elliott writes

NASCAR & Integrity

2011-02-25T13:16:00.000-08:00

The other day, the US House of Representatives denied passage of a bill that would eliminate federal funding for advertising of the US Military on NASCAR cars.

Earlier, the same congress slashed funding for Planned Parenthood and Title X, the LIHEAP, NPR, PBS, and Americorps, cut funding for the EPA to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and rejected numerous defense spending reductions.

I suppose it depends on your politics whether Republican congresspersons are wholly self-interested, NASCAR-loving "rednecks" with absolutely no integrity - or patriots who stick to their core values.

As a result of some conversations this weekend, however, I've learned that, as "enlightened," "open-minded," and "liberal" as I may be I'm super judgmental of folks I perceive to be closed-minded. So it's time for a thought experiment.

What if you believed that a vicious, world-wide conspiracy of armed and dangerous terrorists were mobilizing to destroy your home country, and patriotism is one of your core values? What if you believed that the conspiracy was so vast, and so dangerous, and so illogical and backward that there was literally no chance of any kind of diplomatic solution to the disagreements between these terrorist killers? What if you believed, literally, that they are the embodiment of evil?

Then, wouldn't it make sense to prioritize marketing the US Army (the growth of which is a necessity, remember, considering the scenario above) to NASCAR watchers, who tend to be both lower-income and Southern (two heavy markets for Army recruiting), even when doing so conflicts with one's other values ("fiscal responsibility")?

The thinking could go, "I know that it's important to help poor people heat their homes in the winter, but they won't even have homes if (when) Al-Qaieda takes over our country, installs Sharia law, rapes all of our women and murders all the good Christians. Preventing that from happening is more important as it affects all of us."

I don't buy it, but I could see how some people with values radically different from my own could (though it's hard for me to believe a rational person having those values without simultaneously being burdened by Islamophobia, Xenophobia, Orientalism, etc).

By the way, Obama's budget also cut funding for LIHEAP. Food for thought?

My favorite music of 2010

2011-01-08T11:35:00.000-08:00

It's a week or so late, but...

A lot of this stuff has seen life on my Quarterly Mixes, click back to see what I was into each quarter of this year and what made the cut through to this "Best of 2010" Mix.

It's two CDs because I couldn't trim it down to a respectable single-cd level. I couldn't figure out how to split all of the songs into two different CDs (I originally had them flowing as one piece) - but as the genres vary, I decided to try and keep my original order intact but put most of the upbeat songs - either by BPM, lyrical content, dance-ablility, etc. - on the 1st CD and the downbeat songs on the 2nd CD.

If you see a song on here, and it's different than a song from the same artist that was on one of my quarterly mixes, that's either because 1) I wanted to branch out and get some deeper cuts from that record onto here or 2) I realized that, since that quarterly mix came out, I like this song better than that one. Nearly every song on here means I really liked the album that it came from, not necessarily that that single song was one of my favorites from the entire year, you dig?

Click the image to download. They should show up in iTunes with album art, track numbers, etc. So don't worry. Also remember - if you like these songs, pay for them! This is just a sample. Go buy music!

1. Lost in the World (ft. Bon Iver) / Kanye West // My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
2. Umm Hmm / Erykah Badu // New Amerykah Part II: Return of the Ankh
3. Cold War / Janelle Monae // The ArchAndroid
4. Can Change / LCD Soundsystem // This Is Happening
5. O.N.E. / Yeasayer // Odd Blood
6. Thieves in The Night / Hot Chip // One Life Stand
7. White Sky / Vampire Weekend // Contra
8. Convertiible Balloon / Wavves // King of the Beach
9. When I'm With You / Best Coast // Crazy For You
10. Low Shoulder / Toro y Moi // Causers of This
11. Vesuvius / Sufjan Stevens // The Age of Adz
12. Biting Your Tail / Iron & Wine // Walking Far From Home
13. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) / Arcade Fire // The Suburbs

1. Falling From the Sun / The Album Leaf // A Chorus of Storytellers
2. Don't Leave My Mind / Azure Ray // Drawing Down the Moon
3. The Resistance / Drake // Thank Me Later
4. If You Want It / TV Girl // TV Girl EP
5. Always On My Mind / Reading Rainbow // Prism Eyes
6. Goons / Small Black // New Chain
7. Castles in The Snow / Twin Shadow // Forget
8. I Really Do / Seapony // Seapony EP
9. Good Intentions Paving Company / Joanna Newsom // Have One On Me
10. Honey Come Home / Head and the Heart // Head and the Heart
11. My Girl the Horse / Fences // Fences
12. I'll Build You A Fire / Seabear // We Built A Fire
13. Like the Wheel / The Tallest Man On Earth // The Wild Hunt

What did I miss? Any glaring omissions?

First Words Since

2010-10-12T15:56:00.001-07:00

I re-watched this today. Years later, still my favorite poem.

Quotation Analysis

2010-07-14T12:02:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all, "Quotation Analysis" is a new blog theme/meme/gimmick where I quote someone else and then analyze their quote.

Today's quote comes from Glenn Beck, quoted at this ridiculous tea-party bullshit blog that has a better layout than mine does.

I have taken a lot of hits from people like Rev. Jim Wallis on “social justice.” But I needed you to know there is a poison in some of our churches. Social justice — the way Jim Wallis and Jeremiah Wright understand it — isn’t in the gospel, neither is redistribution of wealth.

Wait, really? I seem to remember a certain passage about a "rich young ruler." From Luke:

[18] A certain ruler asked him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"...

[22] ...he said to him, "You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

I figure you can argue the specifics. I mean, what does he mean by "If you want salvation, sell everything you have and give to the poor" really mean? He's just using a metaphor, right? Beck's (and many, many mainstream conservative pastors and church leaders') argument is that "social justice" or "liberation theology" advocates for a government redistribution of wealth, and that instead we should be free to do what we will with what we've earned.

But the argument that the Bible doesn't quite explicitly support redistribution of wealth is disingenuous at best. But what do we really expect from the likes of Glenn Beck?

New Blog Theme/Meme: Overheard in Capitol Hill

2010-07-12T20:40:00.000-07:00

Overheard in Capitol Hill is a new blog theme/meme/gimmick where my loyal blog readers can make fun of the "effing hipsters" that populate the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, WA, and the "sillie" things that they say.

► Young man to another young man: "If I were going to, like, see someone about my problems... I'd fucking tell my wife, you know?" Overheard at Victrola on 15th

► Man to cell phone: "Well, when we got divorced, everyone was so pissed off at us that it didn't work out." Overheard at Victrola on 15th

► Young girl 1: "So we all started making out, even though no one knew each other."
Young girl 2: "Oh, that's so nice." Overheard at Stumptown on 12th

Have you Overheard something blog-worthy in Capitol Hill?

Five Legitimate Ways to Respond to the Oil Spill

2010-07-09T14:37:00.000-07:00

There are over 750,000 members of the "Boycott BP" group on Facebook.This is, frankly, a travesty. Of course, you can't put too much stock in how many members there are in a facebook group, but still... The level of awareness of the BP Oil Spill in the gulf is tremendous and heartening; and I hope it changes our attitudes and lifestyles and alters the way we think about the cost of oil - but boycotting BP is a useless waste of time. Sharon Begley at Newsweek hits at the crux of the issue quite well:

It’s understandable that consumers are furious and frustrated by the gulf catastrophe and want to punish those responsible... [but] BP and the 32 other operators of deepwater wells in the gulf are there not because they find it technologically interesting to see how deep they can drill... They’re drilling because of America’s—and the world’s—insatiable lust for oil.

The U.S. consumes 800 million gallons of petroleum per week, according to the Energy Information Agency. The only way to make this the last oil spill in the gulf is to make oil obsolete.

...Just as buying green products is better for our eco-esteem than it is an effective way to save the planet, so consumer boycotts of the latest oil company to run afoul of public opinion are emotionally satisfying but ultimately futile.

A boycott does nothing but punish the actual owner of whichever gas station you bypass (to ostensibly go purchase your gas from some other gas station). We need to recognize that the oil spill is our fault because we demand oil and we demand it cheap. Reducing our demand for oil is the only way, short of advocating for a government solution (do this too!), to reduce drilling for oil - to reduce the myriad environmental impacts oil production wreaks on our planet.

But the question is always, well what do I do about it then? Here are some simple suggestions.

The best thing about this list? Almost everything will not only reduce your personal demand for oil but will often save you money as well or have other positive benefits. Sure, they are inconvenient - but next time you see a picture of a oil-soaked pelican, be reminded that inconvenience is necessary to manifest any kind of legitimate change. Here is the list:

1. Change the way you travel. You can't carpool every time you go somewhere. But you probably do go to the same place by usually the same route, quite often - work. Do any of your co-workers live nearby you? Find out, and put together a carpool. If you shared your ride to and from work with one other person half the time, you would reduce the demand for oil that your daily commute produces by fully 25%. Imagine if you did it more frequently or with mor co-workers? You would also save a ton of money over time on gas and car maintenance. Don't know how to carpool? Check out Rideshare Directory, Craigslist Rideshare, Zebigo, or just talk to some of your co-workers.

Here's an alarming statistic: "25% of all trips are made within a mile of the home, 40% are within two miles of the home, and 50% of the working population commutes five miles or less to work. Yet more than 82% of trips five miles or less are made by personal motor vehicle" (League of American Bicyclists). Do you really need to get in the car for a one or two-mile trip? Consider walking, public transit, or bicycle. Not only will this reduce your gas demand, but all of these options will help make you healthier as well.

If you're in the market for a new car, really think about what you need. Do you need an SUV, really? Or would a smaller car work? Would a hybrid or even an electric car work? At least give it some thought. And if you're traveling/vacationing soon? Consider the cost/benefit of taking the train instead of flying - time, cost, and environmental impact should all factor in.

2. Buy local, sustainable food. "Food miles" isn't as popular a term as it once was among environmentalists - I think a lot of people realized that factory farming methods and pesticide use were bigger culprits in terms of pollution than the distance food traveled to get to you. But since we're talking about the oil spill here, I'll mention it. Your food may have traveled across the country or world to reach your local supermarket. Buying local reduces the distance your food travels and thus reduces the gas necessary to transport your food to you.

Most cities have plenty of local farmer's markets (especially in Seattle, and especially now that it's summer). And while some people think that buying at the farmer's market is more expensive, that's largely not true - especially when you consider the true cost of cheap supermarket food (remember those pelicans?). The farmer's market is also a great place to get high-quality meat, if you're into that - but see #5 for a meat-centric recommendation.

Another fantastic option is the CSA Share. Basically a CSA is signing up to get a box of fresh produce from a local farm. They either deliver the box to a "depot" close to where you live or directly to your home! This has a host of benefits besides the "local" aspect - the food is fresh and tasty, usually organic, in-season, and for some CSAs you don't get to choose what goes in the box - meaning you get to learn how to cook a bunch of new things as well.

3. Shop at the thrift store. Many fabrics, including polyester, are made directly from petroleum. But whether it's cotton or polyester, almost all clothing has to be processed with textile machinery, and because almost all major clothing manufacturers have their clothes made overseas, they then have to be shipped here in airplanes and then trucked to your local outlet.

By purchasing second-hand clothing, you avoid all of this (and, of course, save a ton of money). If you are concerned with quality or safety risks associated with thrift shopping, or are worried about style, then focus your shopping efforts at Crossroads, Red Light, Buffalo Exchange, or other high-end "consignment" stores. You can often get name-brand, high-end clothes for a fraction of the price they were new - and usually in next-to-new conditions.

You can buy almost anything used, and in good condition too. Think about the factories that make almost everything that you use - your furniture, for example. They all use energy (usually oil) to power their machinery. Taking one more item off the production line via not purchasing it new reduces your oil demand by that much.

4. Ditch Plastic. Plastic is made directly from petroleum. It is either in or wrapped around almost every product that we buy - and contrary to popular belief, much of it is not recyclable (though even if it was, most people don't care - 80% of plastic bottles go unrecycled. Do you recycle your water bottle every single time?). The most obvious culprits are plastic water bottles and plastic bags.

Plastic water bottles are incredibly convenient - that's why they're so ubiquitous. But spend $15.00 on a reusable metal water bottle and you will never need another plastic water bottle! And once you get used to toting it around, it becomes as convenient as a plastic bottle would be. Water bottling companies have also convinced us that their water is more "pure" or "clean" - this is simply untrue. If taste is the issue, then getting a filter for your tap water is another cheap, more-sustainable solution.

Luckily for the environment, many grocery stores are starting to charge for plastic grocery bags. These are also created with petroleum and sit in landfills literally forever. They can be recycled, but most people don't do it correctly. Get a reusable "green" bag, use paper, or don't get a bag at all! If what you've bought can be carried in your hands, do you really need a bag? If you forget to bring your "green" bag to the grocery store (it happens, but hanging them up near your front door, or keeping some in your car at all times, can help), remember that you don't need to throw away your paper or plastic bags after using them. They can be re-purposed for hundreds of household tasks!

Following Suggestion #2 can help reduce your plastic usage as well - bring a "green" bag to the farmer's market and pick up your groceries that way - no plastic required! The more you buy direct - non-processed food, used clothing and goods, bartering for items at swap meets and garage sales, etc. - the less packaging you consume (and then throw away), meaning the less plastic you create demand for.

5. Reduce your consumption of meat. No matter what else you as an individual do, if you stopped eating factory-farmed meat it would literally be the most helpful thing you could do as an individual for the Earth. The amount of water, grain, and energy that goes into feeding cows, pigs, and chickens is astronomical, and is an incredibly inefficient use of natural resources.

Speaking of oil specifically, however:

Vast amounts of oil and gas are used as raw materials and energy in the manufacture of fertilisers and pesticides, and as cheap and readily available energy at all stages of food production: from planting, irrigation, feeding and harvesting, through to processing, distribution and packaging. In addition, fossil fuels are essential in the construction and the repair of equipment and infrastructure needed to facilitate this industry, including farm machinery, processing facilities, storage, ships, trucks and roads. The industrial food supply system is one of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels...

An organic, local, vegetarian diet requires no pesticides, no long-distance transport, no energy to power massive slaughterhouses and processing facilities, etc. Also, because growing vegetables and grains to serve directly to humans is vastly more efficient in terms of caloric output than growing it to feed to animals to be fed to humans, it reduces costs that meat and vegetable production share, such as irrigation, harvesting, and powering farm tools such as tractors and combines.

If you are going to eat meat (it isn't an all-or-nothing proposition - reducing one's meat consumption is still good!) get it organic from the farmer's market. Organic, local meat usually isn't pumped full of hormones, the feed isn't swathed in pesticides, some farms feed their animals in more sustainable, "natural" ways, and it isn't shipped from Iowa or further.

Conclusions

There is no point being disgusted by what's going on in the gulf right now if you aren't going to do anything about it. In a couple months this disaster will be out of sight and out of mind - so what can we do now, while the devastation is close at hand, to work toward preventing its happening again?

Do what you can. It is very possible for a young single person on a VERY limited budget to do all of these things and be healthy and happy without too much inconvenience (I currently practice them all as much as possible). Not all of these suggestions can apply to everyone, but some of them can apply to everyone.

And then, if you are so inclined, recognize that the only way we'll really break free from an oil-based economy is through government/corporate action - write your congressmen/women and/or senators and let them know you support a comprehensive green energy bill. Get involved with a local organization that supports green jobs or green development or offers rebates to folks that install green energy technology in their homes or that educates people about environmental issues. Donate time or money to an environmental organization. Petition your city to incorporate strict environmental standards in its development goals, etc. There is so much you can do that can actually have an effect - don't waste your time being angry or boycotting one company. Do your individual part by changing your habits, and join the movement!

Questions or comments?
Any other simple suggestions for reducing oil consumption / demand?
Am I totally misinformed and some of these things are B.S.?
Let me know in the comments below (remember, you don't need an account to leave a comment, and I really appreciate them!)

Thank Me Later

2010-06-30T09:30:00.000-07:00

I am wholeheartedly surprised by how much I enjoy listening to Drake's new album, Thank Me Later. I am no fan of mainstream hip-hop. The only hip-hop groups that I can say that I actually enjoy listening to are Digable Planets, KanYe West (basically just this latest album though) and Aesop Rock. I've tried to get into other hip-hop, both mainstream and underground and it's just not resonated with me.

I remember when Drake blew up. I was surprised and amused - I remembered Drake (nee Aubrey Graham) from his long-running stint as character Jimmy on The N's imported pre-to-teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation.

It was actually an excellent show. I would go as far as to say it was to our decade what Freaks & Geeks was for the 2000s and My So-Called Life was to the 1990s. The show used actors the same age as the characters they played, unlike, say, the OC, and dealt with hard-hitting issues (Degrassi tag line: "It Goes There").

Anyway the transition from Jimmy to Drake was interesting to me because was a very kind, sympathetic character. He had strong personality characteristics - was accepting of gay friend Marco's coming out, forgave Spinner for stealing his iPod, got back with his girlfriend (whose name escapes me now) after she went to drug rehab and turned goth even though the popular kids (one of whom he used to be) made fun of him for it. I stopped watching the show when I went to college in 2005 (no Satellite TV there) so I missed some of the later developments - Jimmy's confinement to a wheelchair, for example.

His transition to hard-ass, pussy-chasing hip-hop star Drake (see leading image above) seemed drastic to me, but it had been a few years since I'd heard from him - maybe he had been transitioning his image for a while. I liked Jimmy, though. I didn't want another hard-ass MC rapping about drugs and sluts and money. It's overplayed, you know?

So I had no interest in checking out Drake music until yesterday, when I heard the track "Fireworks," a duet with Alicia Keys (an all-time favorite) on, of all places, NPR. I only got a 30-second preview, but was so enthralled that I went home and downloaded the album immediately. And I really, really enjoy the record.

It helps that the production is excellent. I think of Drake as a mixture between Lil' Wayne, with his slow-ass, boistrous, laid-back flow, and KanYe West, with his articulate-ness, and certainly the 808s-era minimalist beats. I think Drake has taken KanYe's experiment with combining hip-hop and minimal electro to its nadir. This album is beautifully produced.

But here's the thing that hit me: the lyrics. The first three songs on Drake's record sound like R&B, not hip-hop. They are personal, emotional songs (again the KanYe reference is necessary - I think 808s freed Drake to make this record), with Drake's lightly auto-tuned singing - about death and family and fame and doubt and love! Wait, this is mainstream hip-hop?

From "Fireworks," the opening track [mp3] :

Everything the same but it feels different
My dad called me up knowing that I still listen
And he's still got his foot out, guilt trippin'
It's been years, though, I just learned to deal with it
For real, me and my realtor we built up a better rapport
Got my mother in a place with some better decor
She searched the entire city I let her explore
And now she's sayin' she more lonely than every before
How many of our parents' marriages lasted?
I was only five, I bet I barely reacted
I'm flyin' back home for the heritage classic
Searchin' for that feelin', tell me where is the magic?
Let's stay together till we're ghosts
I want to witness love, I've never seen it close
Yeah, but I guess I gotta find it first
That's why I'm really goin' off, fireworks

Damn, that's some introspective shit. Well, by hip-hop standards. Don't buy it? Here's part of "The Resistance:"

I heard they just moved my grandmother to a nursing home
And I’ll be acting like I don’t know how to work a phone
But hit redial you’ll see that I just called some chick I met at the mall
That I barely know at all and
Plus this woman that I mess with unprotected
Text us saying she wish she woulda kept it
The one I’m laying next to just looked over and read it
I couldn’t tell you where the fuck my head is
I’m holding on by a thread its like I’m high right now
The guy right now and you can tell by looking at my eyes right now
That nothing really comes as a surprise right now
Cause we having the time of our lives right now

What am I afraid of?
This is what dreams are supposed to made of
The people I don’t have time to hang with
Always look at me and say the same shit:
You promised me you would never change

There are the standard jams and "look how much money I got" jams but it seems like most of this record is chill and personal. I think the record is worth checking out. And so I don't get a C&D for hosting one widely-available mp3, I only posted it to give y'all a taste so that you would want to purchase the album with money from an online or brick-and-mortar retailer. That's what I did!

Seattle Pride - Leather, Nudity, & Condoms?

2010-06-27T21:18:00.000-07:00

Went to the Seattle Pride Parade + Festival today. Afterward, a friend asked us how it was. "There was a lot of leather, nudity, and we got a bunch of condoms." Is that what being gay is all about? Is it all about unabashed promiscuity and the celebration of fetishes?

After hearing our description of the festival, the friend responded "yeah, that sounds like Pride." I suppose as an outsider that's what you would gather from the parade and party afterward. What do you think?

Not shown - lots of very large boobies, on bicycles and otherwise, multi-colored bodies and penii (also both on and off bicycles), scantily clad persons of every color, body type, and persuasion in various stages of mock-intercourse, etc.

I've often wondered why it's called "Pride" anyway. Pride is a "sin," according to the Bible; and even for the non-religious it's generally believed to be something negative. Aren't we supposed to be humble, not prideful? Then I read this interesting article on the Huffington Post the other day, in defense of Pride:

Given the long-standing historical condemnation of pride as the root of all sin in the Christian tradition, how can we understand LGBT pride to be a blessing and not a sin? As an openly-gay theologian, teacher of theology, and ordained minister, I believe that sin is not just limited to pride or inordinate self-love. Rather, sin -- defined as the way in which, despite our best intentions, we inevitably turn our backs on who God has created us to be -- can also take the opposite form ofinordinate self-hate or shame, something that many LGBT people experience from a very early age.

In other words, sin is not just a matter of lifting oneself up too high (as in the case of Satan, the rebellious angels, or Adam and Eve), but it is also a matter of failing to lift oneself up high enough. Many LGBT people have been taught to hide in the shadows as a result of being taunted and tormented by our peers from an early age. We are constantly told that what we do is unnatural and that God hates us. Is it any wonder, then, that so many LGBT people suffer from a toxic degree of self-hate and shame?

So, then, Pride is a response to society's preference that those living the "gay lifestyle" do so in private, in the shadows, and with a healthy dose of self-condemnation and self-hatred. Pride (as in the month, or the festival) is then a time to instead celebrate oneself in the face of a culture that would rather one hate oneself. And if it's a little flamboyant and over-the-top that's defensible given the conditions gay folks are often forced to live in the rest of the year.

Thoughts?

"Rio"

2010-06-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

Nothing to say today except that Hey Marseilles, my favorite local band, is finally officially releasing their album next week. They made a sillie video to go with the lead single. It's embedded below; enjoy :)

Oh also I'm working on an update to the "Cohabitation" post from last week. Finished the book, talked to my friend about lotsa stuff, and came to some conclusions.

Bite-Sized Musings: On Male White Men Punching Female Black Teenagers

2010-06-17T10:02:00.000-07:00

As though Seattle Police didn't have enough controversy to deal with, on Monday a video surfaced of a Seattle Police officer punching a young Black woman in the face. Video below:

The back story is, from what I can gather: the Police officer was arresting another (Black) man for jaywalking across Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. Some people on the street objected and approached the officer (albeit somewhat violently). There was a confrontation, and as you see in the video, when the situation got heated, the cop punched the woman in the face.

The main question that's come up is: is this racist? The officer was clearly outnumbered, and the women were somewhat violent and confrontational. Should cops be allowed to use force in the face of violence on the part of citizens? Was he "protecting himself" or "controlling the situation?" Was his behavior in line with his duties and responsibilities as a Police officer?

Read any of the comment threads on any of the articles/blogs and the vast majority support the officer's actions. Basically, "When you're a cop you have to deal with shit and you never know what's going to 'go down.' Your life is in constant danger. There isn't room to deal peacefully when you are surrounded by violent people, especially in Seattle's current climate of distrust + anger toward the police. What if someone was to grab his gun? Punch first, get the situation 'under control,' ask questions later."

The jury's still out on whether this cop was "justified" in his actions. He has been reassigned, I've read. There are questions being asked, such as: "If this was a blonde, blue-eyed White girl, would he have punched her in the face?" The answer is ostensibly "No," but we'll never know the answer to that question. There are other issues as to his behavior - why was he there alone? Why was he arresting someone for jaywalking (and is that racist itself? Who doesn't jaywalk)?

But the question that's more interesting to me is - what kind of authority do we grant the police in return for the "safety" that they provide and the sacrifice - the "constant stress + struggle + danger" they live with every day - that they make on our behalf?

If a normal White dude was being harassed by some agitated Black females for a perceived wrongdoing, was surrounded, perhaps, had to defend himself - and he punched one of them in the face, would he be justified? Or is that definitely "wrong?" What kinds of things are OK for police to do, and not OK for non-police to do? Is it ever OK for a big dude to punch a teenage girl in the face? Does it depend on the situation?

"A Little Bit Married"

2010-06-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine and his girlfriend are, for a variety of reasons, considering moving in together. In the (Christian) communities they were raised in, this is called "living in sin." Other communities call it "cohabitation."

While most Hollywood movies and sit-coms consider this a normal stage in a relationship's progression, for these two it's quite a big decision (which it probably is for most people, though definitely for those with a somewhat conservative or religious upbringing). Conservatives love to throw around the "fact" that cohabiting couples tend to divorce more.

My friend is the kind of person that, instead of taking his cues only from popular media, likes to read books and articles and get some quality data before he makes a big decision. So he's been compiling some data and put a couple of books that relate to the topic on hold from the library. The first one that's become available is A Little Bit Married: How to Know When it's Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door by Hanna Seligson.

She defines "A Little Bit Married" as the stage in the modern relationship when it is long-term (i.e. at least one year) but isn't necessarily headed toward marriage - has traits that used to be associated with marriage (i.e. living together) but without the commitment of marriage. He's just begun reading it, but told me that the assumptions inherent in the text are making it hard to take seriously. Notably:

"The common echo from women in the stage of 'waiting to seal the deal' was that being A Little Bit Married can feel like running an emotional marathon, except you aren't always sure whether there is a finish line."

This implies that all relationships are a "race" and marriage is the "finish line." The assumption being that a relationship that doesn't end in marriage is a failure - you have "lost" the race, so to speak.

Another example:

"The effects of not [getting married] aren't as monetarily quantifiable, [but] women do lose something valuable - time."

The implication being that the time spent in a relationship that doesn't end in marriage is wasted time.

I personally believe that an intimate relationship is valuable in and of itself; that a break-up isn't a failure - all relationships provide us with lessons about ourselves and other people, etc, etc.

So far the book's been uneven, he says - though it has been so far full of quotes like the ones above, it also debunks the myth that cohabitors are more likely to divorce. That only applies to "serial cohabitors," those who live with multiple partners over the years. Guess those folks have other issues that skew the statistics, eh?

What do you think about cohabitation?
Would you move in with your partner of ___ years?
Why or why not?
Is it "living in sin"?
Is it different for men than for women?
Do you want to get married before you turn _____?

One Less Reason to Hate Starbucks

2010-06-14T12:10:00.000-07:00

Starbucks Corporation tweeted a surprising and heavily re-tweeted announcement today:

"We're very excited to announce that coming July 1st: Free. 1 click. No registration WIFI at all US locations! :-)"

To anyone that's ever utilized a coffee shop before, this is surprising only because it's taken this long - every other (non-enormous global conglomerate) coffee shop in the United States has offered free Wi-Fi forever.

I wonder what the collective reaction is here in Seattle, Starbucks' hometown. It's easy to hate Starbucks here - there's the faux-independent coffee shop across the street from an actual independent coffee shop, there's the buying out of another local chain, there's the whole debacle with the Supersonics - granted, I don't know how Starbucks is related necessarily, as I moved here long after the Sonics were gone - but it has something to do with Schulz, Starbucks CEO.

But there are other reasons unrelated to Seattle itself - the "fact" that their mass-produced coffee lacks soul, or flavor, or both depending on who you ask; the stupid sizing names they somehow exported into everyone's self-conscious so ubiquitously that even lil' indie shops have to call their medium "grande" or nobody will understand what's going on; and not least the fact that unlike 98% of other coffee shops they charge you to use their wi-fi.

Well, that last reason is no more. This doesn't matter to me - there are other, better, local coffee shops that are open later, have better art and music, offer free refills along with their free wi-fi, etc. - but what if the closest, most convenient coffee shop to you was a Starbucks?

Do you think this is a good move for Starbucks? Will the money they made from charging for wi-fi be compensated by the increase in business as a result of these changes?
Will you frequent Starbucks now? Or do you still hate the company?
What other reasons are there to hate Starbucks?
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BONUS: is it "One Less Reason" or "One Fewer Reason?" We all know which one "sounds right" but which one is "actually right?"

Five Things: Musical Talents/Abilities Edition

2010-06-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

Five Musical Talents/Abilities I Wish I Had / I Hope to Cultivate

Ability to whistle like Andrew Bird
Ability to emote like David Bazan
Ability to harmonize like Fleet Foxes
Ability to write like Colin Meloy or Joanna Newsom or Aaron Weiss
Ability to sing or play guitar at all, perhaps?

Five Ways to "Do Something" about the Oil Spill

2010-06-08T11:18:00.000-07:00

Remember "Five Things?" It was a new blog theme/meme designed to further appeal to the tl;dr crowd. Here are five new things and this is a BONUS because it also deals with current events.

Five Ways to "Do Something" about the Oil Spill

"Boycott" BP while continuing to consume as much oil as before from other oil companies
Buy an expensive, useless product that garishly proclaims your aversion to oil spills and/or love for seabirds (preferably a t-shirt or bumper sticker) and/or gives at least 1% of profits to conservation/environmental causes
Get angry at the government for not cleaning up the spill quickly enough
Add some "oil dripping" graphic to your twitter avatar (via green Iran activism)
Write a blog post or two offering one-sided opinions, freshman year-level philosophy, and largely unfeasible "solutions" without considering the unique circumstances of readers

Bicycling as a Response to the Oil Spill

2010-06-07T19:11:00.000-07:00

I am not giving up on how much of a monumental disaster this oil spill is. Pretty soon we'll be seeing the end of mainstream media coverage of the spill - I give it two weeks. See my previous post for some perspective: how much is 70,000 barrels of oil a day? For the next two months?

I think it's important, though, to not just vilify BP or Big Oil in general or the government or the "drill, baby drill" Republican blowhards, but instead to use this opportunity to spur debate - how do we prevent this from happening again? And I don't mean, how do we create better technology so that when the next oil spill happens we can cap it more quickly. I mean, the reason that we are drilling oil off shore, the reason we are importing oil from the Middle East, and then sending troops over there to protect the stability in the region and thus the stability of our oil supply, is because with the status quo, we need oil. We demand it. Supply = demand. Basic econ.

We are the reason for the oil spill. We, with our cars, our heated homes and showers and laundry machines, our demand for meat, and out-of-season and processed and packaged food, our comfortable lifestyles - we demand the oil and we demand it cheaply. We see in the photo above how costly oil really is.

And I made the point before that moving to "clean energy" isn't really a solution either. As "green" as our "alternative energy" hopes and dreams are, they aren't a solution. Every source of energy has a cost, whether monetary, environmental, social, or cultural.

Most of the cultural conversation surrounding energy consumption has to deal with transportation. How much energy do we use converting oil into gas? And then how much gas do we use driving cars and flying places, and transporting food and goods across the world? And this makes sense, transportation is an important facet of everyday life. I don't like focusing on transportation because the meat industry creates more demand for oil, and destroys the environment in countless other ways, far more than all modes of transportation combined.

But transportation is still important. What if there were a viable solution that, at least in the realm of transportation, virtually minimized demand for energy generation?

A poster at my local bike shop has this (uncited, but logical) statement regarding efficient transportation:

"The most efficient animal on earth in terms of weight transported over distance for energy expended is a human on a bicycle. The most efficient machine on earth in terms of weight transported over distance for energy expended is a human on a bicycle."

No "hybrid" or electric car could ever match the efficiency of the bicycle. Barring the energy required to create the bike in the first place, and the (minimal) energy consumption required in manufacturing the tools and parts that a bicycle requires for upkeep, nothing comes close.

I was going to write more, but - go get a bike. Ride it. Love it. Take a deep breath and for every mile you ride your bicycle instead of driving your car, smile.

Top Kill

2010-06-01T11:36:00.000-07:00

Update: Check out this image of how large the oil spill is in relation to your city. Here's how much of the Seattle metro area the oil spill would cover - and remember, it's not yet HALFWAY DONE SPILLING!

It was announced recently that "Top Kill" has failed, and that the next realistic option for plugging the Deepwater oil leak will be the relief wells BP is drilling - slated to be finished in AUGUST.

“After three full days of attempting top kill, we now believe it is time to move on to the next of our options,” Mr. Suttles said.

The abandonment of the top kill technique, the most ambitious effort yet to plug the well, was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair a blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Efforts to use a hose to gather escaping oil have managed to catch only a fraction of the spill."

Two more months of up to 70,000 barrels a day... How much is that? It's hard to fathom.

A barrel is 42 gallons of oil. Think of one of those water coolers you see in an office (or perhaps in office stock photography - to the right) - those hold three to five gallons of water, maybe. So imagine that you line up ten of those water coolers - maybe every one in your office. That would be as much as a barrel.

You open the spigots on the ten water coolers - but instead of water coming out, it's black, murky, disgusting sludge. Then you leave the spigots open and those ten coolers run out onto the carpet, filling your office, until they run out. That's a lot of oil. That is disgusting; it would coat and ruin everything in your office forever; the smell would never be cleaned out. One barrel would coat your entire office building in a grimy muck of disgusting sludge.

Then imagine that you did this seventy thousand times in one day. That is enough oil to fill four and a half Olympic-size swimming pools. It's impossible to imagine. Four and a half Olympic swimming pools of crude oil spill out into the Gulf Coast, every day, for over a month. That is where we are at now. And because "top kill" has failed, that will continue, unabated, every day, for the next two to three months.

I almost started to tear up in the car as I listened to the news - the spill won't be contained until August. Until August. This BP spill is already the largest oil spill / catastrophic disaster of its kind, ever, and it is only 1/3 over.

How do you respond to this news? We talk about "energy independence" and there are new reports about electric cars and algae-based biodiesel every day. The economic, social, and environmental impact of oil dependence is obvious - but detractors point out the impact of electric fuel and biodiesel as well.

But, then: a troubling thought experiment - when we started building the industrial economy back in the day on new energy-production technologies such as oil and coal, we didn't know how destructive they would end up being (we do now). Who's to say that we aren't going to learn "inconvenient truths" about these new technologies once we turn our livelihoods over to them? What don't we yet know about these new energy technologies?

In my opinion, the only answer to this conundrum is that there is no safe way to generate energy. Some could argue that we're beyond the pale at this point; that because the entire world runs on man-made or man-harvested energy that the only feasible option is to find the least-destructive way to keep the global economy running.

But is that an ethically responsible way to do anything? Find the least destructive way to continue with the status quo? Or do we try to figure out a new way of doing things? A way that, say, requires less energy?

What if we decided that we didn't need to go anywhere further than we could walk or ride a bike? What if we wore our clothes a few weeks, months, or years longer past their fashion expiration dates, or decided to buy used, or locally- or consciously-made? What if we composted and recycled everything that could be? What if we grew our own food instead of having useless lawns in our backyards? What if we ate food that grew on a local farm - no processing plants, non-recyclable packaging, or long-distance trucking required?

And on that note, what if we ate food that didn't waste vast swaths of arable land and natural resources, pollute rivers and the ground, use huge amounts of energy to be processed, emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than all modes of transportation combined, all while making us us more unhealthy (I'm obviously talking about meat)?

Of course, these things are not only a drop in the bucket, they are largely unfeasible for most people - at least most of the time. What I'm trying to say is that we aren't going to be able to keep generating energy and have it be sustainable. There will always be an oil spill, a nuclear reactor explosion, a coal mine collapse - not to mention all of the other environmental, political, social, and economic impacts of energy generation. There will also be some kind of solar, wind, or algae catastrophe at some point. These "alternative" energies are not the answer.

The "answer" is, in part, to use less energy. Change your priorities, your interests, your "needs," your consumption levels. Sacrifice, maybe? It's a big deal. And you and I are responsible for what happened with the spill. And rectifying this shouldn't be easy.

All those folks talking about simplicity were talking about more than just how to avoid the next BP disaster. But they were talking about how to avoid the next BP disaster.

NPR and the 24-hour News Cycle

2010-05-27T13:49:00.000-07:00

A common critique of the "current state of things" is that we are so thoroughly saturated with information, especially news reporting, that we've lost our attention span and are more easily convinced of certain positions via sound bytes, talking points, and the like.

I always figured that with an entire channel (in fact, multiple channels) focused solely on news, 24 hours a day, that there would be enough time to really get into issues, showcase all points of view, have legitimate discussion/debate, and so on. For whatever reason, this isn't the case.

I think, like a lot of people in my generation for sure but probably a lot of people more generally speaking, I haven't really "read" a newspaper in a long time. I have a hard time reading through an entire news article and instead usually skim headlines, get the relevant details, and then impress people at parties and gatherings by appearing to be "abreast of all of the relevant issues." Just don't ask me any questions about details or specifics.

I was talking with a co-worker about how most of the news I get is from the radio, in the car on the way to places, where the top-of-the-hour headline report gives me the important info and then, if I am so inclined, I can do some more research and get the rest of the details later with my own Google news search. From an NPR report about the "State of the 24-hour news cycle" as compared to previous decades:

Well, if you read Ted Turner's vision--and he's now really no longer involved in the running of CNN--but if you read what he had to say back when it was launched, he sort of described it as a newspaper of the air. He said, `You know, broadcast networks are really too much like headline wire service copy.' In a sense, that's what much of the time cable news functions as. They give you brief bursts of updates. In fact, MSNBC now every 15 minutes gives you an update of the news. And in between they're trying to figure out ways to keep you watching. So they'll do reported pieces. They'll do a lot of interviews. There are a lot of talk shows. And to be honest, there's a lot of things that we would classify as kind of pulpy, quasi-tabloid, quasi-celebrity news; anything that's sort of waiting for the next great crisis. And when crisis hits, people turn to cable, they particularly turn to CNN. And when crisis abates, they kind of tune it out. They don't need it as much.

But here's the thing - this is exactly what NPR does. NPR does a headline round-up every hour (or more often). Because it's radio, and you never know who has just started listening and who has been paying attention for a longer period, the headlines are often the same, repeated over and over. You hear short clips from recent speeches or events.

The advantage radio has over print is that you can interview people and hear their voices, get their opinions on things. You can even have four people in the same room, with divergent views, debating whatever current event/issue. But what happens?

How often have you heard a radio host say, "Well, we're just about out of time"? And they had allocated 15 minutes to whatever particular news story. And there are four people to talk to, and then the host has to talk and say things like, "This is NPR, here are our sponsors and here are the folks that did technical support on this story," and whatever. Each person gets two minutes of air-time, just like the "24-hour news cycle." That's enough to repeat the headline, throw in some talking points, launch a couple of ad-hominem attacks at your opponents, and not much else. It's no different.

This is slightly different on certain shows, Democracy Now! for example, but they are still just an hour long. I think radio is difficult because rarely do people sit around and listen to the radio at home like they used to. Do we really not have the patience to sit through a comprehensive, cogent analysis of whatever issue? Can we only handle soundbytes and talking points?

Do you listen to NPR?
Do you still read the newspaper / online news articles?
How do you get your news?
Is there any convenient venue for legitimate discussion / news analysis?
Do you have the time / attention span for lengthy, cogent analysis of the news of the day?

The 1st Quarter Double-take

2010-05-22T19:58:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: I got a cease & desist order from Blogger. According to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), my mix was copyright infringement. So all of the links have been taken down. I guess I'm flattered that they found my blog? Anyway, e-mail me, I suppose, if you are interested in the mix. Am I allowed to say that? I won't e-mail you the link. We can just talk about the songs...

Although Carles and his commenters seem to think 2010 has been the "worst first quarter of a decade ever for relevant music," I've been thoroughly enjoying most of what I've heard that's been released so far this year. Fluxblog already made a 1st quarter mix, and it is excellent so check that one out. But while I enjoyed almost everything on that playlist, I couldn't help but feeling that Mr. Perpetua left some really good stuff out.

The reason for the "double-take" moniker is this: I didn't want to put songs on my mix that were already on the Flux mix. Other times I couldn't decide what my favorite song from a recent album was. So instead of make difficult choices, or put in a less-excellent song just because Matty got to it first, I decided to put two songs from each album, which I like because it gives you a little bit better sense of what these bands are all about. Ever listened to a mix and really liked a song, and then got their album and were really disappointed? Well, have no fear - the Double-take has you covered.

One other thing I noticed that's important - this mix is 1.5 hours long. Whoops! Can't fit that on a CD. So I guess this is an internet/iPod/computer-only mix. Sorry to all the Luddites out there without standard current technology :(

Download after the jump.

Click the image to download.

LCD Soundsystem

"This is Happening"

1. Dance Yrself Clean - One of my favorite experiences is when you queue up a brand-new mp3, put on your headphones, and then are blown away immediately. This didn't happen with the new LCDS album. The sparse lil' beat that starts this song off is barely there. And then, at 3:06, it blows you away! Other favorite experience - having really low hopes for an album (especially given the crap-tastic first single from this record) and then being pleasantly surprised. If I had one word to describe this album, it would be "FUN!" P.S. - hopefully you're reading this before the song gets to that 3:06 point - turn the volume down or you're in for a surprise. The song starts out quiet.

2. Can Change - I think FUN is the theme of the year so far - you'll notice that almost all of the songs on this mix are dance-able. This song is a straight shimmery dance-floor disco song. I don't usually care too much about the lyrics in LCD's songs but these ones are interesting. "I can change/ if it helps you fall in love."

Yeasayer

"Odd Blood"

3. Ambling Alp - "Odd Blood" is perhaps my surprise favorite album of the year. I'd never heard of Yeasayer until I saw that their Seattle show was sold out - and once I checked out their stuff I was hooked. I love this song and listen to it over and over and over - I think the lyrics are so... inspirational, too? "You must/ stick up for yourself son/ Never mind what anybody else done."

4. O.N.E. - This one is the "hit." When I started listening to this music it reminded me of the first time I ever listened to Mates of State - a completely innovative, unique sound unlike anything else I'd listened to before, and so instantly enjoyable and (like Mates of State) pretty positive!

Erykah Badu

"New Amerykah Part II: Return of the Ankh"

5. Gone Baby, Don't Be Long - I don't listen to R&B much. I don't own any of Badu's previous albums. Chalk this up to excellent viral marketing - when her "OMG ERYKAH BADU NUDE" Window Seat video got so much press, it encouraged me to do exactly what it was supposed to - listen to the album. And wow. From the first five seconds of this song, you hear how funky and unique Badu's music is. Her voice takes some getting used to, but this song just gets you groovin' so effortlessly. I love the percussion. I love everything about this song.

6. Umm Hmm - [mp3] At first I thought this was a Michael Jackson sample, but it turns out it's some random 80s R&B group called "Ndugu & the Chocolate Jam Co." Either way, this song is so good.

Toro y Moi

"Causers of This"

7. Low Shoulder - Toro y Moi - stupid, stupid band name and stupid album title. So pretentious. But - it's a good thing that this music is freaking genius. Have you heard of chillwave yet? I think Neon Indian is good, and I can stand Washed Out / Small Black and some other bands a little bit. But I think TyM is the best example of what this genre is all about.

8. Minors - If you've gotten this far in the mix yet, you've realized something interesting about the majority of the songs on here - pop music has certainly become cool again. We all know that "indie rock" died when Death Cab for Cutie did, but I don't think it's become clear until the rise of chillwave exactly what the next aesthetic was going to be. I thought that after all of the keyboards and dance beats made their way into indie rock in the mid-2000s the backlash was going to be toward metal or grunge or something, but instead of rebelling, indie music decided to take it to a whole 'nother level - to disco. But the cool thing is that it's a millenial take on dance music - it's chill and you can't necessarily really even dance to it; it just kind of is a weird nostalgia for an era we never experienced, in a way. It's been happening on the down low for a few years, but mark my words - in the first half of 2010 you will see this aesthetic get more and more popular until it's all there is.

Hot Chip

"One Life Stand"

9. Thieves in the Night - Here's an example - how could a band like Hot Chip ever be popular? Listen to the first 30 seconds of this song - straight drum n' bass beat. This is straight "electronica/techno," even though that genre doesn't really exist anymore. How could Hot Chip be "cool?" I know that five years ago I would balk at anything approaching this music, but now I love it, love it. I never liked Hot Chip until this album. This song is one of my favorite songs in a long, long time. How is that possible?

10. I Feel Better - This song wins the Video of the Year award. Though I guess you either think the video is genius or is insane. This whole album is incredible, though - at least the first five songs are, after that it's a bit spotty. I couldn't decide whether I like this song better than the title track, but wanting to share the video pushed me over the edge.

Vampire Weekend
"Contra"

11. Giving Up the Gun - Doesn't Vampire Weekend seem completely played out by now? It feels like this album leaked/streamed legally on Vampy's website a year ago. But it didn't come out proper until January. I think having that music video with Jonas Bro and other mainstreamers, and debuting at No. 1 didn't help them keep their street cred (if they ever had anyway). But don't pretend like you weren't playing this whole record on repeat for the entire month of January.

12. White Sky - I think the fact of Mr. Koenig's falsetto makes me pick this song over "Run" or "California English" or one of the other great songs on the record. And he really can sing those notes; I was impressed. I think it's easy to hate on Vampy but these songs are so damn catchy. Straight pop music, well produced, slightly tongue-in-cheek lyrics... I don't know. This record puts me in a good mood. Sometimes that's all you want, right?

Beach House
"Teen Dream"

13. Walk in the Park - [mp3] - I'll admit, I didn't really know much about Beach House until I heard the "buzz." Beach House is usually mentioned alongside other chillwave acts, but I don't think they're really chillwave. The vocals aren't all washed out, and it's not really a retro aesthetic; the music sounds very modern. It reminds me of shoegaze except if a shoegaze band replaced their guitars with keyboards. I dub this genre "keygaze." What other keygaze bands are out there? It is relaxing like chillwave, though, and it reminds me of the kinda song you wanna listen to while you... walk in the park, basically, just chill out and don't do much. It's a song about not worrying too much about stuff. "In a matter of time, it would slip from my mind/ In and out of my life, you would slip from my mind."

14. Silver Soul - I have no idea what this song's about but again I just love the texture of it. That lil' sample at the beginning helps. What is that, a bubbling brook? Maybe this is chillwave, not keygaze. I "chill so hard" when I listen to this record.

Joanna Newsom
"Have One On Me"

15. Good Intentions Paving Company - This is the obvious standout track from Newsom's fantastic triple (!) record Have One On Me. To tell you the truth, this album is so long and dense that I still haven't made my way through it completely. It's two hours long. Another full disclosure admission - I used to hate Joanna Newsom. Her stupid voice, mixed with her PhD-level vocabulary, her 9-minute songs, about weird things that make no sense, etc. Like so many incredible bands, though, working backwards helped. Listen to this song, and then the next one, then get this record, and work in reverse. Hopefully by that point you'll be able to get past her voice (it's less ridiculous on this record than her past ones) and you can start listening to her lyrics, and you will "get" it. This song has my favorite part of any song released so far this year - the lil' banjo part in the buildup at 1:32, to these fantastic lyrics: "And I regret/ How I said to you, honey/ just open your heart/ When I've got trouble even opening a honey jar." Wait, no, it's the second lil' acoustic build up part, just before these lyrics: "But I fell for you, honey, as easy as falling asleep." These lyrics are so simple but so freaking... legit, I don't know how to describe it. The density in that simplicity is such an amazing feat, especially coming from someone who can write incredible dense, incredibly complex lyrics - like these ones, from a past album's song, "This Side of the Blue," which makes a bit more sense, I suppose, if you've studied Structuralism: "And the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers/ and we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words/ While across the sky sheet the impossible birds/ in a steady, illiterate movement homewards."

16. Ribbon Bows - This is much more "classic" Joanna Newsom. The previous song doesn't really give you a sense of what most of her music is like. She's a harpist. If you like this song you might like the rest of her stuff.

jj
"No. 3"

17. Let Go - jj is a Swedish band - and I don't know a lot about Sweden, but if this record is any indication, it is dark, snowy, and beautiful. This stuff reminds me of Sigur Ros for some reason, though it's completely different - it's just so atmospheric, textured, slow, dreamy...

18. And Now - Doesn't this song sound like a continuation of the previous one? If you didn't know better, you might think that it's just a two-part song. All of the songs share a very similar (though excellent) sound - I think it only works because "No. 3" is only 27 minutes long; there isn't enough time to get bored or anything.

Honorable Mentions
These albums came out this year but I didn't get enough time to check them out fully.

The National - "High Violet"
[mp3] "Bloodbuzz Ohio"
I really liked "Boxer" but it was never a "favorite." So far I've been liking this record but it didn't "hit" me or whatever. Gotta give it a few more listens.

Damien Jurado - "St. Bartlett"
[mp3] "Arkansas"
I always liked Damien Jurado but this record sounds off for some reason... I gotta give him a chance because he's a local guy (he even has a song called "Beacon Hill") but that can only go so far.

Ratatat - "LP4"
[mp3] "Party With Children"
Criticism of Ratatat's new record is that it sounds just like their last record. I liked their last record so that's fine with me.

Local Natives - "Gorilla Manor"
[mp3] "Party With Children"
I went to college with some of these guys. Had class with the lead singer, Ryan. They were called Cavil at Rest then, and frankly I like their Cavil at Rest stuff a lil' better than Local Natives. But I haven't listened through this new record much yet, maybe I'll like it too?

What do you think of the new music that's come out so far in 2010? Did I miss anything super good? Let me know your recommendations.

Bite-Sized Musings: Death/Lack of Control

2010-05-21T10:28:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: "Bite-sized Musings" is a blog topic theme developed in response to a criticism of this blog by Steve Norberg - friend and editor of Scan My Life - that the posts are too long and don't have enough pictures/bullet points to be digested easily. BSMs are short, relevant questions about important topics intended to generate discussion. They can only work if the "comments" feature is utilized. Please comment; thank you! <3

A Christian friend visited Sula House recently, and we "had a pow wow" and talked about theology. Of course heaven/hell was mentioned, and she asked me: "Are you afraid of death?" Because I'm not really a Christian, the question was kind of: "Aren't you afraid of Hell?" I'm not, because I don't really believe in it.

But I think the question has a more interesting philosophical underpinning - a lot of people who don't believe in Heaven or Hell still fear death. But why? I have a theory - because death is inevitable. I think that people who fear death also have an inherent fear of the inevitable.

Responses to Inevitability

1. Worry/Fear - Many people develop fear of "inevitables" because they cannot be controlled or avoided, despite human effort. "You can't stop it or change it! It's coming no matter what! There is no control! Doesn't that freak you out? There's nothing you can do about it!"

2. Indifference - Fewer people feel that because nothing can be done, there is no use worrying about something that cannot be avoided. "Well, I'm going to die someday and there's nothing I can do about it - so why waste the life I do have worrying about something I can't change?"

This doesn't just apply to things like death and (blaugh) taxes. You've already taken an exam and your professor is grading it. Do you worry about the outcome or relax because post-exam, it's completely out of your hands?

-> Do you worry about the inevitable or are you indifferent?
-> Are you afraid of death?
-> What other examples of "inevitables" can you think of?
-> Does your response to the "inevitable" change depending on its severity (i.e. I'm not worried about my exam score but the thought of death paralyzes me?)

The New Busy

2010-05-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

If you live in Seattle (or one of the three other metro areas in which the campaign has been launched) then you have probably seen the new ads for Microsoft Hotmail. If you haven't, click the link, and the above image will make more sense. I actually think the campaign is sort of clever, though most everyone else on the internet that has commented about them tends to disagree.

Surely there are lots of reasons to dislike the campaign, but mine is less marketing-specific and more an underlying philosophical critique - what is the deal with championing a busy lifestyle? Do people these days really need to be more busy?

Pictures of the ads (for those not in the know) are difficult to come by; here is one:

"The NEW BUSY would have their belts off by now." I actually did see this one in the airport. This made me think of "Up in the Air" - I wonder if Ryan Bingham would be classified by Microsoft as "new busy?" (Spoiler: Ryan Bingham was not happy with his lifestyle).

This is stupid marketing, though - if I don't yet have my belt off, then this makes me angry. I am already upset that I have to take my belt off to fly on an airplane. Now you are telling me I'm not taking it off fast enough?

I wish I could find screenshots of the banner ads that are popping up around the web, because then I could effectively parody them as well, but they say things like:

"The NEW BUSY think 9 to 5 is a cute idea."
"The NEW BUSY make beavers look lazy."
"The NEW BUSY always keep a suitcase packed."

Basically the underlying assumption of the campaign (and of much of American society, perhaps discounting some millenials) is that busy-ness = productivity = success. Doing more stuff in less time. More stuff = more money = more happiness. Being productive. Producing whatever. Filling up your time. Doesn't matter with what as long as you're moving.

I'm personally not a fan of doing anything just for the sake of doing something. I've been thinking lately about the philosophy that says that "work" is overrated. Remember how work is simply a means to an end? Why do you work? To get money. Why do you need money? Survival, providing for oneself + ones family, etc. And then also for "entertainment," which largely requires money as well. Upgrades.

Nobody wants to live in a lil' apartment forever, right? Nobody wants to struggle forever, right? So, then, it's about comfort to an extent. We work to survive, then once that's done, we work to upgrade our lives/ourselves. Get to a point where you don't have to worry about stuff anymore. We all wanna find that happy medium between being poor and having so much stuff that you worry about it being stolen or whatever. Just a nice comfortable medium.

I don't necessarily buy into all that, but we can take it as a certain standard. But I think we tend to forget that work is just the means to get to this place. We ask people what they "do" and we mean "where/how do you work." And it all means "who are you?" Work is an expectation; we all have to work because we all have to "contribute" to society/USA GDP/ourselves/whatever. Not working, or working less than you're able, or whatever, means you're lazy or a communist or something.

But then, there's this point of view that says, "Hey. I'm not where/how I work. That's just the stuff I do to make the money so that I can do the stuff I really wanna do more comfortably, and so I can hang out with people."

Anyway I'm having a hard time articulating it but the point is, what if we lived a bit more simply? What if we rejected busy-ness? What if we lowered our standards, worked just enough to cover the necessary bases and spent the rest of the time hanging out with people and being creative? Does anyone really need to make more than $40k a year?

What if I worked only part-time, and spent the rest of the time chilling with my bros in the park or something? Or playing the guitar, painting, or just chilling out? What if we actually had enough free time to do things that we enjoy doing? I don't want to wait until I retire to do the things I really want to do. I want to do them now.

Disclaimer - this post was poorly written. I apologize. I just had to get something out there, it's been too long since I've posted anything. Maybe forget there was writing and just look at the image up there; I think it's pretty good.

Ethical Consumerism Part 2

2010-04-27T23:51:00.000-07:00

I had to write a blog post for the LVC blog so I updated this one and here is the result:

LVC, WARM FUZZIES AND CONSUMERISM

In college, a friend of mine asked me a question about something she'd heard I'd said. "I heard," she began, trembling slightly, "that you think we shouldn't buy TOMS."

What she heard was half-true. I love TOMS (seriously check them out, a definite model for aspiring triple-bottom-line businesses everywhere), especially since they've made an explicit commitment to not only giving a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair that's bought, but to require fair labor practices in their factories.

What I actually said was that buying TOMS was great but it wasn't the answer. My ideology was: If you don't need new shoes, don't buy any. Buying TOMS because it makes you feel good to support the cause plus you get something out of it, instead of buying TOMS as a replacement for another shoe that you were already going to buy because you need new shoes, substitutes one "evil" for another - supporting unethical labor practices for supporting unnecessary consumerism.

It's a tough, weird ethical debate; surely buying TOMS, no matter how many pairs, is better than buying sweatshop-produced shoes, and gets more shoes onto the feet of children in Argentina and South Africa and wherever else TOMS gives shoes. Add to that the fact that the more TOMS we buy means more fair-wage jobs for folks in Argentina. But instead of "wasting" resources with a purchase, your money will be much better spent through a donation, no matter how ethical the company.

...Right?

It's an interesting dilemma and, fortunately for LVCers, one we don't have to confront often - no capital, no capitalism. But we're no strangers to making others, who do less than we do or do it for different reasons, feel guilty about their choices.

It reminds me of a parallel ethical debate - donate to the panhandler or to the social service agency down the street from her? One is obviously more practical; more efficient. But there's nothing better than the feeling like you've helped someone eat that day - and nothing worse than the cold, sad stare as you lie into the face of a desperate man while coins fatten your purse. There's nothing better than looking down at your feet and imagining that there's a kid halfway around the world possibly wearing the same shoes as you, his first pair ever, because of you - and nothing worse than wondering how much waste the consumerism you've contributed to produces and how cheap, relatively speaking at least, it would be to feed and clothe all of the children around the world.

I think we tend to want to downplay this, the emotional side of charity - when ignorant rich White moms in suburbs talk about the warm fuzzies they feel when they venture downtown to serve soup kitchen food once a year at Christmas, it's hard to not want to scoff and say, "It's not about you." But - it kind of is. And - we're just like her. And - it's OK.

Whether we're doing good for our own benefit - because it gives us warm fuzzies, or we like the idea of being martyrs, or it will look good on our law school application, or the shoes are so fashionable right now - or for the "right" reasons (as though they exist), we're still doing good. And good is good. And more people doing more good is even more good, so if feeling good gets more people to do more good then feeling good is good too. Right?

I maintain: if you have money to burn, and no need to buy anything, but you wanna help out, then donate it - but I want to apologize to my friend. We should never feel guilty for doing good. Go buy yourself a pair of TOMS, sweetie. They're good shoes.

Making Words Work

2010-04-24T23:03:00.000-07:00

I was recently commissioned to make an "infographic" of sorts for a friend's company. Turns out I don't really know how to make an infographic. This is more of an English Language Cheat Sheet, only somewhat-artistically designed.

This remains unfinished. There were a few more pairs of words, and I was maybe going to change/update some of the examples (what is on there is generally the first thing that came into my head). And unless someone reading this blog is like, "Oh I'd really like to have that printed out on a poster of some kind or something for my classroom; these freakin' kids always get these words screwed up" then it will remain unfinished.

This project one of the reasons I haven't posted in over a week. I've been slowly uploading some other design work I've been doing lately, and some I've worked on in the past, over at the PORTFOLIO page. Thanks for looking. Image after the jump.

On Ethical Consumerism

2010-04-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago, I had the privilege of meeting/hanging out with Shane Claiborne, a definite hero of mine. Around that time, I was spearheading an on-campus movement to reduce our campus' consumption of goods made in sweatshops.

I had a dual focus for the movement - I was interested not only in reducing consumption of unethically-produced products, but also interested in reducing consumption/consumerism overall.

A friend of mine (Robbie, pictured above in white shirt on the right) came up to me one day and asked me a question about something I'd said. "I heard," she began, "that you think we shouldn't buy TOMS."

What she heard was half-true. I love TOMS (seriously check them out, a definite model for aspiring triple-bottom-line business everywhere), especially since they've made an explicit commitment to not only giving a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair that's bought, but to require fair labor practices in their factories (scroll down on the FAQ for the blurb).

What I actually said was that buying TOMS was great but it wasn't the answer. If you don't need new shoes, don't buy any. Buying TOMS to support the cause, or because they're cool, instead of buying TOMS as a replacement for another shoe that you were already going to buy because you need new shoes, substitutes one "evil" for another - supporting unethical labor practices for supporting unnecessary consumerism.

It's a tough, weird ethical debate; surely buying TOMS, no matter how many pairs, is better than buying sweatshop-produced shoes, and gets more shoes onto the feet of children in Argentina and South Africa and wherever else TOMS gives shoes. But instead of wasting resources with a purchase, your money will be much better spent through a donation than through a purchase, no matter how ethical the company.

Reminds me of Product (RED) - the tagline on the homepage said "Buy RED, Save Lives." It's a pretty popular notion, now - the belief that through an "ethical" consumerism one can effect positive change.

And it's hard to take a position against movements like this. Again, buying a Product (RED) iPod Nano helps fight AIDS and buying a normal iPod Nano does not (though Apple does not disclose how much of the sale actually goes to fighting AIDS - some companies give 1%, some up to 50%, but it's not transparent). Organizations such as BUY (LESS) have sprung up to counter the idea of "ethical consumerism:" do you really need to buy an iPod Nano at all?

I think that these (for-profit) companies hit on a nice lil' bit of human psychology - we like to buy shit, but if we've done some research or are environmentalists or care about social justice much, we feel somewhat guilty about how much we consume. "Ethical consumerist" products give us an out - we can continue our consumerism, but knowing that a portion (though we usually don't know the size of this portion, and I think it's safe to say it's smaller than we'd like) goes to charity vindicates us.

This is frustrating to an extent; I would like to see more people move away from mindless consumption of non-necessary items as a whole. While I think that what these companies do is somewhat better than the status quo, do they support the faulty notion of "ethical consumerism" and thus slow our society's progress away from the rampant consumerism that we're known for?

I suppose the thoughtful approach to "ethical consumerism" is pretty simple - if you are going to buy something, do a lil' research and perhaps buy something ethical. If you aren't going to buy something, don't. If you want to support a cause, support the cause directly; don't buy more crap that you don't need. I think that's it.

On Citizenship, Terror, and Assassination

2010-04-09T15:23:00.000-07:00

Came across this terrifying article on Tumblr today: Confirmed: Obama authorizes assassination of U.S. citizen.

Goodness, that title sure jumps out at you doesn't it? I don't know if it's possible to see that link without at least glancing over the article. It's incredibly troubling that the President/the CIA have the authority to assassinate anyone; it goes against most Americans' core beliefs about the role of our government.

The article mentions it, but remember when all the liberals went up in arms with Bush's domestic spying program (which, by the way, Obama has not done away with)? If the title of the article were accurate, then you'd expect us all to be 1000x more enraged by this.

But as you read the article and the coverage of the issue you learn that the point of contention for most of these people is not that the president is assassinating someone. The problem is that this person is a U.S. citizen. Nevermind that he is an Al-Qaeda operative apparently actively participating in terrorism against the United States:

"The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday..."

Wait, why again can't we kill a terrorist? We kill tens of thousands of terrorists (or civilians, who can tell them apart?) every year. Oh right, because he's both a terrorist and a U.S. Citizen! You can't assassinate a U.S. Citizen.

What is war if not large-scale assassination? Does the CIA have assassination targets that aren't U.S. Citizens (yes)? If so, does anyone care? That's just what war is, right? We are allowed to kill "enemy combatants." But apparently, by definition, U.S. Citizens cannot be classified as "enemy combatants" without due process:

"Even more strikingly, Antonin Scalia, in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, wrote an Opinion (joined by Justice Stevens) arguing that it was unconstitutional for the U.S. Government merely to imprison (let alone kill) American citizens as "enemy combatants"; instead, they argued, the Constitution required that Americans be charged with crimes (such as treason) and be given a trial before being punished."

My question is, if we are allowed to murder on a grand scale (i.e. war) and on a small scale (assassination of high-level terrorist leaders) as part of the "War on Terror," why does it matter whether our "enemies" are citizens or not? The above quote implies that it is constitutional to imprison/kill non-Americans as "enemy combatants." Why is that OK?

New Feature: Five Things

2010-04-07T14:52:00.001-07:00

So the "Top ___" is nothing new, especially in the blogosphere. But I liked Naomi's recent Top 10 and was inspired to do my own. Except only five. And I think it's important to say that these are not actually the "Top" five anything; they are more of a "first five" things that come into my head.

Five Places to Be:

In a warm, local coffee shop on a rainy day with a book, laptop, and headphones, and nothing important to do - such a cozy state of mind.
At work, closing out your documents and browser windows at 4:45pm on a Friday - the entire world seems ahead of you!
In bed with your lover at 10am on a weekend morning, just before completely coming to, immediately after having realized that you have a number of hours before any responsibilities kick in
Right up at the front of the stage, a lil' bit off to the right, just as the lights dim and you see the headliners congregating backstage waiting for their cue to come out, and you're just starting to feel the buzz from the beers you drank earlier and the one overpriced cocktail you deigned to purchase at the club
Standing on a ridge at the end of a hike through the Santa Monica mountains looking out as the sun just begins to dip behind the horizon - this is perhaps the only thing I miss about Malibu.

North Beacon Hill - a Gentrification Pseudo-Case Study

2010-04-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

"Gentrification" has lost some of the cultural cache it once held. One commenter even told me she had to look up the meaning of the term...

I had the privilege (the right?) to address the Seattle City Council last month. We went to voice our opinions about the recent craziness regarding development in South Seattle (the link is to a great article the Stranger wrote about it).

Basically what's happened is we have a big empty lot that we want to build affordable housing, an open community space, a large events space/community center, and some retail/office space - and we can't, at least for another year, because some neighbors object. If you open the link to the article the first comment is mine and you can read some of my views on the issue.

I was somewhat enraged to hear about the appeal because this is one of the most incredible opportunities that I can imagine happening in a city. How often does a city have a community-oriented, non-profit organization as a developer? Of land that they own, across the street from a brand-new transit hub? In an up-and-coming, middle-income, incredibly diverse neighborhood that is less than 10 minutes from downtown? Not often, is my bet.

The most important part of El Centro's plan, in my opinion, to develop the property is affordable housing - and this is because, as a neighborhood with the characteristics I mentioned above, it is rapidly becoming gentrified. By people like me.

When you walk/bike/drive through North Beacon Hill, you can see the initial signs of gentrification immediately. Fancy new condos and apartment buildings dot the landscape every few blocks, and more are under construction (though it's been slowed by the recession, they are still being built). The rest of the neighborhood is small, one-story houses, in various stages of disrepair:

One of the most attractive aspects of Beacon Hill is its diversity; White people are a noticeable minority. I think that's what "Bayview on Beacon" is advertising: a "vibrant, growing community." All of the relevant statistics are interesting; Beacon Hill is basically just below the city average on almost all measures of affluence: median home prices, median family income, median rent, etc. Probably not for long.

Gentrification happens in neighborhoods like Beacon Hill for obvious reasons - cheap rent, close to downtown, diversity, etc. It's not so poor that it's hard to adjust from the lifestyle you want, and not so far away from more affluent areas of the city that you can't go do the expensive things you want to do without too much trouble. I would much rather live in Beacon Hill than in a snazzy, hip neighborhood like Ballard. And that's why I moved here. I like this neighborhood.

When I spoke to the Seattle City Council, I identified myself as a gentrifier, and explained that one of the most important reasons I believe affordable housing is necessary in the new development on N. Beacon Hill is that if people like me keep moving to Beacon Hill, which we will, especially because of the new light rail station, all these condos, and if the development that El Centro de la Raza wants to do on their lot goes through, housing on Beacon Hill will no longer be affordable for the people who have lived there for years long before I came.

When, in middle-income neighborhoods, developers build condos and develop squalid properties, cities revitalize public spaces, and somewhat-to-very affluent (often White) people move in, property values go up. This inevitably pushes out the non-White, middle- and low-income original denizens of the neighborhood. That's just what happens. And it's called gentrification.

gen·tri·fi·ca·tion [jen-truh-fi-key-shuhn] –noun

1. The buying and renovation of houses and stores in deteriorated urban neighborhoods by upper- or middle-income families or individuals, thus improving property values but often displacing low-income families and small businesses.

Well, here's the rub - this definition seems to place the onus of responsibility on these upper- or middle-income families or individuals. But because I am one of these upper- or middle-income families or individuals, I want to throw the blame because I don't want to feel guilty for what I'm doing. The chicken-or-egg question then is, which happens first - the gentrifiers moving in or the city and developers making it attractive to?

Silly question; no answer - much like the question of gentrification in general. Unless there's a contingent of folks convinced that White people move into these neighborhoods with the explicit intention of displacing poor people, what's the problem?

I recently listened to/read some of NPR's coverage of gentrification (IRONY???) and all of the normal frustrations were expressed - police/city services only seem to come to a neighborhood once White/rich people move in, the "character" of a neighborhood changes, new big box/chain stores lack the cultural component of old local stores and create a boring, "monocultural" aesthetic and, of course, poor folks are priced out of the neighborhood. What I realized is that, aside from the displacement issue, this sounds a lot like NIMBYism too, doesn't it?

What I also realized is that "gentrification," when looked at in the following way, would perhaps be better termed "neighborhood redevelopment" - it has a lot of positive aspects. More city services/policing. Cleaner streets. More business investment. Increased revenue for local businesses as a result of higher-income residents and more density overall (if these businesses aren't forced out of the area, that is). Neighborhood pride as a result of being a "destination" neighborhood (in most of the talks about developing Beacon Hill, the idea of being a "destination" neighborhood is brought up. The underriding assumption is that nobody that's not from here ever comes here, and why would they? It's probably a fair assumption).

Gentrification seems to me to be, in itself, a case-study in ethics - if you do something that you want to do without any conscious malice (move, as an affluent non-minority, to an up-and-coming neighborhood like Beacon Hill), are you responsible for the negative consequences of these actions (you help increase property values thus pushing poor people out of the neighborhood)?

Are you a gentrifier?

Is that such a bad thing?

Besides advocating for affordable housing in your neighborhood, what are you supposed to do about it?

Bite-Sized Musings: Morality

2010-03-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Sam Harris, noted Athiest, Author, Neuroscientist, and Philosopher, read this blog post and decided to write his own blog post about science and morality. His is complex and difficult to understand, so feel free to read this one instead.
____________________________________________________________

Today I was listening to NPR and heard a story linking morality to brain processes - as opposed to one's morality being located somewhere in the "heart" or "soul" or what have you.

Participants were told two stories - one in which someone did something malicious by accident, and one in which someone did something malicious but failed in the attempt.

Normal adults judge the first person as relatively innocent and hold the second person accountable morally for their bad behavior.

But, with a little electromagnetic stimulation to a specific part in the brain,

"The stimulation caused people to pay less attention to [Person 2]'s intention and more attention to the outcome, Young says.

"If no harm was done, then subjects would judge [Person 2's behavior] as OK," she says, even if the story made it clear [Person 2] was trying to poison her friend. That's the sort of moral judgment you often see in kids who are 3 or 4 years old, Young says."

The study argues, sort of, that if moral judgments are brain processes like any other, then "it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul."

I grew up believing that morality was God-given; that "good" and "bad" were defined by God, you could say. That humans aren't meant to judge others, that God would do the judging at the end of things.

This is a great theory; less judgment among humans is, generally speaking, a good thing. Not that Christians tend to take heed of this Biblical advice (Luke 6:37 among others) more than any other population, but that's neither here nor there.

This study, when extrapolated sociologically, suggests that morality is cultural, is society-driven. We learn to judge "good" and "bad" behavior like we learn to subscribe to other social norms.

This can be taken both positively and negatively - if we aren't to judge anyone but instead see behavior as subscribing to or not subscribing to our own culture's norms, are we allowed to judge anyone at all anymore? (See this post about drinking in the daytime) This seems swell to our post-modern, live-and-let-live liberal sensibilities. But what about things like some instances of murder, or incest, or ritual disfigurement (think FGM)? Can we still judge those?

I can obviously see why Christians, and in fact many persons of other monotheistic faiths and others, would balk at this idea. I kind of like it but part of me is a lil' dismayed.

What do you think? Do you buy the conclusions suggested by the study?

Do you think this discounts the argument for a soul?

Do you think the study suggests the sociological conclusion I've made?

Do you think morality is largely culture-specific or are there universal morals?

If morality's culture specific status were to be widely accepted, do you think that this would be a good thing or a bad thing?

Who Am I?

2010-03-27T16:35:00.000-07:00

I was filling out the Census 2010 form with my housemates last night and I struggled to answer some of the questions about "Who I am." Hispanic/Latino heritage is no longer a race, y'all! That makes sense. What doesn't make sense is the way the question is worded on the Census form.

It asks whether I am of Latino/Hispanic "origin." What does that mean? My grandmother was from Spain. I think. Or maybe my great-grandmother. So I am "Hispanic," sort of. But I'm not of Hispanic "origin." I've never been to Spain. I don't know whether my grandmother has ever been there, or where she was born. "Origin" implies a starting place of sorts; does it mean where my "family line" originated, or me personally? Because it was too confusing, I put "No, I am not of Hispanic origin." But I felt like I was leaving something out.

The whole Census thing was difficult for someone like me who doesn't fit into the lil' boxes. My dad is Black, too, or as the Census form suggests, "Negro." I was initially appalled by the inclusion of that word, so entangled it is with our country's racist history, but apparently more than 50,000 people wrote-in "Negro" on their form in 2000. So, whatever.

Got me thinking about identity, though. Like Nick Jonas would say, I want someone to love me for "Who I Am." (sweet tunes, actually somewhat-talented Jonas bro). But who am I? Got me thinking about this recent Cat and Girl comic:

click to enlarge.

I was listening to NPR a couple weeks ago and they were discussing a new report about Millenials - us, y'all! I don't remember everything that was discussed, but I think they mentioned the tenuous relationship that us young folks have with work - something about how previous generations have imagined a much more direct link between what they do and who they are.

I like Girl's understanding of the issue as a positive social trend - we are moving away from defining people by "accidents of birth." This is nothing new in American society, at least ideally or intellectually - we tend to believe that the United States is a land of opportunity, with upward mobility and all that. But maybe in previous generations that's been less the actual reality than we want to believe. And maybe it's still not the reality for this generation either.

As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry explained about grown-ups in The Little Prince,

When you tell [grown-ups] that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?" Instead, they demand: "How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?" Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.

When we meet people, we still ask them "What do you do?" Should we ask the above questions instead? And surely, how one chooses to spend one's time can, and I'll say should, say a lot about who they "are." But only to an extent, you see.

But to what extent? If it's not what you "do," then what is it?

Awhile back, Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like... Books, records, films -- these things matter. Call me shallow but it's the damn truth.

But to what extent are someone's "likes" and "dislikes" representative of who they "are," either? Rob Gordon says that who you are is what you like - the things you choose to entertain yourself with.

Another dimension is politics - are you libertarian, republican, anarchist, centrist? This seems like it has to do with ideals, or vision - how should the world be run, what should motivate people, how you think power should be distributed. I think faith fits in here too - "I am a Muslim. I am Baha'i. I am spiritual but not religious." This is an intellectual identity, of sorts; has to do with your inner self.

But all of these things change and grow as we do. I don't like the same music I did when I was younger, I don't do the same things, I don't practice the same religion or have the same politics. Is there something deeper? And it's deeper than DNA, here, too, I think.

It gets into the question of the individual soul - is there a pure essence to who I am, an "Elliott" deep down in there, never changing? Is my identity transcendental? Does it reincarnate? Is there such thing as a soul? If I had a twin brother, and he had my exact same job, pursued the same interests and passions, had the same upper-middle class upbringing, liked the same music and movies, had the same political leanings as I do, would we effectively be the same person? Or is there something deep within me that constitutes "me?"

It could be all of these things, to varying degrees. We all have the opportunity to define ourselves. So what do you think? Who are you?

Bite-sized Musings: Drinking in the Afternoon

2010-03-22T13:44:00.000-07:00

The other day I was sitting outside during my lunch break (around 12:30pm) near where my workplace's parking lot exits out into the street. A car pulled out of the parking lot and stopped before driving into the street. In the car were two men - both of them with cans of beer in their hands.

I was appalled. Some people drink and drive. It's not a crime to have one beer or so and then hop in your car, right (or is it? One beer wouldn't put me over the legal limit...)? But drinking while driving seems ludicrous (they were drinking tall cans of Steel Reserve, too - the equivalent of two crappy beers in one) . In the middle of the day! They were asking for trouble.

I was so flabbergasted that I didn't have time to get the license plate number and report them to the police (which I should have done, right? I don't want dudes drinking while driving around my neighborhood. I ride my bike through this neighborhood). But it got me thinking - part of the reason I was so surprised to see this was that it was at lunchtime.

Whenever I'm at or near the gas station in my neighborhood in the afternoon I see people (usually scruffy-looking men) buying and/or drinking beer in the middle of the day. Go to a city park on a normal afternoon and you will see people (again, usually scruffy-looking men) drinking and/or passed out drunk in the park. This is both illegal and almost universally looked down upon.

The questions are:

Why is drinking in the early afternoon, even if just a beer or two, unacceptable while getting smashed at a party or the bar at 10pm is fine?
Does it matter whether it's a well-dressed businessman having a drinking lunch in a restaurant vs. a scruffy dude buying a beer from the gas station and drinking in the park?
Why is driving after having had a couple beers sometimes OK but driving while drinking not OK?

Pride

2010-03-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

A man and woman marry and have a child. Their son is born about eight months before the man, a West Point graduate and linguistics specialist, is deployed to Afghanistan.

The couple writes letters back and forth weekly, and the man cherishes the pictures that accompany many of his wife's letters - he watches his son grow, begin to crawl and then walk, smother himself with birthday cake, pal around with a new puppy - through pictures, from across the world. "I miss you so dearly," the letters always begin. "I never imagined how difficult it would be to sleep alone."

As the months, then years pass, the letters arrive less and less frequently and are shorter; they sometimes seem hurried, almost obligatory. Because the man speaks Arabic and has a natural gift for logistics that makes him almost invaluable, he does two back-to-back tours of duty.

His wife talks about herself less and less, and instead focuses on their son. Soon it is he who misses the man dearly, and his wife no longer mentions her loneliness. The man feels the strain of his absence in his wife's letters but chalks this up to the inherent difficulty in any prolonged separation.

The man finally returns home and is greeted at the airport with unbridled, almost manic enthusiasm by his wife. She is almost uncharacteristically over-affectionate, and as happy as he is to see her, he remembers the subtext in the letters and wonders at the behavior.

He is also dismayed at the complete lack of recognition from his son, who does not know him. "Hello," he says, introducing himself to the boy. "I'm your father." The boy stares, then shakes the hand outstretched to him dispassionately.

That night the man and his wife make love for the first time since before her pregnancy. Again quite uncharacteristically, she is timid and self-conscious, complains that she has gained weight and wants to keep the lights off, and initially flinches at his touch. The entire episode unnerves him greatly.

The next day, the couple arranges for the man and his son to spend the day together; to "get to know each other," as it were.They walk to the park in the afternoon and he begins pushing his son on the swings. The boy warms to him slowly and they begin to talk.

"Do you like the swings?" The man asks.

"Yes."

"Do you come to this park often?"

"Sometimes, when mommy isn't working."

"You come only with mommy? Does anyone else come?" He asks, then kicks himself for his jealousy, telling himself that he has nothing to worry about.

"No, daddy doesn't come. He is only home at night." The man stares at the boy as though stunned, and the emotional punch felt in his gut is coupled with the impact of the swing crashing into his torso. "Ow!" yells the boy, as he falls off the swing.

"Let's go home."

They walk back home and stop for ice cream on the way. The man ponders his child's words, but doesn't question him further. He attempts to discount them as the ramblings of a three year-old, but his wife's odd behavior, both in her letters and especially upon his return to their home, slowly envelop him with a malaise he can't shake. He approaches his home with foreboding.

After dinner he informs his wife that he will be meeting some old friends at the local bar. Before he leaves, he enters his son's room. "Tell me about your daddy." The boy hesitates.

"I see him if I don't go to sleep; if I crawl quiet to the edge of the balcony. I see him at night when mommy is downstairs crying after she puts me to bed. She walks back and forth in the living room with just a candle burning. And she cries. And when she cries he cries. When she sits down he does, too. When she lays down he lays down with her."

The man leaves and goes to the bar, where he meets no one.

When he returns home, his wife is asleep. He does not wake or confront her, nor does he speak to her the next day - when he reaches for words, or questions, or clarification, all he discovers is anger. So he says nothing, remaining silent for days.

The woman, distraught at the sudden emotional upheaval, attempts to redouble her affection. She cooks ever more lavish food, makes a clumsy attempt at seduction (that he silently denies), stays home from work to be with him. But he remains practically silent, preferring to spend his time at the park with his son during the day and at the bar in the evenings.

After two weeks of silence the woman can no longer bear it. One evening after watching her husband leave for the bar, she kisses her sleeping son on the forehead and mouths to him that she is sorry.

She walks downstairs to the kitchen, removes a bottle of wine from the shelf above the refrigerator, and pours herself a large glass. After swallowing it, she pours another, then removes a candle from the hall closet, lights it, and sets it on the dining room table. The woman sits down and begins to cry. She pours herself a third glass and slowly walks upstairs, leaving the wine bottle uncorked on the dining room table. The candle flickers, though there is no breeze.

During her husband's absence, the woman began to rely on wine and sleeping pills to sleep. She empties the remainder of her bottle of pills into her mouth and swallows them along with the third glass of wine.

When the man returns home, he walks upstairs to find his wife sleeping, and notices the wine glass. He takes it downstairs and begins to wash it in the sink when he sees the candle. Though there is only one glass, and no dishes in the sink, he puts two and two together.

The man places the glass on the edge of the counter and storms upstairs. "In our home?" He screams, waking their son. "In our own home," he mutters under his breath as he takes the stairs two by two.

He reaches their bed, grabs his sleeping wife by the shoulders, and shakes her. "Who is he?" He screams. The boy peeks out of his bedroom door, frightened.The wine glass, placed too close to the edge of the counter, falls and shatters on the tile floor. The boy shuts his door tightly, runs back to his bed, and covers himself with a blanket.

When the woman doesn't wake up, the man notices the pill canister empty on the bedside table, realizes what has happened and, dumbfounded, stands up and walks to the center of the room in a daze. As his eyes adjust to the darkness of the room, and his vision clears as his fury slowly begins to recede into fear and disillusionment, he falls to his knees on the floor. He begins weeping.

Hearing this, the boy again peeks out of his bedroom door to see his father walking slowly down the stairs, his knuckles white as he grips the banister. The man sits down at the dining room table, head in hands, weeping.

"Daddy!" Shouts the boy, who is now standing in the dining room. The man is incredulous; since he returned home his son had not referred to him as such.

"I'm here, son." The man says.

"No," explains the boy. "Daddy is there." He points behind the man, to the shadow on the wall cast by the candle's light. "He is crying with you, too."

Adapted from a story by Thich Naht Hahn.

Things I've Seen

2010-03-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

I was out of town for about five days; I've also been hit with writers' block, hard. As we all wait with bated breath for the next blog post, here is a sketch-quality comic I made recently. Thanks for your patience.

Click the image for a full view.

On music criticism

2010-02-24T14:49:00.000-08:00

Hipster Runoff recently posted the snarkily-titled "Is Caribou’s “Odessa” the first authentic mp3 of 2k10?" I semi-jokingly commented on that post, saying that I wasn't such a huge fan of the mp3 but that I would wait to reserve judgment until I found out whether the rest of the commenters liked the song. Because I wanted to like it if everyone else liked it, but didn't want to if the HRO micro-blogosphere chewed it up and spat it out.

Unfortunately, there was a pretty even split of HRO commenters that liked/didn't like the mp3. I mentioned then that the mp3 would need at least an 8.0 rating on Pitchfork or else I wouldn't give it another listen, wouldn't try to "get" it. Lo and behold, I checked and it got exactly 8.0 on Pitchfork. So I decided to give it another listen.

It's similar to how "cool" works, and reminds me of a Simpsons episode:

Marge: Am I cool, kids?
Bart and Lisa: No.
Marge: Good. I'm glad. And that's what makes me cool—not caring, right?
Bart and Lisa: No.
Marge: Well, how the hell do you be cool? I feel like we've tried everything here.
Homer: Wait, Marge. Maybe if you're truly cool, you don't need to be told you're cool.
Bart: Well, sure you do.
Lisa: How else would you know?

How do I know if music is "cool"/"relevant" if I don't have Pitchfork/HRO/the blogosphere to tell me whether I should listen to it? There's too much music out there. Bad music is made every day. I make bad music. I can't expect anyone to listen to my stuff without viral marketing/Pitchfork/word-of-mouth/my mom telling them to.

But it's a dangerous game. It's all marketing/advertising. What if bands like Odessa just have hipper marketing teams behind them pushing their music around the blogosphere? My biggest fear is telling a relevant peer with good music taste what I've been listening to lately and having them tell me that my music taste is bad.

My biggest dream is to be an "early adopter," to be the first among my peers to start listening to a hot new band. I remember in high school when I introduced my friends to Death Cab for Cutie. But there's the double-edged sword; now that Death Cab is "played out"/no longer "relevant" they can point back to me and say that I was the one that introduced them to this "lame"/"mainstream" band. What if you're an "early adopter" and then the band "sells out?" That's a legitimate fear, y'all.

I've been slow to adopt a lot of bands, such as Animal Collective, Passion Pit, The xx, etc. Most recently this happened with Joanna Newsom. I didn't "get" her strange voice or dense lyricism. I wasn't reading Pitchfork at the time/didn't realize that she got super good reviews over there. But I was ready this time, and a few days ago got a leak of her new album (9.2, that's really good). It's going to take me a few listens, because her voice still annoys me, but if Pitchfork and this review I heard on public radio the other day say it's good, then it's gotta be good and if I don't like it that says something about my bad taste, not the merits of the album.

And of course I'm joking, but only sort of. If I listen to some music and don't like it, I'm not going to keep listening or pretend that I like it just because the blogosphere says I should (disclosure: I like a lot of Kelly Clarkson songs). Popular opinion can't fully dictate my taste.

But there really is too much music out there to listen to it all and to develop my own opinions about - there were something like 800 albums released in 2009. If an album's an average of 40 minutes long, that's something like 1.5 hours each day, every day listening to new music if I wanted to catch it all.

That's the role that music criticism, and websites like Pitchfork, play. When I can download any album I want for free in less than an hour, how am I supposed to wade through it all? I need a reliable governing body to direct my music appreciation.

It makes sense, especially given the Joanna Newsom example, and especially when you're the kind of person that enjoys full albums, not single mp3s. Her album is two hours long. Do I want to sit and listen to the entire thing to see if I like it? Or should I have someone tell me first that it's worth it? A lot of bands, like the ones I mentioned a couple paragraphs up, are "different" and thus take "getting used to." I had to listen to AnCo's album at least a few times before I "got" it/actually enjoyed listening to it. This sounds silly, but now they are one of the bands I enjoy listening to most. If the blogosphere/Pitchfork/friends hadn't told me they were worth giving the time, I might not have ever listened/began enjoying their stuff.

Even better, websites like Pitchfork can tell me which tracks are "standout tracks" to check out first to get a flavor for what an album is like. Before I download an album/go to a show/make a purchase, I can check out the "standout track" or two and get a feel for what it's all going to be like. If I don't like it then I don't have to "waste my time" with the whole album. Music criticism, if you have a magazine/website that you trust/respect, is an internet-age form of word-of-mouth.

We all know that the best kind of advertising is word-of-mouth. If my friend tells me that I "gotta listen to this band" I'm probably going to do it. Pitchfork is like my friend that has great music taste telling me which bands to check out.

But I have my doubts about Pitchfork/music criticism. Each of the reviews has a single author. Isn't that just one person's opinion? How do I know they are "qualified" to review this album? What if one reviewer thinks it's great and another one thinks it's "played out?" This dude thinks that magazine music reviews have more "authenticity" than a blog/internet site but it's kind of all the same, isn't it? Don't I have just as much right to judge an album as whoever is writing a certain Pitchfork review? Well, probably not. I read this review with Joanna Newsom, specifically the interviewer's questions, and ask myself whether I could have conducted this interview. Nope.

At the other end of the spectrum, I have a girlfriend that doesn't read (maybe doesn't even know about) Pitchfork. I envy the simplicity of her music consumption. She likes what she likes and doesn't really care what other people or blogs think about it. She uses Pandora or the radio and is introduced to new music that way. She isn't constrained by "popular opinion" of her music taste and has the freedom to listen to whatever she wants. But maybe she's missing out on some great bands that Pandora hasn't auto-selected for her to listen to. I can only introduce her to so much music.

I've tried to eschew this "elitist" music taste tendency since high school, but it's hard and I still fall into old habits. Still troll around on music blogs/hypem/Pitchfork, waiting for that next great buzzband. Sill want to be an "early adopter"/be "cool."

I want to get to a middle place where I can utilize the blogosphere/Internets to help me make good music/cultural decisions but where I'm not defined by their standards. Does this place exist?

Do you read the hipster runoffs?
Do you rely on websites like Pitchfork/blogs to help you know what is worth listening to?
Or do you form all of your own opinions completely independent of any criticism?
Do you like Joanna Newsom/AnCo/"difficult"/"inaccessible" bands?
Is there too much music out there?
Are you an elitist? Or do you not care about whether bands are cool/"relevant?"
Is Pandora-listener in a better place than alts trapped in their elitists dance of relevance?
Or is she missing out on some great music/culture/etc.?
Does that "middle place" exist?
Are these posts "too long"/"need more pictures/bullet points"?
Do you "get" when I'm "kidding"/"being sarcastic" and when I'm not?

Men in Love With Each Other

2010-02-19T14:42:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a reading at Elliott Bay Book Co. (no relation). It was for a book called Queers in History, by Keith Stern.

The talk was interesting, especially because instead of doing a traditional reading, he performed his "one man show," which was "rough," in his words, but pretty funny and interesting. Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was probably gay? Did you know (from http://www.queersinhistory.com/facts.htm):

Abraham Lincoln slept with his bodyguard in the White House when Mrs. Lincoln was away?
Joan Crawford and Marilyn Monroe had a one-night-stand?
Leonardo da Vinci was imprisoned twice for same-sex affairs?
Sir Francis Bacon's mother complained about him sleeping with the male servants?
The founder of Shinto Buddhism also founded a tradition of male-male love in Japan?
Angelina Jolie wanted to marry her "Firefox" co-star Jenny Shimizu?
Two ancient Egyptian men shared a tomb as husband and wife?
Lawrence of Arabia dedicated his life's work to a young male lover?
The wife of one US president moved her girlfriend into the White House, and another US President shared his White House bed with the male chief of his security detail?
An heroic soldier in the US Revolution was actually a woman in disguise, who "married" another woman after her service in the Continental Army?
One of the greatest male American athletes of all time was arrested twice for same-sex indiscretions?
In 1886, when US officials asked an Indian tribe to send "their best woman" to visit Washington, DC, the tribe chose to send a man in a dress?

"Facts" is a somewhat onerous title for that page, because most of these "facts" are conjecture based on circumstantial evidence (very few of the "queers in history" actually "came out"). But the circumstantial evidence is quite compelling, I must say. I haven't read the book yet but I want to after going to the reading.

The interesting thing for me was, though, after the reading, as I was getting back on my bike to go home, I was approached by a dude who had also been in attendance. He chatted me up for an awkward few moments - awkward because I was pretty sure immediately that he was hitting on me.

Afterward I wondered why it was so awkward. Being perceived as gay is nothing new for me. Rumors have floated around me about it for years, sometimes explicit, sometimes less so. I'm a firm opponent of the idea of heterosexuality - I think that every human exists, sexually, on a continuum from 100% heterosexual or homosexual (minority) to 50% either way (bisexual). Here's Kinsey's graph:

I fall on the side of the spectrum where I'm mostly heterosexual (i.e. I'm in, and have only been in, heterosexual relationships, and prefer them) but am not 100% against a homosexual relationship (would I ever pursue one? Given different circumstances, possibly, but I am in love with and plan to marry my current female partner). So according to Kinsey, I would be most likely a 1, maybe a 2. I think most people fall into the 1-3 range. I saw a bell curve once, but I couldn't find it in a quick Google search.

So I hope that the awkwardness was because it's always awkward being hit on when you're already in a relationship (and 100% not attracted to the hitter-on-er). I don't have anything against being hit on by a guy, intellectually. I suppose it's just some work I still have to do to extricate myself from the lasting effects of the heterosexism I've been fed socially since birth.

It got me thinking, though, about how difficult dating must be for those seeking same-sex relationships, especially when at present the issue is so politically charged. Most people can generally assume that when they approach a member of the opposite sex that they are "straight." Unless you're at a "gay bar" or other similarly-themed event or gathering place, gay people don't really have this luxury. And "gaydar" is a sham! Or, well, maybe it's not but I'm proof that someone you may think is gay likely isn't. The androgynization (is that a word?) of male fashion hasn't helped, I assume. It's always a guessing game.

Remember when Prop 8 was terrorizing us all, and Colbert did a great few shows about all of the fearmongering. I remember this great Colbert Report clip where Colbert mistakenly assumes an audience member is gay. Whoops, he's just a hipster! I wonder if it's harder to use gaydar at the present time (when mainstream fashion is moving further and further toward androgyny).

But, of course, I write from a male perspective. I wonder if it's similar for women. I wonder if straight male allies overplay the fact that, socially, lesbianism/female bisexuality is more acceptable than male homosexuality. Is it just as hard for girls? I am friends with a few gay guys but I don't think any gay women. Hmm... maybe I do know them but just don't know it?

What if, one day, homosexual relationships were so accepted culturally that you could just wear a nice little nametag or t-shirt saying "I'm gay!" and it would help take the guesswork out for your potential romantic partners, but it wouldn't have the negative societal consequences? Kinda like this shirt:

Or there was no such thing as being "in the closet" because being gay was OK? Well, maybe let's work on the marriage thing first, right?

I was also thinking about how, when marriage isn't an option for you, how does that color your relationships? Are you more or less likely to engage in "casual" dating behavior since "legally" you can't have a "legitimate" long-term relationship? What does this post look like when you read it through the lens of homosexual relationships? Or are we all conditioned to see long-term monogamous relationships as the ideal? No idea, folks. Gay readers, I need your help to understand you and your struggle better so that I can better work in solidarity with you.

Did you know Abe Lincoln was gay? Are you upset/inspired?
Do u think sexuality is a spectrum? Or is everyone 100% gay or straight and those not are kidding themselves?
Or is everyone 100% straight but some "choose" a gay "lifestyle"?
Have u (straight folks) been hit on by someone of the same sex? Was it awkward? Why?
Have u (gay folks) had trouble dating? Is it not that bad? Or is it worse?
Is it harder/easier for gay women to date?
Would having all gay folks be "obviously out" (like with a nametag) make things better or worse?
What about in a different cultural environment?
Do gay folks still think about marriage / monogamy like straight folks do?

Jeff Foxworthy - Funny?

2010-02-16T13:23:00.000-08:00

I was riding my bike uptown the other night past Seattle Center and noticed that Jeff Foxworthy is coming to Seattle soon for a show, with none other than those Blue Collar Comedy Tour stalwarts Bill Engvall and Larry the Cable Guy.

Do you remember these dudes? I have a faint recollection of Blue Collar Comedy being really popular for about a year. If you don't remember, Jeff Foxworthy is the originator of the "You Might Be a Redneck If..." line of jokes, like this knee-slapper:

You might be a redneck if... you were acquitted for murdering your first wife after she threw out your Elvis 8-tracks.

Hahaha! Dudes! Rednecks totally murder people! And they obviously get divorced a lot, and dudes, they're so behind on technology they still use 8-track tapes! Man, what a witty observation. Anyway, this joke isn't funny and neither are most "redneck jokes."

I admit, though, that one isn't necessarily representative. I was googling around looking for ticket information for this upcoming show and I came across this list: Jeff Foxworthy on the Pacific Northwest! Here are some of the gems:

2. You feel guilty throwing aluminum cans or paper in the trash.
11. You know how to pronounce Sequim, Puyallup, Issaquah, Oregon,
Yakima and Willamette.
13. You can tell the difference between Japanese, Chinese and Thai food.
23. You have actually used your mountain bike on a mountain.

Tickets are only $70.00, y'all. But seriously, here's what you realize about these "jokes" - they are portrayed as making fun of denizens of the Northwest, and follow a long heritage of "You know you're from..." lists (you can surely find one about your hometown on facebook if you search for it) - but are in fact "funny" because they degrade the same population Foxworthy's been degrading, albeit on the sly, forever.

This list is funny because it sets up an opposition between people of the Northwest, who "get" what the list is talking about, and people who don't "get" it - i.e. don't get recycling, can't pronounce difficult words, eat fast food, rarely exercise, etc. And this is presumably funny for rednecks, because they see themselves in that other category, and think of Northwesterners as hoity-toity yuppies or whatever.

What I realized, though, was - why Seattle? Are there rednecks here? Are there people that find Jeff Foxworthy funny here? And then I realized - rednecks aren't supposed to find him funny. Who is reading this list of things about the Northwest? People who "get" the list, right? Meaning... not rednecks. People who like making fun of rednecks find him funny.

Did u laugh at this photo? I did. Why? Why did u/did u not?

And that makes Seattle a perfect place for the Blue Collar folks to perform. There's nothing that Seattlites like more than making fun of denizens of lamer places (read: everywhere), who aren't as smart as us (read: everyone) and who don't care about issues as much as we do (again, everyone). Also, like most white people, we love racist jokes but don't like being seen as racists.

Redneck jokes are the last acceptable racist jokes, aren't they? Because, guys, we're making fun of white people. You can't be racist for making fun of white people! Right? Let's face it, dudes - making fun of rednecks is really just another way of making fun of poor, white people. Uh-oh.

Is Jeff Foxworthy a redneck? He's rich. He doesn't have a working television on top of a broken television, he has a flat screen HDTV. He doesn't live in a trailer, have five non-working cars on his lawn, or listen to 8-track tapes. He lives in a mansion, drives an expensive convertible, and it has a built-in XM Radio and mp3 attachment with an ass-kicking sound system. He has a cultural cache with this sub-population, who believe that because he's one of them it's OK for him to make fun of them. But I wonder - how many rednecks are really in his audience? Especially when he's playing in Seattle?

I often thought about Dave Chappelle the same way, and I wonder whether it was part of the reason he stopped telling jokes/making hilarious TV. Just like it's OK for Black people to tell a Black joke, Chappelle could make fun of Black people all he wanted and it was OK. I've used this to my advantage in the past: "Why are Black people so tall? Because their knee grows!" (Say it out loud, it's funnier.)

Last year a rumor got started on Twitter that Dave Chappelle was doing a secret show in Portland. I lived in Portland at the time, got wind of the rumor, and a few friends and I arrived at the secret spot an hour before midnight, and THOUSANDS of people had showed up, just because it had spread around Twitter. By midnight, there were literally three thousand people there to see Chappelle. And I looked around, and Portland being Portland, 90% of the audience was white people.

Who thinks Black crackheads is funnier - Black people or non-Black people?

And I wonder if, as Chappelle got more and more mainstream, he started noticing his audiences getting whiter and whiter. For a comedian whose jokes are largely based on Black stereotypes, (crackheads bouncing around, pimps playing dice on the street corner, spending one's reparations check on a truck full of menthol cigarettes, etc.) that has to be troubling, because you have to ask yourself - when does self-parody leave the realm of sociocultural criticism and become exploitation? Who was going to be paying him $50 million? That's right, some white CEO at some major corporation. Doesn't it depend on your audience? When Black people are laughing at Black stereotypes, it's one thing, but when an audience full of white people is laughing a some Black stereotypes on the screen - are they laughing at or with you, Dave?

And so he quit, and maybe not for that reason. And that's the same question poor people, I think, need to ask about Jeff Foxworthy. I don't know if he has the integrity to realize that when he is playing a show in Seattle in 2010 he isn't elbowing ribs with fellow rednecks about the silly things that they as a sub-population collectively tend to do, say, or think. He is a non-redneck talking to other non-rednecks about the idiotic traits of a wholly other sub-population. I think Jeff Foxworthy transcended from parody to exploitation long ago. or is it possible that's how it always was?

Do u think Jeff Foxworthy is funny?
Is Dave Chappelle going to make a "comeback"?
Did u laugh at that photo?
R u a redneck?
Who's the best comedian working the circuit today?
Do they have to handle this internal crisis of audience?
Did Chappelle "quite while he was ahead" / make a good decision?
Should comedians care about why people are laughing as long as their laughing?
Do super-popular comedians have a role in shaping society for the better?

Catcher, Perks, Teen Literature & Hipsters

2010-01-28T19:33:00.001-08:00

Everyone knows by now that J.D. Salinger died not too long ago. The only book that anyone's ever read by him is The Catcher in the Rye. I read it, but not when I was supposed to - I was never assigned it in high school or anything. I read it when I was maybe 18 or so, without being prompted by a teacher. Maybe that's why I didn't like it that much.

If you've never read it, you can read it here - if you're the type that can read whole books online, I suppose. Interesting about books with a very distinct style, like this one - when I first looked at that site and read the first page, I was even more turned off than I was when I first read the book. But after a few pages I felt myself being hooked. I suppose that's what makes a good writer?

click to enlarge.

I saw the above comic on Andrew Lorenzi's comic blog. I'm not sure if I "get" what he's trying to say, comparing Robin and Holden in this way. I wonder what it was like growing up as a kid in the city during the golden age of comic books, and feeling like you connected with them, maybe because you didn't have television or movies so accessible.

Makes me wonder, as someone who found comics later in life - did kids growing up reading Batman connect with Batman, or did they connect with Robin? Why did all of those old comic book superheroes have kid sidekicks? Reminds me of Kavalier & Clay and how Clay was accused of corrupting kids' minds with the "homosexual" subtext of his comic book creations.

I remember not really liking Catcher until the end, and I think that's because I knew right away that Phoebe was my favorite character. I think she, unlike Holden, isn't a phony. I haven't read the book in a while, so I don't remember why I liked her so much. But I remembered thinking, man if Phoebe was my age she'd be the kind of girl I'd want to date. Apparently she's a big deal, I didn't remember thinking about it much before.

The real interesting thing about Holden Caulfield specifically, and Catcher in general, is the impact it has had on untold thousands of teenagers. I remember when I first started blogging in middle school, before my current blog arrived at its current blogosphere dominance, on xanga. There were a number of "groups" with titles like "I am Holden Caulfield." And I think that's how a lot of teenagers responded to the book. Catcher spoke to us, man, it's like, the book was about us.

I never felt that way. But I did feel that way about what I think was my generation's version of the book, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It resonated with everyone in the late 90s / early 2000s who dressed like this:

Is bro on the left Elijah Wood?

We were nerds, or we listened to "emo," or whatever. We were misunderstood, man, nobody "got" us, we couldn't deal with the popularity contest, or whatever, you know. Anyway, much like Catcher, the book's popularity with a certain underclass of teenagers followed a similar trajectory of an indie buzzband of the moment - championed as the "next big thing," achieves a modicum of mainstream acceptance, and then is derided as no longer cool (see Death Cab for Cutie). Perks has been aligned with today's hipsters enough that a cute little criticism of it can be seen going around the web even today:

I laughed at this. Makes sense. You prolly gotta read the book to get it. But it kinda upset me a bit, I mean, I read Perks at least five times throughout my teen years; I bought it and gave it as a gift to then-girlfriends or whatever a bunch of times. Probably wrote "read this book and it will help you understand me" in the front page or something. Did everyone that read Perks in high school also dress like the emo bros above and then evolve over the years into today's hipster?

What can you learn about the hipster aesthetic by reading Perks? I don't know. I feel like today's hipsters are those who overcompensated for their low self-esteem and self-perceived inadequacies and unpopularity by putting too much stock in being "cooler-than-thou" and intentionally "misunderstood."

Both Catcher and Perks glorified (or at least validated) that unpopular/misunderstood teen aesthetic, and that's why they were so popular with the alts of the past. You found solidarity there. They said, "hey dude, things are gonna be OK. It's alright to be a weird dude who enjoys books and music more than your peers. Keep on keepin' on.

I think today's hipsters would deny having read/enjoyed either of these books, much like we tend to deny the bands we used to listen to that aren't cool anymore (self-disclosure: I was way into Alanis Morissette and No Doubt in the 90s and New Found Glory and Blink 182 in the early 2000s).

Did you read Catcher in the Rye?

Did you read hipster runoff's post about Salinger (better than this one) (still finding my voice, dudes)

Was it life-changing and represented you as a teenager?

Or was it phony over-stylish BS?

Did you think Phoebe was the only cool character?

Are old-school comic books better than today's webcomics?

What's up with young sidekick dudes partnering with older, bachelor crime-fightin' dudes?

Did you read Perks?

Did you like Catcher better than Perks?

If you read Perks, were you an "emo" back then? Are you a Hipster now?

All I Want Is Love Eternally... Is That So Much To Ask?

2010-01-27T14:22:00.001-08:00

One of my new favorite bands is local Seattle group Hey Marseilles. I saw them play at Mayor Mike McGinn's Inauguration Party earlier this month and fell in love. Their orchestral, melodic, surprisingly agile tunes are a pleasure to listen to.

[mp3] To Travels & Trunks

Why can't you see heaven won't wait for us?

Salutations and prayers are too laborious

All I want is love eternally,

with your heart facing me.

Reminds me of another song I've heard recently - Hot Chip's new song, "One Life Stand:"

[mp3] One Life Stand

I only wanna be your one life stand.

Tell me do you stand by your whole man?

These dudes really want to be in long-term relationships, and they're not afraid to sing about it. We know that members of bands are always ahead of the curve on culture, whether it's fashion or lifestyle choices. Is this a mark of the new post-gender norm that twenty-somethings will pick up on next week, and tweens will be embracing in 2015?

Well, let's not exaggerate the uniqueness of this point of view; young people have wanted to be in long-term relationships forever. But here's the interesting thing, I think, about these two excellent songs - it's the confident expectation that's implied in those bolded statements. "All I want is love eternally." "I only wanna be your one life stand." They could be read differently, but the sense I get is that you could easily add afterward, "Is that so much to ask?"

Compare this to the most popular indie rock love song of the last few years (released in 2005, that somehow extended its life for years as everyone, literally everyone heard the song, it made its way onto TV shows and mix CDs, and cover versions proliferated - it's still relatively popular even now) "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" by Death Cab for Cutie:

If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark.

Note the "if." Note that the narrator is doing the following, if it's OK with the romantic object. Emo music, and by extension indie music as a whole (which it largely morphed into, I don't think there are really any "emo" bands left) used to be largely comprised of what were called "hopeless romantics;" yearning for some unattainable love interest. At least in the two songs mentioned above, the narrators are more like hopeful romantics. But this goes beyond hope, it's more like confident expectation.

This is interesting to me because I wonder if it's a trend. I was under the impression that we were entering a post-monogomous age where old, more-traditional view of relationships were beginning to erode, where marriage (and, really, monogamy itself) was beginning to fade away into a neo-60s-ish "free love" era only with all of the lessons we've learned from that era intact (don't use too many drugs, do use protection, sex and love are good with a committed, trusting romantic partner but aren't confined only to one person or to the confines of a society-sanctified marriage relationship). When something like 50% of marriages end in divorce, and have for the last few years, you'd think that us young folks would look at what our parents went through (author's note: each of my parents are on their third marriage) and start giving up on marriage as an ideal and maybe on strict monogamy as well.

If you read the last post, then you got the idea that I am sort of in this camp. I'm at least of the ideology that a relationship is not a must, that we're all OK even if we never get married, that when a relationship ends it's not a tragedy, that you aren't a broken person, that the right person will come along or maybe they won't and that everything's OK even if they never do.

I think that's why I related so strongly with the recent films Up In The Air and (500) Days of Summer. Both show their main characters being bummed out that their most recent relationship didn't work out, but the films also say, a little more subtly, "Hey, they didn't work out, but life goes on and everything's still OK." I remember reading an interview with the director of Days where he says (unfortunately, I can't find the link, and also spoiler warning if you haven't seen the film yet), he says something like, "At the end, Tom meets this new girl, Autumn. And you wonder, is he going to make the same mistakes? Is he going to fall for her? Or is he going to learn and grow?"

And I think that was one of the keys to the film, and I didn't think about until I read the interview. The point is that he was helped to become a more complete, independent person because Summer broke up with him, that that was the role of the relationship in his life: it forced him to man up and realize that he has a life all his own. That relationships are great and they can teach us things but we're never going to get anything out of life unless we're getting that already from our own lives, from our own selves, that love or a relationship can only add to what we already are, can only be a perk, if you will, but can never really complete us. The relationship meant a lot but it wasn't the end-all be-all of existence. He started doing OK sort of because of the end of the relationship, but his potential was there all along. And I think (hope) Tom was learning that by the end.

So when cute indie rock boys are implying that requesting "love eternally" from another person is OK (maybe even expected or justified) it sends a different message. I think that eschewing traditional societal expectations for romantic relationships (let's not even get into traditional views re: heteronormativity) is a good thing. Society progresses. That's a good thing.

Do you think society is growing toward a post-monogamy norm?

Or are we still the same as always?

Do you think that sex should stay inside of marriage?

Did you have different interpretations of these films? Of these lyrics?

What's your favorite 2010 indie rock love song? Will it be as popular as Death Cab's? Is Death Cab still relevant?

Do you think you will not be complete until you find your soul mate + marriage partner?

Can you have more than one soul mate?

Is it a tragedy when a relationship ends?

What did you learn from your last relationship? Was it worth it?

Is it OK to expect a life-long commitment from your partner (to express that expectation through song)?

Any other comments?

"Casual Reading"

2010-01-25T11:40:00.000-08:00

I'm going to change the flavor of this blog. It will no longer be a journal; I'm going to use an actual journal for that. I was inspired by (of all blogs) hipster runoff; it's going to be nothing like that but will be similar in the sense that it's going to be cultural commentary. This will hopefully increase my blogging output as well: a music, art, and written word commentary/critique each week, hopefully. We'll start with this comic (click to enlarge):

When I first read this comic (visit the secret knots, this artist is AMAZING) I figured that the two were strangers, and that it was an absurd tale about someone who began reading over a stranger's shoulder on the subway and got so enthralled with the story that he couldn't stop when it was time for her to get off the train.

But when Lisa read it, she assumed that they were in a relationship, and that the book was a metaphor - that they were "on the same page," so to speak, and that when the book ended, the relationship ended. The ending of the comic makes a lot more sense in this context.

After I accepted that Lisa's interpretation is more likely correct (and is richer, with layers of potential deeper meaning), I asked her about the ending - is it sad? She has four or five other books on her shelf - some longer, some shorter, and this book (this relationship) is just added to the pile, and she looks a little sad, and then she goes to sleep.

But when I look at their faces as he gets dressed, (pretty casually) puts in his earbud headphones, waves goodbye and leaves, they don't seem too sad. I get a sense of acceptance from it. It was just another book, after all. Lisa thinks she's pretty sad, and I don't know if there's a "right" answer but our different interpretations interestingly mirror our life outlooks pretty closely.

What do you think? Are they strangers or lovers at the beginning of this comic?
Is the ending sad?
What do you think about the undressing? Is sex implied or are they just getting ready for bed? Does it matter?
Did you notice the incredible art, specifically the third row of panels?
Any webcomic recommendations?

On Veganism

2009-12-27T08:23:00.000-08:00

I wrote this for a friend's blog and thought I'd copy-paste it. It's kind of a book report/review. I'm going to beef up this entry later, possibly, with some excerpts/facts. For now, this is all.

Last night, I ate elk hamburger baked in a casserole (my housemate from Minnessota, who cooked the dish, proudly calls it a "hot dish," a traditional Minnesottan recipe she got from her mother). The night before, we ate baked chicken. Aside from a small bowl of Hawaiian-style sweet and sour chicken rescued from another housemate's employer's food pantry's excess, that has been the only meat I've eaten in the last four months, and it's the most meat I've eaten in such rapid succession in the two years since I became a vegetarian.

More specifically, I would be classified as a "conscious omnivore" or a "flexitarian" - and these three meals fit into my ethical guidelines: elk is not factory farmed, the chicken was organic, "happy" chicken from a local farm, and the Hawaiian dish was rescued from an untimely demise in a dumpster. But after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals, last night's chicken is the last meat, or animal by-product, I probably will ever eat (note: not necessarily just yet. I'm realizing that becoming vegan is a process, a transition, and I won't be 100% vegan for a little while).

From what I can understand, there are four main ethical reasons vegetarians exist today. There are social reasons (feeding, housing, breeding, and giving water to animals to then eat for meat is incredibly wasteful of natural resources; millions of humans die for lack of these same resources). There are environmental reasons (the meat industry produces much, much more pollution than, for example, all methods of transportation combined and is the largest contributor to global warming). There are the health reasons (vegans, vegetarians, and some nutritionists, contest that the diet is healthier than one including as much meat as Americans tend to eat). And then there are the animal rights/animal welfare reasons. The social and environmental impacts of factory farms are what originally convinced me that I couldn't any longer continue to support the meat industry. I ate meat if it was going to go in the trash anyway, or if it was organic and "ethically" raised and slaughtered. I still ate fish (less impactful on both counts). Health was considered, in passing. But I didn't really care about the animals themselves.

No longer. I long ago saw "Meat your Meat," and since then have been successful at ignoring it, convincing myself that it was more important that the animals had a happy life than the manner in which they died. I never felt any special kinship with animals. If they were raised and then killed ethically, I figured we were all part of a circle of life of sorts, I thanked them for contributing their lives and deaths to my own. I respected animals in a way, but didn't really give them agency. I didn't see their suffering as real suffering, their pain as real pain, the cruelty inherent in killing them to eat them as real cruelty.

I do now, and I can't any longer continue to eat them. I had a choice to make - was it worth it? Was the taste of food worth the suffering of the animals that produced it? Everyone makes this choice whether they realize it or not. We're all "farming by proxy," as Wendell Berry famously said; when we buy and consume meat we are broadcasting our complicity in their (too often inhumane) slaughter. We tend to ignore facts that might convict us to change our lifestyles. Eating meat almost always means buying into a particular American ethic typified by Dick Cheny's famous quote: "The American way of life is not negotiable." And I can't any longer buy into that ethic.

I won't say any more; I am not writing this to proselytize or condemn. All one can do is learn as much truth as they are willing to and then act in accordance with their values. All I'm saying is that I read the book and I was convinced.

Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals, is exquisitely written, devastatingly researched, and is full of his trademark heart and humor. Read the book if you want to be made aware of the facts and then make your own decisions. But don't read the book if you aren't prepared to be convicted by it.

2009 Mix

2009-12-22T16:06:00.000-08:00

I made a 2009 Mix CD. This is not my "Top 10 of 2009" or anything like that; I can never make those and be decisive about them. This is just a nice little mix of songs that came out this year that I like in no order (other than an order that makes aural and aesthetic sense, in my opinion), and there were many other songs I liked that came out this year that didn't make it on the mix.

Click the image below to download.

Song Title - Artist [Album]

1. For Emma (Forever Ago) (Justin on Piano Version) - Bon Iver
2. To Ohio - The Low Anthem [Oh My God, Charlie Darwin]
3. Are We There Yet - Ingrid Michaelson [Everybody]
4. Blue Lips - Regina Spektor [Far]
5. The First Days of Spring - Noah & the Whale [The First Days of Spring]
6. Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.) - Monsters of Folk [Monsters of Folk]
7. When We Fell - David Bazan [Curse Your Branches]
8. La Collectionneuse - Charlotte Gainsbourg [IRM]
9. Heart Skipped a Beat - The xx [The xx]
10. Comets - Fanfarlo [Reservoir]
11. Solitaire - Wilco [Wilco: The Album]
12. Northwest Passage - Leonard Mynx [Vesper]
13. Southern Anthem (Live) - Iron & Wine [Norfolk]

Contradictions

2009-12-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

Here's a rough draft of a song I wrote this week. It's called "Contradictions," tentatively, and the lyrics are below.

"Contradictions" from Elliott Jones on Vimeo.

you're sort of a beacon of marvelous light
that invariably weakens as you wind through the night
across town, through the streets and into my room
where i lie awake and think about you.

where i wonder what happens when everything ends
whether you will be there, and will my friends
and i toss and turn, try to squint through the fog
and attempt to squelch my enmity with god

because he's the same god that loves the ones that i do
and he's the same god that hardened pharoah's heart
and he's the same god that brought me to you
and he's the same god that tears me apart.

it's the same sort of useless, trying to understand you
as trying to figure out what big man is up to
because you're the embodiment of all i ever wanted
all mysterious, all beautiful, understated, unflaunted

and so is that just the fault of the human condition?
a war hawk's nobel prize, justified by his admission?
the best loved, most generous in the ground are laid
the most beautiful woman can't love the way she's made

yeah he's the same god that loves the ones that i do
and he's the same god that hardened pharoah's heart
and he's the same god that brought me to you
and he's the same god that tears me apart.

Equality

2009-12-20T15:53:00.000-08:00

“What makes equality such a difficult business,” wrote the 19th century French playwright Henry Becque, “is that we only want it with our superiors.” His lament illustrates one of the more poignant aspects of an eternal contradiction–the stark disparity between idealism and realism–that has plagued philosophers for all time. Some, like Edmund Burke and the generations of conservatives who followed him, find the idea of true equality not only impractical but subversive, and thus shun it. Others, such as Karl Marx and many of the founding intellectual authors of the United States of America, believed equality was plausible and, in Marx’s case, would be the natural outcome of the oppressive onslaught of capitalism. Neither Burke nor Marx was entirely correct. Burke was mostly correct in his assumptions, as equality is indeed unnatural, but was incorrect in his conclusion. Marx’s idealism is laudable, but his lack of foresight and the impracticality of his ideas of equality rendered his predictions incorrect.

Equality, according to Burke, is not compatible with greed, envy, pride, or lust–arguably inexorable aspects of human nature–and is thus itself incompatible with human nature. What follows logically from contemplation of this contradiction is the opinion of Edmund Burke: “Political equality is against nature. Social equality is against nature. Economic equality is against nature. The idea of equality is subversive of order.” It is at least true that inequality is present in nature. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, many species form dominance hierarchies:

“Dominance hierarchies are best known in social mammals... the evolution of dominance hierarchies in a species is indicative that there is competition for resources. Members of a dominance hierarchy are aware of how they are positioned within that hierarchy and they behave appropriately... In species where organized group living is essential to survival, it also serves to maintain order among pack members.”

It is important to note, however, that by pointing to inequality in nature, Burke is not arguing against equality necessarily. He doesn’t claim that equality is undesirable, per se, and he doesn’t even make the leap toward whether equality is indeed impossible. He simply makes the argument that, observed human nature as it is at present, and possibly taking an example from nature, equality makes for bad government and “subverts order.” Burke was fervently practical and considered contemplation of egalitarianism a waste of time, for “if [a political principle] is not practicable then it is not good.”

But Burke is incorrect by definition. Equality and order are not necessarily at odds. Order is simply “a formal disposition or array,” according to the Random House dictionary. What Burke is talking about is not order, but hierarchy, and equality is obviously subversive of hierarchy. Hierarchy includes a comparison of value, while order only necessitates sequence; the example for order given in the dictionary is alphabetical: d comes before e. But that does not make d better than e or more capable or deserving, and in fact the only difference between d and e is their position–and unless a complex argument was to be made about the utility of the letters, which has nothing to do with alphabetization anyway, you could say that d and e are equals. Thus, equality is not subversive of and is in fact compatible with order, and it is not a waste of time. Perhaps, though, Burke wrote “order” but meant “hierarchy.” Equality is seemingly subversive of hierarchy by definition, and if he meant that then he is possibly correct both in that assertion and in the impracticality of equality as a political system.

Regardless whether order or hierarchy is what Burke meant, however, another problem with the argument from nature is the fact that in animal societies, both scarcity and dominance are determined by different criteria than in humans. Animals compete for resources (usually food) and the fittest animal will usually dominate. That does not only mean the strongest or fastest animal; it could mean the one with the best camouflage, or something seemingly arbitrary like the one with a correctly curved beak. But regardless, the animal most fit to survive does, and gets to eat and to reproduce itself.

In human beings, however, hierarchy is almost always determined by access to capital, not anything inherent such as strength or looks. It can be argued that persons with those two qualities, or intelligence, or an attractive personality can rise up the ranks, but money transcends all of those things in limitless ways. If one has money one can rise up the hierarchy. However, as the encyclopedia stated above, where there isn't scarcity there isn't usually a hierarchy. Cows, who do not compete for what seems like a limitless supply of grass or grain to eat, do not judge or compare themselves to each other and thus are equals such as the letters d and e are.

Burke believed that because of these factors, equality would never function in society. But, as we’ve seen, equality is not inherently subversive of order, hierarchy is a function of scarcity, and in humans, what is scarce is capital. It follows simple logic that if capital were no longer scarce, equality would be possible and at the same time order would continue to prevail. But is radical egalitarianism a lá Communism the only way to eliminate the scarcity of capital? Would all capital have to be distributed worldwide equally? To answer that question, we look to Marx, who would likely have answered, “yes,” and see in his impractical theories potential for a plausible egalitarianism.

Karl Marx witnessed the struggle and oppression of the lower, working classes (or the proletariat) and through scientific study came up with what he thought was the inevitable outcome of industrialization: a revolution whereupon the proletariat would cast of the yoke of capitalism and a new order would be introduced. He recognized correctly that the human struggle, at least in the modern world, is different from that of the animals in that we usually struggle for capital in order to procure goods, not for the goods themselves. The new order he envisioned included true equality among all people, and especially the abolition of both capital and private property. “One of the most vital principles of communism,” Marx says,

“...is its empirical view... that differences of brain and of intellectual ability do not imply any differences whatsoever in the nature of the stomach and of physical needs; therefore the false tenet, based upon existing circumstances, ‘to each according to his abilities,’ must be changed, insofar as it relates to enjoyment in its narrower sense, into the tenet, ‘to each according to his needs.’”

Marx believed that all men had the same physical needs and as such deserved the same amount of food and resources. The main difference between Marx and Burke is that Marx believed initially that equality would surface naturally, that the proletariat would rise of their own accord, as the conditions wrought by capitalism got so bad that there was nothing else for them to do. Once the proletariat became aware of their condition, Marx claimed, they would rise. Unfortunately for Marx’s theory, this didn’t happen. The important point, and the origin of Marx’s most glaring contradiction, is that the proletariat needed to become aware of their condition before the revolution could occur. This concession effectively stated that it might be impossible for Communism to originate organically; the intelligentsia, or the Communists (being Marx and his colleague Max Engels), had to inform the proletariat of their condition if they did not recognize it on their own. Thus he effectively neuters his own argument and agrees with Burke that equality is not natural.

Marx was correct, however, that equality was plausible. Aside from his self-contradiction, he was only incorrect for two main reasons. First, he did not have enough foresight. Marx was writing at the beginning of the industrial revolution (and before it had even come to Germany) and couldn’t imagine the world hundreds of years in the future. He surely couldn’t have imagined globalization, the awesome amount of wealth in the world today, and surely not the gross disparity between the rich and the poor. He would have immediately recognized that not only would the abolition of private property be impractical in a global society, but that today many people barely even own property, and thus would have looked for another means to achieve equality. The second issue is that Marx considered equality in far too radical terms. Burke had a point when he stated that politics must be practical or else they are useless. A theory in which all people, regardless of the amount of work they do or how much they feel they deserve, receive the same amount of that illustrious capital, will not be accepted by those with much to lose (Becque’s quote comes to mind). Obviously anyone with private property is interested in keeping it, and those with a lot of private property will fight tooth and nail to maintain it. What Marx did not understand is that equality does not necessarily have to mean the abolition of private property.

Regardless of these blunders, Marx was correct because equality is possible–just not in the way he conceived of it and not by the method he envisioned. Again, Marx thought that industrialization would generate revolution organically because the proletariat would realize their plight and rise up. He was right in that industrialization would make equality possible. But it would do this because previously there was scarcity and now, as a result of industrialization, there is not. Remember, human beings do not lack resources such as food like animals do; they lack capital, and there is only hierarchy when there is scarcity. Industrialization provided enough capital to eliminate inequality if not hierarchy.

Unlike, perhaps, the 18th century, there is now quite enough food to feed the entire world; it is only distributed unfairly. There is also enough wealth that if it were spread fairly (not necessarily “equally”), everyone could live comfortably. Explains Andrew Webster:

“Egalitarianism as a political programme [Burke] opposed on two grounds. Firstly it was unjust, as it relied upon compulsion, encouraged envy and inevitably levelled people down since levelling them up is impossible. (We know it is impossible because people are genetically unequal; Burke, unaware of genetics, used a ‘scarcity of resources’ argument. For example: dividing a chocolate bar among 100 people leaves each person effectively nothing).”

This is where Burke was also wrong. Genetics and certainly scarcity do not prohibit “levelling down,” only greed and a sense of entitlement do. The situation is much more complex than Webster’s chocolate bar example. In reality, it is as if instead of a chocolate bar, there is a farm complete with animals, an orchard, and a vegetable garden. There are 100 people, some of them owners or managers, some of them workers, and some of them unemployed beggars. There are enough resources on the farm to feed everyone adequately, and to provide for different preferences in terms of food. And that is what happens–the owners and those who have put in more work get more, but everyone gets enough; even those who have put in no work at all get enough to survive. The only way there would be not enough to fulfill everyone’s need is if the owners decided to extract an exorbitant amount of the resources from the farm. This would give us the present situation: this greed excludes the workers from making enough to live well and the beggars from receiving enough to live at all. Equality doesn’t mean each person gets the exact same amount of chocolate, only that everyone gets at least enough to eat.

There is currently enough wealth in the world for to end worldwide poverty without altering the quality of life for the wealthy. There is a certain level of wealth where one’s quality of life is not improved by having more–I personally believe that nobody needs to make more than $300,000 per year. For the efficacy of an example, however, I will use those who make $1.5 million per year; I think many will agree that persons in that income bracket would not suffer much were their income reduced by $100,000.

With that in mind, 40% of the world lives on less than two dollars daily. There are (when incomes are averaged) around ten million people in the world who make $1.5 million a year. Thus, if, for example, each of those people were to give up less than ten percent of their yearly salary, or $100,000, and it were distributed among the extreme poor, the income of those 1.2 million people making two dollars a day would double. And it can be argued that the rich would notice no detriment to the quality of their lives. But for the billions who receive two extra dollars a day, that’s the difference between starving and eating, between staying mired in a cycle of poverty and having access to education and self-betterment, between life and death.

Marx makes it clear that he is talking about needs, not about desires. “The stomach and physical needs,” he claims, is where the focus should be. Where Marx may have gotten it wrong was in being too radical. There does not need to be an abolishment of private property. There does not need to be a revolution in the truest sense, in that the top and bottom switch places. Equality does not mean that everyone has the same amount. That would be the “levelling down” Webster refers to.

A simple example to illuminate this is when comparing a person with a mental or physical illness that requires much medical treatment and a person who is relatively healthy. The extreme conservative might say that the healthy person, by virtue of being born healthy (possibly a result of the benevolence of God?), is more able to provide for himself, to work, to generate capital, and thus deserves the happiness this capital provides. The ill man deserves nothing because he has done nothing to earn capital and is left to rot. This is grossly offensive to a majority of people. The radical egalitarian, however, would say that both men are human beings and deserve equal amounts of capital. This is also impractical, for a variety of reasons–the ill person may get far more than they would ever be able to use, or far less than they require to pay their medical bills, depending on whatever the equal distribution amounts to. Instead, equality should reflect the right to relatively comfortable existence; to survival. The ill person should get enough capital to pay the medical bills and to eat, regardless of whether he is able to work or contribute to society. The other man should receive adequate pay for the work that he does, but not more than he would be able to enjoy; not more than increases his quality of life (determining where this cap rests is a problem I acknowledge but do not attempt to decisively answer).

Equality, in a practical sense, then, could simply mean that everyone has equal rights to life, to, simply, survival. This is the core of Marx’s argument. It would be impossible and, probably, unfair, if everyone received the same amount of capital for different amounts of work. That there could be a minimum wage, more accurately a “living wage,” that everyone, equally, is entitled to, is plausible. This means that the millions of rich people can still be rich and enjoy their wealth, but the billions suffering wretched, life-threatening poverty have a chance at survival as well. The conservative myth of Communism, of equality, of income distribution, is that the only way for it to function is that everyone becomes poor. The idealist myth is that somehow distribution is possible that will make everyone rich. Finding a practical compromise between the two extremes is the only way to actually fulfill the lofty promise of egalitarianism.

Music Du Jour 12-14-09

2009-12-14T11:39:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, someone in my house happened upon Ingrid Michaelson's album "Everybody." I'd heard of her before; she played at Pepperdine a few years back, and she had a duet with Josh Radin on one of his EPs.

She looks like Lisa Loeb. And not just the glasses; it's the whole nerd thing she's got.

Well, it was put into the living room CD player and, seemingly, never left it for weeks and weeks. We listened to the CD over and over. I stole it a while back and put it in Lisa's car. It hasn't had as heavy a rotation in her car, though, and I was supposed to get it back from her and put it in the living room CD player again. I'll do that soon.

Anyway, the album is beautiful. I wonder whether she writes all of her lyrics, because she has some gloriously cheeky turns of phrase nestled here and there in this album that I really really enjoy. And then the title track is just so cute and catchy.

They say you're really not somebody until somebody else loves you
Well, I am waiting to make somebody somebody soon.
from "Are We There Yet"

Baby you've got the sort of laugh that waters me
And makes me grow tall and strong and proud and flattens me
I find you stunning, but you are running me down
My love's too big for you, my love.
from "Sort Of"

You call me a mountain
And I call you the sea
I'll stand tall and certain, and watch you swallow me

You can move me, if you want to
You can move a mountain
You can move me, if you want to
You can move everything.
from "Mountain and the Sea"

Happy is the heart that still feels pain,

Darkness drains and light will come again.

Swing open up your chest and let it in,

Just let the love, love, love begin.

Everybody, everybody wants to love.
Everybody, everybody wants to be loved.
from "Everybody"

But the real pull is her incredible voice. I love the end of this song, "The Chain." The round is so awesome. And what do you know, it's streaming right here for your listening pleasure:

The Chain [mp3]

Some Seattle Photos

2009-12-13T18:14:00.000-08:00

So, I finally got a couple rolls of film developed. I shouldn't have, I can't afford it. But here they are. As usual, about 10% of the pictures came out how I wanted. I'm going to sell my camera. It just isn't worth it anymore. Anyone want to buy a Minolta Maxxum 5 SLR camera with a Quantaray 28-90 lens? Pretty good stuff. It's a good camera. I'm just not patient enough to actually set it manually when I take pictures, and I try to use the automatic settings, and it doesn't work out. Well, here you go:

The first few (bnw) were taken around Beacon Hill and then in a park that Lisa and I visited a few months ago. The color ones were on a hike in Issaquah our house took a while back.

More photos on ihardlyknowher. Enjoy :)

"Racial Identity Reflection: 'Both'"

2009-11-15T15:05:00.000-08:00

This past month, a Louisiana judge denied a couple a marriage license. This seems potentially normal enough, but this particular case was interesting to me because the reason he denied their bid for an official union was because they look like my parents.

The judge's rationale was that the children of an interracial union would be unnecessarily burdened by being born half-black and half-white; that they would suffer an identity crisis of sorts - that they would be accepted in neither race community. "I don’t do interracial marriages because I don’t want to put children in a situation they didn’t bring on themselves,” he says.

Reading the article brought me back to May 2006, when I traveled with a group of students down to New Orleans, Louisiana, for a week, to do Hurricane Katrina relief work. While there, we met an amazing old man named Gary, who was taking six months of his retirement to fly down to New Orleans and volunteer full-time doing hard labor for people he'd never met.

I don't know how we got on the topic. Maybe it was my friend Jimmy, who as a half-white, half-Korean may have been discussing his upcoming engagement to a half-black, half Puerto Rican woman, and how their kids, if they chose to have them, would be something akin to multi-cultural superheroes. However we started talking about it, though, Gary, fully aware of our respective ethnic heritages, shared his opinion on inter-racial relationships with Jimmy and I - namely that he, like the aforementioned judge, and for the same admittedly good-hearted reasons, was against them.

My initial response was shock, disbelief, and then anger. What an ignorant racist, I thought; I'm glad his antiquated ideas will, hopefully soon, die along with him.

Because he's wrong. Right? I mean, it's not like anyone of mixed racial heritage could be... I don't know, the President of the United States, for example? But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether he was right.

I do have identity issues. I never felt comfortable sitting at the black table in the cafeteria; I didn't have any black friends growing up. I don't listen to rap; I'm no good at basketball. For goodness' sake, most of my friends growing up were Asian! But I never felt entirely comfortable at the Asian table either. They were nice enough, but I didn't often get their jokes, and their lighthearted complaints about growing up Asian-American didn't have the same currency with someone who's only experienced the culture second-hand.

But sometimes it seems like I've only ever experienced any culture second-hand. I'm not black, or Asian-American... and I'm not, though I've largely been socialized to be, white either.

I used to play this game with newfound acquaintances where they would guess my ethnic background. I would get a wide range of guesses - lots of Hispanics, lots of Middle Easterns (especially when I grew out the facial hair), lots of Mixed Ethnic Heritages (though the specific mix was rarely guessed). Rarely black. But everyone could always tell that I'm not quite white. I never quite made the cut.

So what if it's true? What if it's unfair to have mixed-race children because, absent a singular, identifying cultural or racial identity, one is left with none? Left to float in the abyss, always on the periphery of authentic cultural experience? Left to wonder what it would be like to identify with a group, any group, please, just let me identify, let me be comfortable for a moment, let me have a table to sit at in the cafeteria, please, can I just get a few jokes? How much am I really missing out on?

And if it's true; if that's the case, then what is someone like me supposed to do - not have kids because it would be by default dooming them to a life of the same sufferings thrust upon me by my unthinking, uncaring, impractical parents? How could they have done this to me? Where was that Louisiana judge to prevent my parents from making such a grievous error? From producing such a contemptible... mistake?

Maybe the answer is to pick a side - white or black - and commit to it, maybe; date in that race only, appropriate that culture's norms, try to belong. And in a couple of generations this whole problem will be smoothed out?

But thenI remember a couple of years ago, and a conversation with a friend. I discussed with her this dilemma, and she said something that struck and intrigued me, something I'd never heard before. Instead of bi-racial, she began, instead of half-white and half-black - she asked whether it wasn't maybe, more of a... "both" situation?

Both black and white? And wasn't that kind of cool, she asked, wasn't that kind of special, kind of a privilege?

"Both," I thought. Both. Not halves; each part separate, conflicting even, in a constant power grab for dominance over my racial identity, each part closing me off from the other's culture. Both. Together. In cooperation.

An opportunity, I thought, to not be trapped inside the paradigm of a dominant - or minority - culture. Free to form my own identity irrespective of race or culture, free to appropriate what feels right in my soul from any culture and to reject what doesn't. I'm free, I thought, Like very few people are free!

But... freedom is scary. And there are lots of benefits to collective group identity - benefits that I have to work, hard, not to envy. Having limitless potential is frighteningly, debilitatingly, daunting.

So for now, I'm working on living into that freedom. I don't have an answer, and this piece doesn't have an ending. Maybe because this isn't and won't ever be over.

Maybe those old white men in Louisiana, and elsewhere, are right, and I'm burdened... or maybe - maybe they couldn't possibly be more wrong.

"On (Not) Having Children"

2009-10-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

There are 29,038,494 reasons not to have children. I was reminded of this fact early this morning as I ate oatmeal, drank coffee, and read from The Sun (some articles from which are mentioned in the previous post).

The theme of this month's issue seems to be "The Hospital," or that's what I've so far surmised (the two articles and one poem I got through this morning were all hospital- or doctor-related). The article I read this morning was in fact a short story (possibly true?) from a mother's point of view, about her 1 year-old son's week-or-so-long hospitalization. You really get into her head. It's heartbreaking.

In the same room as the narrator, though separated by a sheet, is another family - this one with a sick three year-old daughter. The narrator mentions that her one-year-old is going through trauma, but at least he doesn't understand it. He doesn't fear going into the treatment room each day because he doesn't know that he's going to get pricked and prodded in there. He doesn't yet have the awareness. But the three year-old does. The three year-old whimpers in pain and frustration, old enough to not have to wail aloud, to suffer in relative silence; to know the frustration of helplessness, and maybe even to sense what her parents are going through as test after test comes back unhelpful.

So that's reason number 747,203 not to have children - taking them to the hospital is a drag. Lying to them about things not hurting is a drag, having to deal with the complex dilemma of trust, when you are complicit in the procedures that your child only knows as pain but you know are in fact medicine, is a drag, sleeping in hospital rooms with the sounds of other families' children whimpering on the other side of the sheet - it's all a drag.

I don't know this from experience, and... I don't want to? Maybe I can have kids and guarantee that they will be 100% healthy, right? Never have to go to the hospital? I hope, I guess, that those having kids, like those buying pets, ideally know that medical issues are going to have to happen at some point and factor that into the "cost" (with pets, the cost is mostly monetary). So I'm thinking that if, at some point, I'm ready to reproduce, I'll make a cost-benefit decision and the benefits will outweigh the cost.

But what about the other millions of reasons not to have kids? Like, the fact that it's likely all of my bad habits and idiosyncrasies and weird issues and stuff will be passed on to them? Like, what if I'm poor and they have a bad childhood because they don't get enough stuff, or what if I'm rich and they have a bad childhood because they have too much stuff, or what if I'm middle-class and they have a bad childhood because their lives are too average?

Today is Friday, October 30th; children from the Jose Marti Child Development Center downstairs came through our office trick-or-treating. And they're the cutest little things in the universe. There are no words to describe how cute these little Captain Americas, faeries, Spider-men, skeletons, Care Bears, Teletubbies, monkeys, Ninja Turtles, and princesses are. I want one. I want a little kid just so I can dress it up every year!

Maybe next I'll do a post about the 29,038,495 reasons to have children?

"Selling Out"

2009-10-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

A couple excerpts from and commentary on articles from the online (truncated) version of The Sun magazine, which my house subscribes to (and I am so, so glad that we do. Best magazine I've ever had the privilege of reading).

I. From "Who Will Heal the Healers?"

Passaro: What are some items you’ve accepted in trade from patients [for health care]?

Wible: Dog care, carpentry, gardening, massages, cleaning services. Local artisans have donated the use of a kiln and glass-fusion classes. I donate many of these traded items to other patients in need. Then there’s the delicious homemade bread and homegrown produce. I will work for food.

YES to creative, demand-side healthcare. Also, yes to bartering, which is apparently getting more popular (check here and here). Wow. I want to live in a community! Wait, I do. But I mean, in the future.

I. From "Selling Out"

I stood in the store aisle and waited for another customer to choose his groceries and move on. I wanted no witnesses to what I was planning to do. As soon as the man left the aisle, I quickly grabbed a box of instant mashed potatoes — a store brand, the cheapest kind — and threw it into my cart.

No big deal, right? Lots of people use instant mashed potatoes. But not me. Never in my life.

I have sold out bit by bit over the years. As a new young mom, I made homemade baby food with a grinder. I always made spaghetti sauce from scratch and never opened a jar of Ragu. I made my own yogurt and even squeezed fresh limes for margaritas.

I stopped making yogurt more than a decade ago. And even though I add meat and veggies, my spaghetti sauce now comes from a jar. I drink my margaritas at Mexican restaurants, which, I am sure, use a mix.

But I love real mashed potatoes. Crossing the instant-potato line is a major milestone in my selling-out process. What’s next? Minute Rice?
Jessie Lehman
Chicago, Illinois

You know what I did the other night? I ate at McDonald's. I am a sell-out. What do you do when your values become inconvenient? Like, in the past, you barrelled ahead, unencumbered by the trappings of convenience or comfort - you baked your own bread, you shopped at farmer's markets, you rode your bike every day regardless of the rain, you eschewed the trappings of make-up. And then it started to get old. And you're too tired to go running in the morning, and those crow's feet are getting more distinct, and gosh, it's really raining hard today.

I'm not there yet, and I say yet, because I'm getting there and I can see it coming and I'm already disappointed in myself. I have some values. I have some "alternative/radical" lifestyle choices that are "inconvenient" but I'm not at the stage where I need convenience, yet, but I know I will, do you know what I mean? And of course, my life could be a lot more inconvenient. I could wash my clothes by hand, I could ride my bike everywhere, not just to places in a few mile radius, I could quit eating at freaking McDonalds.

How did I get into that drive-thru? Is the only reason it's been so long because there aren't any fast food places in my neighborhood? I was down by the mall. It was available. Isn't the number one predictor of whether one will give in to temptation simply the availability of their vice? And, granted, I didn't get a hamburger or something, but I know those french fries and that McFlurry were nowhere near the "spectrum," I guess, of foods I consider... um... acceptable? Something like that.

I don't know. I feel the same way every time I smoke a cigar (quitting, full-time, cold-turkey, today! No more pussyfooting with caveats and such. Wish me luck); I'm betraying myself. I can't afford them, money-wise or health-wise. Every time I hit the snooze button on my alarm, or sit around doing a crossword in the morning (well, not every time, I really enjoy crosswords) or, say, sit around in the evening, instead of going out for a run or something... Every time I eat at McDonalds, or buy some candy or whatever at the gas station, or put my clothes in the clothes dryer, or take a second shower of the day, or sit at work on facebook or blogging (like right now, though it's sort of my lunch break)...

I feel like a sell-out.

"Countering Social Ills in Afghanistan Through Development"

2009-10-29T10:31:00.000-07:00

During our charla today, we watched a video about the war in Afghanistan. The point of the video was to convince the viewer that the war in Afganistan is not working and that we should withdraw our troops (instead of deploying 40,000 more troops) from the country.

The video recommended development as a more effective means of quelling anti-Western hatred, and I tend to agree. The main issue was security from an American standpoint, i.e. reducing terrorism. Well, it's obvious why war as a security measure is a fallacy; why sending more troops into a country that dislikes being occupied will not increase our security but instead will foment more anti-Westernism.

But another, often more contentious issue is the problem of social ills; of human rights issues. The situation is surely bad (from an American ideological standpoint) in Afghanistan, with human and civil rights abuses, especially directed at women, common. And a lot of Americans see the war as the means to liberate the country from the oppressive, misogynist policies of the Taliban.

This is surely a topic to invest more time in, and this is an oversimplification of the topic, but an important question for me is: why do conservative, misogynist, oppressive ideologues gain, and maintain, power? One answer for me is scarcity.

When there are only so many resources and so much power to go around, those in power and with resources will hold it by all means. This means violence and oppression, in order to keep power and resources in the hands of those who hold them. So, women, minorities, and the marginalized suffer.

But, as a country develops, it liberalizes. As there are more resources to go around, civil rights expand. When there are more educational opportunities, fanaticism decreases. At least, that's how it seems to me, because if your prosperity is no longer tied to oppression of others - meaning when there are enough jobs to go around (Afghanistan has a 40% unemployment rate), and enough resources to distribute, such that another person making their living will not mean that you cannot make your own - then there is a drastic reduction in the impetus to fight or oppress others, because they are no longer a threat to your prosperity. Right? Development can be seen as a means to better society by reducing scarcity.

Maybe I need to think this through more and really analyze the issue, but it seems like development - investing in infrastructural improvements in the country, in hospitals and schools, in rebuilding all that the war has destroyed, projects that are built and run by local Afghanis - will counter those social "ills" we see in the country (and, of course, counter terrorism) far more effectively than troops can.

Anyway. Here's an article I found that explains the security angle better, and has some actual data.

"Dream"

2009-10-20T12:33:00.000-07:00

I'm glad that I'm getting back into the habit of posting more often. Unfortunately, I've been getting in the habit of something else that I thought I had kicked a few weeks back. Drag.

The only reason for this post is to share the fact that, of all of the late 2000s female singer-songwriters made popular by LA's Hotel Cafe and the Hotel Cafe Tour, Priscilla Ahn is my favorite. That she is the prettiest did not factor into this decision, and I will also say that Meiko is a close, close second.

The loop pedal at the middle and end of this makes it what it is. Reminds me of this incredible Swedish singer-songwriter I saw perform when I was in DC namded Theressa Andersson, who mixes all of her stuff live with loop pedals on stage, and she sounded way better live than she does in the following video:

Hope you enjoyed the music!

"Sleep Alone"

2009-10-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

I made this last night. I borrowed a couple books about drawing and figure drawing from the library the other day and I really want to spend a lot more of my free time practicing drawing.

Click to enlarge.

"Hairy Women"

2009-08-21T20:18:00.001-07:00

So, LVC is a group of young activists concerned about community, simplicity, sustainability, social justice, defying conventional societal norms, anti-racism, and many other things. For some LVCers, the "defying conventional societal norms" means more than just extricating oneself from the standard American consumerist/capitalist mindset.

For many LVC women, this means deciding that their internal merit is far more important than their physical appearance - many opt to go without make-up. Some take it a step further and do not shave their arms or legs, or pluck their eyebrows... and a daring two or three have decided that there is no real reason for them to shave any of their body hair. Yes, this means hairy female armpits.

I fully support this decision in theory, and want to believe that since I was simply socialized to find smooth armpits and legs attractive, I could be socialized out of the belief. I know that I would be somewhat uncomfortable if Lisa decided to stop shaving her armpits or legs - but I know intellectually that expecting her to shave her body is an outmoded, sexist convention that I could get over.

As I was thinking about this, and about how much I respect the two women I've met this week (there might be more) who do not shave their armpits, I found myself thinking about my face, and how I haven't shaved in a couple days. And - wait. Why do I shave my face again?

I tried to rationalize it, but realize that the only reason I shave my facial hair is because I don't have enough to grow a full beard, and I think my half-grown peach fuzz is unattractive - unattractive. Much like women shave their armpits and legs because they think the alternative is unattractive. Or maybe they don't? I've heard from women that they wear make-up and/or shave because they like to look pretty or whatever, not because they feel this intense pressure from society (necessarily). But many women have never tried the alternative, I think, because of the social repercussions...

And if they've been socialized that way, and I think that's potentially oppressive, then is not my desire to shave my face also oppressive in some way? But my face feels itchy when I don't shave it. And it's uncomfortable for Lisa when I kiss her or whatever. And... well, there are quite a few more issues as well, chief among them my inability as a male to really understand what's going on with women and their physical selves and understandings of beauty and whatever.

So... to shave or not to shave?

Bonus! Pedro the Lion's "When They Really Get To Know You They Will Leave:"

"Transition"

2009-08-16T07:43:00.000-07:00

I've been gone for a bit - because I've been ultra-busy. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook (which is likely, I don't know how anyone would find this blog otherwise) then you know I recently moved to Seattle, to work with the Lutheran Volunteer Corps for El Centro de La Raza. Let's recap what happened before that:

Two weeks ago was my last week in Portland. I was sad to leave; I loved Portland, with its strange and wonderful denizens, bike-friendliness, ease of navigation, weather, and more. I dreaded the move to Seattle, except (and this is a very, very large exception) for the fact that Lisa would be in Seattle! Even if I was going to be working as a dirt licker, I would have welcomed the move.

I had a lot to do the last week - I had a blog to write for this one guy, I had some work to do for Charles, I had to pack, I had to finish my sign twirling, and I had to get my summer reading done for LVC (still haven't completely finished that). On top of that, I found out early in the week that my brother was going to be hitch-hiking up to Portland with a friend! So once he got there, most of my time was spent with him and I couldn't spend much doing the stuff I needed to do. But it was good to see him. We still don't really see eye-to-eye, at all, but it was a good time. We hung out, busked a bit for tobacco money, and talked. It was a good time.

Anyway, I left Portland, gave my garden to Sal, and drove up to Seattle - and met Lisa! And we spent a week looking at roomshares for her to live in. I found out where I'm going to be living too, and it's gorgeous and less than a mile away from where I'll be working (pretty freakin' convenient). Lisa's place is OK; we definitely looked at a bunch of dumps. The best thing about it is that it's month-to-month, so she can jet out if it turns out to be just terrible. I guess the worst thing about it is the location (Magnolia); it's not super far from downtown or anything but it's just not central or in a cool neighborhood like Ballard.

The next couple days Lisa and I spent garage sailing in search of a desk; Emily and Brian gave us a dresser and side table that will work well. We found a cool one at "Not Yo Mama's Garage Sale," which was pretty sweet. The rest of the garage sales were pretty lame.

So far my review of Seattle, vs. Portland, is that Seattle is, and definitely feels, like a much bigger city. Seattle is extremely difficult to get around in. The street names seem arbitrary, and the directional designations (NE, S, SW, or none) are difficult to wrap my head around. Portland was so easy. Lisa and I got lost basically every day. I think we're starting to get the hang of it, now. I'm going to be glad to be taking the bus most of the time, I guess? Or walking to work? Not having too far to drive. I hope I can get a bike soon, I suppose.

Anyways, I didn't spend long in Seattle; at present I am back in Washington, DC, for a week, to do a training thing for LVC. I took a red-eye flight and didn't sleep really, which is a bummer. I arrived in DC at 8:30am, which is 5:30am PST. I don't have anywhere to be until 2:00, so I am at an Au Bon Pain down the street from our registration area waiting it out. I'd be nice to sleep here in the cafe but I don't see that happening :)

I do like DC, though. When I lived here I don't know if I took advantage of/appreciated the city as much as I could have. I love the metro. I love the feeling of the city. I love its overtly diverse nature. Anyways I'm here for a week. It's hot. Luckily it's going to get cooler while I'm here, but anything's hot compared to the perfect Seattle weather right now.

In other good news, I got two paychecks in the mail today - as soon as I get my reimbursement from LVC and my deposit back from Larry, I am officially going to have my credit card paid off! YES! That means that I spent two months in Portland, spent my savings (there really wasn't any) and my graduation present cash (also not too much, but a sizeable amount), and basically came out even. But the experience - was it worth the experience? I don't know; I ended up getting a job in Seattle anyway (which I could have done from home and saved $1000 or so). But Portland was a great time. And I found out how much I loved the city. I am glad I did it, so then, yes, it was worth it.

That's all for now :)

"My first ever comic!"

2009-08-03T15:01:00.000-07:00

OK! Wow! I'm nervous. I mean, really, nobody is going to read this anyway, but... Well, this is the first comic I've ever really done. Like, scripted it, drew it, inked it, scanned it, a little post-processing, and now it's here online.

And it's not great, but that's kind of the point, I guess? Like, going through the archives of some of the webcomics I read daily now, it's crazy how much they've changed, how much better they've gotten. I'm just glad that I've begun, that that's out of the way, that I can start getting better (I have a long way to go) at drawing comics.

I drew this comic on a 9x12 piece of sketchbook paper, with a mechanical pencil, and I inked it with a fine-tipped sharpie. Haha. For the word bubbles and some clean-up I used photoshop.

So, with all that being said, the comic makes a lot more sense if you (well, I guess, it makes no sense at all unless you) read webcomics. I reference inkdick, DAR, Penny-Arcade, Questionable Content, Pictures for Sad Children, and Octopus Pie in this comic, so if you aren't familiar with them you might not "get" it. Anyways, here you go:

Original Version (click to enlarge):

This one has my original word bubbles in place and I didn't do the greatest job of trying to edit out stray pencil marks that wouldn't erase.

Second Version (click to enlarge):

This one I entered the word bubbles in with photoshop because I wasn't really satisfied with my handwriting (especially toward the end). And I did a little bit better with editing pencil marks. And there's a tiny bit of color.

I still have to decide whether I'd like to put word bubbles in digitally (not this crazy hybrid I tried here that doesn't work) or just be more careful with my handwriting. Anyways, please enjoy and leave a comment! Good or bad, tips, tricks, which of the two versions you like better, etc. Thanks a lot.

"Christianity & mewithoutYou's Lyrics"

2009-08-02T19:02:00.000-07:00

I recently read Anne Lammot's "Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith," which I highly recommend (both to Christians and to anyone else). One of the thoughts she shares in the book struck me.

Before she became a Christian, for weeks she would walk into a Church nearby the Sunday flea market she frequented, because the music was so beautiful. She had been brought up with a healthy distrust of Christianity, and would stand in the doorway listening to the music but leave just before the sermon. For weeks she would stand, entranced by the music, feeling a strange peace in the beauty of the songs, and then her intellect would get the better of her and she would leave after the songs ended. Eventually the music broke her, and she began to stay for the sermon and then, much later, she became a Christian.

A few weeks ago, when I was in LA for Nick and Sheena's wedding, mewithoutYou was playing at a downtown music venue and a bunch of my friends were going. Because one of my goals while in LA was to see some of the friends that I so dearly missed since moving away from LA, it was a perfect opportunity to interact with a bunch of them at once.

I'd never been a big fan of mewithoutYou; the strange vocals, nearly inscrutable lyrics and too-hardcore for my taste musical style turned me off. But I read Chris Faris' review of their new album, and I knew that many of my friends (Amy, Trevor, Matt Dougherty, to name a few) absolutely LOVED the band, so I decided to give them a try.

And the concert wasn't great. I had downloaded their albums a week or so prior and tried (in vain) to get into their stuff. At the concert, I didn't know a bunch of the songs; it was far too loud and hot and crowded; I was tired from a missed flight and hours of public transportation and didn't want to stand there listening to music I didn't really enjoy.

But I talked to Trevor about his love for the band and he said it was all about the lyrics. He said that he is consistently amazed when re-listening to their songs, that he reaches newfound insights each time he sits with the lyric book and follows along. He called them "the most Christian band I know." Coming from the teaching pastor at the church I attended frequently, this is something, and equally so because I very highly respect Trevor's taste in music.

So after getting back from the show, and especially after getting their new album, which is much, much more easily palatable than their older stuff, I started listening to them more. And then a lot more. When I found that I really, really enjoyed their new album, it somehow gave me license to like their older stuff too. Except for their first one (can't get over the screaming, sorry) their last three albums are now at the top of my frequent listening list. I really, really enjoy mewithoutYou's stuff. And now, after having listened to their albums over and over, something curious has been happening.

I've recently found myself in Anne Lammot's position. I am currently not a Christian, per se. But when I listen to mewithoutYou, I get a sense of the peace, love, order, that Christianity offers, but that I don't really understand. I find myself in their lyrics. But I don't believe in the God they do, or I don't think I do. I don't think that mewithoutYou is going to lead me back to Christianity like the choir singers at that church led Anne Lammot to Christianity, but I've just had some interesting thoughts, feelings, etc. when listening to this music that point to something inside of me that I don't really understand at the moment.

Here's a sample of a few of the songs that really affect me:

There's a sign on the barn in the cabbage town
When the rain picks up and the sun goes down:
Sinners, come inside. With no money, come and buy.
No clever talk, nor a gift to bring
requires our lowly, lovely king.
Come now empty handed, you don't need anything."
_from "A Stick, A Carrot, And A String"

In every blade of grass, (x6)
Allah, Allah, Allah
in every blade of grass.

It doesn't matter what you done,
it doesn't matter what you done.
What effect is without a cause?
It doesn't matter what you done.
Now lay your faithless head down
in necessity's cotton hand.
There's a love that never changes
no matter what you done.

If your old man did you wrong (x3)
Well, maybe his old man did him wrong.
If you care to sing forgiveness songs,
come down and join our band.
We'll cut you like a sword,
and sing forgiveness songs.
_from "Allah, Allah, Allah"

What new mystery is this?
What blessed backwardness?
The Immeasurable One is held and does not resist!
Struck by wicked words and foolish fists of senseless men,
the Almighty One does not defend!

What new mystery is this? In overflowing emptiness
the Invisible is seen among the shadows and the mist,
before my doubting eyes, the Infinite appears in time -
the Unquestionable is questioned, but makes no reply!

What new mystery is this? (x5)
"My Rabbi!" My lips betray with a kiss.
_from "A Glass Can Only Spill What It Contains"

No one here to believe but You.
Everyone else is bound to leave but You.
When they swear their love is real,
they mean "I like the way you make me feel."
There's no one here to believe but You.
_from "Every Thought a Thought of You"

"But I'm so small I can barely be seen -
how can this great love be inside of me?"
Look at your eyes - they're small in size, but they see enormous things.

"Oh, but I'm so afraid, and I'm set in my ways."
But he'll make the rabbits and rocks sing his praise.
"But I'm too tired, I won't last long."
No, he'll use the weak to overcome the strong!

We hunger, but though all that we eat brings us little relief
we don't know quite what else to do,
We have all our beliefs but we don't want our beliefs,
God of peace, we want you.
_from "Four Word Letter Pt. 2"

The idea of "Sinners, come inside. With no money, come and buy," is just such a beautiful image, right? One of the most enduringly appealing aspects of the concept of Jesus. And I love, love, love the way that Aaron Weiss chooses, probably to the scorn of mainline Christians, to use the name "Allah" to refer to God instead of, well, "God." And that last line - "If you care to sing forgiveness songs/ come down and join our band/ we'll cut you like a sword/ and sing forgiveness songs." I don't know exactly what he's saying with this cutting business. Cut me open to reveal the truth inside of me, or the true me? Cut me in a malicious way, and then we all sing to forgive each other our mutual sins? I don't know, but it resonates in a way I can't understand. And I love this "blessed backwardness." Another example of the appeal of Jesus. And then the idea that we're all Judas. The (in my opinion entirely correct) understanding of the world's view of love in "Every Thought." And that last one, the questions, the answers, the longing for peace.

Listening to these songs makes me think, "I'd go to a church, I'd be a part of the religion that this guy sings about." And I realized that I did, kind of; that Risen was kind of that kind of church. But then I remember my main problem with Christianity - its exclusivity.

I remember reading third-hand (a Youtube comment or something, talking about a friend who had spoken to Weiss after a show, or something) that Weiss was quoted as saying something like, "I do believe that Jesus is the only way to heaven, but that doesn't mean I believe Christianity is." And I kind of want to accept that. And I'd go to a church that believes that.

But it would basically, by definition, not be Christian, right?

"I was a teenage propagandist"

2009-07-19T23:36:00.000-07:00

Introduction

I've been, for a long time, wanting to write about what could be called my "journey of faith." I haven't really written about God, Christianity, or my take on "faith" in a quite a long time - it used to be a regular topic of mine for musing - because so much has changed, and it's so important to me, and to write it down would make things finalized in some fundamental way, but nothing is finalized by any means. I've been in a continuous state of flux for the last two years or so in terms of "faith." I just realized how appropriate it is that I should put the word "faith" in quotations, because it's really a meaningless word - in the sense that it has so many meanings to so many people that it cannot stand alone and have meaning, and needs some sort of explanation in order to establish context and, thus, meaning.

I wonder now whether a few of years ago I might have written "journey to faith," and I wonder whether six-to-twelve months ago whether I would have written "journey away from faith." I don't at present think either of those is accurate. Much of this was prompted by two very similar conversations I've had recently with two entirely different people about this topic - and my difficulty in having said conversations. Both were Christians, but one a sixty-something conservative friend's mother, and one a twenty-something very liberal very good friend of mine. The first was more difficult, but in both cases I didn't know how to describe my "relationship with God" (or whether I believe I have one), or even describe who I believe God is or whether I believe he or she exists, or really say anything substantial (or coherent) about how I view "faith."

I will make a statement here, which will hopefully serve to end these introductory remarks, assuage any non-Christians reading this, and hopefully not turn away any Christians reading it: I am not a Christian. At least, I don't think I am. I once was. I once knew things wholeheartedly - but I don't know if I really know anything anymore. That's sort of the point. This story is much more nuanced (and I believe that every human being's story is much more nuanced) than "coming to the faith" or "getting to know Jesus" or "falling away from the faith" or "becoming an atheist" or whatever. Maybe no one will want to read it. I'm sort of writing for myself, after all. But maybe it's interesting enough for you, reader, to read on.

The Teenage Propagandist

I grew up in a sort-of Christian home. By "sort-of," I mean it was like the majority of American families in that Christianity was presupposed but not overtly practiced - we said Grace at mealtimes, we went to church on Christmas and Easter and sporadically throughout the year. Once in a while my dad would be hit with a moderate form of religious fervor and would sit us down and read Bible stories to us from a Children's Bible stories book, probably the "Children's Book of Virtues," which I remember clearly, and which was a more secular moral primer for children. We also surely had more Bible-based childrens' books around the house.

My father also had some adult Christian books laying about the house, from authors such as Charles Swindoll and C.S. Lewis, which I assume he read at least once. My father was quite the voracious reader, and as I grew I followed in his footsteps (and eventually became an English major!) and ended up reading almost everything in the house, including these books. We never really had any overt Christian training; my father didn't force anything like Sunday School upon us (with any regularity, at least; I do remember some Sunday School in my childhood). Christianity was presumed the norm, but wasn't thrust upon us in any indoctrinating way by my parents. The indoctrination I later put upon myself.

In the sixth grade, I moved from Livermore, CA, where my brother and I lived with my mother, to Cupertino, CA, where my father had recently moved (they were divorced when I was about four years old, and I somewhat romantically want to believe that the reasoning for the move followed the plot of the film "Boyz in the Hood"). In Cupertino, I met my next-door neighbor, Kenny, who was my age and was actively involved in the youth group in his church.

He eventually invited me to go, and I did, and the rest is history, I suppose. I started going to youth group, then to church, regularly; I started to get involved, to learn about Christianity, and embarked on the path that led me to where I am today. By high school, I was very much a Christian, and joined the Christian club and learned worship songs on the guitar and was actively involved in youth ministry and went on "missions trips" to Mexico every summer, where we put on plays dramatizing the passion of the Christ and also built some homes and helped refurnish an orphanage, and I especially went to the Christian summer camps (where I "met Jesus" for the first time, I suppose, "dedicated my life to Christ," I think is the correct term. I was about 15). Basically, I got thoroughly involved with the church, and considered myself a Christian. My involvement eventually infected my family and they soon started coming to church every Sunday and my stepmom (who was my father's girlfriend at the time, I think) started helping out with hospitality at the church and stuff.

I remember two high school experiences clearly, which will hopefully illustrate the impact that this transformation had on my life. One was a decision I made at some point in high school to purge myself of all secular music. I have been a huge fan of music since I was a little child; one of my earliest memories is dancing with my father to Michael Jackson records in our living room; I remember owning my first CD (either No Doubt or Alanis Morrissette), I remember buying an iPod from a friend when they first came out (the huge, 5gb one) and being enthralled with music. But after a while I was convinced (by God? By the church? By my youth pastor? By my friends?) that true Christians didn't listen to non-Christian music. So I deleted all of the secular music off of my computer and gave away, threw out, or sold all of my secular CDs. And for literally almost a year I listened to nothing but God-praising tunes (Switchfoot, Five Iron Frenzy, the Newsboys, DC Talk, Barlow Girl, and so many more). I now think of this and think of the Nazis burning books. But at the time I thought I was being a good Christian.

Another time was once, when my family was on vacation with another family, I remember vividly debating with a member of this other family all of the reasons that gay marriage, and homosexuality in general of course, was an abomination. Anyone that knows me know would think that this is ludicrous, but I was literally a teenage propagandist - spreading the "love" of Christ to anyone that would hear. Almost all of my friends were Christian, I invited my non-Christian friends to youth group and almost ended friendships over their lack of interest in Christianity (I'm sorry Derek). I remember breaking up with my first real girlfriend when I found out she had lost her virginity and thus wasn't a "committed Christian" or something of the like (I shudder to remember this, let me tell you). I believed in Jesus, and in his resurrection and "saving grace;" I had all kinds of arguments to explain why only Christians would go to heaven, I would cry out in guilt, metaphorically speaking, at my inability to rid myself of lust (and would cry, literally, when I succumbed to, say, internet pornography). I viewed everything in terms of a cosmic battle between a just, loving God and an evil Devil. All of my relationships were colored with this view, all of my actions, all of my thoughts. It consumed me.

I remember when my grandmother, a die-hard Christian, died. I didn't know her too well, though I vaguely remember her sending me greeting cards in the mail every once in a while, and calling me her "little prince." She was a sweet, sweet woman, who mussed up your hair, smoked endless cigarettes, and always had a bowl of candy out on the coffee table of the apartment she lived in alone for nearly thirty years in Pasadena, CA (her husband, my grandfather, died when my father was young - long before I was born). As she succumbed to lung cancer about five years ago, in her mid-seventies, my uncle put her up with home care in the rec room of his house nearby. She hung around for maybe a year after the diagnosis, and I remember visiting her twice - once when she was at least still conscious, could smile if not talk - and once when she was in the final throes of a slow, painful death. At this point she was basically comatose, and the adults sent each of the children into the room to basically say a final "goodbye," if we chose to. When it was my turn, I went in and stood next to her for a moment. I didn't know what to say. I'd never encountered death. I said something along the lines of, "Well, you'll finally get to meet Jesus, grandma." And though I wasn't sure exactly what this meant, I believed it. I believed it.

The College Years

And so of course, when it was time to look for a college, of the five (yes, only five) schools I applied to, three were private Christian schools and two were UCs. I think I got into four of them (UC Berkeley rejected me) and I chose Pepperdine, the higher-ranked than Occidental or Chapman. I didn't really think about what I wanted out of a college. Now, I know that I probably would have been a better fit at UC Irvine. But that's neither here nor there, I of course don't regret my decisions (at the time, I would have said that God told me to choose Pepperdine, and I don't necessarily disbelieve this still - I did meet Lisa, and have a number of other incredible experiences that I might not have had elsewhere. Who knows?).

But I came to Pepperdine a bright-eyed, relatively conservative Christian youth. And now I've exited a more-or-less free-thinking agnostic. Interesting how that happens, isn't it? It took a Christian school, and a Christian book (which I'll get into a bit later) to rid me of my certainty about almost everything. I still wonder at everything that's happened. And to tell you the truth, like I stated above, I don't know if I'm a Christian because I can't denounce God just yet. I feel that at some level He, if He exists, must have had a hand in it. I suppose I'll never know.

I remember that near the end of high school our youth pastor took us, on Sundays, to a few different churches to practice "shopping around" for a church, which we'd have to do when we went to college.

This will be finished eventually.

"Food Stamps, Pride"

2009-07-16T18:30:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I was driving to my friend Nick's wedding with another friend, Mike. We were catching up (it had been many months since we'd seen each other) and one of the things we commiserated about was our difficulty in finding jobs and relative broke-ness. I mentioned that I had recently gotten accepted into the food stamps program (startlingly easy in Oregon) and he said something like, when he was an unemployed, recent graduate, he had considered doing the same thing - but pride, or something like it, had kept him from applying.

I was listening to NPR the other day and heard a teaser for a show on the next morning's program about people who are on food stamps, many of whom had never in their lives thought they would need government assistance. A lady quoted said something like, "I make sure to dress well when I go to the supermarket so that I don't seem like the kind of person who needs food stamps..." I was interested. I hadn't thought too much about it, but the next time I went to the grocery store I felt myself eyeing the floor as I handed the cashier my EBT card (the "official name," they aren't stamps after all), and wondering what the other people in line thought of me using it. I realized I have almost the opposite reaction - I look too wealthy to be on food stamps; do the other people in line think I'm cheating the system in some way? Do they think I don't deserve it? I almost want to dress worse when I go to the store, to avoid that kind of judgment. But all three of these reactions (not getting EBT in the first place, wanting to look like you are above food stamps, wanting to look like you deserve them) all stem from the same source: pride.

I also never thought that I'd be on food stamps. But I'm hopelessly poor. I have never been good at saving or managing money (chalk that up to a standard upper-middle class upbringing, where I had everything provided for me), and it's really making life difficult right now. I am now about $500 in debt, am barely making rent, and an extra $200 a month to spend on food is a life-saver. A job I'm taking in August is a volunteer position, and though I will get my housing, food, and travel expenses taken care of, the additional $100 stipend per month will be spend mostly on my cell phone bill, leaving basically nothing for savings. Because I have this job lined up in August, for the last month or two I have not really been able to work at anything steady - I got a job at a coffee shop after searching for a month, only to have to turn it down because they wanted long-term employees only.

So now I go to the grocery store and pull out my EBT card and feel guilty. I don't have a family to feed; I don't have to wonder what might happen if I get sick and can't afford care because I can't get insurance. Unlike people who do have families and economic insecurity, I have my parents to fall back on if anything really bad happens. I wonder about the people who actually need government assistance - people without backup plans, people whose lives this economic recession has actually hopelessly burdened.

I feel especially bad about it because having $200 a month in food stamps means that I get the luxury of buying almost entirely organic. Granted, I would spend less if they offered me less... but I don't know. One of the most terribly difficult things about poverty is the fact that poor people can't afford to eat healthily. And here I am on food stamps, buying all organic stuff.

I was told at the office when I applied that there are hundreds of thousands of people on government assistance in Oregon. And I learned that there is "plenty" of money in the system to accommodate basically everyone that needs assistance. So there isn't some finite amount, some limit that we're getting too close to; so I'm not theoretically pushing someone else out of the way who actually needs EBT. But I still feel guilty.

Pride's an interesting emotion. It can cause some people to refuse help because they want to be more independent, they want to know that they succeeded on their own (Mike did end up getting a job and is doing relatively well. Not wealthy by any means, but he pays his bills). It can cause some people to try and project the image that they are above assistance, that this is just an emergency, that they will get it figured out soon and then be again a member of the "productive" class. And then it make some of us feel guilty and try to project the image that we are deserving, too.

If anything, the experience has given me, again, a glimpse into the lives of those we often ignore or don't see - those hundreds of thousands in whose favor the system does not work. The hundreds of thousands of (usually brown-skinned) poor folks who will probably always be on some sort of assistance. Who can work all day, try their best, and who will and whose kids will probably always be teetering on the edge of destitution.

It makes me think: is our economic system, is capitalism, working when hundreds of thousands of people need the government to help them simply eat each day? And when a few fat cats in high society screw up, in their greed-induced fervors, and send the economy crashing into oblivion, that upper-middle class university graduates end up needing help simply eating as well? Is there even a way that a country such as ours could transition into a fairer system wherein the majority of people at least have their basic necessities met?

I don't know. I'm not sure exactly what changes would need to be made. But I hope so.

Lethargy

2009-07-11T23:17:00.001-07:00

Derek said something to me tonight on Twitter about how we're both living our big city lives and yet we end up sitting home alone on Friday and Saturday nights watching television. He doesn't really count; it's the first time he's been single in... five years or so, and I guess I don't really count because I'm just passing time until I move to Seattle and this long-distance relationship thing ends.

Speaking of television, though, I was at the Mississippi Ave. Street Festival today and one booth had tons of DVDs for only $5. They also had TV Show DVDs for incredibly cheap - seasons 1 and 2 of Weeds, for example, for only $15; I think they had Grey's Anatomy, they had a few South Parks, the first season of LOST - if I wasn't 100% broke I might have picked one up.

Here's something else I've been thinking about. What's the deal with love and relationships? I know it's a super-unique blog post topic, but I just realized something about watching three seasons or so of a TV show in a matter of weeks - people in TV shows get in relationships, and then the relationships end. Ugly Betty is what I just finished watching, so I'll use it as an example - Betty falls in love with Henry in season 1, and then is on and off with him in season 2, and falls in love with Gio, and then that ends, and then she falls in love with Matt and then on the season finale Matt breaks up with her. There's a lot of love and lot of breakups. But usually the relationships in TV shows are spread out over months. I witnessed Matt and Betty's entire relationship in a matter of days. It just makes it all seem so futile. I guess it's kind of getting me down. It's making me miss Lisa.

People on TV shows always talk about the relationships "working out," or about "the future," but you know from the start that they aren't going to get married, ever. Unless it's the series finale, Betty is never going to get married. It would completely alter the fabric of the show. Think about Sex and the City - the whole show is based around her relationships, and they all have to fail. You kind of root for them to work out, especially when it's a cool guy (Like Aidan... yes, I like that show). But like I was saying before, she can't get married unless it's the last episode (or the film, which I didn't actually see, but I assume she married Big and ended up "happily ever after"). It's like all TV relationships are doomed from the start. Depressing, right?

Anyway, I've been feeling really lethargic lately; I stay up late watching television and sleep in and waste time reading comics or watching YouTube or surfing Digg. And sometimes I'll go out, like today. But I feel like for the last few months I've just been waiting for the 4th of July to be over because then Lisa was going to be here. And now she isn't. And there are perfectly legitimate reasons for her not to be, and I understand, but it still sucks. I didn't realize that that was what I was waiting for. She said something that made me think, why did I move to Portland if I wanted to be with her so bad? Why didn't I move to Plano for a little while?

But I had to take a risk, and it sort of paid off. I feel like I've taken a lot of risks for this relationship. I have never really known what was going to happen or what the future would hold. I never worried about money and it's gotten me in some bad spots but it's given me some incredible times as well. I guess I feel that there should be more risk-taking in the world. Figure out the details later, you know? Get into debt for a little bit if it means being with the people you love for a little bit. If you believe in God or the Universe or Love or something then it will all eventually work out. Plus, we are of the lucky few who have safety nets in that our parents own homes and have enough income that we can always move home and pick up the pieces if our big risks end up breaking us down.

But what I really meant to say is that, after tonight, it's final that I will not be seeing Lisa until mid-to-late August. So waiting is over. I watched my TV shows; Ugly Betty, 30 Rock, Arrested Development - I don't have those to occupy my time anymore. I have some work I can do, I have a million cool events I can go to, I have some new friends I can hang out with. I have a guitar. And I have all the time in the world to WRITE. Why am I not writing in this every day? Why am I not writing stories, and songs, and ideas for screenplays, and essays? Is that not what I want to do with my life? Am I not a writing major? Well, as Lloyd Dobler would say, "My assault on the world begins now."

Family

2009-07-04T00:41:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of thinking. I've had a lot of time, being unemployed; what time I don't spend catching up on all the television I've missed out on for the last few years I spend thinking.

I've been wondering about the life I'm leading, I guess - being out on my own. I'm here, basically alone in Portland. Derek asked me the other night whether I get lonely, and the answer is yes. Well, sort of. I don't really get lonely. I don't get homesick. I've learned that I don't really get that emotional at all.

Talking to Lisa especially, but to Rob and Derek and Ben, about family has got me thinking. And watching Arrested Development, where "family first" is the mantra of that hyper-disfunctional family. But it seems like everyone my age has a sort of bond, a connection, that must be severed, usually with difficulty, for them to make the jump to moving out and living their own lives apart from their family. I don't really have that.

I don't know if it's a result of having divorced parents, and living in so many different places, or the strange family dynamics that have presented themselves as a result of that, but I never had a hard time imagining myself moving far away from my family and starting my own life. I had friends in college who talked to, if did not visit, their families very regularly. And Lisa surely has a difficult time with the decision to move away (though her reasons are more complicated). I was struck when Ben, of all people, told me that it was difficult for him to live far from his family.

I've always thought I was a pretty emotional person. Intuitive. Introspective. But in the last year or so I've noticed that I have a marked lack of emotion about almost everything. I always thought it was cool-headedness, or something, but it seems like it's more than that. It seems like I just don't really care, and that bothers me tremendously.

Why isn't it difficult for me to be far away from my family? To contact them only when it's necessary? Maybe it's normal for young adults to want to strike out on their own, but... it seems like everyone my age at least has a difficult time with it, even if they end up at the same conclusions that I do. My family aren't bad people. They've supported me in everything. They are loving and caring and affectionate. I love them. So what's the deal?

I've always known that I'm the kind of person that would lock up feelings and try to be calm and collected about things, but I never thought it was a lack of emotionality. I'm starting to think that it is. I don't know.

July '09 Photos

2009-07-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I witnessed something so beautiful - two of my good friends getting married, to each other! I took photos and they came out BAD, BAD, BAD. Here are a couple (out of 100) that aren't TERRIBLE:

They are a little bit out of order... but you get the idea. Goodness, it was so beautiful. I want to get married.

Pride and Such

2009-06-18T16:57:00.000-07:00

I was doing really well at posting in here regularly... I must apologize, all of my faithful readers, for the suspense. I'm doing well. I'll try to do a recap to bring us up to speed. Also, I have a terrible memory so we'll see if this even works.

Tuesday, June 9th
I went by Sisters of the Road and dropped off my resume and cover letter. Unfortunately, the lady who took it (who is hiring, who I'd be working under) didn't really want to talk or anything. Maybe she was busy? So I just dropped off my stuff and left. :T And then I went to go get tickets to Greg Laswell for next week! And then I realized I was hungry, and I went back to Sisters for lunch. On the way back (like 30 minutes later) I passed by the same lady... and said an awkward greeting... I wonder what she was thinking. What's this guy up to? He came and left... and then came back later... is he a stalker, a weirdo, or what? You know? Bleh. But the food was excellent and I met Sarge and Arthur. And then I left, and went and did some other stuff that I don't remember at present. :(

Wednesday, June 10th
I had a busy day today as well. I drove all around town - I went and dropped of a resume at a little coffee shop that's hiring, and I drove by the Doug Fir to see if they were selling Bat for Lashes tickets (sold out! But they sell some at the door so I'm going to go try that), I went to a garage sale way out in Troutdale and got a desk and some storage shelving stuff, I drove down to Lake Oswego and looked at a bicycle (no good), and I think I did even more. It might have been this day or the day before that I talked to Jesse and he said he's going to come to the BFL show! So that's cool. I have a new friend. I also made contact with Charles at NWeSOURCE (please don't look up their website) as a potential job opportunity, and with Ifara, Inc., an AIDS awareness/advocacy organization that I might be volunteering with to help them write grants.

Thursday, June 11th.
Thursday! Was a big day. I went in the morning and bought a bicycle! I LOVE IT, here are crappy cell phone photos:

Yessss... I'm fuzzy here about the timing, but I also met with Fred at Ifara, Inc., and am going to help them out for free, and with NWeSOURCE, and I'm going to be helping them out FOR PAY! That's right, I got a job. It's temporary, and piece-by-piece, meaning not steady, but I'm writing and doing a little layout design which is cool.

Then that night I rode my bike to the Doug Fir and waited in line and got tickets to BFL! I also met Jesse there, who is this awesome dude I met at a couchsurfer meet-up the weekend prior. He is a graphic designer, runner, and all-around cool dude. Since we got there about 6:30 and the show didn't start until 9:30, we had about 3 hours to kill, and we had only met once. Luckily, we are both talkative, and we had a ton in common so it was cool! I think we're going to go running next week. Sweet.

Then there was Bat for Lashes... such an AMAZING show. Unfortunately, some WTF band called Hecuba was before them, and they were interesting to say the least. Oh gosh. But BFL was so incredible, and I was literally a foot away from Natasha Kahn, because I stood on the edge of the stage as to not block too many people, and she happened to set her keyboard up right on the edge, right in front of me!

Photo from the Merc, where there are more and a write-up as well.

I was only able to get this crappy phone photo (I forgot my real camera), but you see how close I was:

Wow. It's been too long since I've been to a great concert. I'm tired and I need to get to other things, so I'll finish the wrap-up later tonight or tomorrow.

Who knows what I did on Friday, June 12.

Saturday, June 13th, and Sunday, June 14th have been the Pride Festival! I helped IFARA run a booth where they got people to film safer sex messages for a PSA.
I think one of those days was the day I planted my little garden! If you want to see it, and some of the process, I filmed it and a little tour of my house in a YouTube video for my girlfriend. If anyone that's reading this wants to watch, then they can find the video here; remember that it was filmed for my girlfriend so... skip the sentimental parts if that's not what you want to see, I guess.

Monday, June 15th through Thursday, June 18th are kind of a blur. Applying for jobs, bumming around the house, riding my bike. On Tuesday, I think, I went over to Jesse's for dinner and met his girlfriend, who is super nice (they're both super nice, actually) and then we went for a little jog and talked about stuff. And we passed by the Skate Church, which was weird. But the skatepark looked awesome; I think I might check it out next month...

This upcoming weekend is the beginning of PedalPalooza!

Does Portland have a festival every freaking weekend? I can't go, though; I'm flying back to SoCal to go to Nick and Sheena's wedding. I am pretty psyched for that. But PedalPalooza goes for a few weeks, so... I don't know. Should I do the naked bike ride? Or one of the other 328974 biking-related events? We'll see.

Tomorrow I go to see Greg Laswell! Exciting! I feel like I shouldn't have bought that ticket, though; I still don't have any money. Oh, did I say that I applied for, and received, food stamps the other day? They decided to give me the full amount (about $200), which is probably more than I need. Anyways, I do need it; my income right now is about $400-600 a month, and my rent is $450. So, let's hope I get a real job, and then I won't have to be on food stamps anymore, OK? Yay!

I live at 4221 NE 77th AVE, PORTLAND, OR

2009-06-07T20:56:00.000-07:00

So I chose to live with Larry. Except, Larry doesn't live there, he owns and rents the place but lives elsewhere. So I live with some other dudes. Weird, middle-aged dudes. Most of them are really mellow and keep to themselves, so that's cool. But Sal is really friendly and we talked a little bit. He seems like a really wise man. He moved here from Libya 32 years ago and I think has a lot of experience and wisdom. We'll see. Everyone in Portland is weird, and that is awesome. I love weird people. I think that might not have been expressed enough in my last post. I love how everyone is themself here. There aren't seventeen layers of pretension like most of the people I met in LA. People don't really seem to care about what you think of them... it's great.

We went to a couchsurfing meetup this afternoon and I brought some fruit I had just purchased at a roadside stand (it was a potluck). But then I left it all there! I wanted to bring home at least a little. And I made a friend! So that's cool.

Did I mention that we saw The Hangover the other night? It was hilarious. I recommend seeing it. Not the funniest movie ever, and I surely have critiques. But quite good.

Bat for Lashes is playing at this little club on Thursday. And Greg Laswell is playing next week. I think BFL is sold out, though. Tickets are going for $100 on craiglist? They were originally $10. Hopefully I can buy some at the door, I don't know.

Also, this is a strange, convoluted post, but I like today's Cat and Girl (click to enlarge):

That is all.

Elliott Writes: "Enough"

2009-06-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

I wrote this a while back, and then I revised it a few weeks ago when I sent it as a writing sample for a job I applied for. I think I like it a bit less now, but it's recent writing!

A mentor of mine has a t-shirt that reads, “The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth… it’s enough.” I often wonder about this enigmatic message; its simplicity, its hope. But one realizes that the phrase is only superficially simple. What does “enough” really even mean? And how do we get there?

This past summer I spent six weeks volunteering in a small town in Ghana, western Africa, where poverty wasn’t just downtown, or on a news special, or in my non-profit class, but was everyday life for nearly everyone I met. I remember seeing a poster for sale on the street that featured a naked, emaciated young boy, arms outstretched toward the sky, with an imploring look on his face and tears in his eyes. Above him were the words, “God, you promised us our daily bread; may we have it now?”

And I wondered about the concept of “daily bread,” and about greed, and about the United States, and about Africa, and about wealth and about “enough.”

On our last day in the country, we spent the night at a friend of a friend’s house in Accra, the airport city. But “house” is a inaccurate, because this was a three-story mansion, even by American standards; complete with a servant/doorman, a neatly trimmed garden, and, most unbelievably, both air conditioning and running water.
And spending the night in a mansion was difficult, after six weeks in regular Ghanaian homes; we looked out over the balcony of the third story of this benevolent woman’s home and as the sun set watched a couple across the street give their daughter a bath in a bucket of soapy water, on what could be called the “front porch” of their grimy, dilapidated shack.

And then I flew home. And I stepped out of my father’s new SUV and into the garage, luggage in tow, and then into my bedroom. And I sighed. And I lay down on my queen size bed, and felt the softness of my expensive linens and the comfort of my (far too many) pillows, and I stared at the ceiling. And I went out to the back porch of my parents’ mansion, and I watched the sun set over an enthralling view of the entirety of the Silicon Valley. And I sighed.

It reminded me of a view of the Ghanian countryside, from the third-floor balcony of an abandoned building where Kwame, a homeless rasta wood-carver, slept. I remembered looking out at the view politely refusing as he and his three friends offered me a portion of their rice, which was probably all they were going to have to eat that day.

And I stood on my balcony and sighed, not with my lungs or my brain or my heart but with my soul, in disappointment. And not because of the disparity between my life and the lives of the poor, away from whom I’d only recently escaped, but because I was already becoming complacent.

I recently read a book titled “Under the Overpass,” by Mike Yankowski, about a young man who spends four months living on the streets of various cities. And afterward, he moves back into the “luxury” of a middle class lifestyle but can’t get comfortable. I was only gone for six weeks, and my living conditions weren’t nearly as bad, and I was already beginning to enjoy my newfound luxury. I sighed because I wanted to be uncomfortable too.

I’ve often marveled at the ease with which we ignore the dissimilarity between our lives and the lives of those around us, how we convince ourselves that it’s somehow fair. How we equate the status quo with the way the world was meant to and will always be, how we rationalize greed, how we transform our faiths into creeds easy to memorize but do nothing about, how we only swallow difficult truths that have convenient, often capitalistic, life applications. How we spend afternoons giving out peanut butter and jelly sack lunches to homeless people and then go eat fancy meals.

And after years of hanging out with and serving the poor and homeless throughout Los Angeles County, and Mexico, and Ghana, it took two minutes with my fancy pillows to again take all of my opulence for granted.
But what, really, am I supposed to do about it? Should I drop out of school and go live on Skid Row? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I could keep selling my possessions, and giving to charity, and simplifying, and minimizing. I could continue with attempts to extricate myself from the tenacious twin grips of greed and capitalism. But I’ve insofar not yet been able to feel as though I have done, or ever will do, “enough.”

I remember how once recently, my friend Lisa was walking up to where SOS, a local homeless Bible study and dinner service, which she’s been attending weekly for months, meets. As she entered the building, she was accosted by a surly gentleman who proceeded to accuse her of not doing enough for the homeless.

And I don’t know whether a less accurate charge has ever been leveled, because she’s one of those people who cannot pass a homeless person on the sidewalk without stopping to talk with him or her for fifteen minutes, whose ambition in life is to be a social worker; one of those rare, inspiring people who sees individuals as God sees them, not as the world does.

But, much to my chagrin, she confessed that she thought he was right. And that cut me rather deep, because if he’s right about her, he’s surely right about me. He’s right about all of us. Of course we can do more; we can always do more. We’ve never done enough.

But what do we do, is the question; and moreover: when is it enough? Is simply being aware of the scope of poverty, of homelessness, of hunger, enough? Is talking to people, is giving out lunches and water bottles, and clothes, and volunteering, is donating time and money and effort enough? Is trying to be the means by which another person gets his or her daily bread enough? Is working for an organization that actively fights poverty enough? Is anything enough? What, again, does “enough” really even mean?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer. My friend Cass says all you can do is pick which battle God would have you fight, and fight it. And Tim says that you have to optimize your blessedness to bless others to the fullest. Lisa reminded me that even Jesus didn’t “solve poverty,” but instead gave us tools to make “enough” a feasible future–tools like community, and the ability to break down society’s barriers, and experiences like sharing sunset views with astonishingly generous Ghanian friends, and love.

And maybe that’s the point–that there is no answer, that there never will be an “enough,” at least in my lifetime. I do imagine a future world, though, where enough is real, and is obvious, because it’s the life we live–where shirts like my mentor’s don’t exist because poverty doesn’t; where we will all have our daily bread; where I’ll know what enough is because it’ll be embodied in the heart of every individual. Where, finally, my complacency will be defensible, because equality will be real.

And so I’ve come to the belief that, until that future world is realized, “enough” means a lifestyle aimed at creating it in whatever way I can, whenever I can.

And so, with or without any definite answer, “enough” as a forever searching, always yearning, never complacent lifestyle will have to be enough for now.