An Idea

I never write stories or even try to write novels, but I was thinking about this today. It would be funny if you had a story involving a person (like an agent) time-traveling back to Nazi Germany to complete some mission, and the mission was put into peril when they had to wait for a late train. Imagine the annoyance at learning that the canonical one good thing about life under fascism was not true.

(Come to think of it, that is sort of how I feel when Republicans are not fiscally conservative.*)

(*No comparison of Republicans to fascists is intended or should be inferred.)

The Trouble with Infinity

Infinity has been giving me some trouble lately - not the concept, but the symbol. You see, when I write it, it comes out all wonky-looking. You'd think it's just a sideways 8, so what's the trouble?

Actually, there are two ways that I write the number 8 - I either start at the top, go counter-clockwise, and make (not coincidentally) a figure 8, or I draw the two ovals separately. It kind of just depends on my mood.

The infinity symbol doesn't look good either way, when I write it, but I recently realized that part of the problem is that, when I write it in the "figure 8" way, I start off going clockwise, which is opposite to how I write an 8. So I started writing it counter-clockwise instead. Now my infinities look great!

...and my 8's look like crap.

Idiot David Lane

So, Richard Heene pled guilty today to a felony. He's the guy who, along with his family, engineered the hoax that caused a big rescue operation to save his son who was supposed to have accidentally taken off in a helium balloon, but who was actually hiding in the garage as instructed by his parents. A lot of Americans watched this rescue effort anxiously, including some people in my office.

From the Denver Post article, we get this:

After the hearing, Richard Heene's attorney David Lane said that the seriousness of the charges reflects the anger Americans felt after learning they had been duped by the parents into fearing for Falcon's safety.

"Don't mess with America's emotions," Lane said. "America has the emotional instability of a hormonal teenager."

I can't believe the man's lawyer would say something so offensive and unprofessional. It is not "emotional instability" that causes people to become angry when they've been tricked into fearing for a young child's life, or to want restitution for a foolish crime that wasted public money on an unnecessary rescue operation.

Google Images as Visual Dictionary

One of my favorite ways to use Google lately is to look up things I'm unfamiliar with in Google Images. It doesn't work for straight-up words (like "mendacious"), but it works great for things like "hipster" or "umbros" or "engineer boots." You almost immediately find out what the thing is without the annoying mediation of words.

It's like the best visual dictionary of all time.

Stupid

If I were asked to describe myself, and if I were being honest at all, the first word out of my mouth would be "smart." It is reliably the first word to come to mind about myself, and carries more weight than any other I can think of. Being smart is central to my identity.

I am also weirdly, inexplicably defensive about being smart. When I take a class, I don't feel comfortable until I am sure that the professor has figured out that I am smart. It is the first thing I want new coworkers (people I work for, at least) to know about me. The idea that anyone - friends, bosses, or teachers - might think I am stupid is very concerning to me. I think this is odd given that it's not that likely that someone will conclude that I'm stupid. But I am very afraid of appearing stupid, probably because being smart is such an important part of my identity.

When I was a little kid, and it started to become apparent that I was "gifted," this delighted my mother. In addition to the usual delight people take in their children's positive attributes, I think there are two things about my mother that made this so. First, she's an intellectual snob, valuing intelligence and learning over most other things, and second, she herself never felt like one of the smart kids. (One of the things that attracted her to my father was that he seemed so smart.)

In therapy the other day, I was talking about what my therapist characterizes as my mother's negative attitudes towards a lot of things - for instance, the way she was so clear to me that my 2nd grade teacher's insistence on my copying my spelling words 3 times each, despite that they were very basic words I knew how to spell a hundred times over, was stupid.

Later, I was thinking about my mom's attitudes towards a lot of things, and the word "stupid" came up in my mind over and over. She especially had a lot of contempt for my dad's family, and nearly everything I told her about them was dismissed as stupid. (To give an example, I once told her that they had those rough-textured flower-shaped stickers in their bathtubs - the kind that are supposed to keep you from slipping - and she told me those were stupid.)

My grandmother once chided me, saying, "It's more important to be nice than to be smart." When I told my mom about this (I had thought it stupid), she was absolutely indignant about my having been told such a stupid and insulting thing. (Let's try to be fair, and note that my mother was probably not objecting to the idea itself, but more to the fact of its being used to chide me, given that it suggests that my intelligence was not as important as I thought, and that I wasn't as nice as I ought to be.)

Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Everything bad is bad because it is stupid.

I was also talking in therapy about my early years of school. Was I popular? I was not. Most other kids didn't like me, as best I can recall. Why might that be?

I can't remember the details of my interactions with other kids in elementary school - the ones who weren't my (few) friends, at least. But I do remember that the other kids were mostly stupid. They couldn't read out loud without pausing at the ends of the lines. They couldn't spell words. (One time in 3rd grade, one of my classmates - a friend, actually - asked me how to spell "I'll" and I told him "a-i-s-l-e" because it hadn't even occurred to me that someone wouldn't know how to spell "I'll.")

It must be hard to like a weird kid who thinks you're stupid.

I felt bad, in therapy, reporting that I thought my classmates were stupid. I felt like an adult picking on little kids. I wouldn't describe a 3rd grader as "stupid" now. I tried to make that clear to my therapist.

Intelligence and ability are intrinsically good things. Most people would choose to be more capable in any way they could - smarter, faster, fitter, stretchier, more charming, more dextrous, you name it. But the value system that equates stupid to bad is wrong. (In my head, I say it is stupid. Out loud, I'm saying it's wrong, unethical.)

Lileks once wrote that his young daughter said of Spongebob Squarepants's friend Patrick something like, "He's kind of dumb...but he has a good heart." Lileks was happy that she put it that way, and not the other way around. And I agree, but as a kid I would never have said something like that.

I think there are really two problems here. One is being taught that stupidity is the ultimate form of bad. The other, perhaps worse, is being taught to hold others in contempt. (Contempt comes naturally enough in adolescence; it doesn't need to be taught to toddlers.)

I wish I'd been raised with different values, because I find that adopting them as an adult is possible but difficult.

Living Among the Humans

Sometimes I feel like I have no idea how to do it.

Yesterday, Ed and I went over to the house of our couple friends to discuss some things that went on between us last week and to play some kind of a game. The discussion went really well and was very reasonable, though my feelings were still bruised from the stuff last week. Then we sat down to play Settlers of Catan. (We played one of the many extensions and we played on a gigantic board.)

Settlers of Catan is a resource-management strategy game that involves dice-rolling and trading cards and (in the extension we played) a barbarian who topples cities. There are five types of resource cards and three types of commodity cards (or maybe vice versa - I forget which is which). There are three dice, all with different import. There is a lot of trading between players. It's actually a pretty fantastically fun game that is not as complicated as it sounds.

One of the things that happens in this game is that every so often, the barbarian arrives on our (collective) shores. One of the things you can "build" in addition to settlements, cities, and roads is soldiers. Soldiers drive off the barbarian. If we collectively have as many soldiers as cities, the barbarian is thwarted, and the person with the most soldiers gets a special reward. If we do not, then the player or player(s) with the fewest soldiers lose a city (it is downgraded to a settlement).

So, at a certain point in the game, Ed and I each had a soldier, Christine had several soldiers, and Adam had no soldiers. We had exactly as many soldiers as cities, which is enough. It was my turn, and I was able to upgrade two settlements to cities! And as a result, when the barbarian came on the next roll, Adam lost a city. Had I not built my two cities, he wouldn't have lost the city, because prior to that point we had enough soldiers.

My experience with Adam is that he becomes very frustrated when any plan he had in a game is thwarted, or things don't go his way. This doesn't normally manifest at the end of a game that he's lost, but happens throughout the game. So on this occasion, Adam was upset that I caused his cities to be toppled, and he was (according to his claims) more upset because I had done this without even considering it. In other words, intentionally exposing him to the barbarian would have been one thing, but doing it carelessly was annoying.

I, of course, do not believe that in a zero-sum game I have any obligation whatsoever to pay attention to possible negative impacts my actions may have on others. At least, I don't have such an obligation to them; it of course may behoove me to be alert so that I can screw them over as much as possible.

So he griped about this a bit, and then we continued playing. And then the topic came up again (possibly as a result of another barbarian attack) and he gave me more shit about it. This wasn't friendly shit-giving of the ordinary kind you might have in a game, but to all appearances an expression of actual annoyance and anger over my behavior.

I got really upset and said, "Fuck you." I almost quit the game, but instead I basically sat there and cried (briefly). I was still hurt from the thing earlier in the week, remember. It of course became a pretty awkward moment around the table; everyone sat quietly and watched Ed's turn. After a little while, things returned to normal.

And then he brought it up again, bitterly. (He would deny that he brought it up. I think what happened was that Christine mentioned that Ed was the only one of us who hadn't been close to winning - the rest of us had all gotten close at one time. And then Adam went off on the barbarian thing again.) Of course, we argued with him each time (we being mostly me and Christine). But this third time I banged my hand on the table (causing pieces to jump) and basically stormed out of the room. (In the interest of fairness, I should report that I shouted, "I am sick of being hated all the time for no reason!") When I came back, we had an argument that eventually devolved into yelling. Christine started to cry. I left. Ed put his hand on Christine's shoulder and Adam told him, "Just go," so he put on his shoes and joined me in the car a couple of minutes later.

Sitting in the car, I was just...wow. Fuming. And very pumped up with adrenaline, like exhaling very heavily and shaking. And a little blood-sugar-crashy. Ed was angry as well (at Adam, not me). I drove us home, trying to kind of calm down and chill out. At home, Ed made me some spaghetti and I continued to mostly feel like crap for the rest of the evening.

It's pretty clear to me that whining and griping about someone's completely legal and predictable move during a game is obnoxious behavior. I also shouldn't have taken it personally and flipped out, but I guess I finally reached my limit of dealing with Adam's bullshit. (I don't flip out all that often, but I wish I would learn how not to do that.)

What bugs me is that I've always basically put up with Adam doing that crap in the past, and maybe I shouldn't have. I want to travel back in time and, every single time he pulls that shit, tell him to stop being a whiny little crybaby when things don't go his way. And then just walk away, quit the game (whatever game it is), if he doesn't cut it the fuck out. Maybe coddling people and tolerating their flaws isn't doing them (or me) any favors, in general.

But how do you get along with people without tolerating their flaws? I have flaws that other people surely must tolerate in order to be in relationships with me. I generally try to assume that people are acting in good faith and working on their own shit as best they can. I don't want to become extremely intolerant and turn into one of those people who heads is all filled up with lines that other people shouldn't cross, etc.

I really do not know how one is supposed to relate to other humans.

Awkward Writing

This morning my RSS feed for the Denver Post had the first couple of sentences of an article, "Denver computer guru gives a crash course on PC care":

They have been around for decades, and the American consumer has become completely accustomed to life with a personal computer. So why is it, then, that we keep screwing them up and, in the process, our lives?

Is it just me or is that, if not quite ungrammatical, at least gruesomely awkward?

Pathetic Bear Reenactment

OK, this is really bad. And it only gets worse as it goes on.

The Real Purpose of Neosporin

Last night, while cutting up some peppers, I sliced a bit of the end of my thumb off (just the skin). Trying not to drip all over everything, I had Ed apply a bandaid (feeling grateful, once again, that we have the nice fingertip kind that are shaped well for just such a purpose). It was partly successful at containing the mess.

This morning, I went to change the bandage. I was completely unable to remove the portion of the bandaid that was on the actual wound. I tried soaking my thumb in a cup of warm water for about half an hour (seriously) and it still wouldn't come off. It was too painful for me to pull it off and I didn't really want to start it leaking again.

Yes, I am the biggest wimp ever.

So I went to a clinic today to say, basically, "What the hell should I do with this thing?" In the meantime, I had cut away all of the old bandaid that I could, and put a new one on top of it.

It turns out it is important not to let a bandaid become a permanent part of your body (who knew) so the doctor took it off (almost painlessly somehow, though it did reopen the wound), had me soak my thumb for 10 minutes in lidocaine, and then had a nurse clean it up and dress it with some neosporin and a new bandage.

I feel I now know the real point of neosporin - to keep your bandaid from sticking. Duh.

Smooth Move

This morning, Ed and I went on a hike at Red Rocks. As we were leaving the house, I couldn't find my keys. Now this may sound commonplace, but it's not; I really don't misplace my keys. They should have been either on their hook or in my bag, and they weren't. I looked around all of the other obvious places, and they were not to be found.

I knew Ed had let us in the front door the previous night, so I thought perhaps I had left my keys in the car. That's conceivable - I was bringing a lot of things up. So I suggested we could go down to the car and see if they were there and, if not, I could borrow his car key and find my keys at home later.

They were on the hood of the car.

I left my keys, including my car key, overnight, on the hood of my goddamn car. And they were still there in the morning.

La Sourdine

I'm sure you've noticed how Spanish or French versions of things often come out longer. A case in point: my computer speaker has a big round button, which underneath says

PUSH TO MUTE

and also

APPLIYER POUR ACTIVER LA SOURDINE

Hee.