Dammit, liberal bloggers, you're disappointing me!

How is it that there are all these liberal bloggers wringing their hands over the arrest of Henry Louis Gates in his own home, and yet not a single one of them has yet used the phrase "new professionalism?"

How to keep track of your GTD, and how to score it as well

This week, I've been experimenting using the Keeping Focus form to track of what I do and how much of I do. It has space for five major projects, and little scantron projects that allow you to say "I worked on this a lot / a little / not at all" every day.

I've also decided to score myself: A little = 1, a lot = 3, and not at all = 0. A daily (horizontal) score of five would be average; eight would be excellent. A weekly per-task (vertical) score of 7 would also be excellent.

Right now the tasks are "Get a job," "Update portfolio," "Keep family happy and successful," "Maintain social life," and "Write!"

After four days, my scores are: Get a job, 12; Update portfolio, 3; Keep family happy and succesful, 10; Maintain social life, 7; Write, 0. Ugh, that zero hurts. Technically, I suppose I could give it a "1" since I dictated the start of a story (hot gay dragon-on-man porn!) Tuesday afternoon into my portable recorder.

But the last two days, my daily scores are 7 (good), 5 (okay), 10 (burnout warning), and 10 (eek!). Geez, the week just has to slow down.

Christianist writer unknowingly embraces counterculture neologism

Laurie Higgins has a charming little article, Republican skeletons in the closet, in which she excoriates the Republican nattersphere for refusing to look too closely at Republican politicians who are known or strongly rumored to be gay, and for reacting with outrage whenever one is "outed" in someway, claiming that it's an invasion of privacy.

( A short detour about Christianists and privacy )

Higgins is all in a froth that "homosexuality matters. Volitional homosexual behavior is deviant, immoral behavior regardless of its etiology. That moral claim is not only a legitimate but also a necessary moral claim to make publicly." That's just a typical Christianist argument. It's boring.

What got me fascinated by Higgins was this paragraph:

Same-sex desire and volitional homosexual acts are analogous to polyamorous desire and volitional polyamorous acts, all of which are legitimate conditions for moral assessment and moral disapproval. Most voters would want to know if a candidate embraced polyamory; most voters would reject a candidate for his affirmation of polyamory and his engagement in polyamorous behavior; and those who rejected such a candidate would not be vilified for their political decision or called poly-haters and polyphobes.

That raised my eyebrows: it's the first time I've heard anyone from the Christianist side of the table actually use the term "polyamory" without sneer quotes. It's as if Higgins is unaware that the term is less than twenty years old and is still contentious even within the Polyamory community.

The take-away here is that poly is winning: by framing it in the same context as homosexuality, as a legitimate civil arrangement, rather than depicting it in ways similar to swinging, the poly community has successfully put its detractors on the defensive.

Fantasy Aspirations and the American Dream

1.

I was listening to Rush Limbaugh the other day, and he was going on and on about how Obama's health care plan, whatever it is, must be stopped. His major reason, in fact for the half hour I listened his only reason, was on something that affected him personally: it'll raise his marginal tax rate.

I'm sure a lot of Rush's listeners don't have healthcare of any kind. They have too many assets to qualify for state aid, yet have so little income they can't afford their own health care coverage. Here they are, listening to a man with his own private jet, and then some of them will still go to the phones and call their congressman and tell him not to vote for the health care reform package. I had ask myself, why, why would they do such a thing?

2.

Shortly after my encounter with Limbaugh, I was in a convenience store where a big, middle-aged woman in a shabby, fading summer dress was scratching at a long streamer of lottery cards with the kind of frantic eneregy starving badgers reserve for abandoned termite mounds. She must have spent fifteen or twenty dollars on a game where we all know the house wins, no matter what, and state lotteries especially are nothing more than taxation against those who were failed by the school maths system.

3.

Andrew Cherlin has a book out, The Marriage Go-Round, in which he writes:

Americans believe in two contradictory ideals. The first is the importance of marriage: we are more marriage-oriented than most other Western countries. The second is the importance of living a personally fulfilling life that allows us to grow and develop as individuals–call it individualism. Now, you can find other countries that place a high value on marriage, such as Italy where most children are born to married couples and there are fewer cohabiting relationships. And you can find countries that place a high value on individualism, such as Sweden. But only in the United States do you find both. So we marry in large numbers–we have a higher marriage rate than most countries. But we evaluate our marriages according to how personally fulfilling we find them. And if we find them lacking, we are more likely to end them. Then, because it's so important to be partnered, we move in with someone else, and the cycle starts all over again.

There is a part of me that can't help but think that Cherlin has put his finger on something that explains the other two, but there's a piece missing, and that piece is this: The American dreams come from a fantasy ideology of eternal aspiration to magnificence.

Fantasy ideologies are those that are pursued even at great personal pain and great communal cost-- indeed, that pain and cost validates and grants significance to the pursuit-- because the core story of the ideology is personally satisfying, even though the participants also know the goal of the ideology to be impossible.

Limbaugh's listeners, the lottery player, and the re-re-remarried, all have the same ideology: the American aspiration to some form of magnificence. I think Cherlin is wrong about the personal fulfillment part; it's more profound than just that. The personal fulfillment is a consequence of having a magnificent marriage, just as Limbaugh's listeners will act against their own self-interests, and the lottery player will spend money she's almost guaranteed to lose, because while the chances of magnificence are infinitesimally small, making them even smaller (by re-arranging the tax code, or by not playing the lottery) are even smaller.

I read somewhere that the Danes tend not to be too worried about the state of the world because they are not especially aspirational, and they are not anticipating overwhelmingly positive outcomes, and so every year they're happier than the rest of us precisely because they're pleasantly surprised, year in and year out, to discover that life isn't as crappy as they expect. Americans are the opposite, and so we divorce and remarry, with the hope that the next marriage will be magnificent. We play the lottery, in the hopes that we will win that magnificent prize. We listen to Rush Limbaugh, because he is (for some definition) magnificent, and we aspire to someday have a private plane like his.

The funny thing about all of these examples is that all of them contain an implicit element of fate: we know that to have a good marriage you must not only find the right person, you must be the right person, but most people assume that both of those are a matter of luck, not effort; the lottery is, of course, pure luck; and even making it big in any industry is as much a matter of being lucky, of being in the right place at the right time, as it is one's skill and persistence.

Americans, of course, will deny that they believe life is a lottery. Yet they act as it is, and taking it away from them, making them actually see the numbers, draining away the emotional energy that powers fantasy, brings to the fore more outrage than most politicians can handle.

I think that's a lot of the game. Even the birthers play it: they know the whole birth certificate thing is a dud. But they reserve the right to fantasize otherwise. Democrats did it during Bush's term: "Wouldn't it be great if Congress finally impeached Bush?" Republicans are doing it now: "Wouldn't it be great if a nuke went off in Chicago?" (I didn't make that one up.)

Fantasy aspirations to personal magnificence, especially of the ideological flavor, haunt this country. The marriage fantasy hurts children, especially since it's neither single-parent or dual-parent homes that help children, it's affirmative long-term stability that helps children; I've seen what happens to kids whose parent introduces lover after lover as "my life partner," only to have each relationship shatter on a frighteningly reliable three-year cycle. The lottery fantasy hurts the poor; the Limbaugh fantasy hurts the lower middle class willing to listen to him.

America was not always driven by such fantasies. We were much more hard-eyed a century ago. Our current bout of navel-gazing will be much more difficult to get out of than it was to get in to. But we have to do it, or we are looking at the latter days of a once great nation.

A Big Block O' Time

I got that Big Block o' Time today. I'm booked solid most of tomorrow, but today I didn't have much to do, so from noon until 4:00pm I hacked on the narrator project. I learned how to build new commands into Django's manage.py, and created "loadelfdata," which imported all of my stories, in seperate arcs, into the database, complete with series and series-of-series heirarchies working.

Yay, I has data. Now I need views. And templates. But yay, one major step done-- and it only took me four hours!

Camping, Day 3

Tadpole at Olallie Creek

Family lounges at Olallie Creek

Snowpack toward the loo

We started out late. Far from being the first one up, as I usually have been in the past, this vacation I seem to have consistently been the last one to finally drag my butt out of the sleeping bag and get ready for the day. I didn't bring any coffee with me this time, just hot tea, but it's good and it gets us going in the morning.

Omaha made oatmeal, and then we made PB&J sandwiches, loaded up the trail mix and water supplies, and headed out for Olallie Creek.

The trail was up the whole freakin' way! 4.3 miles, all of it uphill, to get to the creek and its attendent campsite. This was one of those places that the trail guides admit is "rarely visited," because it's a short enough hike that hardcore hikers push on to the next camp, but for a day hike there's nothing to it-- no vast Rainier vistas, no beautiful meadows, no amazing waterfalls. Just a lovely little creek slightly above the summer snowline, in the midst of a forest that rarely has human visitors. We refilled our water bottles often from the little streams that line the mountains; my Pur water filter pumps is one of the best investments I've ever made, and I'm down to my last replacement filter, and Pur has long gone out of business.

There was snow above 3900'. The girls were very pleased. At one point we stopped alongside a stream to rest and the girls were utterly fascinated with this tadpole clinging to a rock, wiggling back and forth, its ultimate goal utterly unknowable. There were a lot of trees fallen across the trail, and we had to climb them repeatedly, scraping our backs going under or risking our necks going over.

When we reached the campsite itself, the girls took off their hiking shoes and dunked their feet into the river-- and then Kouryou-chan succeded in dunking more of herself in, making herself very cold.

One of the things we found up at the campsite was one of those horrific, but still absolutely necessary, vault toilets. This one had a surprise-- a geocache stored about two yards away. It was a green ammunition box, locked with a padlock that was not marked with the US National Park Service mark on it, as all the other padlocks I'd seen on Rainier are. We're not sure what was in it, obviously, and geocaches are illegal in national parks, so what it was doing there and why, we have no idea.

Equally distressing, a snowpack covered the trail leading to the toilet and obscured the path, and someone had apparently chosen not to quest up the snow and done their business right there on the side of the trail. Gross. We reported all of this to the park rangers; dunno what they can do about it.

Home was downhill, blessed be. We went home and had the bean & beef premix that Omaha had made before we left-- very high in protein and carbs, and damned yummy, despite Yamaraashi-chan's complaints. It's one of those things you only ever eat while camping.

After that, bedtime. And we were all ready for it.

( Family pics of the day )