Red Monkey

May 10, 2008

Balcezak

I am both grateful that I checked my blog stats and looked at the Search Terms stats - and profoundly sad at the same time.

While I have heard some people put forth the claim that the internet is not truly growing larger anymore, but instead, is fragmenting off into specialist areas, today I was forcibly reminded that the internet is still growing larger and that it has shrunk our world considerably.

One hundred years ago, if you moved some thousand or more miles from your home town, you would be hard pressed to hear any news of anyone you didn't personally correspond with.

Yesterday, as I logged into StatCounter for a fast look at the statistics for my websites, I discovered a chilling blast from the past. The search term was pretty simple: "christopher balcezak suicide." I was instantly catapulted back in time.

My family lived in Austin, Texas for all of about five years. I started kindergarten there. By the time I was 10, I had lived in Austin far longer than any other city we'd lived in. It was and has always been the town I think of as home.

My first Halloween in Austin, I had to wear the damn pumpkin costume. I hated it. It had to be stuffed with pillows and my mother teased me constantly about being fat whilst I worse it. It felt like torture to me. But it was wear the pumpkin or miss out on trick-or-treating and this would be my first "real" time going out with a big group of neighborhood kids. I mustered all my bravado - and bolstered that by running to my room at the last minute and grabbing my beloved "baby pillow" (travel-sized pillow) and shoving that in the very front of the costume - a kind of hidden security thing.
(Note: ignore the smile. I was NOT a happy camper that evening.)

Mom walked me out to the group of kids with chaperones and dropped me off. Instantly, the troublemaker boy who lived around the corner from us started teasing me about being fat. I retorted with something about being well-protected and bet that I would not feel it if anyone tried to punch me in the stomach.

Yeah, I guess you could say I was baiting him.

Being a tough guy, he was sure he could make me feel it. I thought I was pretty slick. There was no way I was gonna feel his punch through two or three pillows right in front of my stomach - and I have a high pain tolerance anyway. Even if it hurt a little bit, I was not going to show it and his rep as a tuff guy would be shattered. With any luck, he'd stop picking on kids.

He hauled back, punched me in the gut - and one of the chaperones turned around just at that minute. Of course, to the adults, it looked like unprovoked aggression. They ignored the fact that I laughed at the punch (I really didn't feel it) and they sent him home.

That was my first memorable experience with Chris Balcezak.

While we lived in Austin, we went to St. Theresa's Catholic Church. This would have been the mid to late 70s - the church was opened in 1968, the same year that I and most of my friends were born.

I remember the long drives from our house through my beloved Texas hill country to get to church. Up and down the hills, trees and grass all shades of vibrant greens - bits of granite and limestone jutting out from the earth like the bones or teeth of some tremendous creature. The church was tucked in at the top of a hill, nestled into the trees. It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever been and I loved it. CCD (kind of like Sunday school for Catholic kids) was sometimes held in small classrooms, but was sometimes held outdoors - and I admit on those days I was far more entranced with the splendour of the world around me than I was the intricacies of catechism.

I remember the day at CCD when we were doing some stupid exercise outside and we were supposed to freeze when the teacher said some special freeze phrase or another. We did, but shortly thereafter Chris started wiggling and finally stood up. The teacher yelled at him - he was always in trouble for something - until he got her to realize that he'd laid down in a fire ant mound. If you know anything about fire ants, you know that to say this was "unpleasant" is a distinct understatement - those suckers HURT.

Being bratty children and tired of being bullied by Chris, one of us (probably me, to be honest) began giggling and pointing out that Chris had ants in his pants. This is the height of childhood chuckles, you know. Ants in the pants. I mean, it damages the rep of the neighborhood quasi-bully and it rhymes and it's something adults used to tell us when we couldn't be still. And Chris couldn't be still with all those fire ants biting him all over. Poor guy was in tears before he was rushed off to have the ants hosed off of him.

And, of course, we were all in trouble for not being empathetic to Chris' pain. Actually, I think our teacher was rather horrified by our callousness, but the truth of the matter was I don't think any of us truly understood the level of pain that Chris was in.

My last memory of this boy who lived around the corner from me for five years was when we finally, finally got a bus to come pick us up for school. Balcones Woods was some five or ten miles from Pillow Elementary school and our parents were tired of driving us - they wanted the school to provide a bus. Naturally, my bus stop was shared with Chris - and that was the impetus for my often leaving the house early and traveling up the neighborhood to other bus stops closer to the entrance of our subdivision. Our vice principal sometimes rode the buses in the afternoon - partly to mix more with the students, and partly to help keep the drivers keep better control over all of us young hooligans.

The first time he rode our bus, he sat next to Chris, which made all of us laugh (and sigh with relief). Chris was well-known for singing all of the mangled song lyrics like the schoolyard version of "On Top of Old Smokey." Sure enough, one of the kids from the back, called out for Chris to start us on that song. Red faced, staring at the floor and trying not to look at the vice principal, Chris stammered a refusal. To our surprise, however, the old fogey adult vice principal got the song started for us.

I remember looking back in shock - along with all of the rest of the bus - and seeing the stunned gratitude on Chris' face.

It hadn't occurred to me until then that Chris was something of a pariah at our school. To be sure, with his penchant for mercilessly teasing the rest of us and for beating the crap out of smaller kids, there was good reason most of us ignored him. But it didn't occur to me until that moment that Chris might be lonely as well.

For me, all through my life, Chris was a legend - the only neighborhood bully I really knew at all whilst growing up. He was not the quintessential evil bully. I don't recall him beating the utter shit out of any kid. I don't recall him doing any real damage - he was just a bit of a bully. He liked to get his way and he didn't really want to deal with anything else. He liked attention and he didn't mind too much how he got it. To this day, I can't think of my childhood in Austin without thinking of Chris.

So getting this search term hit on my blog was somewhat stunning. Surely this was not the same kid that I knew. I ran the search myself, only to find this snippet of text next to a Google search hit:

Dr. Christopher Balcezak, 34, died from an overdose of Amitriptyline.

That was from 2004. The right age. Still, surely this was another Christopher Balcezak. I clicked through.

Raised in Austin, Texas, Balcezak received his undergraduate degree at Notre Dame, then attended medical school at the University of Texas at Houston, where he graduated in 1995.

It all fits. Raised in Austin, went to a Catholic university ... this article was about the boy I once knew back in the 70s.

He disappeared on the way to making his rounds and was found two days later, in his pickup, in a grove of trees. Later, the coroner released that Chris had purchased a large quantity of Amitriptyline under assumed names all across town. He apparently drove his truck through a corn field and into the grove of trees where he downed a large quantity of the drug with a bottle of Boulevard beer. A Physician's Desk Reference with a place marker at the entry for Amitriptyline was found in the truck - along with a framed photo of his three children, aged 6, 3 and 1.

It's beyond strange, really, to realize that someone you knew some 30 years ago is now dead. It's jarring to realize that I don't know his story ... that I will never know why he chose to end his life just a few years into his participation in a good medical practice - when it looked like his life was just coming together. It was strange to read these articles and tease out bits of his life after I moved away.

Article 1
Article 2
Article 3
Article 4

It's beyond bizarre to realize that Chris did his undergrad at Notre Dame - and I did my grad work there some four years or so after he'd left the place.

While I remember bits of trouble that Chris started or was involved in, while I called his pre-fourth grade self something of a bully - he was not, to my recollection, a bad kid. He was more the "classical" rough-n-tumble kid. He smarted off without thinking - he reacted to most of us by lashing out, but not utterly beating the crap out of anyone. A punch maybe. Two punches perhaps, but for the most part, he was all bluster and bellowing and not the truly violent type.

I've often wondered through the years where Chris wound up.

Thanks to someone hitting my blog via that search term, I now know a small slice of his story. Makes me wish I knew more - it makes me sad.

His oldest is now about the age I was when I moved away from Austin. And his youngest is about the age Chris and I were when we first met.

If I close my eyes or if I stare off into the distance and let my eyes unfocus, I can see past Keith's house and across the side street to the corner where we used to wait for the bus. If I concentrate, I can see Chris standing at the corner, waiting.

I have to wonder why he picked that grove of trees ... I wonder ... I wonder if it reminded him of Balcones Woods ... of a simpler time ... I wonder if he loved those woods as much as I did, if it reminded him of home.

Requiescat in pace.

Posted by Red Monkey at 1:12 AM | Comments (2) | Struggles | Stumble

April 29, 2008

The Dark Side of Belief

Those of you who have read this blog for very long will not be surprised that the news story which has captured my full attention over the last few days is taking place in Austria right now.

A father, Josef, tricked his 18 year old daughter back in 1984, to enter the cellar, where he drugged her, handcuffed her and then confined her in the cellar. He forced his daughter, Elisabeth, to write a letter to her parents stating that she had run away and that they should not look for her. Somewhere between 1988 and 1989, Elisabeth gives birth to a daughter. Then, a son. Nearly 10 years after Elisabeth's "disappearance," she purportedly leaves an infant on the doorstep of her parents' home, with a note stating that she cannot care for the child. This happens again the following year.

The tally so far, a daughter and a son who live in the cellar with Elisabeth. Then 2 infants left on the doorstep for her parents to raise. Four children fathered by her own father. Two she was allowed to keep; two taken from her. All this in the first 10 years of her incarceration.

In 1996, she gives birth to twins, one of whom dies shortly thereafter and her father places the infant in the building's incinerator. The next year, she gives birth to another child who also is left on the parents' doorstep. Then, in 2003, she gives birth to a final son. (source)

Elisabeth and the three children who stayed with her lived in a tiny cellar, which was constantly enlarged over the 24 years that Elisabeth was condemned to the prison. There was a little kitchen, a little bedroom, a little bathroom ... and apparently, a small storeroom as well.

What finally gave Josef away and revealed the four people living in the cellar dungeon? The oldest child became deadly ill and he took her to hospital, claiming she'd collapsed in front of his building. A call went out for the girl's mother ... and eventually it all came to light, quite literally.

When we are confronted with an example of pure malice and evil, our first reaction is generally one of denial and disbelief. Even as we marvel at the evidence in front of us and know intellectually that the buildings at Auschwitz were used in the ways that they were used ... a portion of our mind finds the concept of such cruelty too large to hold and the first words uttered are generally, "no, this can't be."

I spoke last month of Merrily Melson who was faced with a similar situation on a personal level. A partner whom she trusted suddenly began attacking her with an ax. Think about this for a moment. Think about your partner suddenly hefting an ax and come running toward you. What would your first thought be? Would it be "Hey, you're not Jack Nicholson, put that damn ax down before you hurt yourself?" Would the time it took to realize this was NOT a joke mean the first stroke was fatal?

How do you cope with finding out that you are NOT safe?

Merrily Melson was lucky. She reacted to the situation quickly enough to escape with her life and that, trust me, is no small feat. When you are confronted with such an extreme act, your ability to think is essentially cut off. Your brain cooks up a batch of chemicals which rather locks the reasoning areas down and strips you to reflexes. So it's no surprise that in the heat of being attacked by her partner wielding an ax in some bizarre scenario, that it didn't immediately occur to her to grab her son (who was not being threatened at the time). This is an immediate fight or flight response. Had Melson's partner begun threatening their boy in front of her, her instincts would have been to snag him and run.

But without seeing that immediate threat ... we are programmed more toward denial than thought at such a time.

It is the same with child abuse and particularly true of abuse in its most extreme forms. As humans, we accept, intellectually, that some sick people force themselves on children or beat their children or neglect them.

But unless confronted with some concrete evidence or very compelling circumstantial evidence (behavioural clues from the child, perhaps) - we do not believe that it will happen to anyone we know ... to the person next door. To us. It happens to other people. Not people we know and care about. Other people.

It's one of the fictions we live with daily in order to not worry 24/7. Just as we trust that the walls of our homes will not be breached, that our health will not suddenly disappear, that the people we love will care for us. We trust that helicopters will not fall from the sky, that big brother is listening to someone else's phone conversations, that our bosses do not read our blogs.

We trust, essentially, that those around us are worthy of our trust because the world is far too big and dangerous if we have to go it completely alone.

But this trust also means that many people try to say that these cases of extreme abuse don't really happen. Or that they don't happen in the U.S. - and it makes me want to scream. We have an example in Austria where it really shows just how easy this can be. Is it common for abuse to happen at this type of level? No, I don't believe it is common. But I am convinced that it happens more often than we want to think.

What confuses people, I think, is the plethora of wild abuse stories told in the '80s. We had the Atlanta abductions in the news, then there were reports of mass abuse happening in day care centres, and people claiming multi-offender, satanic abuse rings were popping up all over the nation.

If you read very carefully the 1992 FBI report by Kenneth V. Lanning (read the report here), Lanning is pretty thorough and logical with his analysis of the phenomenon. He begins with the history of how the U.S. has handled everything from "stranger danger" to the claims of the 80s. By the fifth part of the report, entitled "MULTlDlMENSlONAL CHILD SEX RINGS," he gets to the core of what I believe has confused the American public.

Lanning, in 1992, had found no evidence supporting a large, multi-offender, multi-victim, multi-murder cult. Look at all the words there. Large. Multi-offender. Multi-victim. Multi-murder.

He states quite clearly that smaller groups are possible and it's possible that smaller groups could even evade the law, particularly (this is a bit more my interpretation, but I think his text indicates he might agree with this) particularly when the victim is a young child, under the six at the onset of the abuse.

An important quote from the report:

Most people would agree that just because a victim tells you one detail that turns out to be true, this does not mean that every detail is true. But many people seem to believe that if you can disprove one part of a victim's story, then the entire story is false. As previously stated, one of my main concerns in these cases is that people are getting away with sexually abusing children or committing other crimes because we cannot prove that they are members of organized cults that murder and eat people.

I think most people in the '80s looked at the extreme allegations made, read the FBI report and came to a sort of conclusion of denial - "he said these things don't happen," when, in fact, the most important part of his report is that the stories of murder and cannibalism and satanic ritual may be exaggerated stories used to conceal very real abuse or crimes.

What he said was, these things don't happen with large groups of offenders and victims.

We have evidence that they do happen on a much smaller scale.

Who would have thought that a father of seven children would kidnap one of his children, imprison her, father seven children on her and then raise three of them himself and imprison three of them (and burning the body of the infant who died)? How did he choose which of the children to raise and which to consign to life in the dungeon? Why did he choose to bring any of them out? Was it simple overcrowding?

The case in Austria simply brings to light all of the questions I have about how humanity treats humanity ... and how tenaciously we cling to the idea that the world is a safe place even as we mouth the words about how unsafe it is.

The dark side of our belief and our hope that such things do not happen ... is that those who perpetrate such things get away with their crimes.

It was unfathomable that any government would kill some six MILLION members of a single group of people and for that to be just one segment of the deaths. Intellectually, we seem to recognize this possibility now - but even as we do, there's a rising number of vocal people who believe that the Holocaust did not happen. Whether that is simple political expediency or not, I think it also demonstrates just how deeply our denial goes.

We do not wish to believe such evil occurs.

The dark side of our belief that evil does not happen is to allow that evil to continue happening.

How do we keep these things from happening? The short answer is that we cannot. Josef and his family were insular. But even if they had been outgoing people, the cellar dungeon would likely not have been detected. Josef was quite good at concealing it and concealing sound. And, not every shy person or introvert is hiding some deep, evil secret.

With the facts we have about Josef's case, I'm not sure that he made many mistakes ... that he gave much reason for investigation. It all sounds so plausible once the daughter was first tricked into her incarceration.

But what about another case where people in the neighborhood knew that dead animals were nailed to the fence and they were pretty sure from which house this was happening? Why did they choose to look the other way? Isn't this a neon sign that bad things are happening?

Or were they just grateful that strays and vermin were gone from their neighborhood? Did the dark side of their belief in humanity convince them to be grateful that's all it was? that what they saw was the worst of it?

How do we balance the need to believe we are safe ... with the evidence that we are not?

Why do we choose to believe some stories ... and not others?

Why do we often choose to believe in grand, large conspiracies ... and ignore the smaller contrivances around us?

Why do we hear so often "I knew how I was treated ... but I never thought 'Pat' would hurt the children"?

Our belief can be a very power and positive agent in our lives ... but it also has a darker side which can cause us to completely deny actions we should take or allegations we should investigate.

We cannot live in a constant state of suspicion ... but there are times when we need to take out the cloth of our beliefs and shake it, examine it carefully and analytically before once again cloaking ourselves in it.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:55 AM | Comments (2) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

April 24, 2008

Why Is It Always Texas??

Recently, I've run across a fair number of people online who seem quite adamant that the disaster at the Koresh compound in Waco was somehow an unfair persecution of a religious sect. Of course, this conspiracy nonsense has been much fueled by the current issues with the break-off sect of the Church of the Latter Day Saints who have built a community for themselves in Texas.

Why, oh why does this crap only seem to happen in my home state??

(Okay, okay, so in Texas and California. Still. I do NOT want Texas equated with California!!) So let's look at some of the pertinent facts and laws which apply to one case or the other.

First, let's start with how works in Texas.

Upon receiving a report of possible abuse or neglect, CPS first goes to the home or school and must speak with the child and do a visual exam. The child will be removed by the case worker investigating only if one of four scenarios exist or there is sufficient reason to believe one of these four is true:

• immediate danger to physical health/safety
• the child has been sexually abused
• the custodial adult is using a controlled substance and that is causing an immediate danger
• the custodial adult allowed a child to remain on the site whilst meth was being cooked

Two, weapon laws at the time of the Koresh standoff with the ATF. Automatic weapons were considered illegal at the time of the Koresh standoff, including the following weaponry found at the compound:

• M-16 type rifles, modified for automatic use


• AK-47 type rifles, modified for automatic use


• Heckler & Koch SP-89, modified for automatic use


• M-11/Nine, modified for automatic use


• AR-15, modified for automatic use


• silencers


• live M-21 practice hand grenades

Three, current age of consent laws. The age of consent in Texas is 17. The legal age for marriage is 18. If under the age of 16, the law requires that the couple receives a court order before being allowed to marry. Marriage for ages 16 and 17 may occur with the written approval from a parent or legal guardian. (See the Texas Family Code 2.003 through 2.009)

Now, given these facts, I firmly maintain that there was sufficient cause to investigate the Branch Davidians. Accusations of child abuse had been made for years, but as is often the case, insufficient evidence was found. We know after the fact that while the Branch Davidians ran a legitimate arms business, they also had acquired illegal weaponry as well.

I do agree, as do most people, that the situation was botched and botched very, very badly. However, those people who think that the Davidians were a simple, innocent religious organization are simply wrong, if for no other reason than the illegal weaponry.

Those people who claim this was a violation of church and state are simply wrong. Churches still must comply with the laws of the land. They can work with their lawmakers to obtain exceptions and the like - as the Amish have done and done quite well - but there are some hard-and-fast rules. Physical safety of the members is one such rule, particularly in regards to children. Another is that gun laws must be obeyed.

(Side note - and it absolutely boggles my mind that any truly Christian organization would run an arms business and stockpile that inventory at the church. To me that goes against everything Christianity is - but, that's just my personal opinion.)

In the current example of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints with their ranch in Texas, a similar set of circumstances has arisen which is drawing criticism from people who believe the group is being persecuted.

In this particular case, there is a documented history of statutory rape and illegal marriage. Their leader is in prison as an accomplice to rape after he forced a girl under legal age to marry her cousin. One of the group's tenets is that a man must marry at least three women in order to get to heaven. We can make all the lame jokes about how being married to three women sounds more like hell, but that simply neglects the real issue: polygamy is illegal in the United States. Marriage to a relative is illegal in Texas. Marriage to someone under the age of 16 without court-granted permission is illegal in Texas. In addition, sex with someone under the age of 17 is illegal.

The state of Texas allowed the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to move into state because it was not illegal for them to do so. They changed a few laws (updating some antiquated marriage laws such as the marriage age). And they left the group alone to practice their religion.

Now, they have received a complaint that a 16 year old was sexually abused.

Whether that complaint is true or not, they must investigate it. Since they have not yet found the teen who made the complaint, they are left with an evaluation of the home life of the other children at the ranch as well as a deep concern for the originator of the call.

Let's look at this in a smaller scale. Two brothers are quite close. One forces his sister's child to marry another sister's brother-in-law. This brother is taken to jail for abetting the rape of a child. The other brother, who believes the same as the jailed one, continues on about his life. One of his five children call CPS and claims abuse. When CPS gets there, that child is missing.

This constitutes a reasonable concern for the safety of the other children and, in my opinion, necessitates their removal from the home until the situation can be better assessed.

Drastic? Yes. Traumatic? Most likely.

I see the same situation with the Yearning for Zion ranch.

This is not a "human rights violation," as I have seen some argue. Their right to practice their faith is no more being curtailed than any other faith. As a nation, we also don't allow practitioners of certain forms of Santeria to commit human sacrifice. Nor do we let the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints commit child abuse.

There are simply times when we have to step in and say, "We are not flexible about this law. You must obey it."

To call this persecution by the government is laughable.

Does it remind us of the failures at Waco? Of course it does. However, this has been handled in a different manner.

There is reasonable cause to think that laws have been broken. Investigation must occur.

Now, if we find out that the call from the 16 year old was in some way faked, we have a different kettle of fish. And the DNA testing? The assertation that this is to discover which child belongs to which adults seems reasonable to me given the Texas legal code. Legally they will need to place the children back with their biological parents when the investigation is over and since many of the adults aren't sure who is who's parent, they need the DNA tests. The Texas code is not set up for group families - they're set up for "traditional" families (meaning biological parents or legally adopted children). I suspect they also want some verification about incest and inbreeding, but that's just my suspicion and is probably only secondary to their legal directive to return the children to the biological parents after the investigation is concluded.

At the end of the day, there is no more persecution going on here than the Catholic Church was persecuted during all of the allegations of sexual abuse.

When the law is being broken ... it's not persecution, it's prosecution.

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:44 AM | Comments (4) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

April 18, 2008

Balance and Loss

It is one of those days when nothing can go right, which is certainly not what I expected after my centering and balancing hike yesterday. Generally speaking, one hike out at a place like Potato Creek can ground me for weeks.

Growing up in Texas, you'd think that I was an outdoor kid. The reality isn't quite like that. My mother was very scared of anything involving the outdoors - animals, insects, reptiles, dirt ... and we generally lived in the 'burbs, not out on a ranch. There was a tension between us most of my childhood, because I did want to be the rancher kid (or thought I did) and Mom thought staying in the house was the safest course of action.

When we lived in Austin, I was at my most free. Our house was on the edge of Balcones Woods and a large quarry. If we went out the front door? We were in the 'burbs. If we went out the backdoor? We were in the woods.

Despite my mother's best efforts to instill fear of all the dangerous outside things - I learned to love nature whilst we lived in Austin, more than any other place I ever lived. I welcomed thunderstorms (even when they made me nervous) - I loved to watch as the winds whipped the leaves around on the trees turning the deep greens into something nearly white. I loved the drive into town when we passed through areas where the road had been dynamited out of granite. I adored looking at the layers and layers in the rock, the plants trying to cling to the sides. My favourite places and times were when we went out to "Bear Creek" park. (I've since tried to find that park but apparently my recollection of the name is not correct.) The mix of woods and creek and old-fashioned "swimmin' hole" simply called to me and relaxed me in a way nothing else could.

I suppose, for me, it was the relief of not having to pay attention to tone of voice or body language - or whether dad's eyes were bloodshot yet or not. I remained aware of my surroundings - there were still rattlers and cottonmouths and even loose rocks whilst climbing - plenty of stuff to cause damage. But I seemed to have an instinctual grasp of my surroundings when I was outside and it relaxed me in a way that being around people never did. The wind through the leaves and branches and underbrush ... the crickets ... the frogs ... the cicada song ... the water burbling through the narrow, shallow creek, gradually deepening and quieting as it got deeper and wider ....

The tensions would just fade away and I could feel my core self, my true self, come to the forefront and simply be. It was easy to shed the outer self which had to deal with all of the demands made on a small child throughout the day - that kid who tried to do everything exactly perfect for every adult.

Today, every time I feel overly stressed ... when life is simply getting to me and I find it more and more difficult to find balance on my own ... I retreat, preferably to a place which includes both woods and water - and is out of sight of the "modern world." When I worked at Notre Dame, I would simply go to one of the small lakes on the north end of campus and walk the circular path, eventually coming to a resting spot just barely south of the "beach." No matter how crazy things got, this always centered me.

After I left ND, that spot was no longer very relaxing for me and I had to find a new spot and Potato Creek State Park, with the long, meandering trails along Lake Worster was just the thing.

So after a few weeks of not getting any job interviews for any of my queries, and seeing very few (very very very few) jobs for which I'm qualified appear on any of the dozen or so job boards I haunt ... I needed a time to center.

The walk did me a world of good. It was good exercise and I could feel all the tension and worry beginning to melt away as I listened to the sounds of world around me. I "hunted" the frogs, hoping for a good photo op. I sat down on a boulder and watched one of the feeder creeks meandering along under a bridge. I had to marvel at the little bird who seemed as curious about me as I was of him ... hopping along in the underbrush, one eye cocked at me, and keeping pace with me. There was the swan who just knew I was taking pictures and he kept trying to pose so I'd snap - and then he'd move to try to keep me from getting the "classic" swan photo.

The crunch of the gravel is one thing that has mostly annoyed me about the park, but there were patches of hay and grass as well.

The wind, the water, the birds, frogs ... it all helped relax and center me.

And then this morning, after my other half left for work, I did nothing but dream about realistic catastrophe after realistic catastrophe.

It began with dreaming that our chimney - which has some issues up at its top where some critters have ripped at the masonry - I dreamed that the chimney finally fell to the ground, wreaking all sorts of havoc with the house in general. Chances are, this is whilst I was dozing in the living room - near the fireplace - and about the time of the earthquake which shook much of the midwest this morning.

The rest of my ill-fated "nap" this morning (from about 5 a.m. until about 8 - my other half leaves for work at 4:30 a.m.), was horrific. I have several types of bad dreams - semi-realistic ones in which things seem real even upon awakening, but which follow "dream-logic." These dreams usually involve real people and situations, but not necessarily people who look like what they actually look like and the places are generally different in some way. Other nightmares involve things from my childhood.

But the nightmares this morning were the worst of the lot. They were the kind that could be real. The people look and act exactly as they do in real life. The places look exactly as they do in real life. And, the scenarios are all too real fears rather than exaggerations or metaphors.

I won't bore you with a list of what those dreams were, only that they destroyed all of the balance I had so carefully nurtured yesterday. And I'm left with just one thought: I need a job. Badly. I'm a hard worker; I do what is asked of me and I ask for more. I'm detail-oriented and focused. I have no ego when it comes to work - I'm not the boss or creative director ... I'm a very happy worker, producing my product whether it's graphics (my favourite) or copy ... or reports or whatever is required of me.

I just beg ... do not make me go back to retail work. Not only is the pay abysmal, it is without a doubt not within my realm of talents - so much so to the point where working retail is honestly more depressing than not working at all. At least now I can freelance.

Something has to give soon.

It just has to.

Posted by Red Monkey at 4:28 PM | Comments (3) | Struggles | Vacations and Photos | Stumble

April 13, 2008

Gender: M / F / ? (part 2)

Continuing from Thursday's discussion about the differences between biological sex and cultural gender-roles:
So it does seem that throughout our human history, there have been quite a fair number of individuals who did not fit into the cultural gender role specified by their biological sex. I am not discussing sexual orientation, which to me, is a separate (although related) issue.

What strikes me about all of this is an issue which has always irritated me and is demonstrated most aptly by a modern example: the About Me box prevalent on every website with any real level of personalization. You can see the problem if you surf through Blogger blogs, MySpace, Friendster or the like. Some people have short, pithy About Me boxes - either their world is easily classified and categorized, or they've given up in frustration. Other people have About Me boxes which trail from the top of the page, down below the fold and then some, a long, skinny tail attempting to balance everything that person is.

The reality of humanity is that we are rarely easily categorized. People are so very much more than their religion, their race, their nationality, their ethnicity, their profession, their marital status ... and more than their sex or their gender.

So, what is it to be male or female in terms of expected gender roles? Well, obviously this changes from culture to culture.

My first-year college students, some 5-8 years ago, had to read a seminal article discussing how gender expectations led to male and female students learning and behaving differently in the classroom. When it came time to discuss the essay in class, the students immediately let me know exactly what they thought about the article: it was hopelessly out of date.

It was one of those moments in teaching that you can't plan, but when they happen, you wish you'd had a video camera to record the whole thing.

The students began by all agreeing that such preferential treatment of boys over girls simply didn't happen any more. It very quickly morphed into "boys and girls are better in different areas because boys and girls are interested in different things."

Girls don't like math.
Boys don't like reading.

As the students made these generalizations, I could see some of them starting to squirm in their seats. However, as first-year students, not all of them were willing to "take on" the entire class and it seemed like everyone else was agreeing.

And then one of the male students said, "Well, you can tell boys and girls are different just by what they play with when they're little. I mean, girls don't like to play with cars or get dirty or climb trees."

Before he could go on, there were a couple of mini-explosions across the room.

We spent the rest of the class having a great discussion on gender-roles and how those often differ from the reality of individual personalities. With a class that included several female engineering students, several international students and a couple of males in "non-traditional" fields, there was a lot of sharing of stories. My students left the class that day, still discussing the issues - a happy and semi-rare day for a required first-year course.

I think many people in the western world have come to the conclusion that it is not necessarily a trait of males to want to have a career. It's not necessarily a trait of women to want to stay home with the kids.

So, while some traits might be more prevalent in men or in women, they all seem to have not just exceptions (which implies they are not common) but that these traits might be tendencies, whether hard-wired or learned.

So what does hard-wire the male and female brain to be different?

Some research indicates that men use more grey matter, leading to a tendency toward more information processing; women tend to use more white matter, leading to more connections between various processing centers.

So, those people who say men and women think differently are right - in general. The problem is that there are always biological exceptions which muddy the waters.

For myself, I cringe when any survey asks me: M or F. I am not that easily categorized. They are not usually asking for my biological sex as that rarely matters in a survey. They are often asking for gender and I don't think that the majority of people in the western world truly fit into the expected gender norms. I know too many men who are "too sensitive" and too many women who enjoy the outdoors "too much." And if a researcher is simply quantifying us by M & F we're going to get pink Hello Kitty compound bows sized for a woman - which might make some of my friends happy (you know who you are!!), but which would just piss me off to no end.

Ultimately, what makes us what we think of as male or female is more complicated than our biological bits and there's a lot more overlap in both directions than M or F would indicate on a survey. As a species, we are programmed to look for patterns and to put everything into hierarchies. The problem is, most of our methods of classification are too simplistic to truly encapsulize who we are. There is no better example of this phenomenon than Thomas Beatie - someone born female, but felt like a man. So, he had his breasts removed, began the testosterone therapy ... but stopped short of a "full" sex change, citing that one day he might want to bear a child.

Is Thomas a man or a woman? Biologically, the answer is fairly simple as we sex people by their genitalia. However, if we were able to look at all of Thomas's systems, would we find all the hallmarks of female, or would we find female knees and reproductive organs, but a male brain?

Is the woman who is outside more than inside, who hunts deer and delights in dune buggies more male or more female?

And ultimately, does it really even matter? Aren't we simply ourselves?

Why should the exterior trappings of male and female dress or appearance matter to anyone short of potential mates? Why do we care?

In online communities, I try to not say if I'm male or female because I feel the question is far more complicated than the simple biological answer. I catch flak for it and I don't particularly care. If there's a shoutbox or live chat feature to the community, I generally find myself the center of a controversy - is "ender" male or female. People get angry when I won't answer the question. Eventually, I pose one question to them: "If I'm not looking to date you, why do you care? I am still the same person I was before the debate started here. Why does it really matter?"

So far, no one has been able to answer that question ... and they have all (so far) decided that it doesn't matter after all. They're still curious, of course, but we are an intensely curious species - and that's a good thing.

[Some further reading:
from the BBC
from

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:10 PM | Comments (1) | Blog | Struggles | Stumble

April 9, 2008

Still Breathing

I was, apparently, a good baby. (I know, what happened, right?) As the first-born, of course, my parents had no real idea what they were getting themselves into, and like all new parents, they thought I probably cried too much. I was put on the very healthy soy formula, since that was the thing at the time. Apparently I was congested so much of the time as an infant, my mother was just certain that I would be claimed by SIDS. Part of that fear was "just" the paranoia of a new mom, part of it was my congestion. But it wasn't long before I settled into a fairly quiet routine. I'd play in my crib, gurgling and goofy in the morning until Mom was ready to get up - a note in my baby book says that it was a great way for Mom to wake up in the morning, greeted by baby's smile.

Despite my determination to play no matter how I felt, by the time I was three, it was obvious that something wasn't right. After a myriad of tests you don't want to give to a three year old in 1971, I was diagnosed with both allergies and asthma.

A partial list of allergies:
Foods: soy, tomatoes, green beans, peanuts, peas, broccoli, most every green vegetable and I believe every legume -- luckily I do not get the anaphylactic shock reaction, so I can tolerate some amount of these things
Outside: grass of multiple varieties, ragweed, pine trees, cedar trees, cottonwood trees, most flowers - pretty much everything that grows outside, I think
Animals: cats and dogs and bird feathers
Inside/Misc.: mold, mildew, dust mites, cockroaches, ampicillin

The asthma could be triggered by humidity, cold, smoke, and "excessive" activity. Yeah. What's excessive activity to a three year old?

The doctor told my mom the bad news: she needed to keep not just a clean house, but an ultra-clean house. My parents needed to stop smoking. And they'd have to watch me carefully outside. And, of course, I'd have to start getting allergy shots.

I started allergy shots.
Mom covered my box springs in a plastic allergy bag. And my mattress. I think we tried the pillows, but I couldn't sleep for the noise it made.
Mom gathered every single stuffed animal and doll that I owned, put them in bags and into the car. I thought Mom and I and my toys were going for a car ride - we did - straight to the Salvation Army. Stuffed animals and dolls were dust catchers. (Try explaining this to a heart-broken, screaming three year old. Doesn't work very well. Obviously, as I'm still whining about it.)
Mom began a cleaning regime which developed into a full-fledged OCD drama. Vacuum on Mondays and Fridays. All clothes, including the bedding, washed on Thursdays. I don't recall a specific day for the dusting, but it was also done often.
Mom was nervous every time I went outside, exhorting me to not run (didn't work).

Out of those two lists, what didn't get done?

I know it was the early 70s. Everyone smoked. Including my parents.

I can recall going clothes shopping (against my will) with Mom and everyone smoking in the mall. The clothing stores had ashtrays in the dressing rooms and I recall one time in particular when I was a bit older. Left alone in the dressing room while Mom went to hunt down another size (I was "saving" the dressing room so someone else couldn't take it), Mom left her lit cigarette in the little stall with me. Brave, I picked it up, surprised a bit at how warm it was, and I carefully stubbed it out, trying not to damage it, just to make it quit stinking up the place so bad. She came back, went for a drag, and was stunned to see that it had "gone out." She re-lit it, took a few puffs, tried on some stuff and again left me there while she went back out to find something else. This time I broke the cigarette and when Mom came back, I was really surprised, but she wasn't really mad. Just said she didn't realize it bothered me so much. That was the only time I ever held a lit cigarette.

So much of my childhood was structured around avoiding triggering my asthma and allergies - but the smoking was something that drove me crazy. I could feel the "dirt" in my lungs from it. The smell got up into my sinuses and drove me crazy. But it really started to get to me when other people assumed that I smoked simply because everything I owned smelled of it, and I smelled of it. The breaking point was the evening I went to babysit for a new client and the mother literally turned up her nose at me and said, "You smoke." I replied that I did not smoke and never had. She sighed dramatically and pointed to a remote location of the backyard. "Smoke over there, where the children can't see you. They are not allowed to see people smoking."

It didn't matter how I protested, I was a teenager, I smelled of smoke, and she was a judgmental woman. Of course, by then, the mid 80s, smoking was becoming a habit to restrict and to drop. I began a "quit smoking" campaign with my mother, but it wasn't until she decided to rejoin the workforce and was afraid that being a smoker was one strike against her too many, that she decided to quit smoking. And she did it, first time, with the help of the nicotine gum.

I know that in the early 70s, it was not easy to quit smoking. Hell, I realize that for most people, it's not easy to quit now, even with Zyban, the patch, the gum and all the rest of the quit smoking aids.

But it was truly one of the great frustrations of my childhood to know that I was expected to not run track, not join a swim team, have all of my stuffed animals given away in front of me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera - and still have my parents smoke in the house, the car - constantly.

It was a constant mixed message. We care so much about you we wrapped your bed in plastic and we restrict what you can do - just so you stay healthy. On the other hand, my food allergies were completely ignored and the most frequent household chores I had (besides doing dishes) was to dust and vacuum. Even though particularly dusting the house was prone to give me a terrible sneezing fit, clog my sinuses and irritate my eyes.

You have asthma, you can't run track. Go dust the house.
You have asthma, you don't need to be building a clubhouse. Go weed the front yard.
We want you to be healthy, as they blew smoke in my face.

Don't mistake me. I'm actually not trying to vilify them for this. I'm trying to understand it.

Mom once told me that when the doctor told her that she and my father needed to quit smoking, she knew that Dad never would. She made the decision at that time to do everything else possible. I told her, but the smoke wouldn't have been as bad if it had just been Dad. He was only home evenings and was outside most of the weekend during the warm months. Her unspoken answer was plain on her face: if he wouldn't give it up, it was unfair to ask her to give it up.

And to a certain extent, I get that. I can imagine how difficult the craving would be with no patch or gum, the moment Dad walked in the door with a lit cigarette. I have no doubt it would be maddening, and I am pretty certain that Mom simply didn't have the willpower at that time in her life to quit smoking under those conditions. I do get that.

But it doesn't really touch the double standard of how my allergies were handled.

Anything that impacted my parents in a serious way was ignored. Mom literally forgot that I had food allergies until I was digging through some paperwork one day and found the results of one of my old allergy tests. I was stunned at how many of the foods I really, really seriously hated were on that list. I tried to point this out to my mom, to point out how unfair it was that we bent over backwards to avoid using cow's milk because my sister was lactose intolerant - and yet I was told to eat food I was allergic to almost every day.

It was a few weeks after finding that paperwork, that I began to have a recurring dream, one that I would have until a few months after I moved out of my parents' house. In the dream, I was at my pediatrician's office (instead of my "grown-up" doctor) and he was listening to my lungs and tsk-ing. I just knew I was in trouble. I'd done something wrong, but I couldn't figure out what.

"She's got to stop breathing," the doctor told my mother. "It's going to kill her." Mom stood across the examining room and looked disapprovingly at me - as if I should have known better. As if she'd been telling me for years that breathing was bad for me and now I was making her waste precious time and money by having to go to the doctor - only to have him tell me to quit doing this.

In the dream, I am too shocked to say a word. How can breathing be killing me? Not breathing is what kills; not continuing to breathe! But they are both looking at me so seriously, so gravely.

The dream cuts to a return visit to the doctor. This time I'm attempting to hold my breath as the doctor examines me. To breathe on the sly, taking stolen tokes of oxygen. It's to no avail. He sighs, shakes his head and again ignores me to look at my mother. "She's been breathing again."

It's a pretty simple dream, really. Obviously by the time I was a teenager, I believed I was being held to impossible standards that other people were not held to. Some twenty years later, I can see that feeling was pretty accurate. I was expected to do everything exactly right, no matter how much that inconvenienced me, whereas my parents were very much allowed to take any shortcut they chose.

Of course, a portion of that is simply the difference between being an adult and being a teenager, but I can also see where my parents were simply not ready to take responsibility for their actions - to think through how what they did affected their children.

I see on a variety of blogs over at Cre8Buzz how different parents today are thinking through what they do and how it affects their kids. Of course, these parents are my age or younger. They've learned from their own mistakes and the mistakes their parents made. I've seen some amazing parents say, "Eh, ya know what? I'm spending too much time online. I'm going to take charge of my life and ration the time I allow myself to be online. I need to go play with my kids more." I've seen them discuss quitting bad habits, talking to their kids about serious issues, pulling their kids out of crappy schools and agonizing over whether to home school or take on an additional job to pay for private school.

I find that introspection and self-examination and honesty a breath of much-needed fresh air.

Ultimately, what many of these bloggers don't realize is that not only are they in conversation with other parents when they share a story about parenting or their kid. (Because by no means are all of these people "mommy bloggers" or "daddy bloggers" - many of them are "regular bloggers" who happen to include their family life in addition to everything else they write about.) They are also, in an odd way, helping those of us who did not have great parents or a great childhood to gain some perspective and attain some healing. Reading one parent say how they tackled a problem with their kid can lead to me thinking through how my parents handled a similar situation - and in spending time analyzing that it becomes easier to see what is a normal bump in the parenting road, and what was perhaps a freaking boulder from the sky.

I suppose, then, that this post is really a thank you to all the folks who brave the stigma of being branded a parent-blogger. You're not only helping out other parents with tips and techniques, you're not just making us laugh with you - you're also helping us to re-evaluate our own childhood and parents.

And that's a good thing.

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:46 PM | Comments (0) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

April 5, 2008

Focus On Your Own Damn Family

This is essentially a repost from January of '07, but one that I feel bears repeating, particularly in light of the people wailing and gnashing their teeth about Thomas Beatie's decision to bear a child.

I will admit that I am somewhat confused by a woman who undergoes much of the sex-reassignment procedures and becomes legally declared a man ... but does not wish to have the genitalia changed as well because "he had always wanted a child." That's not my understanding of transgender and sexual re-assignment, but I will admit that it's only my understanding of it. I'm not gonna dictate what Thomas can and can't do. It's up to him.

What I'm pissed off about, is how any time there is a non-traditional family brought into the media, people instantly begin wailing about "good old family values" and "these people are going to ruin their children's lives."

Give.
Me.
A.
Break.

I am sick to death of this utter CRAP about "traditional family values."

My father was raised by a mother and father. His dad worked hard. His mom stayed home with the kids.

My mother was raised by a mother and father. Her dad worked hard. Her mom stayed home with the kids. They went to church every week.

My parents were raised by people with "traditional family values." My parents had "traditional family values."

That did NOT make my parents good parents.

I did not turn out well because of my parents' traditional family values.

I turned out the way I did partly because I have always had an exceedingly strong sense of self. Because I stumbled upon books which nurtured me and encouraged me in believing that there was normalcy in the world. Because I had teachers who nurtured me even though they never did seem to realize just how much I needed that nor what was wrong.

What creates a well-balanced child ... and a well-balanced adult ... is not just a mother and a father. It is not what we erroneously call "traditional family values."

What creates a well-balanced child is love and attention and boundaries and knowing that all of this comes from someone who genuinely cares for you.

Is the ideal situation for a child a male and a female figure in their lives? Honestly, I don't know and I'm not sure that this is the best question to ask. The problem is that we simply do not live in an ideal world. We live in reality. And it's freaking messy and muddy and unclear down here in reality.

As for the idea that this Mom and Dad family is the Christian way to do things ... since in the U.S. and in the U.K. that seems to be the loudest voices of complaint ... let me set a few things straight.
First, it was not just Mom and Dad until perhaps the last 100 years (or less). Instead, it was most often either an extended family or something closer to a village or tribe. With multiple adults responsible for helping to love and discipline the children - not just one mother and father.
Second, Jesus was not born in the ideal situation. He was born to a mother and father, but he was not born in the rarified air of a good home. He was born, through no real fault of his parents, in the most real and common of places. In the mess and muck of a stable. Not the sanitized manger scene that we usually see.

Why bring up the manger? Because everything about Jesus in the Bible comes down to Jesus being very grounded in reality rather than intense numbers of rules.

To my mind, "family values" should simply mean that a child receives both love and discipline and knows that the person or people taking care of him care for him.

Ideally, children should probably know that they can trust all the adults around them ... that all the adults around them can administer trustworthy and valid and fair discipline.

But we don't live in that ideal world. And many of us prefer to discipline and raise our children according to our own ideas and our own beliefs.

So this old concept of "traditional family values" that is so carped on, is really something of a fallacy.

And, when we look at the reality that many children live in today: abandoned to orphanages, abused and taken from their family of birth, bounced from one foster home to another for a myriad of reasons. Children with "special needs" tend to be in a particularly grim situation. Their special needs mean they need more attention and understanding ... and often more discipline handled in a more thoughtfully fair way.

Is this the "family values" that people are carping about? Leaving these kids in the system?

If we can get children to an adult or adults who can handle the child ... who can give the child the love and discipline and let the child know how much they care about the kid ... isn't this preferable to keeping the kid in the system?

To my mind, this means no discrimination over the person's religion, their marital status, or ... if they're gay or not.

Those so-called "traditional family values" that people babble about ... what are they really?

Because to all appearances, my parents had those values. And I would not wish my childhood on anyone, much less a child. I said earlier that I would have been ecstatic to have lived in the worst inner city 'hood with a parent or parents who really loved me and cared for me. And I stand by that. I would rather have been raised by two fathers who loved me and took care of me. I would rather have lived with two moms who disciplined me and encouraged me in a rational manner.

I would have rather put up with the teasing and bullying at school for that ... than the utter isolation I went through.

And I think most children out there in orphanages, foster homes, and group homes would feel the same way.

Let's quit whining about what the absolute most ideal situation is ... let's live in the reality that these kids are living in. Get the kids adopted out to people who will care for them and not worry about if the family values of every family exactly and totally matches our own.

To borrow the words of those who seem to oppose gays adopting children the most, "please, let's think of the children."

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:19 PM | Comments (6) | Struggles | Stumble

March 28, 2008

Pop Pop Pop

It's is 2:22 a.m. early Friday morning. It's been a long week for me despite the fact that for some people, it was a short week following a 3 or 4 day weekend.

I couldn't go to sleep at first because I was kinda hyped up from choir practice. Then, there was the fire truck that crawled by with the sirens going full blast around 11. I finally started to get sleepy around 1.

When I heard gun shots.

I live in a nice neighborhood. But in South Bend, the neighborhoods go "bad" very quickly. A half dozen blocks in one direction and you're in gang territory, four blocks the other direction and you're in the area where Frank Lloyd Wright built some houses. (By which you can assume that the first set of houses are small and run-down and the second set of houses are huge, ritzy - places in which I can only dream of living.)

I used to live in a really bad part of town. It was good for a while, but by the time the crack dudes moved in across the street and the whorehouse opened shop behind us (less than 100 feet from an elementary school), things were not good. I heard sporadic gunfire when I lived there - though most of it was several blocks to the west of us. Probably at least 12 blocks, a mile. But on cold, winter nights, especially, the sound travels much further than you think it should.

I am one of those dumbasses who will go to the window when I hear things like this. I once reported a wreck when I lived in the 'hood - only to discover, as I watched with my face against the glass high up on my front door - that it was actually a drug deal gone wrong. I was still on the phone with the dispatcher when one man tried to run over the other one with his car. Only the timely appearance of a "random" dude on a bicycle kept me from witnessing a vehicular murder. When a police officer was shot and killed within a mile of my home and the entire police department put my neighborhood under a net, I had to be told to get back in the house.

Yeah. I'm one of those idiots.

Well, to be honest, I didn't leave the house. I opened my window and talked to the cop on the corner. But he was a bit annoyed with me even though we all knew we were on the edges of the net and not where the shooter was supposed to be.

So, around one this morning, I hear the pop pop pop of gunfire. I would have sworn it was twelve or more.

I go to the window and look out. Nothing unusual. I watch for a minute or more, trying to be unobtrusive in my surveillance. I go sit down at my computer. Surely I am exaggerating. I did not hear gunfire. This is a nice neighborhood. I am prone to getting alarmed.

Maybe someone's old shed broke up under the icy snow we received tonight. The pops keep coming. I wonder if a string of electric transformers are blowing up. But I've heard that sound many times in many neighborhoods - that sound is deeper, closer to the sound of a shotgun.

I can't help it. I know I heard gunfire. I certainly can't go to sleep now. Should I call the police? I've no idea where the sound came from other than north of my house and probably to the west. Blocks? a mile? I don't know. Sound travels funny at night in the cold.

By the time I've settled down enough to be tired and ready for bed again, it's about 2:30 a.m. My other half has to get up for work in an hour. If I lay down now, I'll probably turn off the alarms in my sleep and she'll miss work. Considering how anal her workplace is about even a tardy, this can't happen. So, I stay up, troll through the local paper online looking to see if it was my imagination or not.

It was NOT my imagination. There were at least four shootings in town overnight. The second was the one I heard.

a family told police they were asleep inside the home when they heard a car drive down the alley and six shots fired just after 1 a.m. Police sent to the scene found shell casings and bullet fragments in the home.

The next shooting happened about 20 minutes and perhaps 10-12 blocks away from the first. The final one happened just five minutes and perhaps a half dozen blocks from the previous one. These last three shootings were all drive-bys and supposedly only the first two are related.

It's a quiet neighborhood and I know the area to the north and west of us - where the shootings all occurred, get more and more rough. But three shootings within about a mile or two of the house is just ...

Especially after writing about Merrily Melson the other day.

It's nearly 6 a.m. now. Wonder if I'll get any sleep at all.

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:22 AM | Comments (3) | Struggles | Stumble

March 26, 2008

No Guarantees

I enjoy playing an online semi-role-playing game called: Kingdom of Loathing. The whole game is tongue-in-cheek, full of delightful puns, absolute silliness, purposeful misspellings or "typos" - and the characters are all extraordinarily well-rendered, beautifully done stick figures. The site is white with black text. The concepts are simple and while it's not like a MUD with real-time interaction with the other players (except, perhaps in chat, but I haven't ventured in there yet), it's a really fun little game. You get 40 "turns" or adventures for the day, but you can --

Wha?

Oh yeah. I wasn't going to talk about the game. Suffice it to say that I spend an hour or so with the game every day. I also spend time at the fan site The Kol Wiki as well for tips and hints when I get stuck. (Or to find out for sure what some game piece actually is.) I don't always hit the main page, but I did today.

And I was chilled.

One of the people who play the game and apparently someone well known in the KOL community was attacked by her partner March 15th. Apparently, the man snapped and went after this woman with an ax which was inside their home. She escaped, with ax wounds to the head and upper body, went to a neighbor's and called police. When the police arrived, they realized that the man had taken their nearly 3 year old son with him.

The boy was eventually found dead. Apparently killed with a screwdriver.

Article one
Article two

The folks at KOL are doing an in-game fund-raiser for the baby's memorial. I believe there is also a bank taking donations. [El Dorado Savings Bank - 800-874-9779]

I cannot fathom what possesses someone to pick up an ax and attack another person. I cannot imagine that moment of rage and loss of reason which makes running after your partner with an ax seem a viable choice.

I cannot fathom the extended dose of adrenaline and rage and loss of reason which can make a person grab his son and run off, only to take a screwdriver and end the life he helped begin.

I cannot imagine living with the knowledge that I had done such things.

I cannot pretend to know what Melson felt or thought after her partner of six years did this. Or how she feels knowing that her wounds were treated that day and she was released ... but her son's wounds were beyond repair. There is a biological directive for a mother to protect her children - and a similar one which tries to tell you that the father might be mad at you, but he'd never hurt their child. How do you protect yourself or your child, much less both, from someone with an ax?

How do you live with the questions, the hindsight, the second guessing yourself?

My heart goes out to Merrily Melson. There are no magical words to make this better.

I am left speechless by the events and wishing I could offer some kind of comfort.

We live our lives full of hope. Even when things are pretty dark and we think we are hopeless, we are still, biologically, pretty trusting. We trust that our apartment will not crumble and fall. We trust that the water in our pipes is potable. We trust that we can walk from the house to the car without a piece of satellite falling from the sky. We trust that a traffic helicopter will not lose control and come down on the highway. We trust that the cars driving by on the wet streets will not lose control, slam into a curb and punch their way into our home.

We trust that we are relatively safe.

It is a semi-true piece of semi-fiction we tell ourselves because the human body simply can not live in a constant state of fear. It can live in long periods ... but not constant. It is in hearing about tragedies like this one that the fiction is stripped from us for a moment and we are chilled to recall that there are no guarantees.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:35 AM | Comments (4) | Struggles | Stumble

February 15, 2008

No Recession Here

This seems to sum up the job market in South Bend, Indiana, right now:

General - Seeking a position as a Personal Assistant. If you need more hours in a day, I can help. I am 31 and Ivy- League educated.

Yeah, it's that depressed here.

Jobs which ARE here: medical professionals ... holy crap, but all of the want ad boards are full of requests for nurses and doctors and specialists. Apparently we're a bunch of sick fooks around here. Also needed: CNC operators and truck drivers and sales people.

Don't get me wrong, those are all needed fields. I'm just not qualified in any of those. Nor do I have any real interest in them. Except maybe CNC operator... that one actually sounds really interesting. But I don't have the slightest clue how to use that machinery, so ....

Here's a snapshot of just South Bend. On February 15, 2008, that includes "274 South Bend jobs in 211 job titles." Of those 211 job titles, 127 are specifically for medical professionals. Not the shining outlook of jobs it looked like at first glance. Another 11 are for commercial drivers. So, now we're down to 75 job titles. Several of the remaining positions result in a "We're sorry. The position you're looking for is no longer being advertised" error. Most of the remaining positions are in sales or engineering or "WE NEED A GOOGLE CLICKER" type jobs.

Graphic design jobs = 0
jobs for English majors who suck at selling things = 0
jobs for ex-teachers = 0

I'm afraid I'm going to have to go to factory or warehouse work ... and honestly, they're not going to hire me because I'm "over-qualified." They're going to take one look at my education and where I used to work ... and assume I'm not a good fit, and pass me over. And they're right, really. I don't plan on staying in factory or warehouse work because my joints will fail and cause body parts to drop right off.

I should hustle up more freelance jobs, but that won't take care of a steady paycheck nor health insurance. I let my COBRA lapse this month after re-filling all of my prescriptions. I just can't afford $330 a month for the insurance when my meds are about $200 every other month. Now that I've let it lapse, I'm sure I'll get the flu or something. The economic "stimulus" rebate that will be sent out in May isn't gonna do crap for me and for a lot of people like me. It'll go toward paying off the debt load we carry rather than wontonly and recklessly spending spending spending to help the economy.

You want to help the economy? Spend within your means. Rich people oughta be spending more money so us poor schlobs can get paid and reduce our debts. Hire the people you need to hire for your company and quit outsourcing shit. Quit loaning people so much for houses that they can't really afford. Quit sending out pre-approved credit card apps like they are Halloween candy.

It's not hard stuff, people.

I still remember the first time I used my shiny new credit card.

I had just moved out of the house. My parents had divorced immediately thereafter. Mom and Dad had a "gentleman's agreement" (i.e., nothing in writing) that Dad would pay for my car when it broke down. When. Not if. Since he was making just about $100k in 1987, this seemed reasonable to me.

I drove to work Monday morning and discovered a bad thing about my car. The brake pedal went all the way to the floor. I slid the car into neutral and managed to get to work and then home safely, but I was constantly trying to figure out what curbs I should aim for if I needed to stop suddenly. I was terrified to even get into a minor fender bender in this car because ... well, let me put it this way. My mechanic was terrified of the car. The frame had been broken ... right at the driver's door ... and welded back together. Wonderful things can be done with welding, but when your mechanic comes out of the pit looking white as a ghost and telling you the car is dangerous, you tend to get scared about that particular weld. In addition to the glued together frame, the previous owner had installed a "moon roof." Himself.

This moon roof was probably 1/4" to 1/2" thick glass which spanned 80% of the roof of the vehicle. And I have NEVER seen so much caulk used on anything in my life. It was an ugly caulk job, but I tell you, the roof never did leak.

The thought of not having brakes in that car was enough to make most people wet themselves.

So, I called Dad the minute I got home from work. This would be the first time after the divorce that I called for help with the car. His reply? "Oh. Well, we'll deal with it on Saturday." Umm, work? school? These things were not important. There was no public transportation in our town at that time and it was far too far to walk to either place.

"Umm, Dad? I am putting the car into neutral to stop at all. There is nothing left of the brakes; they're gone."

"Saturday."

After I got off the phone and screamed for a while, I remembered the plain white envelope which had come earlier that day. My first credit card. I drove the car carefully to the mechanic's and got the brake job done ... paid for by Visa. Took me two or three months to pay that off, I think. Maybe four. That was back in the days of $3.85 minimum wage ... my rent with my first roommate was $201 (and then we split that in two) ... but having to pay off on the credit card hurt for months.

It's been years since I've been in that kind of financial position. And yet, when I look at the job market right now, that's what's coming for me, I think. A return to 1989 ... living check to check ....

But then I was in school and had high hopes for a career in teaching at the university level. I've since come to realize that's probably not in the cards for me as the entire "publish or perish" thing drives me mad. I'd rather focus on teaching my students than researching and writing about minutiae. (Okay, not all of it is minutiae, particularly not in my field ... but still ... I tend to be more practical than academic.)

There's a little less hope and a lot more cynicism now.

And, it would seem, a lot fewer jobs.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:22 AM | Comments (4) | Struggles | Stumble

February 7, 2008

The Tower of Conceptual Babel

Back in 1993, I was finishing up my bachelor's degree in English in a state school. Not the fancy-pants University of Texas at Austin - known as UT. But the school we perceived of as the poor cousin, University of Texas at Arlington - known as UTA. It wasn't that the school wasn't as good, but we simply didn't get the press that UT did. We didn't have a football team. We were a commuter school. We weren't in a cool town like Austin, but out in the 'burbs between Dallas and Fort Worth. Our concept of ourselves was based on what others thought of UT ... we were obviously a poor outlying satellite.

Despite our concept of ourselves, we had some cool stuff going for us. One of the other tutors at our writing center told me about this nifty thing she'd discovered. It was called a MUDdog ... you got on one of the dumb terminals over in the computer science lab, logged in, entered a few commands and you were suddenly immersed in this text world. I was unimpressed. I had Zork on the Commodore-64 at home, thank you very much.

This was different, she insisted. Through the campus connection, this text world was populated with real people from around the globe. You could talk with them and interact with them in real time!

I tried it for a lark one Saturday when I didn't have anything else planned. Walked up to campus ... logged in ... and eight hours later I finally looked at my watch.

I've been hooked on various types of online communities ever since.

As someone who is always fascinated by human interactions, as someone who can't help but be an observer as well as a participator ... as a writer ... I am utterly enthralled by the microcosms of society that we set up online.

MUDS, chatrooms, IRC channels, "Web 2.0 sites," blogs, shoutboxes, forums (technically that's fora, but I try to go with the flow).

General public, special interests, moms, dads, writers, non-writers, artists, dog-lovers, cat-lovers, extroverts, introverts, introverts who become extroverts online.

Invariably it happens.

Invariably someone trots out their fervent belief in X. And X might be a product, a method of doing something, a religion, a favourite actor or politician or writer ... or whatever.

And just as invariably, someone else takes a polar opposite view.

Now, things can go a couple of ways at this point. It might be we have a nice, logical, rational discussion about the pros and cons of X. Of course, this is the least likely scenario, but it does happen.

Another option: things get heated. X is vilified. X is extolled. Vilified. Extolled. On and on and on. Neither side listens to the other and you literally get an extremist jihad, crusade, holy war of whatever flavour you wish to call it. Sides are drawn up. The inevitable rhetoric gets trotted out: "you're either for us or against us" ... "there is no middle ground" ... "well you know what I mean."

The option that goes one step beyond that is this: X is vilified and so is "that damn dipshit who said X was good." "You're delusional and anyone who thinks like you is delusional."

It seems that even when we speak the same language, we still live in a tower of babel. We still struggle to make our words understood ... to feel that we are being respected and heard and believed. And often, despite what we are sure is plain language and crystalline logic ... other people fail to get our point ... fail to agree. And obviously, the failure is almost inevitably theirs, as we have been perfectly clear and rational.

Over the last two weeks I have watched as two of the three online communities I participate in had serious melt-downs. Honestly, it's nothing I haven't seen before. Ideas being denigrated, people being denigrated, people feeling sure they were denigrated when they were not ... all because emotions were running high.

Often, it's like watching a bunch of junior high age kids (13-15 or so). Kids that age are still learning the finer social mores and how to converse without pissing people off. They speak plainly and say exactly what they mean ... but often their vocabulary does not include any grey area at all. The idea that words have connotations generally escapes them. The concept that words, despite our best efforts to deny this, words do hurt us. Or at least they frustrate us. (And please note that there are plenty of teens who do get this concept ... and there are plenty who don't learn this concept ever. This is merely a developmental stage and a generalization.)

Online, we add to this type of social group the fact that there is no good way to discern body language and vocal tone ... and often we misinterpret words that were not meant in the ways we see on the screen. And, sometimes, no matter how hard we try to craft those words to elicit in every person who reads them exactly and precisely what we mean ... all that work is simply lost in the babel of pixels and previous experience and the mind of the individual reader.

It is in watching these explosions happen online, where you can see each piece of the misunderstanding beginning to unfold and then to blossom and the fruit to explode, spreading its pollen of dissent over the entire participatory community ... it is watching this microcosm mushroom online that we truly see the babel of concept and idea which in the so-called "real world" leads to fighting and war. It's an amazing and, when put in this light, terrifying event to watch.

It starts so very simply.

And it is played out over and over and over again. As soon as one segment of a community finally "gets" how these things get started ... when a few people suddenly realize that they ways in which they phrase things matter AND that they become more capable of trying to take the other side's ideas as something to respect despite disagreeing (and perhaps disagreeing vehemently) ... as soon as this happens, another group comes along who has not yet learned these concepts ... and the battles begin anew.

It is the curse of our relatively short life spans and our frequent procreation and our different rates of learning and comprehending - as a race we seem compelled to play this scenario out over and over and over again.

Whether it's the mud-slinging of an American presidential "season" ... whether it's "your tree's leaves are falling in MY yard" ... or "your people are creating problems" ... or "your actions are eroding the atmosphere" ... "we don't want your sort here" ... "you don't believe as we do."

We bag and tag and categorize each other out of existence so that we don't have to listen to the conceptual babel and weigh all sides.

And even when we have learned the lessons and we try to stay calm and rational ... there is always human frailty, exhaustion ... and a point when someone else's rhetoric finally crosses a line beyond which we feel a moral imperative to call them on it because to not call them on that particular phrasing or concept is to allow an intolerable situation to thrive.

It doesn't ever end. And it feels like "we" never learn.

But whether the babel is language based or conceptually based, it is a constant of human existence. We are locked into our own skulls with wiring and operating systems only somewhat compatible with the others around us.

Our lives are never-ending attempts to connect and to forever try to understand and be understood in the face of failures and partial compatibilities.

Our strength lies in our stubborn certainty that we can finally find the right cord for connection and the right version of the operating system to achieve a true and deep melding.

I'm reminded of a book I never really liked, but I adored one single line. (Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero)

"People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter.

We are individuals afraid to merge ... and yet seeking to be understood so fully that we do merge ... which frightens us more and makes the need to be understood more fervent and powerful.

People are afraid to merge. To lose some aspect of their true selves? Fear that to understand all is to dislike? To find out some idea we might have about that person is false?

People are afraid to merge so we build these towers and walls to protect our thoughts and minds and feelings ... our individuality.

And then we wonder why others do not see things our way, not realizing that the bricks and stones and concrete of our towers and bunkers are simply not transparent. They don't just protect us and shield us, but they blind us to where others are.

Even our most fervently held beliefs are simply stones in the wall, often preventing us from understanding someone else. And when someone doesn't understand us when we think they should ... so often we begin casting our stones at them, trying to bury them in our beliefs - sometimes without even realizing we're doing it. Of course, this only makes us build our own walls thicker and higher ...

... and people are afraid to merge.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:51 AM | Comments (12) | Blog | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

February 6, 2008

Fade to Black

So the official report is in. Accidental overdose of 6 different prescription drugs. It's not so much that it was an overdose as it was a lethal combination. Xanax, Oxycontin, Ibuprofen, Valium, Restoril, Unisom ... none taken to excess ... just a bad combination of several drugs.

All of this brings up the death of River some 15 years earlier. The cases may not be parallel ... but to someone who only knew them and appreciated their work in film ... it feels much the same. Life taken too early, too clumsily. Someone with whom I identified despite the fact that I do not subscribe to the Cult of the Celebrity.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:02 PM | Comments (1) | Struggles | Stumble

January 29, 2008

Dreaming ...

It is a well known fact to anyone who knows me at all well, that I hate winter with a fiery passion. That, in fact, I proclaimed in CCD (think Catholic Sunday School) loudly and frequently that hell was not hot, but cold. Naturally, the parents who'd volunteered to teach were scandalized but hardly knew what to do with a child who simply out-logic'd them about the issue. (Well, we say "left out in the cold" when someone leaves us ... or "turns a cold shoulder," right? And if hell is the absence of God ... then God has given those in hell the cold shoulder and therefore, OBVIOUSLY, hell is cold. These poor volunteer teachers just kind of blinked at me and ignored the issue all together.)

Come to think of it, this is the way most adults tended to deal with me. Anyway.

I talked in an earlier post this month about when I first moved to Arlington and began attending Butler Elementary. There was one area we used to stage our Pretend games of Hardy Boys ... Nancy Drew when Tracy got upset and put her foot down about us playing at being boys. Sometimes Star Wars and sometimes we just made stuff up. There was a tree that was our front door ... another that helped delineate the "rooms" of our "house." Another that I climbed incessantly despite the fact that tree climbing was expressly forbidden. (And it's a measure of how invisible I felt ... and possibly how much the teachers knew what "being in trouble" meant to me ... that they sometimes walked right underneath the tree I was in and never said a word ... despite the little ratty tattle-tales.)

But this place ... this place was for dreaming and the photo does not even begin to do it justice.

If you click through, a desktop wallpaper version will pop up ... 1680x1260.

That rock, that's flat to the ground, mostly buried ... yeah, over there on the bottom, kind of to the right. We used to sit on that and look down into that little "valley" below us and just dream. We were always quiet and serious there. Some places just ask that of you and even grade-schoolers can sense it. Later, when recess was a little less about games of Let's Pretend and a little more ... for me, anyway ... trying to figure out life, the universe and everything, I can remember laying on my back, watching the sky ... trying to find a way to watch the sky and my little valley at the same time ... and, of course, solve all the issues in the universe. All in a 30 minute recess.

For me, the small pathway entrance into the woods represented so many different things. And that clearing you had to pass to get to it. Completely exposed ... except because it was a "valley" ... the teachers couldn't see us if we went down there.

I know my love of that spot drove most of our teachers crazy. It was at the very, very edge of our "safe" playground area. Going down to that valley, or worse, into the woods, was strictly forbidden. The kind of forbidden that kids hate because you can feel the adults' fear behind the edict ... when they are honestly scared that "bad things" will happen to any child who disobeys. It's a very different feel from the arbitrary, we're-imposing-order-upon-you kinds of rules.

And, to be honest, the entire time I went to Butler, at least once a year there were reports of "flashers" in raincoats just waiting to show off for some kid. And, there was a creek which ran through the narrow strip of woods ... home to the ever-lovely cottonmouths (water moccasins).

For me, the woods represented something else completely. Some flashes of a special place. Tinged with hints of fear. Coloured with a need to explore and discover and learn. A need to know and put an end to something that I couldn't name ... and at the same time I was terrified that I was not ready to know what answers the woods might hold, what they might unlock.

Our teachers took small groups through the woods on science expeditions from time to time. And I could see where the older kids ... the neighborhood kids had set up BMX bike ramps and obstacles. A rope swing to get across the creek.

The magic of the woods danced on the unknown edges during these excursions, as if the mere presence of adults ... of a gaggle of other children ... forced the things I needed further away into the undergrowth ... dancing up the vines into the treetops ... lurking in the gaping wounds of some of the tree trunks.

A couple of times, when I was near the end of elementary school ... when I had started junior high and was playing one summer, I went into the woods alone, hoping to unlock this thing that kept teasing me. Nothing bad ever happened. I saw a couple of other kids, playing. No adults. No snakes.

And no answers to my mystery, either.

Despite the fact that the woods taunted me from my recess perch ... when I was finally able to explore them, I was left with one conclusion:

These were the wrong woods.

Beautiful and interesting in their own right. Mysterious and captivating.

But these woods were not, after all, my woods.

And my woods ... Balcones Woods ... back in Austin ... those had been torn down.

I would have to find my answers another way.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:23 AM | Comments (5) | Storytelling: She was, of course, supposed to be sleeping. | Struggles | Vacations and Photos | Stumble

January 16, 2008

It

In high school, I wrote my first complete novel. I'd been attempting novels since the sixth grade, but I had this amazing dream early in my senior year of high school and spun it into a novel. It turned out to be a horror novel, which surprised me. I'd never read any horror books and thought they were probably all lame - scandalous elitism (hush, cabal) from someone who loved science fiction and fantasy books. So, I decided to read Stephen King to see how I stacked up. I found Carrie interesting and appalling both. It was interesting enough ... too short ... definitely a writer's "early" work ... and great googly moogly, but I could write that well. Sheesh, if that was the bar for getting published ....

And then I read Stephen King's It. I was hooked on Stevie-Boy for life at that point. My friend Andy dragged me to go see Stand By Me. Again, I was mesmerized. Stevie-Boy and I thought a heck of a lot alike.

What hooked me the most was his ability to write characters and to understand them so very well that not only do you get deep insight into many of them, but the interplay between characters, particularly in "The Body" and It, is almost to be one of the gang. What was particularly poignant for me was a line near the end of chapter 32 of "The Body" novella in the Different Seasons collection:

Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that?

We moved so often when I was little, friends were hard to come by for me and they were precious. So while I understood that you lost friends and made new ones when you moved, I was searching for stability in my friends ... and I didn't understand how they could move in and out of each others' lives and mine so "easily."

A fast breakdown for those who haven't read the blog long:
born in Amarillo, Texas; moved to Houston, another place in Houston; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Oklahoma City; Carmel, Indiana; Austin, Texas. Then I started kindergarten in Pillow Elementary. Second grade at St. Louis Catholic School. Began third grade back at Pillow, but after the first six weeks of the year, we moved to Arlington, Texas. Out of six possible semesters of junior high, I had 3 at Nichols and 3 at Shackelford. High school was blissfully the same all three years.

Despite having both a mother and a father, a "stable" family unit ... my life was anything but stable. I was always waiting for the next time I would have to move on. I was terrified to make friends and too lonely to not make them.

I can remember the first weeks of third grade at my third new school in as many years vividly. Being introduced to Carrie Thompson, who was to be my "official" friend and show me around the school ... show me the ropes, as it were. We became good acquaintances ... she came over to my house and I went to hers, but we didn't seem to have a great deal in common. And then I stumbled into Tracy and Jill. We seemed to hit it off well at first. Recess games were fun. We hung together in Language Arts class. But, unbeknownst to me, Tracy and I had some similar family issues which made us both bull-headed in different ways. For Tracy, it was a need - and this is totally my interpretation and may not be at all how she sees things - but it seems to me she had a need to be in charge and to not let anyone truly outshine her. I don't think she wanted to be noticed any more than I did, really. But she was determined not to be at the bottom, either.

So for the first week or two that the three of us were friends, Tracy ran our schoolwork with a fist more iron than that of the teacher. Third grade in the 70s consisted of mimeographed purple worksheets. Half the time, the sheets were still damp from the machine and sadly lacking a grape smell that might have made the purple colouring tolerable. Tracy would tell us what number to work to. Maybe to number ten. Then you would stop and wait for the others to catch up. That way, we could all be twinkies and turn our papers in at the same time. I soon learned it was so Tracy wouldn't be the last one to turn in her worksheet, but that we could all three turn them in together.

Our school was "Open Concept" which was, in general, an utterly hellish educational experiment of the 70s and 80s:

Years before the recognition of Attention Deficit Disorder issues, Butler Elementary began as an "open concept" school, with grades one through six in one large "room" of the building. Each grade level was "divided" by rolling bookcases about five feet high and more of these bookcases were used to lightly subdivide each "classroom" within a grade level. Teachers' desks were in a cluster in the center of the grade level area.

I struggled at the beginning of that year. I was put in the second high language arts and math classes at first, despite the fact that at my old school, I was much further ahead in both subjects. When I was finally bumped up, to the "high" classes, they were still behind where I had been at Pillow. So it didn't take long at all before I tired of waiting for Tracy to catch up on the worksheets. And the day I did, despite how much I wanted to make BFF with Tracy and Jill, was the day that I inadvertently started a war.

I remember clearly working on the purple inked paper. Looking over to see where Jill was. And then looking over to see how far behind Tracy was. There was just no way. I couldn't pull out a book and read until I was finished with my worksheets. And I just couldn't sit there and wait for Tracy to catch up any longer. I continued working on the worksheet. When Jill reached the requisite number, she turned to look at my worksheet. The look on her face ... panic. Alarm. And that probably should have been a warning to me as to how Tracy would react. Jill looked over at Tracy's worksheet. Back at mine. I remember her hesitating. Shrugging her shoulders. And continuing her own work.

When Tracy finally got to the stopping point, she looked at Jill's paper. Shocked and betrayed. Looked over at mine. The look of terror and anger both overwhelmed me. I hadn't expected this. I didn't mean for it to be a big deal. I just couldn't wait any more.

Tracy, however, saw it as my attempt to usurp her power. She burst into tears and told the teacher that I had called her a name or some such nonsense. I was shocked. The look of loathing on her face. And from that moment on, the war was on. For the rest of third grade and fourth grade, we did remain friends ... and even added new people to our little group. But from that point on, Tracy was diligent about remaining in charge and largely held that group of four together through high school.

And partly because I didn't see the point in "being in charge" of my friends ... and partly because I was terrified to even attempt to make other friends, I tried not to fight her. Even when she got ticked off and "hired" boys to come beat me up during recess. (Oddly enough, the closest one ever came to beating me up was a boy who fought like a girl, all cat scratches and no good solid roundhouses.) She would always tell me that she didn't do it, but invariably when I asked the boy why in the hell he was attacking me, he'd always say, "Tracy asked me to."

By fifth grade, I had no friends to speak of. Tracy had finally gotten furious with me for something I can't recall and commanded everyone in our group to stop having anything to do with me. For my part, I was tired of fighting with her and I simply stopped even trying to hang out with the others in our group. It was simply no longer worth it. I eventually did make other friends, but it wasn't until ninth grade that I had really close friends again.

And perhaps this is why Stephen King's "The Body" and It speak so poignantly to me. Both books revolve around the concept of friendship, of doing anything for your friends and of knowing them well enough to know their weaknesses not so much to exploit them (although teasing is, of course, perfectly acceptable), but to keep them out of trouble and to protect them from others.

Gordie and Chris from "The Body," knew that their families were ... let's say not supportive. Chris' family was outright abusive and the surrounding community simply abused Chris further. Gordie's family ignored him. The boys became family for each other. Teddy's family was also extremely abusive and Vern's was a little harder to read (or I don't remember it as well). Certainly Vern's older brother was not going to win any good brother awards .... But, despite the fact that the four boys were something of a family to each other, Vern and Teddy slipped away ... "like busboys in a restaurant." Chris and Gordie continued to be family to each other.

In It, there is a larger group of children and a definite set of enemies for them to fight. (One supernatural and one set was "mundane.") And again, the children bind together in an exceedingly strong family for the duration of the crisis. (The slipping apart has more to do with the supernatural plotline, so I'll skip that.)

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you?

Those friends for me didn't come until later, until I was 14 or 15 or so. And that was largely my own fault as I had simply never learned to be human enough to truly let potential friends in. Even still, I found it difficult to let my friends know just how important they were.

And, I suppose, that ruminating on all of this is why I have been trying so hard to hook back up with the people I knew in high school (and some of them even longer than that). It is partly a reality check on my memories (do you remember when we did ...) - but it's largely because to me, my close friends were like family to me then and I've always hated that we let that connection slip away. On my end it was simple fear that I had imagined that connection and that they meant far more to me than I to them. On their ends?

I've no idea.

I love that I've reconnected with some of them. One of them is even from Tracy's little group, although she wasn't part of the fighting from third grade, and, in fact, was friendly with me all throughout school and even college. I'm proud of her like I'm proud of my buddy, Andy. Like I would be proud of siblings. There is still that family connection to me.

I know now that a portion of this is that we do have families of choice as well as families of origin ... and that this is especially true when there was significant childhood trauma involving the family of origin. But I don't know how to express what I'm thinking and feeling at this moment ... just trying to explain what those old friends meant and still mean. I'd hoped by this point in the post, I'd be able to say something meaningful ... but because we do think so much alike, instead I'm left with one last quote from Stephen King's "The Body":

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless...

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:46 AM | Comments (2) | Storytelling: She was, of course, supposed to be sleeping. | Struggles | Stumble

December 10, 2007

WTF is WRONG with People?

So here's the deal:

I'm pissed off. Like seriously pissed off.

I have a friend who has not had the world's easiest life. Dealt a crap hand in terms of parents. Neighbors who knew and did nothing. Left home before finishing high school ... and yet still finished high school. Had to work to support herself. Did so. Did good, valuable and helpful work ... but day care teachers don't make a whole lot. If I'm remembering correctly, she was working two jobs when we met. A nursery school during the day and a drop-in day care in the evenings.

This is someone I admire a hell of a lot. She kept trying to pull ahead to do everything she needed to do to take care of herself and be independent. Took classes at the junior college as she could afford it.

But when I say dealt a crap hand in terms of parents ... I kind of understated that. A LOT. Which created some issues. Which to be perfectly honest, she tried her best to deal with. And she was doing the work that needed to be done. But, as they say, shit happens. Better described, various health problems happened.

And, despite there being real health issues, the doctors apparently decided she was just another hysterical female. The blew off things that they should have pursued. Hospital stays finally cost her her jobs. And the shit continued to happen. And she continued fighting and trying to do everything possible to stay independent and together.

Finally, she was getting dizzy and falling. Back issues. The docs kept putting things off. She wasn't a priority. She could wait.

She tripped in her living room and fell. Not down a flight of stairs or anything. Just fell.

Blew out three vertebrae. Paralyzed. Stuck in a nursing home.

Now to be perfectly honest, I'm pissed off enough about all of that. I wanna holler that little kid plea, "It's not fair!" And it's not fair, but it's life. That's the way this shit goes, I guess.

But what has me really hot now is that she's dependent on the nursing home. Despite all these years of trying to make sure she stayed independent. And they are NOT taking care of her; they're making it as difficult as possible for her to do much of anything.

And the last straw for me is this:
She was using a transfer board to get from her bed to her wheelchair. Fell. Broke her tibia.

I found out last night that the doctors didn't even bother to set the leg. It's still swollen. She may be in a wheelchair, but she's paralyzed - and still has feeling in her legs - and the leg still freaking hurts. They put a short boot on her and called it done. Last night a nurse told her the only way to set the leg was through surgery ... and with a pulmonary embolism, dead spots on the lungs ... surgery is not really an option.

But I just can't believe that this is the best care. I just can't believe that just putting a short boot on someone and calling it good enough is standard care in this situation.

I'm tired of people treating people like crap. Why can't they just do their damn jobs? If you're in a profession to HELP people, then freaking HELP THEM. What the hell is with this ignoring them or thinking that crappy care is "good enough" for those people? I mean really. Why do people have to be like that? It's not that hard to do what's right, especially when it's your job. Why do so many people have to take this "easy" out of just being lazy?

WTF is wrong with people anyway?

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:58 PM | Comments (6) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

December 4, 2007

The Violence Cop-Out

I am sick and tired of hearing people claim that violent video games and violent music and violent movies cause more and more violence.

What a simplistic way of looking at the world.

The real truth is that how we choose to deal with and process these media can create more violence ... or more peace.

I'll be honest. I haven't played a video game formally labeled violent since my C-64 with the original Castle Wolfenstein games, 50 Mission Crush (oh, how I miss that one) and a G.I. Joe game. But, even in the Tony Hawk games I adore, there is still violence. The cops often try to knock the skaters down and in the latest game you can now skate-check (knock down a pedestrian). There's other "mild" violence along the same lines.

Does this make the game violent? Certainly that portion is. But does it make the game players violent?

When I am frustrated in my Tony Hawk games, I have a tendency to smash the skater into a wall. Violent? Well, it is pixel violence. But for me, at least, this is a safe release of aggression. It hurts no one. My little pixel skater may look bloodied for a moment, but no being feels the pain.

I would never do the same thing to a person. That is a harmful release of tension and frustration.

And this is the real dilemma.

Do we consciously choose our paths? Do we think?

As adults with children or with children in our sometimes care, do we think?

Our children at age 7, 10 and some even at 15 cannot fully process through these distinctions I've made. It is up to us to limit their playing time and to discuss with them what they see and play on the screen. The real threat to our children is not so much the video game where they might get the idea to push a friend off their skateboard and down a hill -- kids have been doing that or its equiva