Category: life

Over at Slate.com, Josh Levin is running the week-long series “How is America going to end?”

This kind of thing is internet crack to science fiction writers, screenwriters, readers and moviegoers; survivalists; and those who are convinced that God Will Punish America For (giving rights to bad people, legalizing abortion and flag-burning and medical mar-i-joo-ana, putting a black man in the white house, fill in your own blank). And it’s also mighty sobering. I bet your average Roman didn’t seriously consider the dissolution of empire until it was breaking down his front door, and I don’t either — not because I lack imagination, but because most of my bandwidth is taken up with daily priorities and interactions with family and friends and my interior creative life.

But people who are not me are thinking about these things, and I’m going to follow them on their journey this week. Want to come along? Start with Levin’s introduction/overview — lots of interesting links — and then move on to a discussion with four futurists about their theories.

And be sure to play Choose Your Own Apocalypse! Scroll over the icons on the Apocalypse Board to see your options, and find more complete descriptions of each choice in this single-page list).

Let me know what you think.

I went wandering through the internet a few days ago and found these quotes, and was moved to put them together into a little story.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
 
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
 
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
 
(Vaclav Havel, Dale Carnegie and Raymond Williams)

I have a complicated relationship with hope and her sisters — power, will, fortune, privilege, guts, blind dumb stubbornness. I struggle with the difference between “being realistic” and quivering on the track with my eyes closed while the train comes roaring through, because frankly the difference isn’t always so apparent to me. And here’s the thing: sometimes what passes for hope in this world isn’t so different from that quivering helplessness either. It’s not always easy to know whether to stand or step aside or actually leap and grapple.

But I do know that I like today’s little story: it’s not about being helpless or willfully blind; and I never want to be convinced by despair.

My mom was telling me yesterday that as she gets older, she has begun having amazing dreams — not the usual your-car-turns-into-a-coffee-cup fare, but coherent linear experiences of beautiful places and great conversations with people she loves (dead or alive). All of it vivid. All of it feeling completely real, without that sense of wacky slow-time or quick-time that so often comes with the dreamscape. And she says that even frightening moments aren’t scary anymore: they’re just… interesting.

She tells me that going to sleep these days is like going to the movies. Although to me it sounds like more than that — it sounds like living another layer of life.

How cool is that?

I love the few dreams I’ve had with clarity and heft beyond the usual vapor of random brain-sparks. With conversations that felt real even after I woke; with feelings that carried me smiling or wondering through my day. I’ve tried to learn lucid dreaming without much success so far. I’d love to learn to fly in dreams, or to recognize when something scary is happening and change it for the better — but really what I want more than anything is to have experiences in dreams that are as meaningful and real to me as the waking moments of my “real” life. I think it would be astonishing to have those wandering, wondering conversations with people I miss because they are dead, or on the other side of the world, or because I never met them. I might learn so much. I might mend so many fences, or build so many bridges, or discover new territory inside another person to explore. I might see beautiful things. I might return to the Grand Canyon or walk the beaches of Musha Cay, dance at Burning Man, talk with my great-grandmother again, check in on my best friend Shirley from 8th grade whom I still miss, make movies with all my favorite actors and have those late-night dinners on set where people show themselves in ways the camera never sees. I might stand in the front row of the best U2 concert ever, in the intimacy of a venue of 300 people where the band plays all night and none of us ever gets tired. I’d start all those conversations I was too shy or scared or polite to ever begin. I’d finish some conversations differently…

I suppose it all sounds like a great big Wish List, but somehow it feels like more. It feels as though there’s another layer of life waiting — wanting — to be lived. If I wake with the feeling of someone’s hand on my arm or the smell of the sea still strong in my nose, if it feels that real to the brain — if it feels lived — then you know, for me, that’s real enough. I don’t need to be able to touch it with my eyes open if I can feel it so strongly with my eyes closed.

I told my mum that although I’m a fairly reasonable person (especially for an artist), I’m definitely not most “adult” people’s idea of “rational” (wow, my “quote” key is getting worn out…). Mum, this is part of what I meant. My reality is relative. If it’s real to me, that’s “real” enough. I’ve found some of my strongest and most unexpected disagreements with people spring from their assertion that if something’s not real for them, it can’t be real for me either. But, you know, that’s their reality. It seems limiting to me.

I really do not want to hear the details of dreams other people have had. Blanket exception for Nicola and my parents — it was especially cool to hear my mum talk about her conversation with my Nana and my Aunt Mae. But in general I’m with Nicola on this one; dreams aren’t as interesting to hear about as they are to experience (they work much better in the movies, or in fiction, than over coffee the next morning).

But I’d love to hear what you would choose in the dreamscape if you could. What would you do, feel, be in the privacy of your mind if it could be as real as — even if not real in — your waking world?

If Mark Morford is right — and I think he is (grin) — then none of us are safe for work. And that’s fine with me. I would much rather you were imagining your heart turning to divine pudding and the thing with the giggling.

Have fun with your NSFW self today.

I said in a recent comment that I don’t need any more lessons about the abuse of women. But I’m not sure there are ever enough reminders that there are things we can do to help stop violence against women.

One thing I like about this article is its emphasis on listening rather than telling, and on giving information and presenting options rather than prescribing behavior.

When I was studying ASL, I was part of a class project to interview one of the advocates at ADWAS (Abused Deaf Women’s Advocacy Services). She told us that one of the most important things they do is give agency to the women who come in seeking help. They make sure the woman is clear on the options available to her, and then they ask her what she needs — and believe the answer, rather than deciding for the woman what would be best for her. They’ve realized that controlling people by telling them Oh no, we know what you really need is not so different from controlling them in any other way; which control is, of course, what the woman in question is seeking to escape.

She made her point by telling us the story of a Deaf woman with two kids whose husband abused her. She came to ADWAS, and she didn’t ask for help with a restraining order, or counseling, or legal services, or a place to stay: she asked for shoes for her two-year-old. The advocate told us, “Some people in women’s shelters won’t grant this kind of request, because they worry that someone is trying to take advantage of them. They push women to make a different choice. But when we asked this client why she needed shoes, she told us that her son couldn’t walk out on his own in bare feet, and she needed him to walk so she could carry the baby. So we got her shoes.”

I still have plenty of opinions about what would be good/better/best for other people; but that interview helped me change my definition of support into something that is more about the other person than it is about me. I find as I get older that my close people and I are better at saying what we actually need: Don’t fix me, just listen, or I really want to try this so please don’t tell me that it’s not going to work. Sometimes I support people when they’re making choices that I think are boneheaded or incomprehensible. But those choices are theirs to make.

And so I like the advice in this article: express my concern, be ready with information, and then listen. It may be that my friend will make choices I don’t understand. My choice is whether or not to give her shoes if that’s what she asks for; to keep the door open to her when she doesn’t do what I wish she would.

I can’t always do that. Sometimes I do feel used or manipulated, and I close the door. That’s my choice too. It’s complicated: I don’t think we owe each other rescue at any cost to ourselves, and I also don’t want to be the person who will only help if other people are suitably “grateful” (meaning that they do it my way and then get all gushy about how my way is best).

Still finding the balance. And I’m thinking that’s true for pretty much everything.

Nicola and I met 21 years ago today: and life changed utterly between one breath and the next. Everything I have done since then, and all I have become, is in some way connected to that meeting.

I just can’t imagine who I am in the alternate universes in which we never met. I hope those Kelleys are happy and full of joy. They can send me postcards: I’ll be here, having a beer on a Friday afternoon with my sweetie, celebrating the years.

Earlier this year, our beloved Seattle Post-Intelligencer shut down, and since then we have been taking the Seattle Times, which I find much less interesting as a newspaper. Although I appreciate very much how hard they are working to make PI-orphan readers feel welcome; they even added many of the PI comics to their comics page, which is exactly the kind of thing that matters, you know? Any measure of control and input and respect that we can give one another during times of change makes a difference.

The Times, like every other newspaper in the US, has cut back on its arts coverage in general and its book reviews in particular, and so I have taken less pleasure of late in my Sunday paper reading. But I enjoyed last Sunday, not so much because of the specific content as because of the internal conversational trails it led me down. Perhaps I’m just in a mood to personally connect with ideas. Hmm, which one might simply read as a less obnoxious way of saying It’s all about me!, but perhaps you will make the kinder assumption. These days I tend to be both harder on myself, by which I mean more truthful in my self-analysis, and also more accepting of those truths. I’m guessing that acceptance is necessary to stay relatively coherent even as I become more and more aware of my own fractures.

And so I was struck by this review of a book called Shop Class as Soulcraft. The reviewer didn’t like the book, and it sounds as though I might not either; but I was struck by the truth (in my perception) of the pull quote:

What ordinary people once made, they buy: and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed.
 
— from Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford

And it occurred to me this is one more way in which we have contrived as a culture to give ourselves less control of change, and to… how do I put this? To deify expertise to the point that in order to be “special” by the standards of our culture, we have to be experts at something. We achieve standing in our communities by having something specific to contribute; but within my lifetime the standard for being a fully active member of a community was that we all pitched in with whatever was needed, because to some extent we all could.

Recently, members of my high school class have been talking about taking on a community construction project (building a free dental clinic) as a way of giving back to the town where our school is based. I think it’s a great idea; and I am struck by the number of people who want to participate but “don’t know one end of a power tool from the other” or “can pull nails with the best of them!” Et cetera. No disrespect intended to those folks: what I’m pointing at is not Oh, they can’t build stuff, but rather the readiness with which they downplay the general knowledge they may have, and/or the lack of assumption that if they turn up and someone shows them how, they can probably do a lot of what is needed. These are smart people: so why the apparent lack of confidence in their ability to become successful students once again?

I myself do know one end of a table saw from another. I’m no master carpenter or electrician or plumber, but when something breaks in my house, I try to fix it; and often I’m happy to find that I can. I was going to say happily surprised, but that wouldn’t be true: I go into these situations with the expectation that I can learn enough to decide fairly quickly whether I can fix it or not; and if I think I can, then I try. I’ve made a complete mess of a few things (let’s not talk about the time I tried to replace the motherboard in Nicola’s computer, thank god she’s a forgiving person), and a complete success of others (I fixed a Horrible Grinding Sound in the dishwasher just last week).

The internet is an enormous blessing in this regard; you can find out how to do just about anything if you’re willing to spend a little time with Google. But I grew up with an engineer father and an artisan mother; they fixed things, assembled stuff, made things from scratch, and taught me enough theories to make me feel confident that I could do it too. And so when I was offered a job in a theatre shop one summer, I took it; when the furniture comes all in pieces in a box, I put it together; and when my WordPress upgrade completely breaks the back end of my website to the point that I cannot access a single administrative function (that was yesterday’s fun), I figure out how to get in the side door and fix the problem.

This is not because I’m so special; in fact, the point is that I’m not. Mine is the attitude of the generalist and the student. I don’t try to fix stuff because I think it’s nobler or more authentic, I do it because I want to manage my own changes if I can. I want to know that I can control my own environment if I choose to. Sometimes that’s a fool’s game, for sure; and some of it comes from insecurity on my part, my knee-jerk response in crisis that no one else is going to take care of me, so I’d better be able to do it myself.

But I can’t do everything myself. And I’m part of a community, finally, of family and friends and neighbors for whom pooling skills, pitching in, doing what we can, is just part of the deal. We don’t have to all do everything well; but it’s not enough to just do “what we’re best at.” If that were the case, I guess I’d be writing everyone’s term papers for them, or something. But I cook for people when they are sick; I collect their mail and put out their trash when they are on vacation. I drive them and their dying cat to the emergency hospital. I paint trim, I weed, I run errands. I give communication process advice. I do what I can to help people manage their changes. And they do that for me.

And I think that if I didn’t have the attitude that it’s worth a try to fix things myself, maybe I wouldn’t have the impetus to try to help other people when their things need fixing. Maybe I’d learn to be helpless, to depend always on expertise as opposed to intelligence, or kindness, or community. Maybe I’d stop trying to fix myself too; maybe I’d assume that I couldn’t, or that having parts of myself be broken was the opposite of being whole. I don’t know: I am who I am, and so the rest is just guessing. But it’s something I’m thinking about.