Categories
People

Women can be critical of each other

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m coming down with something and weblogging is actually becoming a least interesting thing to do, but I wanted to toss something out…something absolutely mind boggling.

Women can be critical of each other.

Yes, that’s right: women can be critical of each other. We can be critical, we can be snippy, we can get angry, we can quarrel, we can dislike each other, we can really dislike each other — we can feel the entire spectrum of emotion for each other from love to hate. It’s OK.

I’ve read twice today about how it’s harmful for women and our visibility when we’re critical of each other. That’s hogwash–it’s not saying anything that’s harming ourselves. The men are critical of each other all the time. Why then, can someone please explain to me, can’t women do the same?

We will never be visible if we shut each other down. If we assume that women can only speak of each other in warm, nurturing ways we are shutting each other down. We’re letting our own stereotypes strangle us.

Stop it! You’re beginning to really piss me off!

One last thing: I think the Combos commercials are terrific.

Categories
People

Einstein is human

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Thanks to 3 Quarks Daily (again), a pointer to a story covering the press reaction to the release of thousands of pages of Einstein’s personal correspondence. Tongue in cheek, the article is titled, Einstein in Lust. In it the author, Joshua Roebke, writes:

“Phys-sex Genius” wrote the headline wizards at the New York Post. Fox News, another Murdochian outlet, posted a story by on-air personality Neil Cavuto to its website, titled, “Albert Einstein: Genius, Stud Muffin.” “E = Einstein, the galactic womanizer,” quipped The Sunday Times, UK. “Albert Einstein, sex-fiend” wrote the popular blog Boing Boing. Even a member of the extended Seed family, the ScienceBlog Pure Pedantry, included a post with the title, “Scientific Pimp.”

Einstein’s relationships with various women has never been a secret. Why this information would cause such a fooflah at a time when Paris Hilton faux pax are the stuff of legends is beyond me. Is this is supposed to make Einstein more ‘human’? More interesting? Einstein’s always been human. He’s the most human, brilliant person I know of. As for interesting, lordie, something about his work comes to mind.

Another intriguing note in the article is that while the Western publications focused on Einstein’s Love Life, the East focused on his work. The author points to his earlier work, Big in Japan, which discusses how in countries such as South Korea, China, and Japan, research scientists are hotter than rock stars.

In 2001, the Japanese government drafted a state policy that focused on winning 30 Nobel Prizes in 50 years. If the results of a 2002 poll are any indication, it might work: Japanese boys aspire to be research professors more than to be baseball stars, a level of academic aspiration not seen in the West since the space race. Science celebrity has moved East, building a culture that treats Nobels like Oscars and new discoveries like home-run records

(Hopefully, the Japanese government is also encouraging Japanese girls in science, though I’m not optimistic in this regard.)

The West might want to get its priorities straight: lust is cheap, science lasts forever.

Categories
Critters People

The Rule of Small Deer

There were three deer on the path in front of me.

They didn’t run when they saw me. They just stood there staring at me. Finally, as one, they moved: one pawed the ground, one began eating the leaves from a small bush, the third started walking towards me.

Deer are supposed to run from people, not approach us. I walked closer to the deer coming towards me and it didn’t stop.  I stamped my foot and it didn’t stop. I raised my arms and waved and it didn’t pause, didn’t blink, didn’t stop. I turned around to go back and only then did it head back to the other two.

I turned around, back towards the deer. The little bold one swung around back to me, as if it were on a string pulled by my movements. I began to walk towards it, thinking this time it would shy away. It didn’t. I moved closer until I could see the ragged edges of its fur and the tiny black at the center of its eyes. Still, it came.

I didn’t know what to make of the deer, but I could imagine.

I imagined it had run from humans one too many times. Run from the food and the best footing and the last of the sunshine. Run back into the trees and the shadows and the low branches waiting to trip it and the bushes already picked clean.

Probably decided to hell with it. Yes, that’s it. To hell with it. You push anything hard enough, even a small deer, and they’ll think to hell with it.

Categories
People Photography Weblogging

Lonely impulse

One of my favorite webloggers has been very quiet and I did my usual, which was go into the comments of his last post in preparation of putting in a comment about being quiet, missing him, that sort of thing. Another had already been there, and commented the same, but what stopped me was the response. The weblogger wrote back about getting inspired of this topic or that, but asking himself was he going to a pleasant and helpful person with his writing, and upon answering himself, marked the items as read and went about doing other things.

I thought about emailing the weblogger and telling him he’s missed, and he’s cherished, and we love all his bits no matter if they were “pleasant and helpful” or “acerbic” and even more helpful. But I decided, and this is the reason I don’t name him specifically, that he has to make his own decision about the value of his weblog to himself–I have no right as reader to scold him, as if he’s withheld a lolly by not writing to his weblog. As a reader, the only right I have is to read, or not.

Being a person who also feels friendship with the weblogger, I have even fewer rights. The only right we have is to feel friendship, express it, but we can’t demand a thing in return. We may think we’ve given a precious gift, and as such the other owes us something in return. They don’t owe us a damn thing, and that makes life interesting, challenging, and sometimes, disappointing.

The greatest leap of faith is not based on how we feel about God, all apologies to Kierkegaard. It’s how we feel about one another. Those who study yoga, who sit in silent contemplation of self for hours at a time–they may think they are discovering much about themselves, but what they are doing is creating a walled garden about themselves; building barriers against the binds and ties with others; these connections that we can’t control and that can go from gentle and fulfilling companionship to wild fury in an instance–like the mustang on harness, lipping sugar from our hands one moment, demanding freedom with sinewy strength and desperation the next.

I can empathize with my friend, the weblogger. I’ve felt the last few months that much of what I’m saying seems to be counter to something, or in disagreement with someone–verbally, I’ve been drop kicking the puppies, kittens, and bunnies in our midst. And why not? They raise their butts in the air, they taunt us, demanding kicks. And when I blaze forth in words, the site seems to come alive and sparkle and we’re all engaged and everything seems to click. Most importantly, no puppy, kitten, or bunny was truly harmed in the writing of the screed. When I kick the proffered butts, I send the puppy or kitten or bunny flying higher than it would reach, sitting on the ground looking harmless. And cute. And innocuous.

When the coin of the realm is attention, we all benefit.

Nothing changes, though. I have not built anything during that time. I have not created a great work of writing or art. I have not added to my book, or worked on that new RDF application I’ve had in mind. All I’ve done is fluff what was already fluffy, and polish the shiny parts.

But the attention feels so good! What, you think that for all my talk of disdaining attention I don’t like it? We all like it. Some of us even crave it–like that horse and the sugar. We crave the feeling of connectivity–I bet even the most popular of us counts comments, feeling them, fondling them like sugar cubes in their pockets. That’s an apt analogy, too, because the attention we get is the sugar that also keeps us acquiescent and tamed to the hand.

A fortune I found in a cookie yesterday read:

Your artistic talents win the approval and applause of others.

Emily Dickinson sat at her desk in her home for decades, writing poem after poem, which she would sew into little books and then place into a chest. She asked that they be burned on her death. We, of course, betrayed her to our own good. Most of us, however, write what could be safely burned with little loss. That is our purpose: we are Not Emily. The Emilies need us Not Emily. If we were all Emily there would be no Emily.

It wasn’t just her talent that set Emily apart from other poets. Emily’s writing is unique in that her words are written in a state of being that is absolutely adrift from any other human being. She had achieved a perfect dis-connectivity in her writing. There was no desire to please, or displease in her work; there was no reaching out; no attempt to initiate emotion in others. She was both creator and consumer–the play and the audience. Her writing just was.

Emily found the same state discovered by the Irish airman in my favorite William Butler Yeats poem, An Irish Airman Forsees His Death: she had found her lonely impulse of delight.

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Should my friend return to weblogging? Well that’s a decision he’ll have to make for himself and one with which we have no influence. I won’t lure him, though, into returning, with hints of attention and promises of continued readership and expressions of kinship. He knows I like his writing, but that may not always be. He knows I like and respect him, but people change and life goes on.

Categories
People

Human heat sinks

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Kathy Sierra has a post complimenting Robert Scoble on his decision to stay away from the negatives. One paragraph is:

The notion of “Happy People” was tossed around in the Robert-Lost-His-Mind posts as something ridiculous at best, dangerous at worst. One blogger equated “happy people” with “vacuous”. The idea seems to be that “happy people” implies those who are oblivious to the realities of life, in a fantasy of their own creation, and without the ability to think critically. The science, however, suggests just the opposite.

She then goes into a discussion on the neuroscience of happy versus not people and myths of happiness and happy people and so on. We have to assume that her use of the term ‘vacuous’ is in reference to my post–it’s not a common word. I gather she believes my post must not be ‘happy’ enough in order to link–which, indirectly, makes a statement about my ‘value’ to the discussion. For all the mention of the Dali Lama and the power of positive thinking, this is an antagonistic action.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem with much of this discussion: the words don’t necessarily match the actions. A person can use a great number of high sounding, very positive words, all the while committing a negative act. Conversely, a person can use any number of negative words, or what can be perceived to be a negative tone, in the hopes of accomplishing a positive event.

We’re basing all of this on ‘words’, not intents. Doing this penalizes those who speak bluntly, while the less blunt, or less direct, end up being shiny all over. Where are the plain speakers? Where is the writing that unabashedly accepts the consequences for the intent behind the words?

Robert Scoble may talk about wanting to filter out those critical of him, and that don’t add to the ‘value’ to the conversation. What is value? When you spend time reading a person’s writing, you’ve already given them ‘value’ because you’ve given them your time. Anything negative you say in response to the writing has to be balanced against the fact that you gave of your time. I value time–it would have to be almighty negative for it to tip the scales against.

Robert and Kathy mention ‘happy’. What is happy? Is it a state of mind, or a coy turn of phrase? I have seen a person walk into a room and eviscerate another, leaving them with no dignity, no respect, all the while smiling and using the sweetest of terms. Is the perpetrator then a ‘happy’ person? They have all the markings of one.

Forget the neuroscience and new age blather: what is happy? If both Kathy and Robert are going to define how people must behave to be part of their circle and have value, then I think we’re entitled to ask them to define, in their own terms, ‘happy’. This way, we can then use this measurement with the only people that matter: Robert and Kathy.

You know what a truly happy person is to me? In the context of this environment, and discussion? It’s a person where you could say anything in their comments, and it just flows off their back, like water off a duck. The Dali Lama that Kathy mentions. They may not like the words, they may be saddened, especially if the person saying the words is a friend–they may even moderate the comment; but their happiness could not be impacted by such an ephemeral event. Fortunately, most of us just aren’t the Dalia Lama–aren’t that happy. It’s a good thing, too, because the Dali Lama’s strength isn’t in his own lack of anger, but his ability to generate outraged anger in others.

But this isn’t about anger, and this isn’t comment moderation. If this was about comment moderation, this discussion wouldn’t be happening. Comment moderation is an old topic–do what you want, end of story. This is about defining whether another person is contributing value, and basing this value on some artificial criteria labeled euphemistically ‘happy’. And what is happy? What is happy behavior in weblogging? Is it the words, or the intent of the words that determines ‘happy’?

I’d rather someone who speaks frequently, bluntly, intent plain to see in their phrases–face to face with those who they would criticize. The words may be negative, but the intent is not to slyly undermine or slay with innuendo–no whispers hidden in honeyed words. No, the intent matches the words. One can then engage, or not; but at a minimum, one is given that option.

The person who speaks softly, all bright yellows and sunshine glee, all the while they look out at you from the corners of their eyes–to all appearances, they are happy. Oh, look at them! They are so happy! Yet they can take your energy more quickly than the harshest critic, leaving you frustrated, and discouraged.

They are human heat sinks.

Both Kathy and Robert have a habit of indirectly referencing what others write without directly letting their readers know the source. To all intents and purposes, they’re moderating the discussion, not just their comments. More importantly, they use ‘good’ words, but it has a negative intent. They may say they do this because they don’t want to engage the negative people. If this is so, then why do they continue to engage the negative people?

Enough time and energy spent on this discussion. More than enough.

Jeneane who is rather blunt in her writing had this to say in comments at Kathy’s:

So, let’s get real: Moderate for spam, anonymous, and annoying commenters, and take the heat for whom you delete.

Puffing it up as some grand step toward a better life is just a little bit unbelievable.

Okay, I’m off to meditate.