To Try a New Sword on a Chance Wayfarer

Sunday, January 29, 2012

The mystery plant

This plant is growing in the backyard of my new house.

I don't know what it is. I don't think I've ever seen one before. It's deciduous and kind of viney, with all these puffy, cottony things on it.

If it was up to me, I'd probably call it a "sage vine," because when there's a light breeze, the white puffballs all bob up and down like a conclave of elderly bearded men nodding wisely.

Or maybe I'd call it a "Shih Tzu vine," because it kind of reminds me of those little dogs.

But those aren't it's real name. Anybody know what it is?

I really want to know.

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Friday, January 27, 2012

Moving to a new home creates many opportunities. Today, 10 years after I abandoned my attempt at getting a PhD, I finally got rid of most of my political science books.

I'm not sure why I kept them so long. Of course, as any book lover -- not just any reader, but a Book Lover -- will tell you, one doesn't just get rid of books. One keeps them and displays them as a sort of visual, decorative record of what one is or has been interested in -- of who one is, in a way.

But the thing about these books is, I never loved them. In fact, I never even truly read most of them. In grad school -- in the social sciences, anyway -- on the way to your comprehensive exams, you don't actually read books, you process them to extract information. And because you have so many books and articles to read, you need to process them as quickly as possible, no matter how well or badly written, how interesting or dull they may be. You must know what's in them.

So you develop shortcuts. Maybe you read the first and last chapter, and the first and last paragraphs of each of the other chapters, and glean the main ideas of the book, whatever it is the author is trying to argue, that way. (And you do the same with articles: you read the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion.) If the work will have direct bearing on your own research, of course, you delve in more deeply. And once in a blue moon, maybe, you find a book that you actually enjoy reading, and you read the whole thing. And then you feel guilty for having spent so much time on one book.

So these books weren't books that I loved in any sense. They had been tools for information gathering, not objects of intellectual or emotional desire.

Still, the 65 or so I owned out of the hundreds of books that I "read" during grad school once held great symbolic meaning for me (as did the hundreds of articles that I copied and filed away). Ten years ago, I would not have dreamed of getting rid of them. Five years ago, it would have been a struggle.

Finally, some empty space

But today, well, today what I felt was mainly a little bit surprised at how little it meant to me to box up those books and drop them off at the public library's donation bin. I titled this post "A boxful of failure," because that's what that box represents: my biggest career-type failure. But I'm over it. I'm not failing anymore; I'm having a little bit of success in my own way. So I feel glad to have gotten rid of the books, but not in some big "Finally I've put this behind me" way. I feel glad because now I have room for a lot more books in my bookcases. I switched to reading library books a few years ago because I literally had no more room for books in the tiny house we were renting.

Not that that's a concern anymore, actually. In our new place, I could easily triple my existing bookshelf space without any problem. And the advent of ebooks brings up the question of buying physical books at all. Still, it feels good to know that I can buy about 55 more books before I even have to think about new shelving.

I think I'll hit the used bookstore for some genre fiction. Revisiting Asimov's Foundation series sounds good right about now.

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Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Good Reads/Random Cool Sites (1/18/2012)

Ron Paul invokes Golden Rule, Republicans boo.
Romney straps worker to roof of campaign bus. (Why this is funny. And a pithy one-panel take on the same theme.)
"Dog whistling" is not done accidentally.
Rupert Murdoch meets the internet.
Murder is no longer one of the top 15 causes of death in America.
The Red Flags of Quackery.
The Mormon Church extols religious freedom while BYU expels students who convert from Mormonism.
Jerry Coyne deepens his discussion of the (non)existence of free will.
Google Translate whispers.
Vintage dinosaur art (I got this book back when I was around six years old. It was a favorite for a long time. My mom even made her own painting of one of the pictures [T. Rex vs. Triceratops] so I could hang it on my wall.)

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Return of the attack of the killer porns!

The LDS (Mormon) church's attitude towards pornography worked well enough before the internet. Pornography was a Very Big Deal. It was Evil. It was also kind of rare and exotic. It took a certain amount of effort, and the risk of public exposure, to get it. You had to go somewhere and find it, and maybe someone you knew from church would see you buy that magazine or come out of that forbidden store. So porn was easy to avoid. It was easy for church members to feel set apart from "the filthy things of the world."

If Mormons did indulge, then the furtiveness, guilt, and shame that the church teaches would usually make them quickly throw away the porn. They'd feel sad and pray a lot, but since getting more porn required an effort, it was easy enough not to. "Repentance" was simple and easy.

But now porn is always available. If you have internet — if you live an ordinary life, in other words — porn is never more than a few seconds away. You can't throw your porn away anymore. There's always more. And, unless there's someone monitoring your computer use, there's little worry of getting caught. Those are important changes.

Because the furtiveness, guilt, and shame that the church teaches obviously prevents Mormons from casually enjoying porn, but it also prevents them from casually not enjoying it.

By that I mean that it's hard for Mormons to simply indulge once in awhile and feel a little guilty but not really worry about it. They've been taught that porn is a Very Big Deal and its Evil. So not only can they not think, "That was fun" and go on their way, they can't simply think "Oops!" and go on their way either.

Now they're faced with this Very Big Evil Deal, but they can't get away from it. Porn is always there waiting for them. And there's a whole culture of "porn addiction" surrounding them. There's no one there to tell them that it's actually pretty normal behavior, that pretty much everybody does it, and few people have a problem with it, so don't worry if you do it once in awhile. Everybody acts like it's a Horrible Sin and a Danger rather than a mild self-indulgence at worst, and no one believes that more than the poor wankers themselves.

And that's where some of them fall into a sort of porn death spiral. They feel guilty and ashamed, and what makes them feel a little better? Porn. But that makes them feel guilty and ashamed again. So they need more porn. More guilt and shame. More porn. A vicious circle results, and something very like addiction does occur.

And this is going to continue until the church finally comes to its senses and lightens up. I think the church's treatment of porn will eventually, after many years and a lot of suffering, come to resemble its treatment of youthful masturbation. It has to go from its current 1950s-Mark-E-Peterson-tie-your-hand-to-the-bedpost attitude to something more realistic. It has to treat porn the way it treats youthful masturbation: the church won't come out and say "Everybody does it, so its no big deal." But everybody does do it. So it's no big deal. That's how every sensible bishop treats it now. (I realize that there are probably plenty of not-sensible bishops out there, but the mainstream attitude now is that it's just not that big a deal.) The church has to realize that porn is no big deal either. Until it does, it's going to go on creating "porn addicts."

See also:
Attack of the killer porns!
Discussing potato chips with your son-in-law

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