The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "The Ferrett" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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01:02 pm
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Colgategate
When I walk into the bathroom, I immediately enter a battle of wills with my wife. I stare down at the tube on the counter, and I grin. For I will emerge victorious.
This battle occurs once about every two months, and then takes several weeks to come to its compressed conclusion. And this battle is named, "Who throws out the toothpaste tube?"
Oh, we're stubborn, both of us. Neither of us wishes to admit defeat by throwing out a toothpaste tube with leavings in it, so the both of us manufacture tactics. There's the "drag the toothpaste across the edge of the counter to squeeze the last of it up to the tip" technique. There's the "use the still-moist bits around the lip" technique. And, of course, we cannot ignore the full-on compress with both hands, as though you were giving this fluoridated compound CPR, all in an attempt to wring the last from its body.
As the end approaches, this tube becomes two-dimensional. I walk away from a crushed strip as flat as a sheet of onion paper, thinking no, my wife can't possibly eke another molecule of tooth-cleaning gel from this.
And yet she does. She has hands stolen from a gorilla, or perhaps from some hydraulic press. And so I grasp it hard enough to turn diamonds to coal, flattening it with the force of a thousand stars, using the very scent of Aquafresh to scrub my rotting molars.
I do not know why we are like this about the toothpaste, and only the toothpaste. If we were this frugal on food, we could subsist for months upon a single stalk of broccoli. Yet this battle is about toothpaste, and only toothpaste, and the winner is the one who walks in and sees that crumpled question mark of a tube discarded in our bathroom garbage can.
I shall triumph. Perhaps this is why my teeth fell out. But does it matter? Victory is within my grasp, if only I can squeeze hard enough.
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08:48 am
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White Sky
I could see my breath for the first time this season. I stood out in my driveway, feeling the frost under my socked feet, watching the last birds fly away in the stark white sky.
It was beautiful.
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02:26 pm
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I Think Too Much
I just saw a porno video named "Born 4 Porn." For most people, that's where it would stop.
I, however, thought, "Well, is anyone really born for porn? I thought that was more of a lifestyle choice." And then I realized I was thinking about the culture I live in, at which point I started thinking about some bizarre caste system where there was "the porn caste." You were born into fucking on camera, it was your goal from day one, and whether you like it or not you will perform.
Then I started thinking of the other cultural niches that would start expanding from that. If you were the only ones allowed to perform on-camera, would the rate of teen sexting go down, lest those cleavage shots be perceived as losing status?
And what about the porn caste actors themselves? I can't imagine it'd be the most pleasurable life, given all the objectification and assumptions you'd be prone to on a daily basis - this would be a dark story, I'm sure - but on the other hand, you'd have a whole culture engineered around enforced bisexuality, massive attention to physical detail (assuming any sort of traditional beauty standards, you WILL work out if you're in the porn caste), a lovemaking style based more on visuals than on actual feeling, and a rather cynical view of people.
How would the porn caste have come about? It'd have to be a society technologically advanced enough to have a set of working cameras, and accepting enough of sex that they'd be okay with having it stratified into their culture, but different enough to have a caste system. I'd have to really think about the history of this place, try to see how that all might have fallen into place.
Would the porn caste be lower on the scale or higher? Or, perhaps, in that weird virgin/whore category of high and low? And what would it be like to be raised in a culture where, from Day One, you know your main goal is to fuck? It'd be pretty goddamned creepy. It would, in fact, be kind of a horror show.
Then I realized I was outlining a story I didn't want to write, and stepped away. And slapped myself. Come on, dude, it's a porno film. You're not supposed to linger like that.
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12:19 pm
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My Irritation With Horror
So I'm watching Drag Me To Hell on the Monster Penis System, with surround sound Dolby. And the problem I'm having is with every goddamned horror film in existence:
Step 1: Can't hear actors speaking. Turn up sound. STEP 2: SCARY THING HAPPENS, WITH BOOM-STING THUNDERCLAP THAT GINI HEARS THIRTY FEET AWAY IN HER ROOM WITH THE DOORS CLOSED.Step 3: Turn down sound. Dab excess blood from ears.
Step 4: Actors are saying something. What? Probably relevant to whatever's passing for a plot. I should hear this. STEP 5: SHRIEK! WHAM! BAM! GINI YELLS, TURN THAT DOWN. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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09:32 am
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The Rules Of The Game: Mastering The Art Of Seduction
When I picked up "Rules of the Game: Master the Art of Attraction in 30 Days" in the airport bookshop, I bought it for snark value. I'd already read everything in my carry-on bag thanks to a delayed flight, so why not laugh at the pickup artists?
I knew some of their techniques, made infamous by Barney on How I Met Your Mother: the "neg-banging" of women to lower their self-esteem and make them receptive to compliments, the canned anecdotes passed down from member to member like sacred treasures, the ludicrous formulas they devise ((C - R) + Q + SE = A) to measure attraction (that's the A). So I settled down, readying myself for an analysis of misogyny and male cluelessness.
Imagine my surprise when what I actually found was good advice.
Before I continue, though, let's be honest about the nature of manipulation: everyone does it, and nobody wants to admit it. Some people are really lucky in that manipulating others' reactions comes naturally: they know when to smile, know the right thing to say at a given time, instinctively understand how to make polite small talk. They're naturally gifted in getting other people to like them, which is a wondrous advantage; in many cases, they're no more aware that they're manipulating their audience than a cute baby is aware that he's inspiring "awwwwws" from the crowd.
Then there are the outcasts.
You know these folks, because they come in both male and female flavors. When they walk in to your party, you can feel that awkward pause wash across the conversation. They want to be nice - they are nice - but their smile's a little stiff, they nod their head at all the wrong times, and when they interrupt to say something they either get talked right over or their anecdote, laboriously told and having little to do with what you were talking about, brings an animated discussion to a screeching halt. You dread getting stuck in an elevator with them, because they're too sweet to blow off but they're somehow just a little... off.
They've hardly ever dated. They're continually told they're nice, they'll get their day in the sun - often by the same people who are blowing them off, because they're not evil, but do you want to spend an evening trapped under that awful, expectant gaze?
They don't know how to get people to like them. They suffer for this. They're 24-year-old virgins, wanting wanly to date, making spasmodic attempts at finding a partner and then giving up for increasingly longer periods of time.
"Just be nice," people say. But they've been nice. That generic advice they've been getting for two decades? Hasn't worked. They need specifics about how to make eye contact, how to tell a story, how to stand so they don't emanate that beaten-puppy aura.
And yet, because there's a clear hierarchy in society that hardly anyone ever talks about, if you weren't naturally gifted with charisma and have to develop it on your own, you must be a creeper. People in the know fucking hate hearing about the techniques that break down the fine details of getting people to like you - whether it's that Hooters waitress reading how touching you on the shoulder boosts tips, or the salesman who now knows that mirroring your body posture gets you far more likely to close the deal.
In other words, if you don't know it instinctively, the fact that you had to work to learn what the gifted do naturally is just skeevy. A Hooters waitress who touched you because she "liked" you? Oh, that's cool. The Hooters waitress who touched you for tips? OMG WHAT A HORRID THING. Even if her "like" merely means that subconsciously, she's realized that subtle flirting makes people like her back, and she has instinctively realized that being liked is a wonderful thing?
Is it a conscious effort? Hell, no, but that doesn't mean it's not manipulation.
What this means is that you have a whole class of reading that's gets pre-mocking right from the start, whether it's one of those books on how to land a husband or how to pick up a chick or how to market to a customer. "I wouldn't read that crap," some people say, because changing your personality to get better reactions from people is creepy, even if your personality has left you miserable and lonely. And those people usually say they wouldn't read that crap because they've mastered the rules of society without even thinking, and quietly consider it their birthright.
You either know or you don't. And to those who have the power, anyone who doesn't know is fucked.
But there are still the stranded, those dateless lonely people who drive folks away without ever knowing why. This book is not for you, most likely - it's written for the guys who are thirty and still sweat when they're in a room with a girl, because they don't know how to act. (They don't really know how to act with guys, either, but girls always have that extra societal pressure placed on men where you're supposed to be smooth with them.)
So you know what "Rules of the Game" does for these guys?
It breaks "socialization" down scientifically. The first couple of chapters don't even deal with women at all - it's about dealing with people. It's bare-bones exercises like "Make eye contact with five people today," or "Start three conversations with strangers." It's about breaking down how you dress, how you stand (no slouching!), your voice and how you use it (one exercise tells you to speak into a recorder and listen to yourself, giving specifics on what to look for).
Hell, there are several chapters devoted on how to tell a story. Not writing short stories, but just telling an amusing anecdote. Which is, as I realized, a vital skill in my socializing arsenal, but I'd never thought of how vital it was before now.
And it tells you how to listen, and constantly - constantly - tells you how to pay attention to what people are doing. Yes, the end goal is to get a date - referred to here as "a planned second encounter with a woman you've just met," and the fact that this is viewed as a task that requires thirty days of intensive exercises to get should tell you exactly what sort of guy this book is aimed at.
But in between the various ways you can refashion yourself to seem more appealing to women, there's a surprising amount of discussion about how your goal is to form connections that will be worthwhile even if you don't sleep with the person you're talking to.
For those who are starting from zero? It's all really good stuff.
Furthermore, the scientific approach in the book really takes the sting out of the inevitable rejections. Because when you get dismissed, as any human knows, it's hard not to take it as a rejection of you. But Rules goes out of its way to make excuses for other people - hey, they're busy, they might be wary for other reasons, if someone blows you off it means that your technique was incorrect. You're not allowed to go, "God, what a bitch," but rather are heavily pressured into going, "Well, she completely ignored me - what did I do wrong to deserve that?"
What you're do here is fulfilling quotas. You have to talk to three strangers and get a clothing store recommendation from them. That's all. Do that, and you've won for the day. And if someone won't give it to you, well, that's not the point. Just get your three. That's all you're concerned about: perfecting your technique until you get that bloodless, external goal.
It's an approach that nullifies the emotional damage of getting rejected... And yes, I know women have whole different sets of fear about strangers approaching you, which is entirely valid, but life also isn't a zero-sum game. Being turned down for a date is still something that hurts people, particularly when it comes over decades of rejection - and the exercises take that sting away by making sure you realize that hey, this is all about technique. It's not that they hate your soul, they hated what they saw.
You can work on what they saw.
In that light, the neg-bang becomes entirely different. The neg-bang (which isn't really referred to it as such in this book) is an excuse to get timid guys to do something that's often anathema to them: contradict a woman.
Because denial is a part of flirting, like it or not. If someone's just kissing your ass, agreeing with everything you say and never expressing anything of his own, then that's not flirting, that's an awful suckup. To interact with someone, you have to have the strength to stand up for your beliefs and say, "Whoo, you like country music? Lordy, that's not for me. Couldn't rope me into a George Strait concert if you tried."
To guys that timid, though, who've been taught that "being nice" is all it's about, having them take a conversation that's going well and then - to them - derail it by purposely disagreeing with someone they like is a Herculean act. They require that scientific principle that all but forces them to express their own opinions, because it's not something they'd ever do on their own. As such, there are of course exercises where you are called upon to say, "No, that's wrong." And getting them to do that is a good goddamned thing that will make them better conversationalists.
So what we have here is a book on "seduction" where 80% of it is actually not that at all. Scrape the surface, and what you'll find is a set of advice designed to get people - whether they're women or not - to like you. It's giving you all the little techniques for personal magnetism, something to amplify your personality without necessarily changing it wholesale. There are a couple of people I can think off of the top of my head who could genuinely use this book.
However.
...however.
I can also see where this approach would, over time, go desperately wrong. Because in taking the scientific approach to stave off the pangs of rejection, I can easily see where someone would take these rules and fetishize them.
I do not doubt at all that there are guys who have taken this to the limit of Total Crazy - utter nebbishes, once supplicants who spent thousands buying drinks and never getting a date out of it, who now are flush with power and want to see how far they can take this. I can easily see men running out to play the game of seducing as a replacement for self-esteem, seeing what exactly they can do with this set of rules, forgetting that the rules were guidelines to get them to a better place and not a goal in and of itself. And that is bordering on mysogyny (although given how you're treating the entire world as a scientific experiment for your pleasure, one wonders if it's not sloping towards misanthropy).
So what we have here is a paradox of a book: it's got a lot of solid advice that can take the hopeless to a point where they can, with luck and dedication, become a reasonably popular, friendly person. (And it does it in a way that's going to make them likely to pick it up, because "Rules of the Game: How To Stop Creeping People The Fuck Out" is never going to find an audience. People know they can't get dates; they often don't know they're putting out subtle, off-putting signals.)
But the method of getting those skills is something that can then be ridden beyond the pale to the point where you have a bunch of pathetic guys spouting hoary anecdotes, looking for empty love because they've never had it and now they want it all.
Those who read the book would be well advised to read the anecdotes at the end, wherein Neil Strauss discusses the crazy sex he's had in various countries. Those who've never had that kind of sex may well go, "Holy cow, a threesome! This guy is awesome!" Pay closer attention, my friend; look at how empty his life is, how full of wan longing and pathetic depression his words are, and you'll realize that you're gonna need to hop off of this game before you reach the end.
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09:14 pm
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My Latest Revelation
I have been writing new short stories as an excuse to stay away from revising old short stories - in specific, the ones that people agreed were generally pretty good on first draft, almost there. It's a lot easier to write something new and untold than to go back to wrestle with a story that I may fuck up, or - worse still - revise it to the best of my ability and still not be able to sell it.
So this last month of the year, and of the decade, will be spent exclusively revising. This is akin to spending a month scrubbing toilets in Grand Central Station, but I have too much of a backlog and too much internal reluctance to let myself get away with this. By my next-to-next Clarionniversary, I'd damn well have better revised "Riding Atlas," "Prophecy," "Shoebox Heaven," and "The Ship and the Planks," or I'm going to be in serious trouble.
No, this isn't of firm interest to you, but hey! Sometimes a journal is just a journal. Big post tomorrow. Come back for that.
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11:57 am
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I Knew I Was Fat For A Reason, Dammit
Baby, I couldn't do my post-programming Watusis were it not for a pound of sugarcake!
(Via writer Ekaterina Sedia.)
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02:48 pm
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My Capsule Review
Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995): A man with poor political skills gets in over his head.
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02:19 pm
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Everybody Needs A Gini
I was, as writers are wont to do, despairing about my career.
"The rejection slips are nicer than ever," I said to Gini. "But I'm not there. And I don't know how to get there. Clearly my prose is finally up to speed, I have a better knack of pacing - they just don't like them enough. Or I can't make them buy my central premise. And I just feel like I'm stuck."
"Remember what they told you," she said. "The guys who kept writing and writing and writing had their breakthroughs. It'll come."
"But what if I never have my breakthrough? I mean, I wrote for twenty years before Clarion, and I never would have doped out some of the flaws I have on my own. I've been writing for twenty years, and - "
"No." She put a finger over my lips. "You've been writing for a little over a year. You called a mulligan on all those other years, remember?"
I stood, stunned. For twenty years, I had zero career. Now, after a year and change, I had one pro sale and eight smaller sales. That's not where I want to be, but put in perspective, that's not bad.
"You're marvelous," I said.
She kissed me. "I know."
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11:48 am
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Different Paths
One of the things I love about life is how full of tiny details it is. So many things seemed simple, right up until I did 'em.
Take stand-up comedy, for example. I did it once. I bombed, of course. I thought I could spin a story and make people laugh, but once I actually got up there I realized how intense stand-up was. I didn't know how to stand on stage, the timing for an audience is entirely different than the timing for a single person, and the jokes that generally did well one-on-one just didn't cut it with a bunch of strangers. It was all small stuff, like the way you hold a microphone, that I'd never even considered until I got up there.
And then I saw Kat Williams' standup the other day, and in a between-schticks segment, he said something like, "It's a game. You only have five minutes, so you gotta see how many laughs you can stuff into that time frame. If you get 'em to laugh ten times in five minutes, your goal's to double that. You have to mine every laugh, so that when you leave they go, 'Hey, where'd that guy go? We want him back.'"
To do that, you have to be efficient. You have to know so many tiny details that I, as a non-stand-up comic, would never think about. But I'd love to know all of them. I love those fiddly bits.
One of the most marvelous things about the Clarion Writers' Workshop was how it stuffed me full of knowledge in such a brief period of time. I don't think I've ever learned so much in a six-week period of time, to the point where I look back at some of my pre-Clarion stuff and go, "Hey, I really didn't see that?" Now, when I read a story, I see hundreds of subtle techniques, some working, some not. Being hyperaccelerated like that really makes it starkly clear how much craft there is in writing.
There's a part of me that wants to access that alternate-self me where I'd said "fuck it" and gone balls-out to be a stand-up comic, to be an actor, to be an artist, just so I could punch through the space-time continuum and see their craft as they did.
I know it's complex. I know it's subtle. I just wish I had the eyes to view it.
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03:08 am
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Dragon Age: Beaten
I had to do something I haven't done in a long time: Adjust the difficulty level to "punk" to beat the game. This is a thing I don't normally do, but a) the final battle takes about twenty minutes, and b) the AI was failing me so badly I figured I might as well counter-cheat. Because when you have two massive tanks who, despite many urgings, stand there like morons watching the battle when your healer keeps charing in to face off the Archdemon, you get tired of watching your healer get tail-thrashed into oblivion. And once the healer goes down, well, my party was pretty much dead. After ninety minutes of "get halfway, have Wynne die, watch everyone else burn potions," I decided the AI needed some rectification.
Still, the game is over, and I have seen that final cinematic (or at least one of them), and suffice it to say it's still worth your money. I do feel an urge to play through again, as an evil character - though not quite so quickly. This might be an "over the next couple of months" thing.
The ending? Qualified. It's obviously leaving room open for sequels, and all of your "good" decisions have ramifications that may not be obvious. I like that, even if some of them feel a little like a Joss Whedon/Serenity kick in the teeth just for ending's sake.
Now I die of bed. And tomorrow, I work a long day. Whee!
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12:22 pm
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The Perfect Movie
Today, I'm watching The Royal Tenenbaums and, for the seven millionth time, proclaiming it the perfect movie. There are many reasons for this, but for me right now, it's the scene where Royal catches his sort-of ex-wife Etheline on the street that he is dying of a terrible disease, and she breaks down crying hysterically, and then a minute later he apologizes and tells her that he didn't mean it, he just wanted to reconnect. And she whaps him with her purse, and he claims he's dying again, and she peers very closely at him and whispers, "Are you or aren't you?" And suddenly, I know everything I need to know about both people in this marriage.
What's your perfect movie, and why?
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10:46 am
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From ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) andrewducker: Have Your Own Personal Jesus
Not surprising at all: God believes what you do.
"People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want," the team write. "The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."
In that, I try to be honest about my personal faith. I like to believe that God's for the causes that I am; I always keep it in mind, however, that I could be really pissing Him off.
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10:30 am
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Now That's Writing
Last night, I did something I never did before: I consulted my wife for advice on a moral quandary.
On something I was about to do in a videogame.
As such, I do have to say that though Dragon Age drags for a bit in the middle, it's a game that gives you a lot of subtle choices. Is this the right move? Who knows? Yes, as the "good" guy you just kept the noble, upstanding king on the throne... who perpetuates a caste system that stagnates his country. So was that the right move? I'm still not sure.
( Cut for spoilers and blathering RPG meandering )
So that is my final "plot" decision in the game before I go into the final battle... And because it's a moral blur, I'm honestly not sure if this is the decision I want to make. The ramifications on the game-world? I'm totally not sure whether this is correct. And it may be the mistake that sets up the plot for the inevitable Dragon Age II: Age Harder, because it seems like the kind of frail, very human idiocy that could cause generations of misery.
That's a good game. The kind I'll remember for a while.
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01:16 pm
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Alternative Worlds With Bearded Babies
I always feel a little weird when I see "having a baby" highlighted as the ultimate thing that a woman can do with her life. You know the deal: you may have a Pulitzer Prize, a fine job, wealth beyond measure, but unless you've pumped out a kid you're hollow inside.
I mean, not to bag on babies, but it's the end result of a biological function that most people are drawn to regardless. Not that having a child isn't an ordeal, but barring the barren, bearing a child is something that requires no native talent aside from a fair amount of endurance and a functioning womb.
And yet that's what's fetishized in this culture - HAVE A KID. All your other accomplishments, all that stuff you actually worked to bring about, sure sure - but when you getting knocked up?
If it was "being a mother" that was hammered home on, maybe I could get behind that, but the emphasis isn't generally on the considerable effort that goes into being a kind and loving mom. I know lots of terrible mothers who have done nothing with their lives, but people nod approvingly because they squeezed one out. And thus, the sum function of their lives has been reduced to something their bodies were designed to do anyway.
I envision a world where, for strange and Darwinian reasons, society would reward me greatly for growing a beard. People would stop me on subways to stroke it. Whole movies would be devoted to men's adolescent longing for beards, and the struggle they had because they loved their job, but what really would satisfy them was a beard. Soap operas would revolve around frail men struggling with petitioning beautiful doctors to bring their chin-hairs to luscious fruition, photographing in fine detail each shade of that five o'clock growth.
"That Bill Gates," people would say. "Sure, he's made billions, then given billions to charity. He's smart as a whip, has a beautiful wife and several intelligent children. But - " And at this point, they would lower their voice conspiratorially - " - no beard."
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08:08 am
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My Momma Always Told Me, Life Is Like A Box Of Zendikar
Whenever I write about the plight of the poor and how it might be possible to improve it, I invariably get two types of polarized reactions:
One side informs me that the system is utterly broken. The odds are stacked so high against the downtrodden that there is nothing to be done. The poor are no more able to affect their fate than a stick floating in a river, and the only action they need take is to wave their arms and hope that someone in power comes and helps them.
The other side peppily chirps about how the poor are just durned lazy! If they had the gumption that their betters did, they could all break the laws of physics and escape the gravity well of the Earth via willpower alone.
And I find myself wishing both types of commentors understood more about incremental advantage, and how it can be used as a force for good. Because really, life is like a game of Magic: the Gathering.
Bear with me. I am fully aware that is one of the nerdiest statements I have ever made... Yet it is true. And let me explain why, without getting too much into the details of Magic, how a stupid game about dragons and big-boobed angels tussling in the sky applies to - well, to a lot of dealing with life.
See, when you sit down to play a game in Magic, each player brings a deck that they built themselves. Some of these decks are massively overpowered; you'll have times when you face a deck that's engineered specifically to destroy your deck, or a deck that has a lot of expensive cards that are hard to beat, or a deck that's flat-out better than yours.
Your chances of beating these decks? Not good. The odds are against you from the start.
Yet hand a novice player a killer deck and have him play a master with a weak deck, and the master actually has a decent chance of winning. Why? Because Magic is a game of incremental advantage.
Let's say you have only a 25% chance of winning against this particular deck. But if you know when to send back an opening hand that's weak against this deck, well, you might gain a couple of percentage points. Laying your lands in the proper order and tapping them correctly might improve your chances by another percentage point. Playing your threats at the right time? Another percentage point.
Magic's a complex game, and there are a lot of places to make mistakes. But if you're really rigorous about how you learn, strengthening every weak spot you can, then you can turn an guaranteed loser of a deck into - well, something better, if not spectacular. Sometimes you can get that 40% win chance to a 60% win chance - but more often, you've upped that 25% win chance to a dreary 40%. Despite your doing everything you can, thanks to a situation you had little control over, your outlook still isn't good.
But sometimes, the uber-deck stumbles. It doesn't draw the cards it needs, or your opponent doesn't know how to play it, or you get the right series of cards to pull it out - and if you know how to take advantage of that, then you can pull wins out of nowhere.
There are a lot of things you can, and should do, to prepare - yet none of those things guarantee a win. The best players routinely go to gigantic tournaments, and don't get the right draws, and bomb out. There's a lot of luck in Magic, good and bad, and all you can do is hone those percentages so that everything that's under your control will go your way, will.
The rest? Who knows?
Which is why I get irritated by both sides of the "It's hopeless/it's ALL HOPE!" debate.
Because yes: poor in a given system have a system that is largely stacked against them. It's never going to be easy to beat that shit, and there are a lot of very smart people in ghettos who did everything right and never got the damn breaks. Like Magic, sometimes you can make every correct move and still get the crap beaten out of you by a better deck. That's life.
But that also doesn't mean that poor people should just sit around passively and wait for rescue from an outside source. There are things you can do to up your percentages - smart moves that can be taught (and often are not taught because any given group of poor people doesn't get a whole lot of education on beating their system), and should be. Yeah, it's stacked against you, but you still retain some power to affect your life - and if that system ever stumbles, if there's ever an opening, then you should be as fully educated as you can to drive a goddamned truck through it.
And that's not blaming. Saying, "Hey, there's more you can do" doesn't magically negate the fact that yeah, most of the things in a poor person's environment are dedicated to ignoring, humiliating, or stopping them. It doesn't ignore the fact that doing the right thing in those circumstances is a fucking behemoth of an accomplishment, one that sometimes involves swimming upstream with both your arms tied behind your back. If someone can't do it, well, hey, lots of people can't.
But not doing it, understandable though it may be, robs them of those incremental percentage points. It can hand them a defeat when, with another decision or preparation, they might have had a triumph. Those percentage points do not guarantee a win, nothing does, but by God it gets them a lot closer to a chance at victory.
I want them to win.
We can all debate what a given downtrodden segment needs to do in order to triumph, of course: that's a long-standing debate, with a lot of legitimate space between understanding the realities on the ground without making excuses for those realities. I just wish that both the pollyannas who think that the human spirit is infinite and the Debbie downers who think that circumstances define you irrevocably would look at reality and understand that no, the odds aren't good. But while you're working to make the odds more even from the outside (which, as part of any balanced fix, you absolutely should), the principle should be clear:
It's a noble goal to help the people under the gun understand how to make their own odds better.
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05:02 pm
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Thank God I Found You!
From a spam mail:
"My company makes the computer memory USB flash drives that allow you to store and carry information, pictures, and presentations from your computer."
Oh my GOD! So YOU'RE the one! I'd been wandering around, trying to find the manufacturer who makes those rare and unique items - and by some crazy random happenstance, it turns out the one company who has a stranglehold on USB memory drives has contacted ME! Oh, thank God! Now we can proceed with our customized marketing schemes involving flash drives!
You wouldn't happen to know who makes these "pen" things, would you? I can't figure out who's in charge of manufacturing those, either, and I need some ones with my business name on it. I'll pay! I'll pay lots!
Yours truly,
Lost in the 18th Goddamned Century
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11:29 am
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I've Heard Two Songs About Fireflies And Liked 'Em Both
So it's a little crazy on Ye Olde Ferrett front between deadlines, writing, and family visiting, so I have at least three essays I want to take the time to write and haven't gotten to: - A discussion on edges in the game of Magic: the Gathering and how they apply to life
- A review of "Rules of the Game," the pickup manual workbook for lonely men (which should surprise some people)
- Describing a new player archetype: Chaotic Brutal
Alas, all of these require the time to write them, which I don't have right now. Probably tomorrow.
Anything you'd like to see me write about? I'm always happy for ideas, even if the answer to "What do you think of X?" is "I agree with him," "I think it's bad," or "I've never heard of it."
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04:19 pm
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This Gives Me Hope
If no less a man than Ray fucking Bradbury said he had to write a story a week for the better part of a decade to unlock his magnificence, then so shall I proceed. Even though, come on, I'm not gonna be Ray Bradbury.
My latest batch of rejections have been essentially, "We couldn't find anything wrong with it, but it's not for us." Which is, as it turns out, frustrating on a whole new level (it's the literary equivalent of "It's not you, it's me"), but at least I make progress. I'll keep sending out, and counting those eighty-four rejections I've gotten since Clarion, and keep pounding the keys.
Because, hey, man. Ray fuckin' Bradbury. He's tattooed on my soul, which I think is staggeringly appropriate.
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01:05 pm
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The Bad Son
SCENE: GINI, my BLIND MOTHER, and I are all discussing her Living Will. We have gotten past the bits about unconsciousness and are now discussing the post-mortem wishes.
GINI: Now. Do you want to donate your organs?
BLIND MOTHER: *hesitates*
ME: You could donate your eyes to someone you don't like.
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