Half-formed idea

Let's all work to associate the word "pathetic" with rapists, sexual harassers, etc. Whenever it comes up in conversation, find some opportunity to label them as pathetic, using cultural expectations of masculinity to convey our message to its greatest advantage. Pathetic in the most stereotypically unmanly way. Pathetic like living in your parents' basement. Pathetic like a 40-year-old virgin. Pathetic like a teenage boy who's so overexcitable he cums his pants the first time he manages to touch a girl's breast. We will channel the worst of our middle-school bullies to sneed and spit out the word pathetic with complete loathing and contempt. They're all pathetic little boys who are raping/harassing/whatever because they aren't man enough for a consensual relationship of equals. How pathetic!

Panhandlers earning $200 a day

At some point during my adolescence, a newspaper article was published saying that panhandlers earn $200 a day. I don't remember where it was published or what methodology they used to arrive at this conclusion, I don't even know if I read the article myself or I just heard about it. I just remembered the number $200 a day and the fact that the grownups around me were outraged about it.

At the time, I couldn't quite conceptualize $200 a day. It sounded like a lot to me, but I couldn't give you specifics about the quality of life it would support. But now I can grok that amount. I more or less know what it feels like, what it will buy.

And you know what? I don't think they have it easy!

It's certainly not wretched poverty. You could have your own apartment if you could manage to get an apartment without having a job. You could have phone and TV and internet. You could buy groceries. You could furnish the apartment over time. Overall, you could manage a perfectly decent standard of living on $200 a day.

But there's also work involved in panhandling $200 a day. You have to be outside in the elements. You have to deal with people. You're doing the in-person equivalent of cold-calling. You're in an undignified position. People are looking at you with scorn. And you're essentially working solely on commission, with no salary or benefits.

I don't have to deal with any of that shit in my current job! And frankly, if I did have to deal with that shit, I'd be actively searching for another job, perhaps even quitting my job and living on my savings until I could find another job. Speaking from the privileged position of white-collar salary, I wouldn't panhandle for $200 a day because I wouldn't consider that adequate compensation for the working conditions.

I think, in light of the working conditions of panhandlers, they aren't getting a free ride. In other words, if they are actually getting $200, they aren't getting it for doing nothing. Instead, it's a twisted form of entrepreneurship. They can't find a job so they make their own, and the job they've made is to use salesmanship and performance and psychology to convince people to give them money.

That sounds hard to me. I don't have that kind of drive and initiative, and I'm not up to faking it for only $200 a day. I'd rather earn my money the easy way, by sitting in a cubicle and translating.

Parenting advice from the childfree

Inspired by a train of thought arising from the first letter in Friday's Vine (i.e. Friday March 9, it hasn't been archived yet):

Think about the sexual values you want your kid(s) to have. Yes, I know, squicky. You don't want them having sex at all ever. But work past that mentally and think into the distant future, when your kid is a full-fledged adult and in whatever kind of situation you think it's appropriate for people to be in before they have sex. What do you want their sexual values to be? Do you want their sex to be loving? Kind? Gentle? Respectful? Fair and equal? Fun? Romantic? Not taken too seriously? Taken very seriously? Heterosexual? Homosexual? Married? Unmarried? For procreation purposes only? Heavy protected by contraception? Just decide, quietly and to yourself, what these values are.

Then, whenever a book you're reading contains sex scenes that reflect these values, buy the book and keep it on a bookshelf in your home. The books don't have to be about sex, they just have to contain one or more sex scene of whatever level of graphicness they happen to be. You can read them or not as your preferences dictate to you, just keep them on a bookshelf in your livingroom or some other public area of your home. Don't point this out to your kid or anything, just keep it there in your home.

Why? Because at some point in early adolescence, your kid is going to learn that some books have sex in them. And they're going to look for the sexy parts of books so they can learn more about sex. While they might prefer a more visual medium, books have the advantage of being innocent- and respectable-looking, silent, and easily portable. Once your kid discovers that there's sex in them thar books, they will read the books, especially the sex scenes, and most likely surreptitiously. But because you have chosen books whose sex scenes reflect what you consider to be positive sexual values, your kid's earliest exposures to sex portrayed in media will reflect the values you want to instill.

The Sarah Silverman Program

I just saw the Sarah Silverman Program for the first time today, and I'm astounded at how good it is. That isn't necessarily an assessment of its net comedy value, but rather the fact that they took what by all rights should have been stupid, offensive, gross-out humour and made it funny. I don't normally find that kind of humour funny at all, but I was laughing! And now I'm trying to figure out why.

I think I was laughing despite the gross-out humour, not because of it. I don't find the "Look! A fart!" funny, but the way they set up a whole situation that is funny, with or without the fart. Saying it's funny doesn't do it justice. It's both tightly plotted, with everything being used well, and utterly bizarre.

The bizarreness actually helps make it funny despite subject matter that should be offensive. These characters clearly do not inhabit the real world. Natural consequences to their actions exist or do not exist as necessary to serve the comedy. Sarah invites a homeless guy to come home with her, and he doesn't take it as a pickup or show any sexual interest in her. He takes her frankly insulting attempts to help him exactly as well as she intended him to take them. Why? Because it's funnier that way and moves the plot in the necessary direction. She starts talking about queefing on TV, going way overboard, and the TV audience thinks it's hilarious but the homeless guy is offended. Why? Because it's funnier that way and moves the plot in the necessary direction. I know I usually complain about lack of natural consequences in my fiction, but for comedic purposes this works better without. And I can accept it on that basis. It's like Monty Python with a plot in that way.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think this show doesn't have a laugh track, and that really helps, especially when the humour is such a delicate balance. They aren't telling me what's funny and what isn't. My enjoyment isn't interrupted by a bunch of fake people laughing at a fart. I can just take what I can use and go on, as Ani Difranco says. Without a laugh track, it's like when someone mentions in passing that they have a core belief that you find objectionable; with the laugh track, it's like when they spend the entire dinner party trying to get you to change your core beliefs to correspond with theirs.

I'll probably come back to this later, because I'm fascinated by the fact that I find this funny. For now, I just hope that zombie ghost thing doesn't give me nightmares tonight!

Hijab

I just realized, from watching Little Mosque today, that one thing I find raelly dissonant about hijab is that Muslim women generally cover their heads when out in public, but they will bare their heads when at home, including in front of their father and/or brothers.

Intellectually I can accept that's What's Done. But when I really think about it and try to identify with the situation, I find it very strange to expose to your father a part of your body that you aren't willing to expose in public. There is no analogy or equivalent in my own life experience. Yes, I'll wear my pyjamas or a bathrobe in the presence of my father, but that doesn't actually expose any of my body, it's just highly informal. If I'm wearing a cami and planning to put a shirt on over top and my father knocks on my door while I'm dressing, I'll make him wait until I've put on and buttoned the shirt - he doesn't get to see me in my cami if that's not what I'm exposing to the general public.

I just have no frame of reference for showing your father a part of your body that you keep hidden from the public. Covering your head, your face, your whole body, I grok that. You can't date, no physical contact with the opposite sex, I grok that. Putting a scarf over your head to go shopping and then taking it off when you get home to your father, just too much for my puny little brain.

Little Mosque has officially lost me

Rayyan is a doctor. That means that she is a) a very responsible person, and b) at least in her mid-20s, probably older.

I simply cannot enjoy spending time in a place where a grown woman who is a physician and whose behaviour has been nothing but exemplary is not trusted to adhere to her own morals.

This plot might work with a teenager (although I'd still find it distasteful), but you can't just transpose it onto a grown adult who is a doctor.

Brilliant Ideas That Will Never Work: luxury witness protection program

Conventional wisdom is that people aren't willing to come forward and report crimes that they've witnessed. The solution: make it worth their while. If you witness and report a major crime, you get put into a really posh witness protection program. Along with their new identity, witnesses get a home, paid for outright, fully furnished, and stocked with everything they'll need (since they have to leave their previous lives behind). They also get a generous annual allowance, tax-free and indexed, to ensure that they never have to work again. If they have any kids, they get an additional allowance to cover their tuition and school expense. And they get all this for the rest of their lives providing they don't ever get involved in crime.

I wonder what effect it would have on gang-related crime if snitching suddenly became more lucrative than a life of crime?

I don't think Dear Ellie quite gets what the internet is all about

A self-described "internet geek" writes to Ellie asking for advice on how to attract women. Most of the advice she gives is adequate, but this one statement I disagree with: "...push away from your computer to try something new – rock climbing, snowboarding, whatever. Now you have something to be enthusiastic about in conversation."

There are two problems here:

1. The internet is an excellent source of things to be enthusiastic about in conversation. Rock climbing, not so much. Whatever you're into, the internet can help you find out more about it and hook you up with communities of like-minded people. Rock climbing...is rock climbing. It's only one thing. If you spend an hour rock climbing and you aren't particularly enthusiastic about it, you've just wasted an hour. If you spend an hour on the internet looking for things that are interesting, you will definitely find something to be enthusiastic about.

2. If rock climbing or snowboarding or whatever is the tipping point that causes this guy's next relationship to launch, that relationship isn't going to last. He needs someone with whom he can discuss whatever he's actually into, not someone for whom he will always have to act like a rock climbing enthusiast.

I think the guy's main problem is that he thinks he has to Make a Move - that there's this one-chance, make-or-break Move that he has to make, and if he does it right he'll come out with a girlfriend. Ellie should have focused her advice a little more towards getting to know people and building friendships over time, and she completely neglected to mention how the internet can be helpful in doing that. On the internet, this guy can find other people who are passionate about whatever he's passionate about - for real, not random rock climbing - and find where he can meet likeminded people IRL. Plus he can use online communities to practice making friends so he's more comfortable doing that IRL.

Living alone redux

Apart from the fact that it's a crash course in the joys and responsibilities of adulthood, there are two other things:

1. You get to spend some time with your true, uncensored self. There's no one else around to impress or accomodate.

2. You can keep almost any aspect of your life secret from almost everyone.

It really teaches you a lot about yourself and your priorities to have complete freedom in your private actions, and complete control over who finds out about them.

Modern and Normal by Karen Solie

Usually poetry doesn't work for me, but this one did. It wasn't over my head, I got it. All of it worked for me, but what I liked best was the found poetry. She took text from packaging and textbooks and other ephemeral sources, and arranged it as poems. Ever since I read it, I've been viewing everyday texts in a more poetic way, which makes the act of translation far more interesting.

Lower Bay

I went through Lower Bay today, and, just like everyone else in the city, I feel the need to blog about it.

The station itself looks kind of post-apocalyptic. That might be because there's no one on the platform, no one at all. I was kind of disappointed that I couldn't see what was happening in the tunnels though. I thought this was because of the poor lighting in the tunnels, but now that I look at the videos on youtube I can see that it's because the driver had done that thing where he opens the door to his little cabin the full way, blocking off the front row of seats and the front window. I suppose he has his reasons, but it seems a bit inconsiderate given the exceptional situation.

I found that Museum was handled well. There were a LOT of TTC supervisors and transit cops on the platform, and they'd verbally repeat every loudspeaker announcement, so everyone was within hearing range of someone giving the information in person. Must be a boring job for them though.

What surprised me is how quickly we got from Museum to Bloor. When I was taking a class of U of T, I went every day from Museum up to St. George, transferred to the Bloor line, then over to Yonge&Bloor to transfer back to the Yonge line to go home. Going through the Y was so much faster! Just on that basis, if they decided to start using Lower Bay again, I wouldn't disagree.

Overall it wasn't that exciting, although it must be so cool if you go in not knowing that there's another station down there.

Ethical question

Someone scratched a swastika on the wall of the elevator. Would I be helping if I were to add some more lines to the graffiti to close the "squares" formed by the swastika, thus changing it from a swastika to one large square subdivided into four small squares?

Critical thinking

I've been doing some tough thinking lately, really reflecting on myself and my role and place in the world and what I have to offer, and I've come to some pretty serious conclusions:

I am not special, not at all. I have nothing unique to contribute. Even if I were given the power to rule the world, I couldn't offer anything to make it a better place.

Okay, stop. Think about what you were thinking in response to those statements. Some of you were probably wondering what had happened to get me so depressed. Some of you were probably thinking "That's not true!" and mentally drafting a comment to convince me I'm wrong. Some of you may have been sneering at me for wallowing in angst and self-pity. But, unless you came here thinking that I have an over-inflated ego and deserve a downfall, your reaction probably wasn't positive or neutral. In our culture, those kinds of statements are not considered positive or neutral. They aren't considered healthy or normal. They're considered negative, a sign of a problem that needs fixing.

So what does this have to do with anything? They recently did a study labelling an entire generation as narcissists because, when asked to respond to certain statements, the responses of the students studied were the opposite of the statements I made above.

The Narcissistic Personality Inventory asks students to react to such statements as: "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I like to be the center of attention."

(It isn't explicitly stated in the article, but the way these tests generall work is that you give a yes or no, or a response on the agree or disagree spectrum, to the statements given.)

I don't think this is a valid indicator, because our cultural values indicate that an "agree" is the "right" answer, the "healthy" answer. I think people would be inclined to say "agree" or "yes" when they didn't actively disagree, or when they were thinking "There's nothing wrong with me in this area, I'm perfectly healthy and normal in this aspect of life." Telling someone "You're special" is a meaningless cliche, while "You're nothing special" is an actual insult. "He thinks he's special" is run-of-the-mill everyday egoism, while "He think there's nothing special about himself" borders on time to schedule a therapy appointment.

So does the fact that our culture has established "I'm special" as the norm mean that everyone actually thinks they're special? I don't think that's necessarily true either, because there isn't really any place in our culture to reflect on or question your own specialness. You can question other sacred cows, like sex or politics or religion or your basic moral values, and by the end of your first year of university you most likely already have. If you decide to change your religion or politics to something drastically unorthodox, or have kinky sex with unlikely partners, or give on up capitalism or consumerism or family values, there's a name for whatever you're doing and and online community for likeminded people. But if you decide to question whether you're actually special, there's no name for that, no community for that. If you go to a therapist because you find yourself questioning your politics or religion or sexuality, they'll help you work through the feelings around it, but won't try to change your politics or religion or sexuality. If you go to a therapist and say "I'm beginning to have doubts about whether I'm actually special," they'll probably try to get you to see that you're actually special.

Lather, rinse, repeat for making the world a better place and for wanting to be the centre of attention.

As long as we consider negative responses to these statements as signs of a problem, we can't go around indicting people for giving positive responses.

Weird framing choice

The National is doing a thing on diabetes. While making the point that weight gain and an unhealth diet affects the likelihood of diabetes, they showed footage from a Tim Hortons. The camera zoomed in on the contents of one customer's tray, then panned over to another customer's buttocks.

Weird thing: the buttocks in question weren't at all fat.

They weren't the sexiest buttocks ever at all in the world, but they certainly weren't fat.

WTF?

The problem with Little Mosque

The problem with Little Mosque is that none of the characters can say no. Right now Yassir's mother wants him to take a second wife, and Yassir doesn't just go and say "No, absolutely not." So then she goes to the imam, and the imam doesn't say outright "No, we don't do that here."

I can accept this sort of thing for sitcom plot purposes once in a while, but it happens every week!

The convert starts being a self-righteous dick, the imam never says "Um, dude, that's not what we're all about there."

Yassir's client and the mosque both need wiring done, there aren't enough electricians to do both, and Yassir doesn't say to anyone "No, I'm sorry, there aren't enough electricians." Instead he blows up the mosque.

The finance-focused archdeacon comes for a visit, and the (priest? minister? what do Anglicans call them?) stages a massive charade instead of saying "Yeah, the presence of the mosque helps us fund the church."

Call me when they start acting like grownups.

Enough about the dresses, what about the hair?

I was really surprised at the number of actresses wearing their hair long and straight for the Oscars. My hair is like that naturally, so I really don't think of it as a formal hairstyle.

You'd think I'd be happy that my hair naturally falls into an Oscar-calibre hairstyle, right? Well, it's not that simple...

The problem is that, when left to its own devices, my hair becomes lank and limp and greasy and stringy. It constantly needs to be fluffed up with a brush, the part certainly doesn't stay neat, and it tangles if you even look at it funny. I could certainly acheive, say, Gwyneth Paltrow's look for a photograph, but there's no way I could maintain it for several hours.

So what in the world did all these actresses do to keep their hair looking good? I have no idea! Everyone's talking about the dresses, but no one's talking about the hair! I've heard that mousse is involved, but it just makes me look greasy even faster.

Nonarbitrary goals are the secret to happiness

I've previously postulated that pessimism is the secret to happiness.

I think another secret to happiness is not to make your goals too specific or arbitrary. I know that conventional wisdom is to make your goals specific, but I think unless the specificness has some particular purpose, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment.

This train of thought started awhile back when I read an article (linked to via some smug CFer or another) wherein a woman was convinced that she would have her children play with wooden toys only. (Incidentally, thanks to Google for re-finding that article for me with only msn lifestyle wooden toys plastic as keywords.) It occurred to me that if something meaningless like her children playing with plastic toys disappointed her, she would never be happy.

Then I thought of my family's xmas celebrations (yes, I am an atheist; no, my family is not). We used to have all these things that the grownups made us do. Let's all gather around the piano and sing xmas carols. Let's all share opłatek. Let's take a picture of all the kids lined up by height. We grew to not like those things, and people rebelled or opted out, which always disappointed one or more grownups. But as we got older and scattered far and wide and built our lives elsewhere with other people, they grew to be more appreciative that we were still all showing up. So instead of being disappointed that not every single person wanted to gather around the piano and sing carols, they were happy that everyone was there and more or less having a pleasant time.

It's not uncommon for people to set unnecessarily specific goals. "I'm going to be married by the time I'm 30" before you even know who you're going to marry. "I'm going to teach my son how to ride a bike" before you have any children. But why 30? Why a son and why a bike? What if you don't meet your soulmate until your 32nd birthday? What if your child is born with no legs? It's better to set goals like "I will only give my heart to people who are kind to me" or "I will teach any children I might have whatever I can." That way, you won't be taking a situation in which there is nothing wrong and defining it as a failure.

"A two-liter bottle of soda"

Peejee told Davan's father that Davan drinks "a two-liter bottle of soda" every day.

"A two-liter bottle of soda"???

Do they even use litres in the US? If so, why? Y'all don't use the metric system anywhere else outside of hardcore science, do you? Is liter even a legitimate spelling variation? It looks so funny! Do there really exist people who say both soda and litre? I figured if you said litre you'd also say pop.

The effect of expectations on comprehension

Disclaimer 1: This post is about linguistics. It does veer perilously close to politics because a point of linguistic research reminded me of a current political situation, but it is not intended to be at all partisan. Please consider the political aspect as nothing more than the most readily-available practical example, and please keep any partisan debate or discussion out of this comment thread. This is a linguistics-only zone.

Disclaimer 2: The following is an excerpt from page 195 of Deborah Tannen's Talking from 9 to 5: How Women's and Men's Conversational Styles Affect Who Gets Heard, Who Gets Credit, and What Gets Done at Work. I am copying it here because a) I'm under the impression that doing so is fair use, and b) Dr. Tannen can explain it much better than I can. If this is a copyright problem, please let me know nicely in the comments and I'll be happy to remove it. Any typos are my own.

The effect of expectations on comprehension is also supported by research. Speech-communication professor Donald Rubin was concerned with complaints by students at his university that they had trouble understanding foreign-born teachig assistants. Rubin suspected that their preconeptions about foreign-looking speakers being difficult to understand might be playing a powerful role. to test this idea, he tape-recorded a four-minut lecture given by an American-born woman from Ohio, then played the tape to two groups of students at two different times. As the students listended to the leture on tape, they saw projected on a screen a photogrpah of the person they were told was the lecturer. In one case, they saw a photograph of a Caucasian woman, in the other, a Chinese woman. [...] He foundt hat the students wh othought they wer elistening to a Chinese lctruer scored lower on the comprehension test than those who thought they were listening to a white American - and their lower socres were about the same as those for a third group who had heard a lecture given by a real Chinese teaching assistant with a heavy accent.

The first thing this made me think of was Stéphane Dion. A lot of people have been saying lately that his English is insuffcient, which surprises me because it's quite clear that he's thinking in English. As a translator, I have been trained to identify gallicisms in English, so that I may eliminate them and make my French to English translations sound more natural. From what I've heard, Stéphane Dion's English has fewer gallicisms than a bilingual Ottawa anglophone's English. When you can hear all the mistakes he isn't making, it's quite clear that he's either thinking in English, or quite deliberately making a concerted (and successful) effort to give everything he says in English an English syntax.

But people still think he's difficult to understand. Why is that? Idealistic Pragmatist's readers suggest that it's his accent, which it may well be. I listen to French accents all day, so I can't tell you what they sound like to the average anglo. However, I asked some anglos in my life, and they said yes, he does have an accent, but it's not that bad. He's comprehensible. My parents' consensus is that they've had professors with worse accents and learned perfectly well from them.

So bearing all this in mind and then reading Tannen all made me think: what if Dion's English isn't really bad, but people have heard that it's bad and then they're having trouble because they expect it to be bad? This is impossible to test, of course. If someone thinks they don't understand something, then they don't understand it. You can't go around saying, "Oh, you don't really have trouble understanding that, you just think you have trouble understanding it." So if people are suggestable enought, they are actually going to be unable to understand him. I wonder if political strategists know enough about linguistics to do something like this on purpose?