I'm pretty liberal these days. I've mentioned before that I got into liberal groups thinking, "Hooray! At last, a place of tolerance and less thought policing!" Hahaha. People are people, and in groups there are things they pretty much always do. Policing the group boundaries is a part of that, and you don't necessarily need a list of dogmas or an Inquisition to do it. In fact, all the lack of those things does is make it harder to tell what offenses are going to get you in trouble.
One of the dogmas of progressivism is that if you are the victim of oppression, you are allowed to be angry. No one is allowed to tell you not to yell and shout, because that's tone policing. And I agree with this on a basic level. Obviously if you're suffering pain and trauma, you need to be able to express that. Being rushed toward forgiveness is unhelpful.
What bothers me, though, is that more and more things are considered tone policing. Anger is virtuous. Kindness is "both sides" rhetoric, which takes the side of the oppressor.
I have two examples lately. The first was when Melinda Selmys wrote a post about how some women in the white nationalist movement may be victims of ideological abuse, and so you might consider, if you feel safe doing so, maintaining some sort of distant ties.
She was met with rage and accused of "hugging Nazis." Jewish people said that she should let them decide whether she could maintain ties with such a woman or not. After all, the only reason she could be so casual is that she's not a victim of their oppression.
I felt and feel that Melinda's bona fides as an opponent of white nationalism are clear. She's not saying it's okay to be a white nationalist or that they're not that bad. She's saying that you might be able to rescue someone from a toxic belief system and that's a good thing to do. Attacking her feels like friendly fire. If you're going to attack and demonize your allies for not drawing exactly the lines you do, you'll wind up with a lot fewer.
The second instance is a post in a group of autistic people and some of their parents. I'm a little nervous sending parents to this group, even though it's incredibly educational, because they often get yelled at for mistakes they make out of ignorance. I don't want to introduce parents to autism acceptance and immediately turn them off it because the group demonizes neurotypical parents.
Someone said as much in the group this morning. Something like, hey, let's remember that not all parents who come in here being ignorant are the enemy. They just don't know we don't like puzzle piece symbols and ABA or why, so let's instruct them kindly instead of yelling at them and kick them out of the group.
So naturally everybody yelled at her and kicked her out of the group. Anger isn't just allowed, it's a requirement. Kindness isn't just unnecessary, it takes the side of the oppressor. The only way liberation has come is through "fighting for it."
I understand that nonviolence and gentle outreach isn't the answer to everything. Sometimes you have to push harder than that. But when you're a tiny minority and you're not armed or otherwise in an advantageous position, you can't win simply by being madder than everyone else! You may manage to shame other progressives into not arguing with you, but you're not actually converting very many people.
Having and voicing your feelings is important. But winning is also important. If you want to end the injustice you're dealing with, you need converts. And converting people doesn't happen simply by spraying out your raw feelings and shaming them for not liking it. It doesn't happen by stereotyping everyone who is not in your group as oppressors even when they're potential allies, and attacking them for being ignorant about something they've never heard of before.
There are a lot of ways toward liberation. Some people want to march in the streets. Some people invite a prominent neo-Nazi to Sabbath dinner till he changes his ways. And I totally understand that not every way is for every person. And that we shouldn't act like radical outreach is the only way and that all black people have to hug KKK members in order to convert them.
But if you do want to do those things, you shouldn't be shamed by your own side for it. These things are risky but they do sometimes work. And does it matter how your liberation comes so long as it does?
Well, that's what I think anyway.
Friday, May 10, 2019
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
Fact-checking The Martian
So, I got The Martian (the book) from the library and am gobbling it up. I did have some initial resentment because there were few vivid sensory descriptions, no evocative emotions, and little character development in the first few chapters. I just got a very nice rejection the other day because my novel doesn't have those things in the 50 pages the agent read. And I was like--but you see, my character is very cold and cerebral, she isn't going to be pouring out evocative descriptions and feelings! You should be picking up on her personality by the lack of those things!
And Andy Weir, in this book, does exactly the same thing and gets away with it. Grr. I'll tell myself it's because my book, too, can get away with it and I just haven't sent it to the right person yet.
Anyway, it does okay for itself, science-wise. Lots of stuff about Mars and the methods used by the astronauts to set up their visit. All very plausible. But there were just a few times that I found myself shouting at the book because it got something wrong, and not just a bit inaccurate, but a huge problem that our main character should notice.
Mark Watney, the main character who is marooned on Mars, is a botanist and an engineer. I know basically nothing about engineering, but it turns out I know kind of a lot about botany, and specifically about artificial closed ecosystems. Mainly because they've played a pivotal role in my latest two novels. It just maddened me that Mark is in a perfect situation to close the loops on the carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles, and he mostly does not do that. When he does try to do it, to some small degree, he doesn't do a very good job or account for the most basic things.
Realizing he doesn't have enough food to last till he's rescued, Mark decides to start growing his own. This is a great idea. He only has three sproutable items in his food supply: potatoes, peas, and beans. He decides potatoes are the best choice because he can get more calories per square foot of garden that way. He's not worried about any other nutrients, you see, because he has a big ol' bottle of vitamins.
That's where I started getting annoyed. Calories and vitamins aren't the only things you need to live. You also need protein. Most of us don't worry too much because there is plenty of protein in any normal diet. But if you don't get protein, you'll get protein deficiency or kwashiorkor, which causes muscle wasting and poor healing. You really have to get some.
One potato is 163 calories and gives you about four grams of protein. If we assume he eats about nine per day, he'll only get 40g of protein, and he should be getting 56g at a bare minimum. Does he ever worry about this? Does mission control? Does he have trouble carting around heavy weights in a spacesuit? Nope, never!
If you're ever in this scenario, plant the beans. Probably the smartest thing is to diversify the indoor garden and do some of each thing. I'll forgive him for not doing peas, though--odds are good they're split. Split peas won't sprout. An extra advantage of both peas and beans is that you can, if you have to, eat the leaves also. Potato leaves are toxic, so there's all this plant matter that has to be simply thrown away.
The last annoyance here is that Mark freeze-dries his potatoes because if left inside "they will rot." Has Mark ever owned a kitchen? As long as it's cool and dry, the potatoes will be fine.
So much for the choice of potatoes. What about the rest of the farming project?
Well, plants need a few basic things: carbon dioxide, light, water, various minerals (especially potassium and phosophorus), and nitrogen. Mark, being a botanist, just says they need carbon dioxide, water, soil, and soil bacteria. There's a great deal of fuss over him having this tiny little bit of bacteria and inoculating the soil and mixing in his own feces for it to decompose, because as we all know (because he told us) plants can't grow without soil bacteria.
And . . . that's simply not right. They need nitrogen. Normally at least some nitrogen is provided by soil bacteria (especially if you planted peas or beans) but most gardeners end up introducing their own because the soil on its own isn't as productive and will wear out. (Mark points out that gardening as heavily as he is will exhaust the soil, but doesn't really explain why, or that this can be prevented with proper inputs.) All this fuss about bacteria and he doesn't really need it! He has two other available sources of nitrogen, maybe three.
1. In order to farm, Mark needs water. He has plenty of oxygen, but he needs hydrogen to make the water. He decides to make it by breaking down rocket fuel, hydrazine. A molecule of hydrazine has two nitrogen atoms and four hydrogen atoms. It's horribly explosive, which is the focus of this episode, but at the end Mark has hydrogen, plus most of the nitrogen was released as harmless gas. But he adds, "Chemistry, being the sloppy bitch it is, ensures there'll be some ammonia that doesn't react with the hydrazine, so it'll just stay ammonia. You like the smell of ammonia? Well, it'll be prevalent in my increasingly hellish existence."
Mark, being a botanist, somehow hears "ammonia" and thinks "stink." I am only a home gardener, but when I hear "ammonia" I think "usable nitrogen." Of course it's only a tiny bit and Mark doesn't even need it because he has soil bacteria, but when later the soil bacteria die, he could very well produce any amount of ammonia out of the hydrazine.
2. Of course that's really an excessive amount of work given that every single human has a virtually endless supply of ammonia. Namely urine. Mark's is handled by the water reclaimer (we are never told what it does with the stuff it filters out) but if he saves his poop to garden with, he absolutely should be saving his urine too.
In its raw form, urine isn't good for much, but given a little time and some urease enzyme, it'll break down into ammonia. Much of this will evaporate and be lost (that evaporation is why pee stinks) but some will be useable to put on the garden. Urease enzyme is basically everywhere, including on your skin. Mark clearly has some in his environment, because when he has to pee in a bucket, it smells "like a truck stop men's room." Fresh urine doesn't smell bad unless you're ill. That smell comes from ammonia. How does the nitrogen get into your urine? From digesting the protein in your food. It's a neat little cycle!
So, all he's gotta do is age his urine for a few days and carefully apply to the soil. As a botanist, he'd probably have a good handle of how much to put on; you wouldn't want to overdo it (i.e. don't go out right now and water the garden with your pee, it'll probably get nitrogen burn and die). No nitrogen-fixing bacteria required! Again, he initially had the bacteria so I can see why he didn't worry about this method, but later it seems like it would start sounding like a better choice?
3. The third option is trying to rig something to get the nitrogen out of the air. That's how artificial fertilizer is made today, but I admit I don't know exactly how it works or whether it would have been possible for Mark.
The next concern I would have for the plants was lighting. We're never told if the Hab is translucent, but we are told it has plenty of electricity from the solar panels and several chapters into the gardening thing, he mentions in passing that there's plenty of light. Which is actually surprising--I mean, who bothers to put broad-spectrum, ultrabright grow lights if you just want the astronauts not to be in the dark? I thought I'd be up for him removing all the lights from other parts of the Hab and rigging up something to get them as close as possible to the plants, but noooope. Not even mentioned. His yields suggest the light was adequate though.
Next quibble is with the water cycle: Mark has gotten himself some water, which he pours on the soil as needed. The water evaporates and makes the air humid, but that's no problem because the water reclaimer condenses any extra humidity. There's a minor snag because there's a clog in the reclaimer from "soil minerals." But the soil never goes into the water reclaimer. The water evaporates, meaning it leaves all minerals behind. It's distilled. WHAT A MYSTERY.
That makes the sum of the farming quibbles. I had one about how Mark thought he could save energy by going without heat (um, food energy is still energy and cold will increase your metabolic rate!) but as he discarded that plan when he found out how cold it was, I'm gonna let it go.
Next, a small chemistry quibble. When Mark makes the water, he describes the chemical formulas in terms of liters: "50 liters of O2 makes 100 liters of molecules that only have one O each"; "Each molecule of hydrazine has four hydrogen atoms in it. So each liter of hydrazine has enough hydrogen for two liters of water." But . . . that's not how it works. Volumes aren't used for much in chemistry because different substances vary in density. You'd need to be measuring in grams, or better yet, moles.
The last and most obvious problem is how Mark recharges the rover with solar panels. He has to spread them out to soak up sun, so he can't drive while charging. He starts at dawn, drives until the batteries run out--four hours--and then spreads out the solar panels. It takes them twelve hours to charge.
How long is the day on Mars? Isn't Mark going to run out of daylight?
Mars's day is under an hour longer than ours, so on average it gets twelve and a half hours of daylight. Let's say it's summer. Mars's axial tilt is a bit more than ours, but not by a lot. The latitude of Mark's camp is 31 degrees north, about the latitude of Houston. Houston gets fourteen hours of daylight on the summer solstice. Even if we give Mark another half hour for the Martian day length, and another half hour for the planet being slightly more tilted, I just don't think he's going to have time to charge up those panels before the sun goes down. And I'm not sure they'll charge as fast those last few hours, with the sun getting low!
And then Mark takes another rover trip months later. So if the day was over 12.5 hours on the first trip, it's not now. There's even a day where he drives eight hours, charges his panels, and runs out of daylight when they're only 70% charged. How do they get 70% charged in only 4-6 hours if it takes 12 to charge them fully?
It's especially annoying given that Mark could have just gotten up earlier and driven at night. Why waste precious sun when your panels aren't up? (Does the rover have headlights, I wonder?) Did the author simply not remember that solar panels need sunlight? He gets that dust storms affect them, but seems to assume a day that's any length he wants for the plot.
That's all the errors I caught. If there are engineering problems, I wouldn't catch them.
So did it ruin the book for me? Actually no. I enjoyed nitpicking it. I guess it's the same impulse that makes people love Star Trek while publishing whole books of the errors in it.
I even grew to like Mark Watney. He's not a wildly emotional guy, he's a wisecracker. Which ends up helping him not go off his nut when he's alone on Mars.
So I'd definitely recommend the book. But Andy Weir, if you're planning another book involving farming in space? Call me first.
And Andy Weir, in this book, does exactly the same thing and gets away with it. Grr. I'll tell myself it's because my book, too, can get away with it and I just haven't sent it to the right person yet.
Anyway, it does okay for itself, science-wise. Lots of stuff about Mars and the methods used by the astronauts to set up their visit. All very plausible. But there were just a few times that I found myself shouting at the book because it got something wrong, and not just a bit inaccurate, but a huge problem that our main character should notice.
Mark Watney, the main character who is marooned on Mars, is a botanist and an engineer. I know basically nothing about engineering, but it turns out I know kind of a lot about botany, and specifically about artificial closed ecosystems. Mainly because they've played a pivotal role in my latest two novels. It just maddened me that Mark is in a perfect situation to close the loops on the carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles, and he mostly does not do that. When he does try to do it, to some small degree, he doesn't do a very good job or account for the most basic things.
Realizing he doesn't have enough food to last till he's rescued, Mark decides to start growing his own. This is a great idea. He only has three sproutable items in his food supply: potatoes, peas, and beans. He decides potatoes are the best choice because he can get more calories per square foot of garden that way. He's not worried about any other nutrients, you see, because he has a big ol' bottle of vitamins.
That's where I started getting annoyed. Calories and vitamins aren't the only things you need to live. You also need protein. Most of us don't worry too much because there is plenty of protein in any normal diet. But if you don't get protein, you'll get protein deficiency or kwashiorkor, which causes muscle wasting and poor healing. You really have to get some.
One potato is 163 calories and gives you about four grams of protein. If we assume he eats about nine per day, he'll only get 40g of protein, and he should be getting 56g at a bare minimum. Does he ever worry about this? Does mission control? Does he have trouble carting around heavy weights in a spacesuit? Nope, never!
If you're ever in this scenario, plant the beans. Probably the smartest thing is to diversify the indoor garden and do some of each thing. I'll forgive him for not doing peas, though--odds are good they're split. Split peas won't sprout. An extra advantage of both peas and beans is that you can, if you have to, eat the leaves also. Potato leaves are toxic, so there's all this plant matter that has to be simply thrown away.
The last annoyance here is that Mark freeze-dries his potatoes because if left inside "they will rot." Has Mark ever owned a kitchen? As long as it's cool and dry, the potatoes will be fine.
So much for the choice of potatoes. What about the rest of the farming project?
Well, plants need a few basic things: carbon dioxide, light, water, various minerals (especially potassium and phosophorus), and nitrogen. Mark, being a botanist, just says they need carbon dioxide, water, soil, and soil bacteria. There's a great deal of fuss over him having this tiny little bit of bacteria and inoculating the soil and mixing in his own feces for it to decompose, because as we all know (because he told us) plants can't grow without soil bacteria.
And . . . that's simply not right. They need nitrogen. Normally at least some nitrogen is provided by soil bacteria (especially if you planted peas or beans) but most gardeners end up introducing their own because the soil on its own isn't as productive and will wear out. (Mark points out that gardening as heavily as he is will exhaust the soil, but doesn't really explain why, or that this can be prevented with proper inputs.) All this fuss about bacteria and he doesn't really need it! He has two other available sources of nitrogen, maybe three.
1. In order to farm, Mark needs water. He has plenty of oxygen, but he needs hydrogen to make the water. He decides to make it by breaking down rocket fuel, hydrazine. A molecule of hydrazine has two nitrogen atoms and four hydrogen atoms. It's horribly explosive, which is the focus of this episode, but at the end Mark has hydrogen, plus most of the nitrogen was released as harmless gas. But he adds, "Chemistry, being the sloppy bitch it is, ensures there'll be some ammonia that doesn't react with the hydrazine, so it'll just stay ammonia. You like the smell of ammonia? Well, it'll be prevalent in my increasingly hellish existence."
Mark, being a botanist, somehow hears "ammonia" and thinks "stink." I am only a home gardener, but when I hear "ammonia" I think "usable nitrogen." Of course it's only a tiny bit and Mark doesn't even need it because he has soil bacteria, but when later the soil bacteria die, he could very well produce any amount of ammonia out of the hydrazine.
2. Of course that's really an excessive amount of work given that every single human has a virtually endless supply of ammonia. Namely urine. Mark's is handled by the water reclaimer (we are never told what it does with the stuff it filters out) but if he saves his poop to garden with, he absolutely should be saving his urine too.
In its raw form, urine isn't good for much, but given a little time and some urease enzyme, it'll break down into ammonia. Much of this will evaporate and be lost (that evaporation is why pee stinks) but some will be useable to put on the garden. Urease enzyme is basically everywhere, including on your skin. Mark clearly has some in his environment, because when he has to pee in a bucket, it smells "like a truck stop men's room." Fresh urine doesn't smell bad unless you're ill. That smell comes from ammonia. How does the nitrogen get into your urine? From digesting the protein in your food. It's a neat little cycle!
So, all he's gotta do is age his urine for a few days and carefully apply to the soil. As a botanist, he'd probably have a good handle of how much to put on; you wouldn't want to overdo it (i.e. don't go out right now and water the garden with your pee, it'll probably get nitrogen burn and die). No nitrogen-fixing bacteria required! Again, he initially had the bacteria so I can see why he didn't worry about this method, but later it seems like it would start sounding like a better choice?
3. The third option is trying to rig something to get the nitrogen out of the air. That's how artificial fertilizer is made today, but I admit I don't know exactly how it works or whether it would have been possible for Mark.
The next concern I would have for the plants was lighting. We're never told if the Hab is translucent, but we are told it has plenty of electricity from the solar panels and several chapters into the gardening thing, he mentions in passing that there's plenty of light. Which is actually surprising--I mean, who bothers to put broad-spectrum, ultrabright grow lights if you just want the astronauts not to be in the dark? I thought I'd be up for him removing all the lights from other parts of the Hab and rigging up something to get them as close as possible to the plants, but noooope. Not even mentioned. His yields suggest the light was adequate though.
Next quibble is with the water cycle: Mark has gotten himself some water, which he pours on the soil as needed. The water evaporates and makes the air humid, but that's no problem because the water reclaimer condenses any extra humidity. There's a minor snag because there's a clog in the reclaimer from "soil minerals." But the soil never goes into the water reclaimer. The water evaporates, meaning it leaves all minerals behind. It's distilled. WHAT A MYSTERY.
That makes the sum of the farming quibbles. I had one about how Mark thought he could save energy by going without heat (um, food energy is still energy and cold will increase your metabolic rate!) but as he discarded that plan when he found out how cold it was, I'm gonna let it go.
Next, a small chemistry quibble. When Mark makes the water, he describes the chemical formulas in terms of liters: "50 liters of O2 makes 100 liters of molecules that only have one O each"; "Each molecule of hydrazine has four hydrogen atoms in it. So each liter of hydrazine has enough hydrogen for two liters of water." But . . . that's not how it works. Volumes aren't used for much in chemistry because different substances vary in density. You'd need to be measuring in grams, or better yet, moles.
The last and most obvious problem is how Mark recharges the rover with solar panels. He has to spread them out to soak up sun, so he can't drive while charging. He starts at dawn, drives until the batteries run out--four hours--and then spreads out the solar panels. It takes them twelve hours to charge.
How long is the day on Mars? Isn't Mark going to run out of daylight?
Mars's day is under an hour longer than ours, so on average it gets twelve and a half hours of daylight. Let's say it's summer. Mars's axial tilt is a bit more than ours, but not by a lot. The latitude of Mark's camp is 31 degrees north, about the latitude of Houston. Houston gets fourteen hours of daylight on the summer solstice. Even if we give Mark another half hour for the Martian day length, and another half hour for the planet being slightly more tilted, I just don't think he's going to have time to charge up those panels before the sun goes down. And I'm not sure they'll charge as fast those last few hours, with the sun getting low!
And then Mark takes another rover trip months later. So if the day was over 12.5 hours on the first trip, it's not now. There's even a day where he drives eight hours, charges his panels, and runs out of daylight when they're only 70% charged. How do they get 70% charged in only 4-6 hours if it takes 12 to charge them fully?
It's especially annoying given that Mark could have just gotten up earlier and driven at night. Why waste precious sun when your panels aren't up? (Does the rover have headlights, I wonder?) Did the author simply not remember that solar panels need sunlight? He gets that dust storms affect them, but seems to assume a day that's any length he wants for the plot.
That's all the errors I caught. If there are engineering problems, I wouldn't catch them.
So did it ruin the book for me? Actually no. I enjoyed nitpicking it. I guess it's the same impulse that makes people love Star Trek while publishing whole books of the errors in it.
I even grew to like Mark Watney. He's not a wildly emotional guy, he's a wisecracker. Which ends up helping him not go off his nut when he's alone on Mars.
So I'd definitely recommend the book. But Andy Weir, if you're planning another book involving farming in space? Call me first.
Sunday, May 5, 2019
Is it right to walk away from Omelas?
This post is about this story by Ursula LeGuin. You should go and read it, and come back. It's not long.
Okay, so you get the gist: a city where everyone is happy, but by some mysterious mechanism, this is all caused by a little child being locked in a dirty closet and mistreated. Everyone in the city knows it, but if they show the child any comfort, the city's happiness will be destroyed.
Some people, the "ones who walk away from Omelas," leave the city when they find out. They don't want the happiness that comes from torturing a child. And of course that's the course we are expected to agree is moral.
But when I read the story, I wondered why they just left. Why didn't they save the child? Is it really enough to refuse to participate, when there is a child you know is in utter misery?
I guess the question that raises is, do you have the right to take away the happiness of everyone in the city? And how much happiness would you be taking away? If the child is rescued, does the whole city devolve to that level of misery, or simply become a more average city?
Or would the people just grab another child and put it in the closet?
Would you still rescue the child even if you knew they would? Just because you had to do what you could?
There was a Doctor Who episode to this effect. The city was powered by torturing a starwhale, and each citizen had the choice to vote against it, or forget it was happening. Most people chose to forget, and at first it seemed that that was that. Not enough people wanted to release the starwhale. And it was pretty fair, because it seemed the city might not survive at all if they let the starwhale go.
But the Doctor, of course, does not accept moral dichotomies. If presented with a trolley problem, he'd find a way that everyone lives. So naturally it occurs to him that he doesn't have to abide by the people's vote, he can singlehandedly free the starwhale. But is that right? What if the starwhale destroys a city full of children?
I'm curious what you guys would do. Walk away? Free the child? What facts would affect your choice? What would you do if you were ignorant of what might happen?
Okay, so you get the gist: a city where everyone is happy, but by some mysterious mechanism, this is all caused by a little child being locked in a dirty closet and mistreated. Everyone in the city knows it, but if they show the child any comfort, the city's happiness will be destroyed.
Some people, the "ones who walk away from Omelas," leave the city when they find out. They don't want the happiness that comes from torturing a child. And of course that's the course we are expected to agree is moral.
But when I read the story, I wondered why they just left. Why didn't they save the child? Is it really enough to refuse to participate, when there is a child you know is in utter misery?
I guess the question that raises is, do you have the right to take away the happiness of everyone in the city? And how much happiness would you be taking away? If the child is rescued, does the whole city devolve to that level of misery, or simply become a more average city?
Or would the people just grab another child and put it in the closet?
Would you still rescue the child even if you knew they would? Just because you had to do what you could?
There was a Doctor Who episode to this effect. The city was powered by torturing a starwhale, and each citizen had the choice to vote against it, or forget it was happening. Most people chose to forget, and at first it seemed that that was that. Not enough people wanted to release the starwhale. And it was pretty fair, because it seemed the city might not survive at all if they let the starwhale go.
But the Doctor, of course, does not accept moral dichotomies. If presented with a trolley problem, he'd find a way that everyone lives. So naturally it occurs to him that he doesn't have to abide by the people's vote, he can singlehandedly free the starwhale. But is that right? What if the starwhale destroys a city full of children?
I'm curious what you guys would do. Walk away? Free the child? What facts would affect your choice? What would you do if you were ignorant of what might happen?
Thursday, April 18, 2019
To care and not to care
There has been a lot of bad news lately. On the same day, Notre Dame caught fire and we got news that Gilbert's kidney damage is continuing to progress and he will not recover.
I got that news and felt nothing. Except maybe guilt for not feeling anything. I just felt profoundly unsurprised. Why should anything good remain? Even the things that aren't currently dying or on fire will sooner or later be destroyed. Including myself.
After putting some thought into this, I started wondering if I am maybe not feeling as fine as I think I am. I used to be deeply emotional all the time. I cried a lot, but when I wasn't crying, I was often ecstatically happy. These days all of that feels kind of muffled.
It was such a relief slowly coming out of the waking nightmare that was my pregnancy with Jackie that I didn't complain too much over the lack of emotion. I'll definitely take calm over constant anxiety and intrusive thoughts. But it's been two years and I would kind of like to get back to feeling like myself, if that's possible.
But to know how to do that, I'd have to figure out why.
One possibility is that I am too busy and distracted. I have a smartphone now and I spend way too much time on Facebook. Am I hiding there from my feelings? Do I need to spend more time simply looking around me and enjoying the present moment? That might be so.
Another possibility is that I was so traumatized by getting pregnant with Jackie that I have been disassociating from my feelings. In which case I might need to somehow recover from that and deal with those feelings. I'm not sure how to do that.
A third issue came to mind today. I was at the park and I made a point to put down my phone and enjoy the beautiful weather. There were fresh green leaves on the trees which were tossing brightly in the wind. For a moment, I felt happy.
And then I thought: this won't last. Like dogs and cathedrals and everyone I love, it will be destroyed and no one will even remember it.
It just made me realize I have never truly recovered from the death of my faith. I relied on it to a degree I never noticed while I believed in it. I assumed everything was stable, everything was good, eventually every evil thing would be destroyed and every good thing made immortal. That gave me the ability to enjoy temporary pleasures and shrug off temporary pains.
"And for all this, nature is never spent
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.
And though the last lights over the black West went,
Lo, morning, on the brown brink Eastward, springs."
I believed this, as a ground of my being. Is it possible to still believe the same if the Holy Ghost isn't brooding over it all? What if there really isn't such a place, where all the good things are stored up for eternity?
I don't see any of this as an argument for the existence of God. Why should there be, simply because I want one? If there is none, the desires of my heart are simply glitches, and there is no guarantee they will correspond to the things it has any hope of achieving. Maybe things just suck, you know?
I try to reassure myself that wiser people than me have found joy in their lives without religion. They live with and accept the fleetingness of all good things, they love people even though they're all going to die eventually, they build and plan and hope even though the universe itself will one day collapse in on itself. Maybe I just need to find the way, read existential philosophers, meditate more. Or maybe it's a matter of practice: maybe part of the task of being human is coming to terms with the hand we're dealt, and I spent most of my life not learning how to do that because I thought I was holding a hand full of aces.
I'm recording these thoughts mainly as a way to reflect on them. And I think it's helped some, because I teared up writing the Hopkins quote. But I'm open to ideas.
I got that news and felt nothing. Except maybe guilt for not feeling anything. I just felt profoundly unsurprised. Why should anything good remain? Even the things that aren't currently dying or on fire will sooner or later be destroyed. Including myself.
After putting some thought into this, I started wondering if I am maybe not feeling as fine as I think I am. I used to be deeply emotional all the time. I cried a lot, but when I wasn't crying, I was often ecstatically happy. These days all of that feels kind of muffled.
It was such a relief slowly coming out of the waking nightmare that was my pregnancy with Jackie that I didn't complain too much over the lack of emotion. I'll definitely take calm over constant anxiety and intrusive thoughts. But it's been two years and I would kind of like to get back to feeling like myself, if that's possible.
But to know how to do that, I'd have to figure out why.
One possibility is that I am too busy and distracted. I have a smartphone now and I spend way too much time on Facebook. Am I hiding there from my feelings? Do I need to spend more time simply looking around me and enjoying the present moment? That might be so.
Another possibility is that I was so traumatized by getting pregnant with Jackie that I have been disassociating from my feelings. In which case I might need to somehow recover from that and deal with those feelings. I'm not sure how to do that.
A third issue came to mind today. I was at the park and I made a point to put down my phone and enjoy the beautiful weather. There were fresh green leaves on the trees which were tossing brightly in the wind. For a moment, I felt happy.
And then I thought: this won't last. Like dogs and cathedrals and everyone I love, it will be destroyed and no one will even remember it.
It just made me realize I have never truly recovered from the death of my faith. I relied on it to a degree I never noticed while I believed in it. I assumed everything was stable, everything was good, eventually every evil thing would be destroyed and every good thing made immortal. That gave me the ability to enjoy temporary pleasures and shrug off temporary pains.
"And for all this, nature is never spent
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.
And though the last lights over the black West went,
Lo, morning, on the brown brink Eastward, springs."
I believed this, as a ground of my being. Is it possible to still believe the same if the Holy Ghost isn't brooding over it all? What if there really isn't such a place, where all the good things are stored up for eternity?
I don't see any of this as an argument for the existence of God. Why should there be, simply because I want one? If there is none, the desires of my heart are simply glitches, and there is no guarantee they will correspond to the things it has any hope of achieving. Maybe things just suck, you know?
I try to reassure myself that wiser people than me have found joy in their lives without religion. They live with and accept the fleetingness of all good things, they love people even though they're all going to die eventually, they build and plan and hope even though the universe itself will one day collapse in on itself. Maybe I just need to find the way, read existential philosophers, meditate more. Or maybe it's a matter of practice: maybe part of the task of being human is coming to terms with the hand we're dealt, and I spent most of my life not learning how to do that because I thought I was holding a hand full of aces.
I'm recording these thoughts mainly as a way to reflect on them. And I think it's helped some, because I teared up writing the Hopkins quote. But I'm open to ideas.
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
We enable this
Warning: post is about child harm.
There was an awful tragedy in our town last year. A mother of twin toddlers went to work, and since her usual babysitting fell through, she left the twins in the care of her boyfriend, who lived with her. While she was gone, the boyfriend beat both twins severely, killing one of them.
The murderer, of course, went to prison. What surprised me was that the mother was also charged, on the argument that this couldn't have been the first time he abused them, and she had to have known. No one else had had any reason to suspect abuse--the babysitter never saw any sign, nor the pediatrician--but the opinion of the town seems to be adamant that she did know. I was horrified by the bile expressed toward her online, saying that if the judge didn't give her the death penalty, somebody else would. Someone slipped her a razor blade while she was in prison and urged her to kill herself.
What gets me, what really gets me, is that all those same people who are utterly without mercy toward this mother because she should have known, are also the people who think parents who don't spank are neglectful, how in their day they got the belt and were better for it. I even heard a man commenting at the library the other day that he moved here because my town is a lot friendlier to corporal punishment and in the liberal town he'd moved from, "you can't raise your kids right." Certainly this town is big into spanking. Everyone does it, everyone is proud of doing it, and they do it in public sometimes. Any and all problems a child has are put down to weak parents who don't know when to smack.
And it just boggles my mind that nobody connects these dots. How is anyone supposed to recognize abusive behavior when hitting children is okay? Exactly at what moment is the mother supposed to know to call the cops?
I have known friends in similar situations and they don't know when to call the cops. Because yeah, he blew up and he spanked the kids when we're not a spanking family, but spanking's not a crime. Or he jerks them around, shakes them, screams at them, but well, he didn't leave a mark.
I listened to a comedy routine the other day where a dad talked about having choked his son for using a bad word. Hopefully he didn't really do that, but how would you know? Because hurting kids is something we joke about. Because hurting kids is normal. As long as you didn't cause any sort of permanent harm, it's considered discipline. Even if you were angry and out of control, because nobody's perfect.
I just hear and see all these things and it hurts me to think about. It makes me so angry. Children die of being hit by parents and caregivers and we still can't wean ourselves off of it. We think it's funny. And I just don't know how we are going to stop these abusers before they kill a child if the line between legal and illegal is drawn as far out as it is.
This has been a rant. Sorry to be such a downer but, man, we gotta talk about this and stop doing this, like, yesterday.
There was an awful tragedy in our town last year. A mother of twin toddlers went to work, and since her usual babysitting fell through, she left the twins in the care of her boyfriend, who lived with her. While she was gone, the boyfriend beat both twins severely, killing one of them.
The murderer, of course, went to prison. What surprised me was that the mother was also charged, on the argument that this couldn't have been the first time he abused them, and she had to have known. No one else had had any reason to suspect abuse--the babysitter never saw any sign, nor the pediatrician--but the opinion of the town seems to be adamant that she did know. I was horrified by the bile expressed toward her online, saying that if the judge didn't give her the death penalty, somebody else would. Someone slipped her a razor blade while she was in prison and urged her to kill herself.
What gets me, what really gets me, is that all those same people who are utterly without mercy toward this mother because she should have known, are also the people who think parents who don't spank are neglectful, how in their day they got the belt and were better for it. I even heard a man commenting at the library the other day that he moved here because my town is a lot friendlier to corporal punishment and in the liberal town he'd moved from, "you can't raise your kids right." Certainly this town is big into spanking. Everyone does it, everyone is proud of doing it, and they do it in public sometimes. Any and all problems a child has are put down to weak parents who don't know when to smack.
And it just boggles my mind that nobody connects these dots. How is anyone supposed to recognize abusive behavior when hitting children is okay? Exactly at what moment is the mother supposed to know to call the cops?
I have known friends in similar situations and they don't know when to call the cops. Because yeah, he blew up and he spanked the kids when we're not a spanking family, but spanking's not a crime. Or he jerks them around, shakes them, screams at them, but well, he didn't leave a mark.
I listened to a comedy routine the other day where a dad talked about having choked his son for using a bad word. Hopefully he didn't really do that, but how would you know? Because hurting kids is something we joke about. Because hurting kids is normal. As long as you didn't cause any sort of permanent harm, it's considered discipline. Even if you were angry and out of control, because nobody's perfect.
I just hear and see all these things and it hurts me to think about. It makes me so angry. Children die of being hit by parents and caregivers and we still can't wean ourselves off of it. We think it's funny. And I just don't know how we are going to stop these abusers before they kill a child if the line between legal and illegal is drawn as far out as it is.
This has been a rant. Sorry to be such a downer but, man, we gotta talk about this and stop doing this, like, yesterday.
Friday, April 5, 2019
7 quick takes
1
Writing fiction is taking up more and more of my life these days. I've just started another novel which is basically the Mayflower in space. (With a sublight, constant-acceleration drive--which perhaps is only of interest if you are a COLOSSAL NERD but then, that's my target audience.) My goal is to write 30,000 words in April, which isn't a whole lot, but it should be a manageable pace this time. This is part of my effort to write more apart from NaNoWriMo so I'm taking a little more time to get it right than I have for the past two novels.
I love writing, and dreaming of stories. But you know what I'd really love? Doing it without Barbie's Dreamhouse or Cocomelon going on in the background. Still, I am grateful to the purveyors of those terrible shows for making it possible to write, even on evenings when Jackie hates sleep.
2
Speaking of, here's a random review for you: Cocomelon is a children's show which is free on YouTube and not awful! You do have to stay in the room when kids are watching YouTube to ensure it doesn't autoplay its way into violent porn or something, but Cocomelon is a trustworthy channel.
It's baby songs. So I mean, it's a little bit dreadful. It has this creepy-looking monkey and a truly obnoxious song about what to do when you really, really, really want to sneeze. But on the other hand, it has its moments! A lot of the songs are really popular fables, like the ant and the cricket or the three little pigs, set to folk songs. And all of them have little animated stories that go with them, like "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" has a baseball game with the little family. I like that there is one family it focuses on, though there are occasionally other people and animals who I think are the baby's stuffed animals.
And this little video is just adorable and I kind of love it: https://youtu.be/3ChFTJSDYTQ
Anyway, Jackie is completely mesmerized by it and has learned many of the songs. Sometimes she swaps in new words, like this morning she repurposed the eating-vegetables song into a song about going to school. It's so cute, I can hardly stand it.
3
I had a whole post planned on this topic, but I think it's better to accept that I'm not going to write a long post on it anytime soon. It's just this simple thing: I strongly disagree with the idea that any ethnic group has a "right to a homeland" or that there exists a "right to the self-determination of peoples."
This came up in The Better Angels of Our Nature, but I keep seeing it around so I thought I'd address it directly.
Do I mean that people don't have a right to stay in their homeland, or that people don't have the right of self-determination? Of course not! Every individual has rights. But ethnic groups, like all groups, don't have rights.
And the thing is, in a republic, we should assume that all people, of every ethnicity or religion, have rights. These rights ought to be enshrined in the constitution of every nation. If a certain ethnic group has no rights, the solution shouldn't be to transport them to the "homeland" of that group, or to carve up the nation with a separatist movement, but to change the nation until it grants rights to everyone.
Because if you do allow that ethnicity is a meaningful way to separate people, and that everyone has to live in the country assigned to their ethnicity, which is the only place they have any right to live . . . well, first off, you're an ethnonationalist which really should be enough. But if not, there's also the argument that it results in absurdity. Where would I live? With the Brits, the Irish, the Germans, the Swedish, the French...? There are a lot of people who aren't all one thing. And some countries are composed of very different ethnic groups. How tiny do we have to dice them up? Take a page out of Switzerland's book, and learn how to make a country out of diverse backgrounds.
This of course applies to Israel, but is also an argument against ethnonationalism anywhere.
4
Let's see, on a cheerier note: books I've read lately! You can read all my reviews on Goodreads--I'm trying to write at least a brief review of everything I read.
During March I tried to read as much as I possibly could, so I could finish stuff before April. I started the Expanse series, which so far I liked. (Only finished book one, Leviathan Wakes. Book 2 is staring at me trying to tempt me away from my writing.) I love the world in that, and got a lot of inspiration. Science fiction is so rarely atmospheric in the way fantasy almost always is. Star Trek makes you feel like you're in a nineteen-eighties living room. This book really made you feel like you were in space.
I also read up to book three in the His Majesty's Dragon series, by Naomi Novik. It's such a clever idea, and carried out so carefully and accurately, but at the same time, it hasn't measured up to the other books of hers I've read. It just doesn't have a very . . . arcky plot. As I get better at plot, I realize that a lot of otherwise good books don't have that feel that you are on a single adventure. Instead, it's just stuff happening, with no clear beginning or ending point.
I finished Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series, thanks to driving to the faraway library and placing a hold and coming back to get that hold. That's how bad I wanted that last book, and not in audio format, which was the only way my own library had it. It was good. I still think the first book was by far the best. In the first book, you're dropped in the middle and have to slowly figure things out. In the other two, there's a lot of explaining and I don't love that. But all three were still very good and I would recommend them. The whole ship-AI-with-human-bodies-linked-up thing is . . . weird. And cool. I also liked that their language only has a female pronoun because it just gave a very different feel and set of assumptions to gender-neutral than you get when authors use he. (Like, for instance, The Left Hand of Darkness.)
Last, I read Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, the next Bujold book. That honestly disappointed me a lot. I am not sure if I judged it more harshly because I expect better of her, or if I would have even gone past chapter three if it had been written by anyone else. It was just kind of boring. No suspense. No peril. I think Bujold decided she had darn well earned the chance to let her characters hang out and have a good time. So they do. For a whole book. It did give me a warm feeling to leave all the characters doing well, and with none of the sobbing I did over, say, Memory. (Still haven't forgiven her for what she did to Admiral Naismith in that book.)
5
Marko got on the honor roll this quarter--straight A's. I am so proud, because this has been his goal all year.
Michael's school pictures turned out really well.
I'm signing up Miriam for kindergarten tomorrow. She and I both have all kinds of feelings about that. Mostly I'm excited. She talks. so. much. She's so bored. She needs this.
Jackie is much less fussy now that her two-year molars are just about through. I thought this would make her easier. Well, I mean, she is, because anything would be easier than her screaming all day. But she is now SO energetic and happy I'm utterly exhausted keeping up with her. She wants to do all the stuff and she wants me involved. She changes clothes about four times a day, which means we all have to go upstairs and she has to reject half a dozen options first. She loves to be silly. She talks so much and so much more clearly.
But she naps, like, every other day. It's the worst. If she doesn't nap, odds are good she'll get overtired by bedtime and stay up an extra two hours. But if she does nap, she's not tired enough and will stay up an extra three hours. Either way, she'll be exhausted the next day and nap, unless I get her out of the house at the crucial time, but without so much time in the car that she falls asleep. It's this constant struggle, long past when my other kids gave up naps. I think the trouble is that she's a night owl, the only one of the family that is, so she stays up late even when she is tired. But she can't sleep in, because we have to go to school, so a nap is her only option.
6
I have had just the most excruciating sore throat all week. And tired, so very tired, though what else is new. I finally dragged myself to the doctor, which I hate to do. I worried that I'd be told it was viral and I was wasting my money and also malingering. It's a whole thing.
Anyway, turns out I have strep. It's ridiculous how happy I was to hear that. First, because it means it will quickly clear up with antibiotics. Second, because it means I'm not a big baby, it really was that bad.
Even better, the doctor said "that looks like it really hurts!" and "you must have been feeling awful all week!" and it just made me feel so believed.
7
Remember our dog, Gilbert? He's been peeing on the floor a lot lately. I didn't love that, so I've been taking special care to take him out more often. I figured, well, he's about eight years old, his bladder might not be what it used to be, he needs to go out more often. That worked for maybe a week, and then he started having accidents even then.
Then yesterday I found some blood drips next to a pee puddle. Uh-oh. John took him to the vet today, assuming he had a UTI. Unfortunately, while he does have a UTI, he also has failing kidneys. So either he's had that UTI for months without anybody noticing, or he's had something else wrong with him (any number of a long list of things). The vet gave us everything he could -- special diet, medicine, other medicine -- and we're to take him back next week. It's possible he might still get better. But odds are not good and most likely he will die within a few months.
I'm shocked and upset. I don't like Gilbert very much, but he is a member of the family and the kids love him. So does John. I want him to get better so the others won't be sad. We've told the kids he's sick; I figure we can mention the dying thing if he doesn't get better. But it's so tough. They've never lost a pet before. And given how Marko reacts to losing a balloon or an action figure, I shudder to think.
Wish him luck. I don't feel optimistic; he is suddenly acting very ill. He was leaping around like crazy two days ago and now he just sits there wagging.
Monday, March 18, 2019
Second Lenten shop
Today I went shopping again for the next two weeks. This time, I didn't buy any meat for dinners because I think I can get buy without making it at all -- and anyway, I've got quite a lot of meat frozen from last time. The only exception is a box of fish sticks (in case I really don't have it in me to make dinner) and a package of pepperoni, for pizza.
What I don't understand is how I could cut out the most expensive items and still spend $191. Don't I usually spend more than $9 on meat? I guess I replaced it with so much produce it came out the same. Oh well. At least there are plenty of healthy things to eat in the house -- nobody's going to be left eating bread and oreos.
Here are the planned recipes for this week. This time, I'm not assigning them to specific days. I just can't always predict which days are going to be good to make something complicated, and when I'm going to basically have to phone it in. I felt like phoning it in last Wednesday, but I had already marked falafel on the calendar, and it was a very stressful evening. One does not simply tell the children the plan has changed!
1. 15-bean soup
I got a mix so all I really need to do is add some veggies.
2. Tacos
3. Falafel
This time I bought pitas, because falafel itself takes a lot of attention and it's stressful to try to homemake pitas at the same time. Besides, half my pitas didn't puff.
4. Split pea soup
5. Noodles, tomato sauce, eggplant, and mushrooms
I made this last week, worried it would be a flop, but no, the kids loved it! I did let Marko pick out the mushrooms.
6. Broccoli teriyaki with white beans
This was a hit last week also. Which is weird because they don't usually like my attempts at Asian food!
7. Lentil pot pie
This was on my list last time, but I made shepherd's pie instead because I ran out of flour. This time I'm not going to be caught short!
8. Hummus sandwiches/wraps
I bought premade hummus for this last time, and the kids kept whining that it's not as good as mine. Ha! Mine's a bit chunky because my blender is a little weak, but I guess they like that.
9. Enchiladas
I got a couple of plantains to go in these; I think that would be nice.
10. Lentils 'n' dumplings
Basically I'm thinking carrots, celery, lentils, and broth, with my usual dumplings on the top.
11. Nachos
These will go on whatever day the avocados get ripe.
12. Pizza
Poor John is going to be stuck with flatbread and sauce. Because is it really pizza without the cheese?
12. Chili and cornbread
13. Tomato soup
14. Fish sticks
What I don't understand is how I could cut out the most expensive items and still spend $191. Don't I usually spend more than $9 on meat? I guess I replaced it with so much produce it came out the same. Oh well. At least there are plenty of healthy things to eat in the house -- nobody's going to be left eating bread and oreos.
Here are the planned recipes for this week. This time, I'm not assigning them to specific days. I just can't always predict which days are going to be good to make something complicated, and when I'm going to basically have to phone it in. I felt like phoning it in last Wednesday, but I had already marked falafel on the calendar, and it was a very stressful evening. One does not simply tell the children the plan has changed!
1. 15-bean soup
I got a mix so all I really need to do is add some veggies.
2. Tacos
3. Falafel
This time I bought pitas, because falafel itself takes a lot of attention and it's stressful to try to homemake pitas at the same time. Besides, half my pitas didn't puff.
4. Split pea soup
5. Noodles, tomato sauce, eggplant, and mushrooms
I made this last week, worried it would be a flop, but no, the kids loved it! I did let Marko pick out the mushrooms.
6. Broccoli teriyaki with white beans
This was a hit last week also. Which is weird because they don't usually like my attempts at Asian food!
7. Lentil pot pie
This was on my list last time, but I made shepherd's pie instead because I ran out of flour. This time I'm not going to be caught short!
8. Hummus sandwiches/wraps
I bought premade hummus for this last time, and the kids kept whining that it's not as good as mine. Ha! Mine's a bit chunky because my blender is a little weak, but I guess they like that.
9. Enchiladas
I got a couple of plantains to go in these; I think that would be nice.
10. Lentils 'n' dumplings
Basically I'm thinking carrots, celery, lentils, and broth, with my usual dumplings on the top.
11. Nachos
These will go on whatever day the avocados get ripe.
12. Pizza
Poor John is going to be stuck with flatbread and sauce. Because is it really pizza without the cheese?
12. Chili and cornbread
13. Tomato soup
14. Fish sticks
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