write it down

Tweeting Your Epitaph

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:47:04 -0500

On Friday, I joked that people should have to spend one day a year wearing their internet comments on a sandwich board. On Saturday, a man walked up to a United States Congresswoman and shot her through the head. He shot an wounded 17 other people, and killing six. Among the dead was a 9-year-old girl who’d wanted to meet the politician because she’d recently been elected to her student council.

We don’t know the killer’s motives yet, but most speculation centers around his political writings about big government and the gold standard. Because we live in an era where everyone has a public persona, we all have access to the killer’s list of favorite books: a mish-mash political, economic, and dystopian literature. Much of his personal history has led to the belief that he suffers from a mental disorder, possibly schizophrenia, and that this is the reason for his actions.

Many on the left side of the nation’s political divide (where I sit) have pointed fingers toward the more vitriolic comments on the right, singling out former Vice-Presidential candidate turned celebritician Sarah Palin and her use of gun metaphors (“Don’t retreat, reload” and a campaign image of Congressional districts, including the victims’, marked with apparent rifle scope crosshairs).

I don’t know why the killer acted. No one does, and based on history, I’d say it’s likely we’ll never know the whole truth. Personally, I doubt that the killer was motivated by something as straightforward as a media figure’s words. He seems to have gone deep into the rabbit hole before his rampage, and I suspect his reading ran deeper than Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck. On the other hand, I think it’s very possible that his choice of target, a woman who seems tangential at best to the killer’s seeming obsession with currency, was the result of something like Palin’s crosshairs graphic.

And while I don’t think Sarah Palin is responsible for creating a killer, it does appear that among her first responses to Saturday’s tragedy was to remove the image from her website, and to begin spinning the crosshairs as “surveyor’s symbols” once it was clear that she’d never be able to hide it from the internet.

Which brings me back to my joke about internet comments and sandwich boards.

I’m a First Amendment guy. It’s near sacred text to me, and I would never support legal remedies for violent or stupid rhetoric. One of the things that sets America apart from many other Western democracies* is our no-holds-barred approach to free speech, especially political speech. In America, if you can think it, then you can pretty much say it without fear of reprisal.

But just because you’re not legally responsible for the words you use, or their possible effects, doesn’t mean you aren’t morally responsible for them, and make no mistake, words have power. As a weapon or a tool, there is nothing more effective than words for motivating human beings. If you don’t believe me, then reflect on the fact that all of the major religions of the world are built on sacred texts, and that according to the Gospel of John, Christians worship a word “made flesh.”

So, while I don’t want to ban anyone from saying anything ever, I do think the world would be a little better off if we all remembered the power of our words and realized that, for better or worse, the words we speak or write are very often the only things we’re known by.

Do you really want to wonder in the aftermath of a tragedy whether your words were throwing fuel on the fire, or spend time deleting tweets rather than comforting the grieving? And before you hit the “post” button on that latest internet rant, bear in mind that you could be writing your epitaph.

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*I’m thinking specifically of the UK’s bad libel laws and the French tendency to ban head scarves. Canada also has a history of banning books that were sold openly in the United States, and of course Australia is dead set on censoring the internet.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Repealed

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 14:46:43 -0500

I’m happy about this news. Congratulations to all of you who serve our country with honor despite being treated as a second class citizen or as a ticking time bomb. For those of you for whom this comes too late, I’m sorry.

The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is the first gay rights issue I can remember being aware of. I was in high school when President Clinton gave the executive order that created the policy, and while I understand that the military is inherently a conservative organization and lead by people a generation or more older than I am, it’s difficult for me to understand why a policy so medieval lasted so long, or that it even required debate before being repealed.

A Coming Out Story

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:20:36 -0400

Like a lot of people that grew up in small towns in the 80s and 90s, I had only a dim awareness of the many varieties of sexuality. Although I learned later that several of my friends in middle and high school were gay, I didn’t know anyone openly gay until college, and I’ll be honest that I wasn’t completely comfortable around the gay men I met.

I wanted to be. Intellectually, I knew I should be, but growing up in the conservative South left its mark. While I was tolerant and friendly, I also kept my distance.

Until I met Chris.

I didn’t like him much at first. He had a kind of personality that I found grating. Outsized and over the top, a natural actor who could hold an audience, any audience, for as long as he wanted, it seemed to me that when he walked into the room he sucked every bit of air out of it. I was shy and awkward, and I hated him a little bit for his ability to be everything I wasn’t.

It was only later, when we worked together on a production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown (I played Linus), that my feelings changed. We spent hours together every day building and painting sets, and away from other people I got to know the real Chris. Funny without being over-the-top, sweet in a weird way, and really sincere about music and theatre, I liked this previously unknown Chris a lot. We became close friends during that summer, spending most of our free time together.

We developed a Sunday night tradition of church followed by watching The X-Files at my house, and usually a movie after that. It sounds outrageously geeky now, but it was a lot of fun.

Still, I didn’t know he was gay. I wasn’t naive. I’d thought from the beginning that he was, but he always talked about girls he liked and his plans to go into the ministry after college. So maybe I was a little naive, but I took all of this at face value.

He went home for Christmas break that year, and we didn’t speak again until January. This wasn’t just pre-Facebook. It was pre-internet and pre-text messaging, at least for me, so I didn’t know what he’d just been through until the first Sunday night after he got back. We met up as usual, but as we got into his car after church, he said, “I need to tell you something.”

I don’t remember everything he said, but he’d had a confrontation with his parents. They’d asked him before if he was gay, and he’d always denied it, but this time he didn’t. This time he told them the truth, and now he wanted to tell me.

I remember what I said that night, and though it wasn’t perfect I feel like it was the best I could do at that point. I said, “Hey, that’s fine. I’ll be friends with anybody,” which wasn’t strictly true, and wasn’t quite right, but it’s all I could get out.

——-

I don’t want to make coming out about straight people, but if our friends are going to come out to us, then we need to be ready. I’m sure those of you who grew up in sophisticated urban areas could have done better, but there are a lot of people, like me, that couldn’t.

So here’s my advice- when a close friend come out to you, all you have to say is this: “Thank you for telling me. I know that sharing that was hard, and I want you to know that I’m you’re friend just as I’ve always been.”

Don’t say it like that, though. Only Dear Abby talks that way.

You may feel differently about your friend afterward. That’s normal. I can tell you that I felt a little hurt after Chris came out to me. All of those times he’d gone out of his way to seem straight, and I’d gone out of my way to believe him, felt like betrayals to me, even though I understood why he’d had to lie.

Fortunately, I had enough sense by that point to know that feelings aren’t always our friends. Work out your feelings on your own time. If you feel like you have to share them with your friend, do it a day or a week later. Make it a separate conversation. Your friend has just made a huge emotional leap with you, one that required a lot of courage, and probably doesn’t have any reserves left to deal with your hurt feelings.

——-

I wish I could say we lived happily ever after. In some ways we did, I guess, but friendships are so complicated. We stayed close friends after that night. We grew much closer, in fact. We worked together, lived together, wrote and produced a movie together, but a lot of things have come between us over the years. Some of the things were petty squabbles and some were deep seated issues (mine, mostly), and though they seem smaller now, time and distance have conspired to keep us from mending the gap.

I miss him so much sometimes. We see each other every few years, and when we do, we fall right into the same old rhythm, and it’s fantastic.

A few months ago, I presided over the wedding of two friends. I’ll be honest, I was good. I was funny when I needed to be, sincere when it was called for, and managed the crowds and the individuals deftly. I was a million years away from the shy and awkward college freshman that resented Chris for his way with an audience.

It was about halfway through the weekend when I realized I was being Chris. Maybe I wasn’t as natural or as good, I’m sure I wasn’t, but everything I did to handle that weekend I’d learned from him. Thinking about it, I realized that I’d been doing it for years.

I owe him so much. He made me into me. So much of what I like about myself is wrapped up in what I got from him. That’s why I care about LGBT issues. They aren’t abstract to me, they go straight to the best parts of myself.

——-

I originally wrote this piece for National Coming Out Day, a day dedicated to celebrating the place that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Americans hold in our nation and also to encouraging people to be open and honest in their sexuality. I didn’t publish it then because I wasn’t quite sure about it, but at a time when the media is reporting an epidemic of young people taking their own lives because of the abuse they’ve received over their sexual orientations, and a day after an Arkansas schoolboard member wrote some unbelievably hateful words about gay men and women, I don’t want to hold it back anymore.

I'm not finished.

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 08:57:10 -0400

I didn’t get the best education. My college wasn’t the greatest, but even there I could have gotten a better education if I’d really wanted it. I didn’t try very hard because I’d never had to, and I didn’t have any real end goals to try for anyway, and so I just slid by. My grades were good enough to keep my scholarships, but I didn’t learn much of anything.

I didn’t realize how uneducated I was until much later when I left the comfortable hell of the food service industry and myself in a working world populated by truly educated people. Over the years, I’ve made friends with people that are truly educated. They speak multiple languages, they can talk about art and mathematics with authority. It’s humbling.

So I’ve decided to go back to school.

——-

I have a job that most people would kill me for, a perfect family, and all of the other things that a college degree is supposed to buy for you, so why bother?

Because I can do more.

A couple of years ago, I sought some therapy. I was unhappy, and I didn’t understand why or what to do about it. At first I thought it was because I’d always been unhappy, that it was just another personality trait of mine, but my unhappiness was poisonous to my new family, and I needed to deal with it if I was ever going to be a good father and husband, so I sought help.

Therapy taught me that there was a disconnect between who I was and who I thought I was supposed to be, and I could never be happy until I reconciled those two people. The liberty that came with the realization that I could leave behind the idea of who I was supposed to be and define myself by who I was, a financially successful man with a family that I loved, allowed me to be truly and desperately happy for the first time in my life. You have no idea how good it felt to learn that, if I wanted to, I could leave behind all of the aspirations in my life that never materialized, but continued to hang around my neck like an albatross.

At the end of my final session with the therapist, he shook my hand and said, “You’re not finished becoming you.”

“I’m not finished” has become my personal mantra.

——-

A few weeks ago, I looked into a program at the University of Texas that has always interested me. It’s an interdisciplinary graduate program that plays to pretty much all of my interests, but I’m not ready for it. Even if I could get into it (no sure thing), my time there would be wasted without a better grounding in the basics.

So I’m starting over. First at community college, and hopefully at UT after that.

The prospect of another decade or so in school is daunting when I think about it. I suspect I’ll be in my mid-forties before I complete the course of study, and who knows what career prospects will be there for me, but it doesn’t matter. The purpose is bigger than the goal anyway.

On Toys

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 09:17:07 -0400

One of the consolations of parenthood is that toys return to your life. I hadn’t realized how much I missed them, but here they are again- little totems that you endow with a fraction of your imagination.

I know adults, men mostly, who still buy toys for themselves. I understand the desire to own a little bit of something you love, to open the package and run your fingers over it or put it on the shelf to admire, but I rarely let myself indulge in toys. I may purchase books and music, but never toys.

I restrict myself in part because I think it’s good to grow up and leave things behind. It’s oddly satisfying to leave things and drop habits or people that you’ve outgrown. It gives you room to grow further and allows for the sharp pleasure of nostalgia when you come across them later in life.

I’m also leery of them. I fear that by endowing them with my imagination I have crafted little souls for them and therefore become responsible for their well-being. Having done so, I may never be rid of them. It’s too much to bear. Let my children do it for me while they are young and imagination is cheap.

Image source: Apartment Therapy

On Modesty, Katy Perry, and Muppets

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 13:14:56 -0400

Dr. Chapman and I had a discussion a few days ago about a recent incident involving Sesame Street and Katy Perry. We’re not a household that consumes much Sesame Street, but we do have small children, so it comes up in conversation. It was an interesting talk, and I continued chewing on it afterward.

I believe the controversy also trickled out into the mythical land of childless adults that I once visited in a fever dream, but just in case you don’t know the details, the short version is that the singer filmed a segment for the show wearing a dress that exposed some cleavage. Some people objected after a clip from the performance was shown online, and the producers of Sesame Street pulled the segment from the show.

I’ll admit that I’m uncomfortable with any sort of censorship, and that my default mode is to take sides against these kinds of objections. The idea that a little cleavage is somehow harmful to the children watching Sesame Street seems absurdly alarmist to me. It would be hard for anyone that takes their child to a supermarket to avoid exposing them to similar amounts of cleavage at the checkout stand.

I would understand (and agree with) objections had Perry’s performance been sexually provocative in any way, but it isn’t. It’s just several minutes of silliness. Had it been sexually provocative, then it it would have been inappropriate for Sesame Street no matter how the singer was dressed. It may also be that Perry’s adult persona sets a bad example (I don’t know), but I think that’s irrelevant. If children are familiar with Perry outside of an appearance on Sesame Street, then seeing her on Sesame Street isn’t going to damage them further.

Dr. Chapman suggests that the real issue is the example set for young girls. We take a close look at the images of women we expose our children to (no Barbie, no “princesses”), and we would hope that Sesame Street is a safe place for them. That’s legitimate, but I disagree that this performance sets a poor example. Unlike Barbie, Perry is a an actual flesh-and-blood human being with a normal, if slim, physique, and again there’s nothing provocative about it.

I get that it’s a short segment for a children’s TV show and not that important in the long run, but it seems like the proponents of modesty are rarely on the side of women, and inherent in this censorship is the idea that breasts, and the female body by extension, are somehow corrupting or innately sexual. Neither of those things are true, but bowing to pressure from those that feel that way reinforces the belief. Ultimately, a young woman was silenced because of her body, and that’s wrong even if she was singing to a Muppet.

——

To be clear, I take my Muppets seriously, and I’ve got no real opinion on Katy Perry.

——

A lot of my thinking on this topic has also revolved around how I would want my own daughters to present themselves to the world as they grow up. I know that as their are enormous pressures on girls to conform to certain roles, and that questions of dress and fashion bring with them all sorts of baggage. As much as it pains me, I’m not going to be able to shield them from this.

The best I can do is to teach them to weigh their own happiness, taste, and comfort against the expectations and presumptions of society. I’m not unfamiliar with these things. I grew up with a lot of body and appearance issues, and only now as an adult with children am I finally gaining an understanding of how I want to present myself to the world. So, I want my own children to grow up physically confident and to dress according to their own identities, and I’m most concerned with helping them find and polish those identities as quickly as possible.

I’m certain that in the years between toddler and adulthood, their mother and I will struggle to find the balance of guidance and freedom in their dress and appearance (as most parents seem to). Once they reach adulthood then who they are and how they present themselves will be their own business, but I’ll take on anyone who tries to diminish them for their choices.

On Government "Waste" and Stupidity

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 14:30:21 -0400

I tend to froth a little when politicians and journalists offer examples of wasteful government spending that, given a moment’s reflection, isn’t all that wasteful. For example, when Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal attacked budget allocations for volcano monitoring. If there was ever something you wanted the government to monitor, I would expect a volcano to be it.

So, when one of my Facebook contacts posted the below, I broke my rule about never ever arguing on Facebook.

I won’t repost the entire conversation, but I spent long enough on it that I thought it might be worth posting it here (with some edits) for future reference:

Words like “wasteful” and “stupid” get thrown around a lot, but I don’t think we consider their meanings when we use them. It’s fine if you think this shouldn’t be a priority over something else (deficit reduction, education, lower taxes, whatever), but that doesn’t mean this study is wasteful. Here’s why I believe it isn’t.

First, an epidemic of a slow acting virus like HIV in one place will spread to another place if left unchecked. This already happened, but we were able to mostly contain the AIDS epidemic in the developed world (in part, because of massive government investment.) However, HIV evolves quickly and there’s no guarantee that our current drugs will be effective forever. We need to make sure it doesn’t spread, and research into the effectiveness of simple (and cheap) methods of prevention seems like a good idea on this front.

Second, even if this study doesn’t pan out, that doesn’t mean it was money wasted. You own a business*, and a fairly technical one, so it’s a fair bet that you buy some equipment from time to time. I’m certain you spend a few minutes or a few hours researching those purchases before you make them. In federal government terms, this study is a few hours of research.

Third, $800k is cheap. It’s 8/10 of a cent per taxpayer, and these grants aren’t just handed out like candy. Other scientists review them and decide which studies most deserve funding. I guess you could consider a small purchase wasteful, but it’s hard to consider it “stupid.”

Fourth, there’s the human cost that I mentioned before. There are 2 million infected children in the world, and 90% of them are in Africa. I believe 1/3 of the children born in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV. How many lives could be saved if this method reduced transmission rates by even 10 or 20%? Enough to warrant an $800k investment, I think.

Unless you believe that all foreign aid (or government spending) is somehow wasteful, then I find it hard to see why this would be a bad place for the government spend our money. The single caveat being that this was stimulus money, and I’m not sure how many jobs this created (though I would assume some). That hardly qualifies it for the “stupid government spending” award of the day.

——

*My Facebook correspondent own a photography studio.

——

A few other facts about AIDS in Africa:

‎- 5% of sub-Saharan Africans are infected with HIV. 2.7 million new cases were reported in 2007.

-20 million people have died of AIDS there since 1981.

-The cost of providing treatment for these patients (many of them women and children) is billions annually, but only half of the infected receive the treatment.

Repost: Five Corrections

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:57:00 -0400

(I need something to test this new RSS feed, so I’m reposting this. You don’t have to read it.)

No one has written a Wikipedia entry about me, but I’ve compiled a list of common misapprehensions about me just in case.

That I was born in Alabama.

I grew up in Alabama, but I was born in Texas and lived there until the age of seven. Actually, I’m the only person that ever made this mistake. A few years ago I requested a replacement birth certificate from the wrong state.

That I finished reading Watership Down

I’m relatively certain Hurricane Katrina destroyed my permanent record, so the chances that my high school diploma will be revoked are slim. Besides, I never explicitly claimed I completed the assigned reading. Still, I feel a little bad that my English teacher has labored under a false impression for nearly two decades.

I liked the book, really. I just hate rabbits. A lot.

That I’m gay.

Straight people often make this mistake. Gay people rarely do (except for that Senator). I’m not sure if it’s my degree in theatre or the fact that I learned the art of flirting with women from one of the great gay masters, but this happens more than it should for a man with my slapdash approach to accessorizing.

Typically I’m too flattered to make corrections, but I’m putting up this disclaimer for the sake of wiki accuracy.

That I know anything at all about your computer.

I understand this one. I wear a lot of black t-shirts, I’m a little overweight, and my job title at Google is Technical Specialist III. Of course I can diagnose the issue with your graphics card!

Shamefully, I know almost nothing about your computer. In fact, I care very little about your computer. Don’t get me wrong, I love my laptop. I can’t live without it, but to me it’s just a tool that I use to do the other things that I care about. As long as it can do those things, then I think it’s the best computer ever. Also, I use a Mac, so I’m pretty sure it loves me back.

Why do people continue to believe I can help them? Because, like the wise old man in a very special episode of Diff’rent Strokes, I’m too proud to admit that I can’t read, so I fake it.

You can solve almost any problem with a Google search. Try it.

That I know David Schwimmer.

Only one person believes that I know David Schwimmer, but how can I be sure she won’t try to write a Wikipedia entry on me?

There’s a guy that’s pretty famous around Google who is also named Schwimmer, and I mentioned to my boss one day that he came to a party at my house. I guess she didn’t recognize his name because she asked me if he “acted like Ross in real life?” I had no idea what she meant, but I nodded my head anyway, and ever since then she’s believed one of the stars of Friends and The Pallbearer spent New Year’s Eve of 2006 at my house.

Honestly, this was the best way I could think of to correct that error.