I’m divided on this whole thing. This woman is clearly not interested in nerdy pursuits, but the actual substance of her piece isn’t really about hating nerds, it’s more about the sort of information that gets put in dating profiles. Now, in her particular case, the information she wished was there was about a nerdy pursuit. And it could be argued that the sort of deep passion for any subject that is required to become a World Champion of it can be considered nerdy — car nerds, fitness nerds, politics nerds, et. al. — but you don’t need to unless you are intent on casting this woman as a hater of passionate interests.

Common interests build relationships, and discordant interests contribute to strife, that’s true whether it’s you not liking their interests or vice versa. There are countless shortcuts in the modern world of dating, all of them mildly distasteful when discussed openly and plainly, and if the worst one this woman is guilty of is too hastily deciding that she has nothing in common with this man, then she is hardly outside the norm.

Now, that doesn’t mean she isn’t at least a little deserving of the scorn she’s received today, just not really for the supposed nerd bashing. She published this piece. She “outed” this person, when it would’ve been fairly simple to alter some details and leave certain points vague enough that his particular identity didn’t matter, simply that she felt she had nothing in common with him and felt he should have made his level of involvement with Magic clear in his profile; it would have been a dubious point, and fairly demeaning to “nerdy” pursuits, but it would have been presented with a degree of tact. She chose not to do that, and she should bear the consequences of the very public way in which she disclosed and presented this story, but let’s not turn this into a war on nerds.

It’s perfectly fine not liking someone because you don’t think you have anything in common; it’s marginally acceptable to write a piece about it on an incredibly popular blog; it’s decidedly not OK to include the sort of specific details that she includes. That’s just being a bitch.

Footnotes

1. You can google it if you like, but I don’t see the need to contribute to its search rank by linking to it.

This is why I’m always so shocked when people reject without any thought the idea of living forever. I’ll never see my world truly become the world I want it to be, I’ll never see humanity spread out into the stars; but it will happen, and that’s something I’d give anything to see.

But a bigger reason is that you don’t need to be Christian to celebrate gift-giving and kindhearted joy. Which is why I smiled with delight when I noticed what had happened when VLC updated recently.

Apparently, though, there are some people out there who are bigger assholes when it comes to Christmas than me.

I am seeing a santa hat icon now on my media viewer. Not being Christian and not celebrating Christian holidays I’m wondering how I can remove that?

If VLC had put a crucifix or an angel or something decidedly Christian, I could see the issue here — I still wouldn’t care, but I wouldn’t mock this guy for it — but we’re talking about a Santa hat. Santa is not a part of the traditional Christmas, he’s about as secular as you can get and to take issue with his appearance in VLC is absurd.

Footnotes

1. That is not a statement about atheists, it’s a statement about me; most of the atheists I know are more into Christmas than some Christians I know.

Granted, Louis CK’s opinions are slightly less optimistic, but I think that sentiment is worth carrying with you every day. Like David Foster Wallace’s advice to constantly remind yourself that ‘this is water’ it’s something that reminds you of the dangers of succumbing to the status quo.

We’re living in an awesome world, but we’re missing some awe.

Plain Old Memories are things you can re-experience in your mind, maybe even evoke the scents and sensations of the moment. The tentative hold before you approach for your first kiss, the first time a girl you like smiles back at you, that night you started at a basement party and wound up dancing naked in the fountain. These memories are much less reliable than Remembered Facts, they’re so rooted in emotion and passion that over time they become little more than the emotions of the moment with a few sprinkled images and a healthy imagination to fill in the rest, but they’re so much more human than that second form of memory.

Remembered Facts are things you know happened to you, but they feel distant, like facts from a table you had to memorize at some point. As an example, at my fourth birthday party I had pizza. Something didn’t sit well and I got sick from it. I didn’t eat pizza again until I was in grade 6. I’m sure there was a point when that event felt real to me, but at this point I simply know that it happened. I know that it happened in exactly the same way that I know that World War 2 happened. I can attach emotion to it, but the emotion will never come from it. There’s an immutable distance to it. Do you remember it? No. You know it happened, but you don’t really remember it.

I always tell people I have a terrible memory and this is what I mean. So much of my youth is obscured by veil of abstraction, a dehumanizing wall that lets me know things happened but never re-experience the urgency of them. I know that many things have happened to me. But I don’t remember them in the way I think most people remember their personal histories.

I’m currently in the process of watching Quantum Leap — a show that desperately needs a modern more serialized remake, which I totally want to write — but once that’s done, I think I’m going to take a break from these sorts of marathon viewings of television shows. I need to invest in some non-televisual thoughts.

Of course, in the meantime, all these episodes of Quantum Leap are still going to have to be watched, and I’ll probably have to write about at least a few of them before everything is said and done.

Is it really necessary to either pay these ridiculous costs for a barely functional website that times out more frequently than it returns a page? Well, no, I can have a blog on any number of the free blogging services and it would suit 99% of my needs. But there’s something to be said for having your own domain, the agency it exerts.

I still haven’t decided what, if anything, I’m going to do about this. I’ll probably end up simply buckling under the monopoly of shitty shared hosting and get something more dedicated. Though, should I do that, I hope I’ll also put some more effort into making this site something that couldn’t be hosted by any random free blogging service. If I’m paying for something, I might as well use it.

Something most people wouldn’t know about me if I didn’t tell them is that I’m from Newfoundland. I lived there for around five nonconsecutive¹ years and I’ve visited a few times since then, but I don’t often identify myself culturally as a Newfie.

But it’s still there. I might say “three” instead of “tree” but I enjoy The Mummer’s Song as much as anyone, probably more than most, and the strange beauty of the little towns and villages sprinkled along the coast is unlike anything I’ve seen in my brief experiences in other rural areas. But this set of photos from Greenland by The Big Picture is pretty damn close.

My home town’s Come Home Year celebrations² are taking place right now. I opted not to go, but these pictures give me a tinge of regret. I think I would have liked to return, if only for a while.

Footnotes

1. Despite being born there I lack the distinctive melange of influences that is the Newfie accent due to my early departure at barely a year old. Staying in Ontario for the bulk of my early formative years, I lived a mostly normal life until my parents decided that they missed Newfoundland and moved back there. Those years were troubled for me; I had a small contingent of friends but I was decidedly an outcast in school, with my head buried in books to avoid the laughter that rang in my ears, whether fictional or figurative. Though I likely would’ve encountered the same neuroses and social pariahism during those years without the isolation, both geographic and emotional, Newfoundland offered me and that isolation was a big factor in my becoming a nerd, something I consider a plus, I still hold some (restrained) antipathy toward the island.
2. Which are exactly what you think they are.

In particular, the form of atheism I most often identify with, apatheism, is described quite well by one of Andrew’s readers:

Maybe there is a god. Maybe there are many gods. Maybe there’s no god at all. Maybe I could drive myself crazy second-guessing myself and every theologian and pastor and religious friend out there. Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter, and I’ve just got to lead the best life I can, as I see it, and if that’s not good enough in the end — if there be an end instead of a simple fading away — then as far as I’m concerned, any god that would condemn me for doing my best to be the best person I can isn’t a god I’d want to believe in, in the first place.

Dedicated readers out there might recall that I was once a very passionate christian. Well, I called myself christian but I didn’t believe in the holy trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus Christ, so really I was just a guy that strongly believed that God existed. I had debated with myself about the nature of God for so long and in such detail that I had come to the conclusion that God is so far beyond human comprehension that any attempt by us to understand his wishes or obey his will would be a terrible distortion.

Eventually, I argued myself down to seeing it as this apatheist does: I’m going to live my life the way I think is right and good. The god that deems my sincere efforts unacceptable while leaving his criteria ambiguous is not a god I want to worship.

At the time this moved me deeply and I can remember understanding the significance of this shift. I had gone from a mostly-Anglican Christian to an I-don’t-know-what², and I felt great relief at finally overcoming some of my deepest issues with my faith.

Naturally, not long after that I stopped believing in God. Not necessarily as a result of this religious shift, rather I suspect that this shift was merely a stepping stone my psyche deemed necessary as I weaned my mind off the belief in deities. Nonetheless, I had become a full-bore apatheist.

Apatheism can appear deceptively like a form of lazy religion³, but what I believed then and what I believe now are very different. What I believed then was that a god that will ultimately judge my life, but I accepted the impossibility of knowing its criteria and simply lived a life I thought was right.

But to the apatheist, God is not unknowable, God is irrelevant. God, even if he did exist, doesn’t matter.

If everyone but me believed in God, but they didn’t let that belief affect politics, or science, or education, I’d be content. But what I see instead is the vilification of atheism and the slow creep of church into state. And that’s when I’m not an apatheist anymore.

I’d love to not have to care about religion, but quite frankly that’s irresponsible given the growing atmosphere of religiosity in our culture.

Footnotes

1. With numerous drafts broaching the topic from slightly different angles sitting on this blog from two years ago
2. I later realized that it was strikingly similar to a view known as ignosticism, though I contend there are still vital, though subtle, differences mostly borrowed from apatheism
3. Or conversely, lazy religion can be seen as a form of apatheism

As it’s developed, I’ve read many intelligent arguments on both sides. But the truth is most of the religious side of the debate presumes a level of deference to religion. Atheists, it seems, are not allowed to compare religion to belief in Santa Claus or similar fanciful beliefs. At first it was attacked for being glib, but that does little to alter the fundamental similarities in the belief in Santa Claus and the belief in God.

Subsequently, the argument was made that people spend a great deal of time developing their religious stance, whether it’s through thorough readings of the philosophies of theologians across the ages or merely an internal conflict, and so the comparison is unfair. Admittedly, there are people who examine their beliefs thoroughly, break down all the preconditions of life that their parents instilled in them to arrive at a self-determined philosophy, one which includes God, but those people are a far and away minority. For many people, religion is a part of their life because they’ve never thought about it¹.

Similarly, following an atheist argument that religion can undermine the “development of logical thinking” in children, a religious reader responded with:

I have an 18 year-old and a 15 year-old which my wife and I have raised in the church. They are both at the stage where they are questioning and challenging everything. The idea that I could possibly “brainwash” them into believing anything is specious.

Which isn’t wrong so much as it is unsophistcated. The fact is that the reader almost certainly could “brainwash” their children if they wanted to. We always read of the children who escape from a cult they were born into, but we ignore the fact that many children remain in the cult, contented and certain that their way of life is the true path to salvation.

I use cults as an example, but parents with enough religious zeal can just as easily cause many problems for their children. Home schooling children that the Earth is the centre of the universe and that it’s only 6000 years old and evolution is a lie — all things that Christian parents do² — absolutely affect the child for years to come. No one is claiming that the damage is irreparable — after all, there are atheists out there — but to ignore it because it lacks 100% efficacy is exceedingly naive³.

The problem with having a religious debate is that when atheists argue with fundamentalists nothing is accomplished, but when they argue with reasonable, temperate theists like those reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog, we get nice nuanced arguments which describe God in a manner very different than the norm. The theists seems to forget that atheists are mostly arguing against the edge cases.

I’m staunchly atheist, and confident that there is no God. But when I attack religion, I don’t attack the muted and temperate version that intellectuals believe in, the kind where God is a passive observer, or where he sets the pieces up and has spent the past 12 billion or so years watching them all fall around him like a massive set of dominoes. I attack the religion that forces genital mutilation, stonings, oppression of women, ignorance of science, and all the stuff that the brainy version of religion has eschewed in its development.

Often, atheists (and theists) are accused of ignoring the moderates of the debate, instead focusing on the fringes of their debate, but one thing I’ve noticed as time goes on is that even the extreme atheists, so far as I know, do not argue for the abolition of religion. What they argue is that religion is irrational and that the world would be a better place without religion. The first half of that argument is absolutely true. Religion is the belief in something for which there is absolutely no evidence, an inherently irrational stance. The second half is much more contentious and an argument that I personally don’t accept. That said, the “atheist fringe” is much less extreme than the religious fundamentalists, so to act as though they are equal criticisms seems disingenuous to me.

The edge cases matter⁴. So don’t call upon the “civility” of atheists to sit down and shut up when it comes to the pernicious ills of religion.

Footnotes

1. I speak from experience; many members of my family have no actual philosophy with respect to their religion, they merely accept it as what they’ve always “believed.”
2. Obviously not all Christian parents, but these extremes do exist
3. I’m not advocating the abolition of religion here, nor would anyone suggest state-enforced atheism, but ignoring the problems of religion accomplishes nothing.
4. On both sides of the discussion

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking part in the grand experiment that is Infinite Summer. But reading Infinite Jest, even in 75 pages per week chunks, can be draining. So recently, to kill some time avoiding reading Infinite Jest, I decided to read another book: Secretary’s Punishment.

A little back story is needed here. A few months ago I bought a few adult erotica books because I wondered how good the books were. If they weren’t well written I was thinking about writing my own, cashing in on my unremarkable writing capabilities. Now that I’ve read one of them, I thought I’d write up my thoughts.

The book centres on a young woman named Emily Robinson. She’s just moved to a new city, away from her abusive fiance, and just started a new job that she needs to keep or she won’t be able to stay in the new city away from her troubled past. The only problem is that her new job is as an administrative assistant (though he abhors the term and prefers the anachronistic ‘secretary’) to a demanding man named Edward Caudry, who has yet to find a secretary up to snuff.

That’s the basic premise. And while it’s a diaphanous one it’s enough to establish the early structure of the story. In a format both delightfully and disappointingly like the silver screen Secretary, whenever Emily makes a typo in the documents she writes up, Mr Caudry (as he is known exclusively for the first half of the novel) brings her into his office, has her bend down onto his desk, face pressed to the red-ink circled typos, and gives her an increasing number of spanks to her ass.

Obviously, it doesn’t start as that; it begins as an alternative to being summarily fired, which she accepts somewhat credulously due to her financial dire straits. Her arousal over the entire scenario forces her to masturbate in the bathroom of her office, until he begins to exert more and more control over her; he begins demanding that she not wear pantyhose, that she wear ‘approved’ panties (which he examines every morning), that she not orgasm when not in his presence (a simple demand given how readily she seems to orgasm from his spanks).

So there’s three aspects to this: is the story credulous? Is the writing arousing? And is the writing any good? Well, the story is, for the most part, believable. Though, the progression from a hostile work environment (the first day) to walking around the office without any panties, giving the boss a regular morning blowjob, taking of her skirt while seated at her desk, and some light-to-medium bondage (all by the end of the second week) is the most hastened aspect of the story. Each new day at the office was a new level to the dominance and submission, which to a degree works, but it is the most unbelievable and at times troubling part of the progression. Spreading it out over the course of even a month would’ve made it seem more realistic.

And, yeah, the writing is arousing. Well, for me anyways. The descriptions are very good, and the author tends not to use the annoying euphemisms — trouser-snake is one that comes to mind — that make most erotic writing tiring². Of course, generally speaking it’s not hard to arouse the male mind, even with simple prose. Mention a vagina, perhaps a clitoris, include reference to an orgasm rising within the woman’s loins and that’s really all it takes: rinse and repeat.

And the writing isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either. One thing that I pondered over as I read the book was if the spelling and grammatical mistakes in the book were intentional or not. I could imagine an inventive couple taking the book and using it in their own BDSM role-playing, highlighting the mistakes, and doling out spanks. Then, again the novel might just have had a shitty editer.

The book is mostly dialogue and descriptions of sex, with the rest internal monologue, almost all of which is dispensable. Does that mean I could write an erotic novel? Well, it’s not impossible. The skills required are little, and if this book is any indication of the genre, it’s in dire need of good characterization.

The novel is split in two halves with the first being written from the perspective of Emily and the second from that of Edward. The first half is fairly well written, with Emily at constant conflict with her confusing desire to be punished, to be controlled, to be dominated. It’s not high art, but the internal dialogue allows the reader to see the character slowly shifting from her rather innocent beginnings to her “true personality” as a submissive. It gives the story a little bit of class and respectability.

And most importantly, even though the story is ostensibly that of a boss taking advantage of his position to garner sexual favours from his assistant, the internal monologue keeps the story from feeling degrading or sexist. Which brings me to the second part of the novel, titled Edward.

The second half is much much worse than the first. The first flaw is taking on the persona of the male dominant Edward. For the first half of the novel he is portrayed as a masterful Dom, able to spot that she’s orgasmed in the bathroom, capable of bringing her to mindblowing orgasms with the slightest twitch of his fingers, perfectly gauged in the way he slowly brings her submissive side out. He was exactly the type of character from whose perspective you should never narrate, so already switching voice was a mistake for that reason.

The novel quickly takes us behind his veneer of self-assuredness into his neuroses about how far he should push her, caused by his last relationship in which he didn’t push his Sub far enough fast enough, and all sorts of things that bring him down to earth so to speak. I understand why the novel tried to do this; by humanizing him, it makes the final ending, with Emily and Edward in a stable relationship, a little more appealing. But the final ending could have been just as satisfying if he remained a cipher on the surface. Even the implication of Emily’s understanding of his inner machinations would have made it clear they were on level footing. This more explicit path is harder to swallow.

But that’s not the worst flaw. Much of the second half of the novel is like Hard Sci-Fi for fetishists, discussing the nuances of the relationship between a Dom and a Sub, the levels of power the must be exerted from both partners, how trust can be re-established when a Sub begins to fear their Dom. There are numerous scenes that reiterate these points in a very lecturey way, as if the author wanted to inform the perverts reading the book about BDSM³.

But after all that opinion, there’s a strange, for more than one reason, shift in the story near the end of the novel. The following paragraph appears not long after Edward has managed to coax Emily back into his life:

She was his girlfriend at that moment and Edward had a sudden revelation. The submissiveness was more like a game, he realized. Adriana [Ed: the ex who wanted more domination than Edward could offer] had never been the woman for him because she was a true submissive, one who required a strong, firm master to guide her. Edward was more like an actor who took on a role now and then. That didn’t mean he wasn’t a true Dom when the time came. It simply meant they didn’t have to live the life 24/7.

So once all the rules and boundaries of BDSM have been delicately laid out for the reader, Edward seems to abandon them as a lifestyle, instead twisting them into a game. That in itself is not surprising; aside from the most extreme scenarios, all BDSM is relegated to a subset of your life. But this shift is not made manifest in Edward’s demeanour in the remaining pages of the book. He has the realization that their Dom-Sub is closer to role-playing than it is to the full-on Dom-Sub lifestyle. Yet, he still has her work nude with her arms bound, he still has her spend her nights naked and giving him sexual acts when demanded of her, enforcing her diet and her wardrobe at all times. If it were truly just a game to him, they’d have a normal life, perhaps with innuendo and flirtation throughout the day, leading to some BDSM role-playing at night. But that’s not the situation the novel ends on.

And finally, there’s the closing paragraph:

“Now, I feel like two halves of the same coin. You challenge me, you love me, you take care of me.” Her eyes twinkling, she added, “What more could a girl want?”

Again, this isn’t visibly sexist. But, “a girl” might want many more things. Many girls might want independence, financial stability, someone to converse with, someone who “challenges” them in a form other than in their pain threshold. In fact the novel starts off with Emily leaving her abusive husband to fend for herself and it ends with her being completely controlled by another domineering man. But this time, we’re told, it’s a good thing. Maybe that’s what she wants. But it’s certainly not what “a girl” wants, it’s what “that girl” wants. A minor quibble, but as an ending to the story it sticks in my craw more than the less general alternative.

All this points to one inevitable conclusion: I need to write an erotic novel while ensuring the characters aren’t diminished or degraded for the sake of the sex and that the story concludes pleasantly and logically. Either that, or I need to write something of value, like one of the dozens of half-completed short-stories I have sitting around⁴. Either/or, really.

So where does that leave us? Well, I’m still a week and a half behind on the Infinite Summer schedule, and now I’m sexually and artistically frustrated. This was a great idea.

Footnotes

1. For the record, this post, which is a far too serious about itself critique of an erotic novel, is written tongue firmly placed in cheek — though I won’t say which one.
2. Or at least subject to ridicule on television sitcoms
3. Or it’s the author’s attempt to legitimize some of the, in my opinion, sexist conclusions to the story
4. As an aside, I did write a story on Ficly not long ago, though the word limit (1024 characters) left me with a very ambiguous tale, one that even I have trouble grasping wholly

And niche blogs are the only kind that can last in this new web, where there are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, with a large majority of them being useless chatter about whatever’s on the author’s mind. That is, just like mine. So I’m a drop in an ocean. The sheer density of the blogosphere makes it nigh impossible for a blog that doesn’t have very frequent very insightful very narrowly focused content to be seen amid the detritus.

But, as the little subheading of my blog says, everything matters. I could very easily devote this blog to television, or to science fiction, or to science fiction television, or to mid-90′s science fiction television, or to any number of painfully constructed microverses, but I’d rather do my own thing.

One factor that comes into play is my generally lackluster writing capabilities. I don’t consider myself a bad writer, and on certain days I might even be a good writer, but it takes more than that to be noticed. For every well-written insightful niche blog there are dozens more that write about the same things but with less clarity and fewer readers. So, in my particular case, the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t problems inherent in my unexceptional prose also decrease my incentive to overspecialize.

But there’s more than just that pragmatic urge at work when I make the active decision to write broadly¹. Good storytelling does more than focus. While my material on this blog is primarily “non-fiction” I generally draw my writing inspirations from the world of fiction. The best television shows out there are the best because, aside from creating a compelling foreground, the effort exerted on the background reifies that world.

And while I’m not creating a world, I am defining a world: the world as I see it. If this blog were focused on one thing in particular, you would know that that one thing is important to me, but that’s all you’d know. And I don’t think that’s enough. I think that to find my stance on anything to be of value, you need more than just that stance. You need to see the words written here as coming from a person, to judge them beyond their surface structure. It needs to come from a living person. So this blog is dead, but I am very much alive².

Footnotes

1. The next example is going to be about television, so I hope you’ll enjoy the irony.
2. If you’re reading this after I’ve died, clearly that last point is no longer valid.

I find much of the well-written reactions have the common trend of levelness. Our media enjoys the deconstruction of celebrity, which is why Jackson’s tortured personal life is such fodder. So let’s get that out of the way now: I don’t know if he was a pedophile, whether in thought or action; I tend to think that the damage he suffered as a child left him with a yearning to find the childhood he never had which, in turn, led to his desire to befriend young boys. But I make no illusions about his actions. They were troubling and it is not an unreasonable assumption to believe his love for those boys was not platonic but romantic. But I don’t. Roger Ebert put it best:

I have no idea whether Michael abused the children he “adopted.” It is possible those relationships were without sex; he seemed frozen at a time before puberty. Whether he touched them criminally or not, it is easy to see what he sought: To create, with and for these Lost Boys, a Neverland where they could imagine together the childhood he never had.

These words do not revel in the broken life of a man. Too often the need to have heroes and villains makes us think the worst or the best. We vilify or we justify, but we don’t analyze. We don’t try to understand, we avoid nuance.

I hope that Michael Jackson’s music survives his death without the stigma his life has brought to it in recent years. And I hope that his personal life is not turned into a darker more twisted tale as time goes on. But I don’t want either side of the story to disappear.

I tend to take these small things and expand them with dire warnings; I’ve written in the past of the dangers of guilty pleasures, and now I write of the dangers of fundamentalism, albeit in the guise of celebrity obsession. We must be able to take the good with the bad, and not reject the former because of the latter nor ignore the latter out of respect for the former. Because once we do either, we begin our fall into a world of extreme fundamentalism, whether its to purity or a lack of same.

Human beings are not easily understood, so we categorize, we typify, we stereotype. None of this applies to the wonders and horrors our kind can produce. And none of it should.

In this increasingly connected world, I’m obviously not the first to discuss this on their puny insignificant blog and I certainly won’t be the last, but Michael Jackson is dead at 50. My eyes welled up when the initial shock washed over me. He went beyond all superlatives. And, despite his troubled life, he will be missed. Though, I suspect, never forgotten.

But that’s a fairly cold and calculating way to look at writing a review. I don’t want to merely insert enough keywords as to increase my traffic by throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. That said, I have found myself more willing to go back and examine and re-read my more detailed reviews. Looking at the little moments that make a show good is one thing that many other reviewers fail to do, and to write about those details in the hopes of reaching others who, like me, appreciate the little things a show does is a big reason I write about television.

So I’ve decided that if Dollhouse gets renewed for another season, I will write detailed reviews — luxuriating over every shot, every thought, every furtive glance — for every episode of Dollhouse until the series ends. And I mean series the way an American or a Canadian does. If Dollhouse becomes a breakaway hit in its second season and then airs continuously for the next fifty years, I will have a horridly long review for every single episode in the bunch. Of course, the real question is this: is this promise a reason to renew or a reason to not?

I did enjoy the movie — I simply accepted the sexism as a part of the universe in which the story’s told — but my reaction to the sexism was visceral. And I most certainly didn’t have that reaction when I saw it in the theatre. If anything, I’ve become more aware of sexism. That said, I’m a little bit sexist.

I’ve noticed as my volume of blog reading has increased, I will often find myself reading a blog post and having an assumption challenged. Very deliberately and scholarly written posts I tend to attribute to men unless I know who the author is or there is a reference to the author’s sex in the content of the post. Similarly, light and airy posts are assumed to come from women. Neither of these prejudices are particularly appealing to me. They’re not harmful, I don’t think; when the evidence tells me that my assumption was wrong I make a note of it and move on reading the content just as I did before. But it’s not something I like about me.

Are these quiet assumptions harmful? I’m not really sure. My intuition is that they’re not, so long as you are aware of them and their flaws. Our brains have evolved in a very specific manner, but that sometimes makes them screw up. When we see something in water we know it’s not in the line of sight because of refraction and we adjust accordingly; I see these ongoing corrections I make as a similar adjustment we all must make to override any prejudices we may have, however they come about.

Of course, it has an unintended side-effect, one which likely increases the danger of accidents. Humans are resilient by nature, we tend not to give up easily. So when we come out of the gate looking to get something done, see the path closing ahead of us, however temporarily, we think “if only I got there a little bit faster.” And so we hit the gas a little harder, we push the pedal down a little farther, and we’re tens of a second away from rationalizing making it through the light. So we push a little harder, and finally we make it through. Human progress.

But as your speed increases, your likelihood of pushing through on a risky yellow also increases and your likelihood of getting in an accident (and a higher speed one at that) increases in kind. These gridlock inducing measures are designed with speed reduction in mind, but it inevitably leads to speed increases, and brakes getting hit a little harder each day, getting worn that much faster, leading to even more accidents. It’s a lose-lose scenario. I wish the people that programmed these lights understood that. Maybe the supercomputer will help with that.

The only problem with that is that Freud’s stances are outrageously outdated and naive. It is no longer the predominant stance of psychiatrists, nor is it taught as anything more than a historical curiosity in psychiatry classes any longer. Granted, all of this is from my personal experience while working towards a cognitive neuropsychology minor in university (which I sadly abandoned for brevity’s sake), but nearly every aspect of Freud’s work was taught minimally and then a superseding work was introduced that explained all of the things Freud’s work did but better.

Say what you will about the subjectivity of psychiatry and psycho-analysis, but when it comes to Sigmund Freud, neither the man nor his work is sacrosanct.

The worst part is that I know this is a man completely undeserving of pity or sorrow, yet his cracked skin, his broken expression, his aging face all call to me to have those feelings. Photography has the power to imbue its subject with more than it deserves.

Those natives had the wrong idea. Photography doesn’t steal your soul, it preserves it. It puts it out there for everyone to see, even if they don’t want to.

It’s all mostly meaningless, so why not celebrate the meaningless by giving importance to an arbitrary marker of the passage of time? Which is my weird way of wishing everyone a happy Pi Day. And happy birthday to the remains of Albert Einstein.

Porn will never be a truly mainstream form, but it will never be a completely ostracized form again. Pandora’s Box, as it were, has been opened. When porn first lept from the dirty underbelly of America and made its way into mainstream cinema in the late 60′s and 70′s, a part of it was that porn stars were struggling actors who showed up for auditions and found themselves wondering whether or not they should shave their pubes. And so there was a generation of porn stars hoping to make the leap to mainstream cinema. Deep Throat wasn’t made with any particular mainstream success in mind, at least not from what I’ve read, but the tongue-in-cheek plot, the satirical writing, and the general sexual freedom being examined by the public at large at the time made it a mainstream sensation.

For a brief period, porn and regular film even intermingled with cult hits like Deep Throat and big epics like Caligula. But ultimately the stars of Deep Throat accomplished nothing of note in non-pornographic film, and mainstream cinema slowly moved away from the explicitness of the X-rating. Porn would continue on with the cheesy plots and soft focus camera work of the 70′s for many subsequent years, but ultimately the conservatives won: Porno Chic was dead.

But now, in the past four years or so, the porn industry has introduced many a pervert to a new breed of porn star. Women like Sasha Grey, Bobbi Starr, Joanna Angel, and many more. These women don’t have the aspirations of the old-school porn stars. Just a little over a decade ago, with stars like Jenna Jameson, porn was merely a means to and end, which often meant mainstream success. But these women have no such desires.

There has always been a sort of underground fetish for extreme acts in porn, but it has always remained lingering in relative obscurity. But now, this new generation of porn star revels in expressing themselves through the sexual boundaries of both them and their sex partner. Much of their work has gone towards revolutionizing the sterilized sex scenes of the past — moving beyond the decades-old blowjob, missionary, doggie-style, facial pattern seen in most porn of the past — but their dislike for the pointless “Please fix my car, Mr. Mechanic. I’ll do anything” stories of yore is also quite well known. Sasha Grey recently worked on James Gunn’s PG Porn, which satirizes ridiculous porn plots, and her distaste for these old cliches was noted in her interviews regarding the project.

Some might say that this is nothing new. The Gonzo genre of porn — wherein the camera is a character in the scene and the actors don’t act but merely fuck — has been on the rise for quite some time. But this new brood goes beyond that; they bring passion to the job. For quite some time, porn relied on large silicone-filled breasts to distract viewers from the look of complete disinterest on the faces of the stars and the middling moans of mock pleasure. The new generation is much more natural looking, and uses experimentation and enthusiasm to arouse their audience; smiling, which was once essentially verboten, has become a staple of the porn starlets repertoire.

It’s true that some of these porn stars will attain mainstream celebrity by virtue of porn’s relative integration into the mainstream, but none of these women seem to have that as a goal. Sasha Grey has discussed what her future goals are and they consist of eventually starting her own porn company and continuing to push sexual boundaries on film. Obviously, she didn’t turn down Steven Soderbergh when he cast her as the lead in his upcoming film The Girlfriend Experience, but it hasn’t changed her goals by any appreciable amount.

Bobbi Starr, another new starlet whose work is also primarily adventurous extreme scenes, has different goals. From her wikipedia page:

As of 2008, Starr is a student studying pre-med, with the aim of becoming a gynecologist. Her intent is to work within the adult entertainment industry, where she has identified a lack of female gynecologists.

Joanna Angel runs her own studio, BurningAngel, which focuses on so-called Alt-Porn films. She also contributed a chapter to the book Naked Ambition: Women Who Are Changing Pornography and like all the women who inspired this article, they are changing porn. Most of these women are not what you would expect of a porn star. They’re intelligent, highly motivated, and love their job. To me, there’s a perfect storm of change happening in the porn industry. The women who keep the industry alive are taking an active interest in the managing of the industry, and they feel no stigma; they want more than to be successful within the industry, they want to improve the industry.

And that’s ultimately the key here. President Obama said in his address to the joint session of Congress “I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.” People were quick to correct him that American did not invent the automobile, but they did invent the automobile industry. Henry Ford, for all his flaws, saw an industry and wanted more than to succeed within it, he wanted to improve it.

Did I just compare Sasha Grey to Henry Ford? You’re damn right I did.

I admit that I’m going a little overboard with this hagiographical ode to porn, but at the same time, there are many feminists who still cling to the idea that porn is little more than rape and a means of sexually demeaning women. Neither is the truth, but mine’s a little closer to it. The chauvinism of the porn industry is dying if it’s not already dead. The industry is changing. The women are taking it back.

We psychologically stay home, even when we’re gone. I’m doing it at this moment, typing on my laptop while Paris awakens outside. My friend Dan moved to New York to produce a TV show, and says never really saw the city: he had thirteen nights free in four months. He was either on set or on the phone with Los Angeles the rest of the time, and came to see the JFK-LAX flight as a commute.

I see it happening with with this generation of college students. When I left Boulder to go to Drake, and when I left Drake to move to Los Angeles, I left people behind. Through phone calls, letters and visits home, I maintained relationships with a few close friends. But ninety percent of the people I knew vanished in the rearview mirror. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Through Facebook and email, it’s trivial to keep up with dozens of classmates more or less daily.

But is it really a good idea?

Your twenties are a crucial time, and I’d argue that it’s harder to discover yourself — or reinvent yourself — when surrounded by a vast network of people who already have a fixed opinion of who you are. I went to college and grad school not knowing a single person, and while it was a little terrifying, it was also liberating. Decoupled from my previous opinions and embarrassments, I was able to become the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of myself. I could only do that by going somewhere new. By changing place.

There is a level of permanence to your persona that wasn’t there forty years ago. Becoming a new man, à la Don Draper, is hardly feasible in this world where your blog’s archive sits there for all to read, where your twitter updates lay in neat chronological order, where the photos on your facebook page sit waiting to be found and reported on. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. But it’s certainly where we’d headed.

In an attempt to weed out trolls and flame wars they have strict rules about your demeanor. You have to write grammatically correct and full sentences. You can’t attack personally, you need to stick to the subject of the thread and of the forum. You’re also not allowed to write spoilers in the “episode discussion” threads which is great because you can theorize and question without worrying about someone spoiling the show. But these rules and restrictions come at a price.

Every time I come to the forums, I read post after post which criticizes Kate and Jack. They call Kate a cold-blooded selfish bitch and basically do nothing but wish death upon her. They call Jack an idiot and say that he is the worst and most boring character on the show. But Kate is not a selfish bitch; she has a fucked up history, lots of baggage, a fear of commitment, and lots of other things wrong with her. But she feels every minute of that. And throughout the series thus far, she has been incredibly selfless, and willing to help the entire Island community. Jack is sometimes an idiot, but everyone is sometimes. Jack had to live his entire life under the thumb of a father he was unable to please. A father who would criticize him for attempting to help out a kid being bullied. His entire life is guided by that need to fix things; to impress his father. When he flies to Australia to pick up Christian Shephard’s body, he’s doing more than just mourning a father. He’s realizing that he will never earn his father’s love.

I’m not discussing these crucial aspects of their personality because I think that what they do on the show is what I would do or the best thing to do. It is, however, what I think they would do. These characters are not static. Jack tries to fight these urges, Kate tries to fight these urges. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t. That is at the very core of humanity, and to attack these characters because they are consistent and not merely set pieces through which the plot progresses is idiotic.

So, when a forum poster attacks Jack for not questioning Kate further about Aaron’s fate and calls Kate a murderer, I respond forcefully with a logical rebuttal. Jack has never seen Kate as a murderer. He has never cared what she did in her past. He knows her. Whether or not he actually knows her, he thinks he does. He trusts her more than anyone else. That’s why he asks her for her support when trying to convince the Oceanic 6 to lie. He loves her so deeply, that he’d give up his freedom and perform surgery on a man he has come to revile so that she could be happy with another man. To think that Kate having murdered someone, no matter how justified or unjustified it was, would sway Jack’s trust of Kate is downright intellectually dishonest.

So, in my response to this practically trollish comment, I called that poster out for making that statement. I asked them if they were really going to use the “Kate is a murderer” line. I followed this up with a calm and correct rebuttal as to why that was a foolish statement. I then followed that up by telling the poster that they should judge the character’s actions by the character, not by what you want the character to be. I held no ill will to that poster, but I sincerely hoped they read that and realized the error in their analysis.

Instead, my message was deleted and I got a warning from a moderator because you are not allowed to discuss other posters on the thread. Which is a foolish rule, because the forum’s users lose any ability to examine the merit of one anothers’ examinations. I’m not saying that we need to be boorish in our critiques but without the analysis of analysis, any improvement of ideas occurs away from the group which results in the group seeing the improvements but not the improvements to the process which led to that. Perhaps, I was too brusque, but my point was valid and even ignoring the direct communication toward the other poster there was still content apropos to the discussion in that post. Deleting it only hurts the collective intelligence of the group.

I understand the need for some level of moderation on forums. Aint it Cool News’ talkbacks have no moderation save some manual processes enacted when a particularly persistent troll writes hundreds of useless messages and harasses the community indiscriminately. Without moderation, most of the internet would devolve into a slew of attacks and slurs. But to delete valid content because it was deemed slightly snippy according to the whims of a moderator is unacceptably, and unecessarily, Draconian.

France created a civil unions law in 1999 for gays but failed to designate gender and now about a third of straight couples getting married in France opt for civil unions because they are easier to get out of. Don George points out the obvious:

…it is terribly humorous and ironic that the French created civil unions to protect the institution of marriage…and now civil unions are undermining marriage because people are opting for them instead of marriage. Talk about the law of unintended consequences. So possibly the lesson for our country is that the best way to protect the institution of marriage is not to deny people marriage by creating a separate but equal system, but to allow gays to marry.

Er: yes. If you read my first ever essay on the topic, in 1989, you will find it was exactly this possibility that led me to back full marriage equality over marriage-lite options such as domestic partnership and civil unions. It was a way to integrate gay people and protect marriage.

What I don’t understand about the conservative viewpoint on marriage is their view that it is an inherent good. That somehow marriage is necessary for society to flourish and freedom to ring through the streets of the world.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Atlantic blogger generally found on the other side of the political spectrum, has a different view of marriage:

As much as I can recall, there were basically three reasons for us to get married. 1.) I might leave. Marriage would force me to do the right thing. 2.) To declare our commitment to each other before a community of people whom we loved. 3.) The business reasons–the legalities of your estate and guardianship. I found–and still find–the first two reasons were utterly unconvincing. The third held some sway, but with the help of a lawyer we’ve managed to take care of that. The first turned marriage into a kind of insurance policy, and I just believed that if you felt you needed insurance for the person you were having kids by to stick out, you needed to reconsider the whole proposition. The commitment and community reason held some appeal. But I believed, and still believe, that long-term romantic partnerships are between the two people entering into it.

I hated the idea of public declarations, because the life blood of the relationship–what bills to pay, how to raise your child, your love life–all of that happened when no one else was around. Kenyatta knows more about me than any human being walking the earth–and this is as it should be. No one knows more about my strengths and my weaknesses, my failings and my successes. I trust her to the end. But that trust was worked for–it was not declared or conjured by the presence of other people.

I’ve had similar views on marriage for a while now, but so rarely has the argument not against marriage, but against the necessity of marriage been so succinctly put. Some people might have a different idea of what a long-term relationship requires. I know that my ex did. But to imply that marriage is an inherent good is misleading.

There’s a bit of a paradox here. I joined facebook primarily because I wanted to catch up with old friends I don’t talk to much anymore. But for the most part, this can be done passively. I add them as friends and when I go to write on their wall, I come across a tidy aggregation of their hobbies, their interests, the music they like, the movies they like, what schools they’ve gone on to, what jobs they’ve held, and much more information. So before I even ask them how things are going, I’ve received the answer.

Beyond this, any answer to a question asked through facebook is automatically tainted with more forethought than that from a private conversation. That response can be read by anyone you’ve deemed a “friend,” a loaded phrase given the hundreds or thousands of “friends” you can amass through social networks. A facebook conversation has a very different dynamic than that of a real conversation.

Because of this, I’ve never found myself enthralled with facebook. Keeping in touch with dozens of former friends is an empty effort to me. I’d much rather cultivate the few good friendships I have in real life. Obviously, you can develop more substantial relationships through facebook, as you would in the real world, but there’s no real incentive to me. In general, friends you’ve lost touch with weren’t lasting friends. Whether it’s because you changed or they changed or you ran out of things to say to each other, friendships die for a reason. Trying to rekindle them through facebook isn’t likely to succeed.

Which I guess is why I barely ever visit facebook anymore. That initial burst of regained connections has faded away. Obviously, this depends on the person. I’m not anti-social per se, but I’m certainly not comfortable in highly social environments which is why I tend to avoid them.

So my intended use of facebook is not what most people use it for, but even excluding that facebook is not a replacement for more direct communication. Whether it’s face to face, or on the phone, or through instant messaging direct communication, that direct connection is needed for friendships to be anything more than acquaintances.

I’m not a huge celebrator of birthdays, but Darwin certainly demands a bit of recognition for the massive game-changing effect he had on modern science, and since we’re already at it we might as well toss a bit Lincoln’s way.

But still, I chose to explore the possibilities. I thought for at least a moment that immortality would be a good thing. No one else did. What the fuck is wrong with everyone?

When I finally opened the door to that question, the professor asked a few others why they wouldn’t want to live forever and none of them gave the answer I thought. I assumed that most of them, being philosophy students, had thought it out in great details. But no, they all said it was because of global warming.

Global warming. Seriously.

More abstractly, they all talked about the disastrous effect humanity has had on earth thus far. They didn’t think they would want to live forever when 100 years from now the world would be a desolate wasteland destroyed by the cruel banalities of man. More reasonably some thought that earth would survive but humanity would likely be extinct in the near future and then they would be alone forever. To wit, a majority of the students believed not only that humanity would be gone within their lifetime, but that earth would be irrevocably damaged by us.

Our planet survived an impact with a Mars-sized planet. Without ten thousand more years of technological improvement humanity could not irrevocably damage the planet even if we tried. We could destroy the majority of life on the planet and possibly all of it, but life would grab hold again. It’s tenacious like that. That innate tenacity in combination with the intelligence of our species is what makes us the dominant species of our planet. We’ve made many mistakes over the millennia, and with each new generation’s greater reach and power those mistakes become more and more dangerous but we’re not done yet.

There has been talk recently of what might happen if the Yellowstone Caldera erupts as it did 640 000 years ago, because of a recent increase in tectonic activity there. The level of damage that would cause is beyond catastrophic. Ash from the eruption would blanket most of North America and change the climate of the entire planet in ways far more drastic than the accumulation of greenhouse gases we’ve contributed in the past 200 years ever could. It’s hard to imagine just how much the world would change because of an event like that, and yet I’m not worried for the future of humanity. I’d almost certainly die, but humanity would persist.

It seems like the environmentalists have managed to scare the shit out of the world. Gone is the quixotic optimism for the future of the 50′s, replaced by the dour nihilism of now. We talk of alien archaeologists examining our cities thousands of years from now wondering what killed us, but we’re not going anywhere.

We’ve reached a point in our evolution where our intelligence is almost a detriment. Given the comfort of our more base needs, we have more time to think and greater minds with which to think. And so we think of what can go wrong. Each new generation imagines new terrors capable of destroying us with their free time. These thoughts of dread can paralyze us with fear of the inevitable or they can spur us to imagine new solutions. Lately there has been far too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

Here’s what I know about the ultimate fate of humanity. We will go away. There will come a time when no humans exist. That is inevitable. But the question is when. Do we want to give up and whimper away in the next hundred years, or do we want to keep growing, keep getting smarter, keep fighting until the end, until the universe dies around us?

The atheist who refuses “God bless you” or tries to remove “under God” from the pledge of allegiance is just being an asshole who thinks his personal beliefs should be enforced on the rest of the world. I do understand that the pledge was modified early in the 20^th century to include the God statement and it has no place in a pledge to a nation which claims to have a separation of church and state, but the net effect it has on you is nil. No child, sitting in class as they recite the pledge, is seriously examining it to make sure they follow it religiously: they’re droning on by rote.

Once again, I’m not completely disgusted or surprised by what I once said (I save that sort of self-disgust for opinions I held four to five years ago) but it’s not really right, either. Obviously, the pledge shouldn’t contain religious symbols. It is a pledge for a secular nation! A nation which explicitly separates church and state. The insertion of “under God” was done to reinforce the evils of atheism during the Red Scare and the Cold War. It didn’t belong there in the first place and removing it is the right thing to do. It’s true that most children repeat the pledge blindly without really caring about its content, but that doesn’t mean the kids who do listen to the words have to be subjected to theism as a de facto mindset.

The impetus for this shift in opinion came when I underwent the iron ring ceremony for graduating from Engineering. It’s supposed to be a secret ceremony (mainly so we can act like we’re cool) so I won’t betray the trust of my fellow engineers, but it’s safe to say that some of the required oaths of that ceremony are fairly strongly tied not only to theistic belief but to Christian belief. As I read the oaths I noted the explicit religiosity but continued to read, silently swearing to uphold the core principles of engineering while ignoring the religiosity. But a fellow classmate — or so I was told later on while hammered at the after-party — refused to read the oath because it was too religious. Much later, most likely due to the alcohol, I realized that this was what I should have done as well. Most especially because I was swearing an oath with my peers and it should be something I remember and uphold diligently, but also because I had spent far too long being a “fair weather” atheist, keeping quiet about my beliefs because I didn’t want to evoke any controversy. Since then I’ve tried to be more open about my atheism which brings me to “God bless you.”

Ever since I’ve been at my current job, the co-worker to my immediate right has said “God bless you” when I sneeze (which is surprisingly frequent). Again, at first I would mumble something or pretend I didn’t hear it simply because I didn’t want to cause any trouble. But this act of evasion was just another way to hide my beliefs. Now, I still think it’s kind of a dick move to go out of your way to shoot someone down for saying “God bless you” but I no longer feign approval of it. And if you’re my co-worker who always very politely says “God bless you” I’m sorry if I seem like a dick because I don’t thank you for it; I’m just trying to be slightly less of a dick than if I were to “correct” you.

It’s called preference. I don’t want to kiss guys and I think it would be gross. Just because you accept other people’s homosexuality doesn’t mean you have no problem performing homosexual acts.

In some ways it’s right, but at the same time going back to that thread now I see myself as woefully ignorant. Actors are paid to perform roles. And most of the actors who get interviewed about kissing against sexual preference (truthfully, no-one ever asks NPH how weird it is to kiss hot chicks all the time) are famous enough that if they didn’t want to kiss a guy, they wouldn’t have to. And really, even if you’re a struggling actor desperate for a role and you’ve got an audition for a gay character who goes through an intense and intimate sexual awakening (not that I’m working on a screenplay or anything) why wouldn’t you do it? A kiss is only as intimate as you make it. A kiss is only as sexual as you make it. And all of that happens in your mind. It has nothing to do with how deep your tongue goes down their throat or how hard you push your face onto theirs.

Beyond all of that, I’ve grown up a fair bit since then. I’m not wet in the pants to make it with a dude, but it’s not something that disgusts me any longer. And there’s always a chance the dude’s a good kisser.

This study talks about how TV is escapism — which is true of any entertainment media, even though the same study says that happier people read more books — but in many ways, good television holds a mirror up to you and examines the various aspects of humanity. A few years ago, I was at a (cliche alert) crossroads in my life. I was around half way through a university degree which was promising but didn’t hold the appeal it did when I first applied. Beyond that, my faith was dwindling. For years, I had a constantly evolving understanding of God and religion. When I first had my religious re-awakening in high school, a lot of people thought it was because I had a crush on one of the girls that went to my church, but the fact is that I simply wanted to understand God better. I was experiencing teenage angst and wanted to figure what “all this” is about.

My faith grew over those years but ultimately I found myself having an understanding of God that differed and contradicted the one that both the Bible taught and that my church taught. Because of my growing skepticism of psychics, ESP, and other paranormal phenomenon and my growing understanding of how science explained the universe, I no longer thought that Jesus was actually the son of God. I still believed that he was a wise man likely sent by God to teach people a newer better way to live and worship, but I could no longer consider myself a Christian.

So, I was confused about life, the meaning of it all, and a few other things. Around that time, I started rewatching Babylon 5, a show that I hadn’t watched in quite some time, and I think it’s safe to say that it changed my life. I went from a mass of self-doubt and uncertainty about pretty much everything to having a very solid understanding of myself and the way I wanted to live in this world. I still consider Babylon 5 one of the best shows ever made, and almost certainly the best sci-fi show ever made.

There are a lot of times throughout my life that TV has helped me. Not because it let me forget about my sadness for a few minutes, but because I discovered new things. The long, drawn out character development that happens in television allows you to connect more intimately with their lives and in turn make discoveries about yourself.

Of course, one telling aspect of this study (what you didn’t think I’d turned this post into an opportunity to whine about personal problems did you?) is that it covers 30 years of television and television has only recently become something more than mere escapism. What was once a rare occurrence on television — serialized storytelling and complex relationships — is now a mainstay. Television, in the intervening years, has grown up. It is more than a time filler now. It can and does explore life with equal or greater depth and insight as other more respected media. And in another 30 years, after a generation of people who have grown up with intelligent and thought-provoking television, the data will tell a different tale.

It’s shitty half of the time because it’s cloying and cliche and the other half of the time because it’s deceitful. The first half is the stuff you see in one minute mini-infomercials late at night. The second half is the stuff that makes it out of the core Christian Rock culture and into mainstream rock.

Switchfoot. POD. Seventh Day Slumber. This Beautiful Republic. Christian Rock bands generally have really lame names. And if you run across the music of any of the bands that “pass” as regular rock, you’d probably like it enough to listen but not enough to love it. It becomes a part of the din of songs that get played on your local rock radio station. But, for me at least, when you find out they are a Christian Rock band, suddenly every time their songs come on you can hear nothing beyond their hidden evangelizing.

It’s not that I dislike that they infuse their music with their religious beliefs; the best music comes from your most strongly felt emotions. But those bands go about it in a deceitful way. When interviewed they claim they’re not “Christian Rock” even when they began their career in the highly accessible Christian Rock tours that can really raise the profile of up and coming bands. I understand that the label of “Christian Rock” has a dirty connotation to it, but it has that because of bands like those that deny the meanings behind their songs. Rather than admit that they’re praising God, they pretend the song is about a girl.

The less notable segment of Christian Rock isn’t much better. With their over-the-top references to Jesus and God, they go beyond simply expressing their feelings and thoughts and head into the world of evangelizing. And when your songs are little more than evangelical chants wrapped in rhythm, you not only lock yourself into the Christian base, a base which doesn’t need evangelizing in the first place, but you reduce your credibility as an artist.

I’m an atheist but that doesn’t mean I detest religion; I simply have no need or desire for it in my personal life. But many of my favourite shows and movies have religious and mystical concepts at their very heart. So don’t think I hate Christian Rock simply because it involves God. I hate it because it involves God poorly.

An example of a band which is not Christian Rock but has lyrics which discuss God and Jesus very openly (and earnestly) is Page France. I’ve listened to most of Page France’s “Hello, Dear Wind” and overall the album’s a little weak, but the tracks that I find myself returning to since the initial listen — the opening two tracks (Chariot, and Jesus) and the closing track (Feather) — all contain various levels of religious and Christian symbols. But the key is that those songs talk about Jesus and God in novel ways, and they appear to be not an active part of their music. Their songs don’t include God because they think their songs should include God, but merely because the songs they end up writing include him.

I said Christian Rock sucks, but the truth is that Christian Rock shouldn’t even exist. Like the “Pro-American” parts of America Sarah Palin talks about, Rock music isn’t something to be chopped up and spread among ideologies. Music which contains religious references isn’t Religious Music. Categorizing music is fine, in fact I Love it, but there’s a difference between an adjective and a noun. A noun is what you are, but an adjective is simply a modifier. Much like the difference between calling a gay person “a gay” and “a gay person” it seem nominal at best, but the difference is staggering in its connotations. And far too many people don’t treat “Christian Rock” as an adjective followed by a noun.

Footnotes

1. With apologies to Daniel Tosh

This doesn’t belittle what he accomplished. He was willing to fight obscenity laws when no one else would. He attacked establishments like the government and the catholic church and wasn’t afraid to call them on their corruption and greed. But at the same time, he said some pretty stupid shit.

While discussing pornography and obscenity laws, he claims that pornography and obscenity laws are there to stop entrapment of wholesome people by prurient interests. His defense of what he does and other so-called obscene and pornographic works of the time is that they are not as a whole prurient in nature and so should not be judged by those laws. I’m OK with that part, but along the way he accepts and endorses the initial claim that pornography is essentially entrapment, that people are unable to resist material which arouses them. Seriously?

Are we expected to believe that someone can come across a magazine rack with a Playboy on it and be unable to maintain his composure and act like a rational human being? This seems like an absurdly backward view for Lenny Bruce, someone I’ve always understood to be a very forward thinking man, to have.

At least with pornography he defends most cases of it by virtue of its artistic merit, or the difficulty of objective analysis of artistic merit. But when it comes to drugs he’s just plain fucking nuts. He made the claim that there really are no drug addicts aside from the dozen or so the various law enforcement agencies have on the take. He describes heroin, in spirit if not in exactly these words, as a drug that no one uses. Maybe its merely that Lenny Bruce has the disadvantage of being dead and therefore unable to update his facts to modern day, but heroin and cocaine and other such hard drugs are a huge problem and their users are many.

Lenny Bruce was vastly influential — and without him we might never have had George Carlin or any of the other idols of modern comedy — but from my limited exposure to his work he doesn’t seem like a particularly great comedian, and his political stances, which are the core of his comedy, fluctuate wildly; maybe his own addictions tainted his responses on drugs, maybe the fact that he liked to swear and the fact that his job required not swearing guided his opinion on censorship. Either way, Lenny Bruce was a deeply flawed man, who managed to incite a revolution. Because of his work, obscenity became less obscene. Because of him, and others of that time, I can say “fuck” or “shit” or even “cunt” whenever I want. And that’s a freedom, like any other for which we’ve fought in the history of civilization, we should never take for granted.

Earlier today, I went to Walmart to look around for a new bookshelf/dvd shelf and as soon as I entered I saw to my right a stunning girl. She was working the express lane and as I looked at her she took a look around and our eyes met. Though it was brief I felt an instant connection. It was one of those moments that would run in slow motion if my life were a movie. Well after a few minutes, I decided Walmart’s options were pretty shitty and decided to go home. But I didn’t, as I left there I looked towards my car and then I looked towards the nearby Chapters. For some reason I decided I’d drop by Chapters before I headed for home.

I walked about the aisles for a while picking up a few more books for my nonexistent bookshelf and then I headed to the front to pay for them. As I was walking down the main path to the front of the store, I noticed that same girl again, this time searching for a book at their online kiosk. My first thought was that this was a moment of serendipity. A perfect opportunity offered up by the universe for me, a chance to start up a conversation with a girl, and a girl I’m already interested in no less.

So as per usual, I walked by her with awe, stopped for a few seconds to think about the best way to start the conversation and after coming up with a few lame introductions which would only have worked if she were similarly interested in me I abandoned the idea entirely, paid for my books, and went home cursing all the way.

So regarding the post’s title, why am I such a coward? Countless men have sucked up the fear of rejection and general introversion to ask out girls they fancy, or the species as a whole would be nothing but extroverted douchebags. So why didn’t I just man the fuck up and ask her out?