life in mokievision

May started with a terrible essay (broken down fabulously over at Captain Awkward and by Dr. Nerdlove), in which a man tried to shame his ex for refusing to maintain a relationship with him. Not the relationship, but any relationship. By his own account, she had moved on and found someone new, and she didn't want to hang out with him and rehash the drama of their now-defunct relationship over and over. She did not want to be in a relationship with him, and she did not want to be in that dysfunctional not-relationship with him, either, and so she called it quits - except he doesn't think she has the right to do that. He believes he has veto power over an ex-girlfriend's right to decide who she associates with, because he hasn't got closure (read: the change to debate-to-death her decision to end the relationship). His response to her cutting off contact was to ignore it, keep poking, keep popping up, even after being threatened with a restraining order.

And he painted her decision to cut contact with him as abusive. Yes, seriously. He suggested it was abusive of her to expect to decide for herself who she did or did not interact with. He also suggested that abusive men are abusive because they feel powerless, hint hint, ladies.

Y'know, in case you wondered why she threatened him with a restraining order.

Then, less than two weeks after that essay made the rounds, an asshole declared war on women, and a world that would give women to other men but not him. He killed his roommates, grabbed his guns, and set out for "the hottest sorority" on campus, because. Because girls never approached him, and would have rejected him had he ever bothered to approach them. Because girls pick jerks (who actually ask them out) instead of 'gentlemen' like him (who sit around waiting for ass to be handed to them, like Sleeping Booty, and never put themselves out there for outright rejection). Because when he attempted to assault some women months earlier (what a gentleman!), some nearby men had intervened and kicked his ass. Because he was a misogynistic shitstain driven to obtain riches and women, and frustrated with a life that did not magically hand him these things. Because he was an entitled, spoilt rotten adolescent piece of walking, talking crap who'd had everything handed to him, and his response to adulthood and the requirement that he grow up and work for things was magical thinking (use The Secret to win the lottery!) and an inevitable tantrum.

Because girls aren't psychic - but thank God for instinct and intuition.

And the apologists poured out. It wasn't misogyny because look, he killed more men! - despite the videos and the manifesto and forum posts in which he declared his hatred for women and that he was going to kill as many as possible, and the fact that he only failed because he was utterly incompetent even at being a super-villain. It wasn't misogyny, because look, he had Aspergers, and oh why did no one get him treatment! - despite the fact that autism isn't a mental illness, the mentally ill are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence, he was receiving help and his family did attempt to get him committed out of fear he was a threat to himself and others. It wasn't misogyny, because he was probably gay! - and what the fuck is in the water over at Fox News? Seriously now.

And worse, there were the creepy comments. "If even one girl had put out..." What? Pussy would have cured him? No. Or the NYPost's naming and shaming of a girl from grade school that didn't even remember the asshole, though her father did - specifically, he remembered him as a creepy little fuck.

May ended with women on Twitter sharing times they were harassed, intimidated or assaulted - and being harangued by men who were upset because this conversation about women being harassed, intimidated and assaulted was not taking place within the context of how it hurt men to be associated with this and discussed this way. They insisted that the conversation must begin with how feminists discuss men, and must include caveats that specifically let certain men (them) off the hook, because somehow, simply saying that a man raped you and the police didn't take it seriously is slandering all men, because this is really all about men's feelings, isn't it?

So let's start June off better, with Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds, in which a nerdy guy calls out the pop culture nerd narrative as insulting to and unhealthy for nerdy guys and women alike.

Finally, the perfect response to the usual You can't criticize nonsense.

You know what I'm talking about. The thin-skinned writer who gets irate and insists that you can't criticize his work because you're not a best-selling author. The artist's friend who overhears you point out that the figure is a little stiff and loudly interjects that you're just jealous because you can't draw. The asshole who whips out a snotty variant of "Those who can't do, teach," or in this case, "What qualifies you to teach? If you were an expert, you'd be doing!" That nonsense.

Here it is, courtesy of a commenter (wlubake) at Scriptshadow: "This is asinine. Teaching comes from analyzing a craft. It is a completely different skill set than having the creativity to actually perform the craft."

Fuck, yes. It is a completely different skill set. Teaching and creating involve different skills. Performing and analyzing involve different skills. The skills needed to mentally deconstruct a work, analyze the pieces, and offer that analysis to others in a way that they can understand - those aren't the skills the writer or artist or chef or whatever uses to put the work together in the first place.

Of course, the opposite is also true - just as your favorite writer about their experiences with writing groups, and that one participant who thinks applying regurgitated writing blog tips to a story is the same thing as analyzing.

Work stress + lack of sleep + nifty TV show = sad, sad tendency to play catch-up with the TV show blogging, and then to comment on month-old TV-related posts with things that have already been kinda sorta sorted out, because in the moment of I kinda sorta forget.

"Is that canned chicken?"

With two bowls of slow-cooked and shredded chicken breast in the fridge? No. Why would I open a can of shredded chicken when I already have shredded chicken?

Ugh.

I prefer fresh ingredients over tinned veggies and heavily processed boxfuuds, not out of a puritanical fear of any edibles that come from a container but because I'm cheap: ingredients go farther than prepackaged meals, and I don't have to worry about the sugar/salt/fat tango*, or the corn/dairy industry shoehorning in fillers to earn those subsidies. I keep a good supply of tinned and boxed food on hand for weather troubles and scheduling issues, but generally access to fresh food isn't an issue, since I live within walking distance of two supermarkets and a summer veggie stand. Time isn't even an issue: in the same time it takes a Pinterest mama to pull up a "3 cans + 2 boxes = homemade meal!" recipe, open her boxes, Instagram it and throw it in the oven, I can have my ingredients sliced, diced and cooking.

It just doesn't make sense to rely on boxfuuds in my situation.

If I don't tell older relatives what the meal is made of, it's the tastiest damn thing they've ever put in their mouths. If I reveal that a meal doesn't contain at least one can of Campbell's Cream Of Soup, or one box of Cheezy Noodle Product, they look at the dish like it's toxic. I don't know if it's generally generational or just my family, but there seems to be some kind of deep distrust of, well, cooking. Like it's not food unless someone opened a box.

And forget leftovers. Forget any big meal meant to store or stretch over several days, unless it's boiled (to death) ham'n'beans. "Eh. I'm not in the mood for that." Mood? You don't get to be in the mood to waste $15 of chicken that you requested.

"Is that canned chicken?" Would she know the difference without asking? Nope. And yet she didn't want it unless it came from a can.

No wonder my grandfather was such a cheap bastard, if this was what he was up against.

If you're not quite ranted out after all this, I offer: The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater

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* It's difficult to maintain tastiness in a product meant to sit on a shelf for months at a time. Boxfuuds therefore rely a lot on salt, sugar and fat for flavor. If the box claims to be low in one, look over the ingredients carefully, because it's probably high in one (or both) of the others to make up for the cut.

What can I say that hasn't already been said? News of the shooting was devastating. The national discussions it started on gun control, mental health access and the role of the media have been frustrating, but were overdue. The national discussions some people tried to start using the tragedy suggest that any mental health care reform needs to start with our politicians and celebrities. Please, won't someone think of Victoria Jackson?

On the same day that a man shot 20 children and 7 adults in Connecticut, a man in China slashed at least 22 children with a knife, a man in Indiana was arrested after threatening to set his wife on fire and then shoot up a nearby elementary school, and a teen in Oklahoma was arrested after plotting to lure students and faculty into the school gym and open fire. In the week since, a man walked into an Alabama hospital and opened fire, a Maryland teen was put in psychiatric care after concerned students reported that he had detailed information on the school building and security, and a Utah elementary school student brought a gun to school and threatened his classmates, citing fear of being killed like the kids at Newtown.

Maybe the world is always this crazy, and we just spend so much of our time focused on our own little corners that it's usually easier to ignore.

Mental Health Reform
Yes, please.

Though speculation abounds about the attacker's mental health, his actions point to a larger societal problem, and if we can't see it objectively in our own backyards, we can observe it unfolding in China, where attacks on schools are on the rise. Some experts attribute these attacks to mental illness, while others talk about frustration with rapid social changes, unemployment and general disenfranchisement.

I don't think that's an either/or. Dismissing these attacks as mental illness fails to address seriously the debilitating stress that drives people to the point where exploding seems like a solution; talking about them only as frustrated men downplays the value of access to good mental health care in favor of talking up punishment and armed guards. We need a healthy middle ground, where a person doesn't need a diagnosis of mental illness to get serious help, and doesn't feel stigmatized for seeking out the help they need.

Gun Control
Social media has been rife with strife, hasn't it? In one corner, people waving photos of an armed Israeli teacher with her students as proof that we need guns in schools--nevermind that the photo is of a guard, not a teacher, and that under Israel's restrictive gun control policies, citizens wouldn't even have access to as much firepower as the attacker had that day. In the other corner, people pointing out that the 22 children involved in the Chinese knife attack will all survive, so eager to make the point that they gloss over the alarming larger reality that schools are increasingly seen as a viable target by the disgruntled.

To share my biases upfront: my grandfather was a hunter, my cousins still are, and I know people who work in dangerous vocations that have to be armed for their own protection, so I know that there is such a thing as a responsible gun owner. At the same time, I also believe there's no reason for your average everyday citizen to have an assault rifle in their home, and that the discussion about gun control in our country is muddled by an unhealthy combative mindset that has latched onto guns as symbols of power and agency.

Examples of that mindset? Start with politicians pushing to arm teachers, under the assumption that at least one teacher with a gun could easily take out a gunman and reduce the danger. In reality, all armed teachers would introduce to the situation is crossfire: statistics tell us that accuracy drops among trained police officers when shooting moves from target practice to real situations, and psychology tells us that humans are consciously unwilling and subconsciously sabotaged when firing on other humans. (Yes, that's a Cracked article. Their explanation is a more interesting read.)

This kind of thinking is dangerously related to the kind of thinking that says, "I'll get a gun and show them all that they messed with the wrong guy." This kind of thinking isn't the solution--it's the problem. It's the kind of thinking that got an unarmed teenager stalked and shot by an armed junior detective wannabe after the real police told him not to engage, and which had half the country arguing if the wannabe had the right to 'stand his ground' and fire on the unarmed kid that he was stalking through the kid's own neighborhood. It's the kind of thinking that led a grown man to fire into a minivan full of teenagers because their music was too loud.

Whether or not we manage to come to a consensus on the issue of accessibility to guns, we have to address the connection between anger and armament in our culture. We've gotten the idea that waving weapons around is a legitimate way to express our frustration, even to the point of bragging about it on cable news stations. Is it any wonder a segment of the population carries out that threat?

The Media, the Politicians, the Deities and the Wingnuts
By midweek, even the media was questioning its presence in Newtown, and the value of the story vs. the empathy of its actions.

Sadly, some of us have gotten so entrenched in the politics of empathy that we've started to lose hold of the real thing.

Politically and/or religiously-minded individuals tried to stick the tragedy to their favorite hobby-horses. On the right, Mike Huckabee blamed the 'removal' of God from schools (nevermind what that says about attacks in places of worship), Victoria Jackson tried to equate it with abortion, James Dobson blamed it (and everything else) on the gays, and Ted Nugent blamed 'political correctness and moral decline', if you're inclined to take a tongue-lashing about morality from a man who gained legal guardianship over a teenager so he could have sex with her. On the left, there were snark remarks about 'arming those evil union teachers' and a demand to talk gun control before the families even knew if their children were among the slain.

For me, none of that tops Charlotte Allen's error-ridden misogynistic New Review essay in which she blames the "feminized setting" of the school, stating that "women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers," lamenting that there were no men on staff to leap into action, that "even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys" might have taken the attacker out had they not been pushed to hide like scared little girls. It's a batshit revisionist view of events that ignores two brave women who rushed to try to stop him, insults the custodian who saved lives not by flinging a pail at an armed man but by running through the building warning teachers and students to take cover, and denigrates teachers who saved lives by concentrating on getting kids out of the line of fire rather than throwing themselves into it.

And, on the other side, those pointing out that the heroes of Newtown were all women (sorry, custodian!), and waxing philosophical about the differences between the genders, as if male teachers would not have given their lives for their students in the same situation.

But can we say that they're at least learning? Between Anderson Cooper's refusal to use the attacker's name on the air, and the media's greater focus on the victims rather than the gunman, the media seems to have figured out that they don't have to feed that morbid curiosity or give the attacker a posthumous platform. If this holds up, it's already a great step forward.

I will not dream about politics tonight. I will not dream about politics tonight. I will not dream about politics tonight...¹

But I'll sure as hell write about it. I seem to be writing more about politics now than I did during the year leading up to this election.

For a few minutes this week past, it seemed as if the crazy spell was broken. The shrieking prophets of doom were temporarily dumbstruck. The viewers blinked out the sleepy dust, stretched and asked what time it was. The moderates dared to raise their hands and suggest rethinking the party's policy of political martial law. Everyone took a little step back from the Cliffs of Insanity.

A few folks asked if we could stop catering to the fringe now, and start work on "a message that works for people who represent all of America."² There were many nods; turning a blind eye to the tinfoil behatted birthers was not only embarrassing, it was also counterproductive in reaching out to "a segment of society whose members have often been discriminated against through the types of disqualification-hunts that [rabid birther] Donald Trump engaged in so vigorously."³ And, as liberal Rachel Maddow pointed out (with only moderate gloating), the idea behind the two-party system is that those two parties come at problems from two different angles and hash it out; it breaks down if one party dedicates itself entirely to keeping anything at all from getting done in the name of destroying the political career of one particular president.

Alas, it was not meant to be. Or at least, not yet.

Despite his attempt at a classy concession speech, Romney threw out a snarky parting shot about Obama winning on the basis of 'gifts' to targeted voters. The gist of the message is common sense: the Democratic campaign tailored its approach to a wide range of voting blocs, emphasizing Obama's stance on reproductive rights to female voters, on immigration issues to Latino voters, on student loans to young voters, etc.--while the Republican campaign seemed to target only angry white guy voters. The language of the message, on the other hand, is loaded with the same angry white guy rhetoric that the party has used for four years to slyly stir Teapublicans into a foaming rage of willful misunderstanding. Off in a family room somewhere, someone's uncle is ranting at his family that Obama literally handed out presents in exchange for votes, and that's the goal of this rhetoric. The stupid, counterproductive goal.

And now the conspiracy engines at Fox News have smelled fresh blood, proclaiming voter fraud because areas of Pennsylvania went 100% to Obama. It seems incomprehensible to them that in predominantly black urban areas, Obama got nearly all of the vote, despite the campaign writing off black voters and urban voters in the first place, and pre-election polls showing Romney's support among black voters to be so ridiculously low that it registered as 0%. But again, beneath the bewilderment that they can't find a single Romney voter in some areas, the message they're sending is one of disenfranchisement: there shouldn't be that many black people voting, and if there are, it must be fraud. It can't be that they were motivated to get out and vote--it must be that they're dishonest and cheating the system.

With the Right torn between those who want to 'double-down' and those who want to pull back to a more moderate platform, I've seen many suggestions that this is not the end of our partisan woes, but just the beginning of the GOP's own less-than-civil war.

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¹ I wrote this bit last night, and it worked! I didn't dream of politics! I dreamt of editing text...
² "David Frum: Why Mitt Romney Lost the 2012 Presidential Election (VIDEO)," The Huffington Post 14 November 2012.
³ John Dickerson, "Why Romney Never Saw It Coming," Slate 9 November 2012.

It has been suggested by someone who is very, shall we say, 'right', that I'm actually seething about something else that I can't do anything about. That anger that I can't fix is snaking its way out of my molten core and finding its way up to the surface through minor fissures here and there, causing things that should be small nuisances, like unclear instructions, to become sinkholes of raaaaaaaaaaaaaage.

Damn! I hate it when other people are right.

Realizing it helps. I can see where I tried to convince myself that I wasn't that angry over the thing that's making me seethe, since (a) it's a stupid thing to feel angry over, and (b) I can't do anything about it. And I can see where trying to shove that issue into the 'minor nuisance' box knocked all the real nuisances out of the box and all out of proportion, since (a) they were legitimate (if minor) issues, and (b) I could do things about them, including raaaaaaaaaaaaaage. It was easier to get angry at a few small, clear targets that I could knock out or blow up about than at a vague and currently unfixable thing.

You know what else helps? Mocha coffee hazelnut spread stirred into warm almond milk. No, wait, I mean, talking about it. But that too.

And another thing pointed out to me: socializing wipes me out and makes me cranky. I know, I shouldn't need this pointed out, since I point it out so often, but my Friday was full of more people and places full of people than usual (ooh, that's sad), so I should have expected to be spending my Saturday and Sunday waving a knife around re-establishing all perimeters, prison-style.

So now I feel stupid about being so tetchy for the better part of a month, and guilty for feeling stabby at someone (okay, everyone) yesterday, and waving a knife around, prison-style. (Joke! Don't call CPS!) And drained, because that's a lot of realizing and feeling to be doing all at once.

(Also, like I should be posting some emo song lyrics or something...)

[Related posts: I'm all out of fucks, because I used them all in this post. / All my fucks are back! / Well, that was brief.]

A couple of quotes from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe seem particularly relevant right now.

First, the host: "Repeatedly showing us a killer's face isn't news, it's just rubbernecking, and what's more, this sort of coverage only serves to turn this murdering little twat into a sort of nihilistic pin-up boy."

And I agree.

Second, from the same, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz:

We've had 20 years of mass murderers, throughout which I have repeatedly told CNN and our other media, 'If you don't want to propagate more mass murders, don't start the story with sirens blaring. Don't have photographs of the killer. Don't make this 24/7 coverage. Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story, not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero.

Do localize this story to the affected community and make it as boring as possible in every other market, because every time we have intense saturation coverage of a mass murder, we expect to see one or two more within a week. (Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, 25 March 2009)

Update: The experts may expect to see one or two more attacks within a week, but I think we all underestimate how many plain old-fashioned assholes will pop out of the woodwork.

[Related posts: We never learn. / Let's play Armchair Profilers!]

I keep vowing to improve my social skills, and I keep failing miserably at it.

No, I'm not fishing for reassurance. I'm very aware of my flaws in this regard, that's all. I don't remember birthdays, anniversaries or holidays. I rarely send presents, and when I do it's almost never on time or in alignment with the proper social etiquette for such things. (Oh hullo, box that I should have sent dracunculus ages ago. Oh, her birthday was last month. Double fail!) I don't hang out much, and I don't like hanging out that involves spending money because I feel guilty over what I'm not spending money on instead, like, say, that new fridge. Or pants. Egads, do I need new pants. I've never mastered the art of dropping in on people, and I always feel creepy when I'm visiting folks just by virtue of being in the room. For example, I'm pretty sure saying that after bringing up pants was pretty creepy.

When you think about it, it's kind of amazing that I've even made friends. And not out of yarn and plasticine, if you dig my meaning.

Back in the retail days, I promised myself I'd hang out with the co-worker friends once in a while, but their timing was insane. Who wants to end an 8-hour shift in a popular store where you're surrounded by people by going to a popular bar where you'll be surrounded by people? Everyone except me, as it turns out. My full-time schedule frustrated non-work friends too, because I was reluctant to give up one of my days off--my few, precious, people-free days off--and not at all willing to 'just tell the boss you can't work that day.'

I'll give them the former, because that's all me being a hermit. But the latter? Asking me to either blow off an already set work day or go to war to rearrange it so that I can go hang out with someone who doesn't understand, "I'm working"? Who asks that? (In my experience, the guy who was on his third write-up and about to be fired, the girl who complained that management wouldn't give her the hours she thought she deserved, and that one relative who never understood why I took jobs so seriously, mostly because she rarely had one. But that was supposed to be rhetorical.)

So I thought it was all explained, all just bad timing combined with my crappy hours. Then I ditched it all for the freelancing gig, which theoretically means I can set my own hours, or at least carve out more of them for other people, and instead I've only gotten worse about it.

Do I prioritize work first because it's so sporadic that I don't dare take it for granted? Sometimes, yes. Like the party I was actually looking forward to and planning on attending up until an hour beforehand, when I had to admit defeat and settle in for the night to fix an exploded work project that was due omgrightnow. I'm still grumpy about that, but it was a big next-month's-rent gig and I couldn't afford to blow it off.

And sometimes, when a nine-to-fiver tells me, "Now that I'm off we should go do something," as if I don't even have a schedule to be taken into consideration. It makes me want to hand them the latest mammoth undertaking and tell them, "No, finish that, then we'll go do something."

But other times I know that, even if the work is pouring in right now, it can wait and I should go be social, but then I tell myself, "But maybe if I get this done there will be more work, and what if urgent work comes in while I'm out? And going out means finding pants and spending money..."

There's nothing else for it but to keep trying, I guess. I wonder if Tina's game for getting together. Maybe we can go shopping for pants...

You can make a lot of jokes about Missouri...

No, really. Go ahead. With my blessing, even.

Earlier this month, St. Louis Public Radio (which still exists, despite this being a red state!) reported that the state's House voted in favor of making gun owners with a concealed carry permit a protected group that "cannot be fired, denied benefits, or otherwise discriminated against"--a protection that the state's gays currently do not have.

But I see a convenient work-around, my fellow Missourians...