these particular pieces together.

A conversation about gay marriage gravitated towards the question of what marriage should be and the tension between marriage of passion and marriage of commitment regardless of passion. Jason Kuznicki complains that only gays get taken down a peg for getting married for “love” and is suspicious of this rationale. Rufus F counters that straights do get it, though differently. What happens is that newlyweds get junk about the honeymoon phase and how they’re not “really married” until, well, until they can’t stand each other?

I know where Rufus is coming from on this. There seems to be the need of people to be intrusively realistic when it comes to the lives of others. Killjoys. I have complained in the past about writers panels whose first advice when it comes to being professional writers is “Don’t!” Not because they don’t want the competition, but because folks have these romantic and unrealistic ideas of what being a writer is. And many writers do I’m sure. But the advice, as put, is monumentally unhelpful. The only purpose is to kill the enthusiasm that the speaker apparently lost some time ago

And so it goes with love and marriage. It can be helpful to tell a high school kid who has his first girlfriend to relax and that “this too shall pass,” but some feel the odd need to tell them that it isn’t really love. And looking back, it isn’t generally. It’s not adult love. But you know what? They’ll discover that for themselves. Don’t be an ass just to be right.

When I was working in Estacado, I many of my peers were of the age where they were getting married. In the nearly two years I was there, at least a half-dozen colleagues got married. Each and every time there was an already-married employee who felt the need to tell the guys that once they get married the sex stops and the wife becomes a pain in the ass. At some point I wanted to smack the guy and say “Dude, I get it, you’re in a sexless marriage and you married a frigid woman. I get it. Now cut this spit out.” If I were feeling particularly mean and brave, I would have suggested that he brought it on himself by marrying a super hot woman (which he did) that likely settled for him.

Leaving aside for a moment that the notion of marriage being the end of sex is statistically unsound, it’s purely unhelpful advice. It’s mostly just inappropriate venting as with my former colleague or sometimes, when stated by single guys, sour grapes and/or a blind justification for their lifestyle choices.

I don’t have any new development or link to point to, but I was reminded of something recently that annoys the living crap out of me. Whenever some news comes through about some breakthrough in the search for a chemical contraceptive for men, a whole lot of women make the same comment: as if any man would take such a pill. Because, as they would have you understand it, men have no interest in contraception. It’s not as though pregnancy is a man’s problem. We’re all a bunch of Peter Pans without a care in the world while it’s women that have to concern themselves with such things. Of course, it gets worse when men agree with this.

There is, naturally enough, some truth to this. Women should not rely that men take the speculative pill reliably. Because, you know, they could fail. Then his failure becomes her problem (as well as his). I have to point out, though, this is something that is asked of men more often than one might think. Some women find the condom to be uncomfortable and so will ask men not to wear one. Some men have certain troubles with a condom. In these cases, the options are either to trust the woman when she says that she is taking the pill, withdrawal and risk outlining exactly how much you don’t trust her, or go home frustrated. There also comes a point in the relationship where continuing to wear a condom demonstrates a lack of trust unless the woman is on the same page.

I’m not saying that guys are uniquely put-upon here. I’m not saying that we have it tougher than women. To some extent that depends on the morals and philosophies of the participants. I mean, worst case it’s not something a guy has to worry about for nine and a half months or so after the deed. That should matter a lot more than it does to a lot of guys, but some people have pretty short time-horizons. Even if in most ways we have less urgency to our worry, in some ways we can have more to worry about (simply because we can’t make the “problem” go away, once conceived). We can have the best of all possible worlds (an abortion we supported but did not have to undergo or decide on) or the worst(a baby that we vociferously did not want from day one but have our wages garnished for 18 years to support).

But even to the extent that we can agree that it’s something that women have to worry about more than men, that does not mean that it is not something that men don’t have to worry about it. Some guys are extraordinarily detached from their responsibilities, and some guys will get away without having to pay a red cent in child support. But for guys that could not or would not forgo child support even for a child they did not want, this is some pretty serious stuff. And even if the more conscientious guys are not as worried about it as are the conscientious ladies, they’re still a lot more worried about it than are the less conscientious women who know that they can abort the problem away or just think that having a kid would be neat.

I guess where the women that say things like “men wouldn’t worry about it” are partly coming from is that they don’t have to worry about the less conscientious women. They just have to worry about the dudes. They don’t have to worry about some girl getting pregnant accidentally on purpose. They have to worry about some guy that just doesn’t give a flip. The standard of female behavior is defined first and foremost by their own conscientious behavior. The standard of male behavior, on the other hand, is far more varied. At most, these guys are as conscientious as they are. Often, they are not.

But make no mistake, there are a lot of guys that would be very interested in a pill for men. They would be very interested in having the freedom to not worry about a woman accidentally missing a pill. They would love to be able to tell the woman sitting across from the table that needs him to stick around because she might be pregnantbecause she might have missed taking her pill by an hour or two, “I don’t think that’ll be necessary because I didn’t miss mine.”

Spiritual women are more promiscuous than are non-spiritual women. The study differentiated between “spiritual” and “religious” and though the article focuses on spirituality, the pecking order seems to be spiritual over non-spiritual, irreligious over religious. Their theory:

“Believing one is intimately tied to other human beings and that interconnectedness and harmony are indispensible may lead one to believe sexual intimacy possesses a divine or transcendent quality in itself,” Burris writes. “In fact, ascribing sacred qualities to sex has been positively associated with positive affective reactions to sex, frequency of sex, and number of sexual partners among university students.”

Sounds blissful.

I have an alternative theory.

Being an atheist is undemanding but also unpopular and for a lot of people unfulfilling. Being a member of an organized religious provides you with a packaged set of beliefs but comes with a bunch of rules you have to follow. Call yourself “spiritual” and not “religious” and you can do whatever the heck you want with less in the way of social consequences and you can find meaning in whatever the heck you want to find meaning in. So if it feels good you can make it not about feeling good but about connectedness and all that jazz. The rules are typically more generous when you make them up as you go along. You get gratification from all ends.

That these people would correlate highly with people that engage in promiscuous, unprotected sex is hardly a surprise.

Since getting back to Delosa, I’ve been staying up very late at night. This is in contrast to Cascadia, where I am usually in bed by 12:30 and up by 8. These days I go to bed after 4 (usually 5) and wake up after 10 (usually 11). I love my family (and hers), but I find that late nights are the only time that I really get to myself. That seems to be a more-important-than-usual thing. Every day I intend to get back more on schedule, but then every night I realize that’s not what I want at all.

The problem is that on Tuesday I have to take my father to the airport and we’d be leaving at 3am. So do I just throw in the towel on going to bed on time and take him to the airport and back? Or do I make the extra effort to get on-schedule so that I can go to sleep at 9 and wake up at 2? My hesitation with the former is that usually around 4 I start getting tired and I don’t want to be tired on the road (the airport is on the other side of town — an hour away). But then five hours of sleep isn’t a whole lot and getting up and moving at such an early hour could leave me feeling just as tired.

Or maybe I need to just knock off the caffeine and melatonin. That way, I can guide my sleep to a more normal schedule by taking melatonin without my body being as conditioned to it as I presently am.

Decisions, decisions…

A couple weeks ago, I was saying to myself “Good lawrd it’s hot.” But then I would see Facebookers in Colosse talking about how it’s over 100 in the gulf city’s signature humid style. And my friend Kyle informed me that in Estacado there are rivers drying up. It’s not so bad, I told myself, not like Colosse.

And it’s still not like Colosse right now. Actually, it’s far, far worse.

You see, in Colosse, you get air conditioning. Up here? Not so much. Our apartment doesn’t have it. The apartments of numerous coworkers and friends don’t have it. Whether like this is typical enough in Colosse that you’re prepared for it. Colosse doesn’t even allow apartments to be rented without AC for months of the year. Charitable organizations collect wall units to distribute among the poor. Cars from up north that don’t have AC end up in used car lots in no-time flat.

Up here? Not so much.

Clancy’s coworker and friend came within a hair’s breath of getting a hotel room with AC. Clancy and I considered it for tonight, but elected instead to evaporate ice and push that around the room or something like that. More on our arrangements later.

To compound matters, when I got to work this morning the power was out in our building. So no AC. Then power came back on, but only lights and just a little AC. The AC we were getting was offset in most parts of the building by the increasing heat of the emergent sun. With our computers not coming back on, we had little to do but sit around and talk about how hot it was. That or go out and smoke, where it was outdoors but at least air was moving. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

The night before last I made the decision to sleep in the recliner downstairs. Not because I don’t want to sleep with my lovely wife, but because downstairs there was none of this fan-blowing business that cools a room down.

For those of you that do not recall, I may hate the heat generally, but I love sleeping in it. There isn’t much that feels so cleansing to the soul as waking up in a pool of sweat. I don’t like covers because I kick them off. I don’t even like wearing shirts to bed because they’re uncomfortable. So my solution is sleeping in a warm room, shirtless. And as I wake in the morning, my sins and all the sins of the world are expelled from my body like the dews of sweat rolling off my temples, out of my armpits, off my chest, and all manner of surprising places. It is a glorious experience. And one I only get to enjoy rarely since my wife is sane and likes a cool room with moving air and snuggling under covers.

Last night I decided it was warm enough that it would probably be hot enough even with Clancy’s fans blowing and windows open and all that. I wasn’t entirely right about that. I got bits of coolness in the night.

Hot water has historically been a problem in our apartment. This morning it was not. She was a lot less excited this morning when I told her “I left some warm water for you” than she would have been a scant couple months ago.

Work has taken an added importance this week. For me, it’s because of… well a bunch of things that I am not getting into at the moment. I worked 16 hours on Monday, 12 on Tuesday, and 9 today. But even without all of this overtime, there’s just not a whole lot of motivation to leave work when you’re coming home to an oven. I may like to sleep in warmth, but I don’t like to live in it.

The weather has had an interesting effect on parking at work. You would think that it would be like rain where everybody that otherwise might ride a bike or walk to work instead drives and so parking spots are scarce. For whatever reason (probably manpower balancing) parking has been exceptionally good lately even with the weather of this week. The main difference is that, unlike usual, parking spots around the building (as opposed to the garage) are the last to go. People would rather walk up flights of air-conditioned stairs than leave their car out in this weather. Not me. I’ll just crack a window open.

The other big thing at work is that, except when the AC is running at half-power, the HVAC and air pressure from the hyperactive AC screw around with the security system something fierce. On Monday they had to post a security guy behind our back door because the door absolutely, positively refused to close without assistence. They knew about our door because someone called it in. At some point they realized that it was a lot of doors so they just upped the patrol. Either there’s no audible alarm that goes off if a door is left open (that would be contrary to what they tell us), they turned the alarm off, or some guy at Mindstorm’s security office is now deaf.

So here I am writing a post before I go to bed. Clancy and I have decided to part ways for the evening. She’s sleeping in the guest room with her ice/fan setup. I am sleeping in the main bedroom without any fans. I thought about leaving a window open so that I might get a little circulation, but this obnoxious cool breeze that I would have killed for an hour ago was creeping in. Clancy was envious.

Seeing how excited I was to be sleeping in an oven, she made a sheepish face and said “Sorry I always have you sleeping in Clancy-friendly bedroom climates.”

“It’s okay,” I told her, “there aren’t nearly as many people with my sleeping-temperature preferences as I think there should be. I know I’m a freak.”

“Yes, but you’re my freak,” she said.

And with that, she closed the door and left to make as hospitable environment as she could out of the guest room and I closed the window to mine to keep that wicked cool breeze at bay.

When your spouse is asleep on the bed and you need to put some socks on before you go to bed, you might look at the bed and say to yourself, “You know, I might wake my wonderful spouse up if I sit on the bed.” You might then see an exercise ball and say “Hey, that’ll work.”

DO NOT BE DECEIVED!

Howevermuch possible it was that they would wake up because of the shifting weight of you sitting on the edge of the bed, she is much more likely to wake up to the sound of you wavering “Woah… oah… oah” and then in pain shouting “SH**! SON OF A…”

Much better to use the bed.

Then again, after this all happens, the inspiration may strike you to write a midnight post about it. In which case, you go to the computer room to type, sit down, and think to yourself “You know, if I’d walked here in the first darn place, my ankle and elbow wouldn’t hurt.”

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.

“I don’t know how man and women actually sleep together, you know?”

That was one of the things Clancy mentioned in an offhand way the weekend that we first met. Having developed a mild attraction to her, this statement caught my interest. She was a medical student. Did I really need to draw her a diagram? Of course, she was actually talking about the act of sleeping together.

Prior to Clancy, I’d never lived with a woman. I’d rarely had the opportunity to even sleep with a woman. Julie lived with her parents and I lived in the Southern Tech University dorms during most of our relationship together. Evangeline was reluctant for the same reasons that a guy that picks up a girl in a bar is afraid to be seen for breakfast the next morning. It happened with some others, but none of them had a presence in my life that sustained long enough for me to ever get used to it. So it remained a rare treat.

Why a treat? It’s handy to have a living, breathing bedwarmer. And something to lean against and affectionately into. And a sense of belonging somewhere in some abstract sort of way. Belonging next to someone. Sort of like the holding of hands. The reminder that you’re not alone even if the person that you are sleeping with is not a sexual partner or an officially established relationship partner.

Then I married Clancy and suddenly I had someone to sleep with.

Every night.

Well, actually not every night, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

To bring me back to Clancy’s infamous quote, there are disadvantages, too. You no longer have domain over the entire bed for your own sprawling pleasure. And, if you snore like I sometimes do, you get periodic pokes to get on your side so that you’ll stop. And if you’re sleeping with a snorer, you have to do the poking. You have to be careful when you get up to use the john.

For Clancy and I specifically, there are three main issues. One of sound, one of temperature, and one of timing. On the timing front, she and I get up at different times. She likes to straddle the alarm clock. It used to be that she could play that game for an hour or more, but one of the sacrifices she’s made in the name of us is that she has mostly cut that out. She does have a dawn light, though, and if she gets up before me it generally wakes me up. Or if her alarm goes off in the morning even once and I have to be up in less than 45 minutes, I can’t go back to sleep (for the most part). When I get up before her, it usually means that her reading light is on when I want to go to sleep.

The temperature thing is pretty straightforward. I like to sleep in warmth and she likes to be snuggled up into blankets in the cold. Back in Estacado I would turn off the AC in the summer when she wasn’t around and wake up in a glorious sweat.

The biggest thing, though, is sound. When I was single, I had to listen to music when I went to sleep. Not just music, but specific music. It had to be something that wasn’t jarring (no Eminem, for instance) and it had to be something I was familiar with. If I wasn’t familiar with it, I would typically pay extra attention to the music to the detriment of my sleep.

Clancy doesn’t like music when she goes to sleep. At all. This is something that I have more-or-less capitulated on. I’ve learned to sleep without music. In fact, until the move out here I didn’t even have a device with which I could listen to music. When we set up here, I recast one of my pocket PCs into a bedside stereo.

When she’s on a obstetrics rotation, she is usually working the overnight in one of every four nights. This is not a good thing, on the whole. I don’t like coming home and knowing that she’s not going to be here (and that the following night she will be catching up on lost sleep). But it does have its advantages. It is the one night when I can listen to whatever music I want at whatever volume I want. I get to sleep quicker. I enjoy my journey to sleep more (though, to be fair on that front, she doesn’t have a problem with me listening if she is in the bed and I am going to sleep before her).

It also gives me better dreams. I like dreaming. Unless it’s some terrible nightmare, of course. But I don’t just like good dreams, but almost all (non-nightmarish) vivid ones. I like analyzing them. Not so much in the sense of “what does the freight train in the distance mean?” but rather “what were the feelings I had in that dream and how can I use it in my writing. It also allows a certain freedom to feel things that are out-of-place in my life. Sadness when I have little to be sad about in my day life. Lovelorn when I am happily married. Happily attached to someone back when I was alone. It lets me see people that I never get to see anymore and that I will never get to see again.

I think the music helps me remember my dreams at the expense of the quality of my sleep. I wake up more frequently throughout the night so I catch glimpses of more of the dreams that I have. Though I also wonder if part of it is that it attaches my dreams to something in my waking world making it more likely to survive the chasm between sleep and wake and slow down the speed at which my mind drowns the memories of my sleep after I wake.

Really, I don’t care about the alarm clocks and the dawn light and the sock I sometimes wear over my eyes. The dreams and the ability to listen to music as I do go to sleep are about the only real advantages to my fourth-nightly cold bed.

Since getting married, I don’t like sleeping alone so much.

But I do like getting to listen to music when I sleep.

Lizardbreath thinks that there is money to be made in durable condoms for the kid that keeps a condom in his wallet for years on end while he waits to get lucky.

That reminds me of a little story that’s neither here not there. Many years ago I was dating a young woman that let me know that it might be a good idea if I had some condoms around and asking if I had a waffle-maker, waffle mix, and maple syrup so that she could make some breakfast the morning following our date. She actually managed to make that statement and ask that question in a single sentence despite it being our second date with nothing of consequence happening on the first. She was funny that way.

I told her that she would need to bring over her own waffle-maker and waffle mix but that I would take care of the other. Unfortunately, as luck would have it I did not have any condoms around. So at the last minute I headed out to the local pharmacy. All they had was the 25-pack for something like $20. $20! I plopped down the money and said to myself, “This condom supply had better last me a very long time. I don’t want to need to buy any more any time soon.”

Then, a few minutes later, I said to myself, “Wait a minute. That’s exactly what I want!”

A couple days ago, I looked and the mirror and discovered that I got a papercut… on my forehead.

I thought to myself that I must have rubbed paper against it at some point. At least it looked like a paper cut. What else makes a cut that looks like that?!

Then, this evening, I noticed that I had two more cuts that were identical in nature though much smaller.

Cuts on the forehead tend to bleed a lot. Professional wrestlers (of the entertainment variety) cut their foreheads when they need bloody faces because they bleed so much and hurt so little. I remember when an battery pump for an air mattress fell on my head, it gushed blood. Whatever it was that cut my head resulted in no blood whatsoever, but definitely left a visible mark. Or three marks. I can buy that I might slide paper against it wrong once, but three different times? That just made no sense.

I think I figured it out, though. I have a little table by my bed. I think I must be laying my head against it and maybe rubbing it just enough to leave a mark. I move around a lot in my sleep and I’m used to sleeping up against a wall, so that makes a bit of sense. I guess I’ll have to get a blanket or something.

Or maybe I’ll just keep scratching up my head and look like a total badass professional wrestler!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I present to you The Summary Table of Contraception Efficacy

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

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

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

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

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

Though I don’t have nearly the kinds of problems that my wife does, there are some mornings that I just don’t want to get out of bed. Fortunately for me, my office is generally flexible about such things and I just have to shoot my boss an email letting him know when I’m going to be in and I can go back to sleep. Typically, the extra hour of sleep benefits everyone. It benefits me because the sleep feels so good, it benefits my employer because I am more awake and alert throughout the day, and it benefits the drivers on the road because I am not driving half-asleep.

The dangers of sleep deprivation are well known and I needn’t go over them here except to say that I really think that we really need to consider adding weight to them. That’s a topic for another time. The purpose here is not to talk about sleep, but to talk about waking up.

It is my fervent belief that our bodies are at least partially programmed to rise with the sun and I think that we do ourselves a tremendous disservice when we try to jam this programming.

Above I talk about the benefits of getting an extra hour of sleep. The thing is, though, it’s not the extra sleep that I believe does it but rather when it is that I am getting out of bed. I average probably about six hours of sleep a night. If I go to bed at 11 and wake up at 5, I am a lot more tired than I am if I go to bed at 1 and wake up at 7. In the former case, it can make me upwards of 45 minutes to “wake up” and in the latter case I am out the door in fifteen minutes. If I can get out of bed at 8:30 or 9, I am in awesome shape.

This is regardless of when it is that I go to bed.

In a case of Adventures of Missing The Point, I refer you to the comment section of Megan McArdle’s blog. McArdle points to a study suggesting that starting school later helps students achieve more. She talks about nocternalism and hours of sleep, but comment after comment says - completely ignoring the cited study - that starting school later wouldn’t actually help the students because they would just go to bed later. The term I have for this is “rhetorical autopilot” wherein a person has already come to a conclusion on a particular issue and when confronted with someone that disagrees with them, they do not listen to the grounds of disagreement but rather explain their point of view as if the other person had said nothing but what they’d heard before.

The issue is not how much sleep a kid will get under the new regime, but rather how well they wake up. I think that some people really need just a little sunlight (I fall more into this category, I think), some people need a few hours of sunlight to slowly wake up (my wife, for instance) and some people need practically no sunlight (my father). In other words, the later in the day we get started, the more people we have at their best.

Unfortunately, we’re moving in the opposite direction. Commute times to work are getting longer and longer, for instance, necessitating earlier and earlier bedtimes. As school schedules get larded with more and more after-school activities and kids take after school jobs, high school students are expected to get up earlier rather than later.

Obviously, we do have to draw the line somewhere. Even if 10% of the population cannot get up gracefully at any point before noon, we can’t just start the workday at that time for their benefit. What the heck would people like me do in the morning? It’d split what little recreation time we have in half. Also, scattering scheduling is also somewhat complicated. It’s helpful to have everyone in an office during the same general hours. Sometimes this is not the case and employers are obstinate in their refusal to give employees more leeway, but much of the time a standard 9-hour day makes sense.

Unfortunately, the one thing we can do from a public policy perspective is something we not only don’t do, but are actively doing the opposite. I speak of Daylight Savings Time. Daylight Savings Time is built around the notion that we want to save the daylight for later in the day. That’s all well and good, but we’re taking it from where I honestly believe that we need it more: the morning. Last year, congress even went so far as to lengthen DST making the number of weeks where we have to go to work groggy increased by four.

They say that decisions are made by those who show up. I’d be willing to bet that the kinds of people that get elected to congress are more naturally energetic than the rest of the population. They’re also I’d bet much more likely to be morning people. As too are their contributors and advisors. Unfortunately, they probably equate nocternalism with laziness or instant-gratification. That’s unfortunate, because they make things more difficult for everyone else.

I had a dream a few nights back about my ex-girlfriend Evangeline. I was sitting alone on a couch with her. We were talking about this and that. I don’t really remember what. We weren’t flirting, but there was an uncomfortable warmth and ease. It was reminiscent of when we talked after I had met Clancy. There was the feeling that conversation between us was never this easy when it mattered most.

She paused and interrupted me. “There’s something I need to tell you…”

I nodded. “I know. I read it on his blog. When is the wedding?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I thought about emailing you or calling you. But I had no idea what to say.”

—-

The dream was unusual only insofar as it was picture perfect for what could have taken place. I have been mulling over what kind of congratulations to give her off and on since I found out about her pending marriage. I feel like I shouldn’t feel anything at all, but in a way I do. It’s neither happiness (which would be appropriate) nor regret (which would be unfortunate in more than one way). It really isn’t often that I feel something that I cannot easily identify.

The subject of dreams has been making the rounds lately. That of course means that you want to hear about mine. Actually, nothing to report as far as recent dreams go, but having spent the weekend at my aunt’s house, near my grandmother’s, I thought I would pass along a dream I used to have every time I spent the night and my grandmother’s house.

It took place in my grandmother’s back yard. I would be back there playing something or another and then I would be ganged up upon by the Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote. They would proceed to throw tennis balls at me and I would try to dodge them. How successful I was varied a good deal from dream to dream. I do know that I never tossed an appropriate counter-toss. Then, at the end of most dreams, my father, in the guise of mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, would come pick me up (there was access to a road from the back yard). We’d drive off and that would be the end of that dream.

Note, this is the last of the Walt series. I skipped last week because I didn’t want HC to become too fixated on that particular tragedy. Next week I’ll probably be talking about basketball.

It was up to me to break the news of Walt’s death to his two closest other friends, my then-girlfriend Julie and my pay Kyle. It was a very long night. Walt and I were close, but Walt and Julie were closer and it hit her a lot harder than it hit me. She had fewer friends than I did and next to me Walt was the only really close friend that she had. It was, to an extent, up to me to be the strong one.

So I spent most of my time trying to figure out the logistics of what had happened. Did he go out with the intention of killing himself? If so, why didn’t he take the gun? Or did he take the gun and his step-dad didn’t realize it? There were drugs in his system and I had been unaware of significant drug use on his part. Had he been using them for a long time? Was there a side of him that I, one of the closest friends he had, was unaware of? The drugs honestly surprised me a little more than the suicide did. So did the drugs take a depressed guy and make him suicidal? Was he suicidal and tried to take the drugs to cope? If he was strung out or whatever how did he drive home, take the gun, and drive out to the woods to do the deed? Did he take the gun to shoot cans or something? A passtime that I would have unfamiliar with if he regularly did things like that.

I spent my time nibbling around the edges of the issue at hand. You can only do that so long before something gives. It came to me in a dream.

I was at the football field of my junior high. No idea what I was doing there. Walt was sitting in the bleachers. “Walt! Oh, my God! Walt! You’re alive!” I lamely exclaimed.

He had a confused look on his face. Then he reassuringly smiled. “Oh, right, there was a misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding? I attended your funeral.”

“Well, it must not have been my body, right?”

“Must not,” I said. I ran and embraced him. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you. What are you doing here? You didn’t even go to school here.”

“Here is as good a place to be as anywhere. I was homeschooled. I didn’t go to junior high anywhere. So I’m here because you went here.”

“Huh?”

“This is where you were at your lowest. This is where you came close to wanting to die. It would make the most sense that I would appear here, wouldn’t it?”

I still didn’t understand. He’d been down, sure, but the biggest evidence of how down he was was the suicide, which was apparently erroneous. “Why would you want to be where I was depressed?”

“Because maybe then you would understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Why I did what I did. I need you to understand. No, actually, you need you to understand.”

“What did you do? You never killed yourself.”

“Oh. Right.”

“So there’s nothing to understand. Because I didn’t understand why you did it.”

“Why wouldn’t I do it?”

“What?”

“Why wouldn’t I kill myself?”

“Because…”

“Why?”

“I… ahhh..”

“Why shouldn’t I just take this gun, aim it at my head, and pull the trigger?” He asked.

I had no idea where the gun came from, but in his right hand he was holding a rifle. “Because that’s not the answer,” I lamely replied.

“Yeah, right. I’m fucking dead and here you are still criticizing my actions. You can’t even give me the last action I committed on earth without criticizing me for it.”

That didn’t make sense for a couple of reasons. First because I didn’t always criticize him. We had our differences and I gave him my two cents, but I was usually supportive of the decisions that he made and sometimes took to defending even the ones that I disagreed with. or at least I thought. But mostly it didn’t make sense for another reason. “But you didn’t…”

“Oh, get real, Will. You attended my funeral.”

“But you said…”

“And you attended it because I took a gun and put it to my head like this. And shot myself just like this!” BAM. He pulled the trigger and blood went everywhere. His face was all bloody, though he was still standing.

“Walt! What the fu…”

“And even now you can’t come up with a reason why I shouldn’t do it. Or can you? Tell me why I shouldn’t do it? Why I shouldn’t have done it.”

“Because people care for you?”

“So it’s all about you? Why should I want to live?” BAM.

I stood there silent. I couldn’t understand what was happening. He kept shooting himself. Part of his head was missing. But there he was, standing and taunting me.

“Tell me! I am a disgusting sinner in the eyes of God, my father didn’t even attend my funeral. My best friends stopped calling me. Suzanne betrayed me and Julie is all yours even though you don’t love her half as much as I do. Tell me what I have to live for! Tell me!!” BAM. BAM.

“Come on, Walt…”

He just kept screaming at me to tell him what he had to live for. I kept sputtering out, too shocked and devestated to answer him. “Tell me! Tell me!” BAM. “Tell me…” BAM. As he screamed and kept shooting himself, tears were streaming out of the half of his face that he had left.

And I woke up, sobbing and crying myself. I had plans with Julie that night, but I called to cancel them citing a sick stomach. Hubert wasn’t around and I didn’t want him to see my like that, so I headed out to work. I’d recently bought a 1998 Bob Schneider CD which had a song that was almost a perfect description of the range of emotions (and non-emotions) that I had been feeling. I took the CD to work with me. Once I got into the empty building and settled in, I played it on repeat while I cried. I hadn’t realized how much I had been holding it in and I was ready to stop.

my friend got shot all by himself in the head just last week he narrowly escaped growing older like the rest of us will you know i don’t miss him very much at all cause i have lost the ability to feel anything at all and i got problems all of my own you see to deal them you know that i hate you all cause my friend got shot all by himself in the head just week -Bob Schneider, Suiciday