List of the Worst of Human Society (General)

I brainstormed a list of the worst of society, the lowest of the low, the degenerates, the people you would send to populate Australia. This was my list:

Mercenaries
Criminals
Murderers/Assassins
Child Abusers
Wife Beaters
Slave Traders
Sex Slavers
Terrorists
Pirates
Torturers/Inquisitors
Animal Abusers
Rapists

As we can see, the first Worst that came to mind was "mercenaries", because I in my mind apparently live in 1600s Europe. I think I was also thinking of Haliburton and other defense contractors and weapons makers, as they are the modern mercenary, available to any combatant with money. Plus it just sounds like a villainous word.

"Criminals" is too all-encompassing, as everyone on the list would fall under the criminal banner, but it was brainstorming after all.

The next thing of note is that I thought of "pirates" before "rapists". PIRATES. It seems that I am marginally more afraid of PIRATES than I am of RAPISTS or TORTURERS. Pirates arguably are rapists/torturers, but the opposite is not true, so I am still more afraid of everything that pirates embody than I am of being a victim of a sequel to the Spanish Inquisition. (At least pirates are not "animal abusers", as everyone knows they love their parrots.)

Where did I acquire my ever-loving fear of pirates? Maybe blame Robert Louis Stevenson. Maybe blame Daphne DuMaurier, whose novel Jamaica Inn I read recently -- the whole danged village feared the innkeeper for being a...well, I don't want to spoil it for you.

First fear the Terrorists, then fear the Pirates. They will swashbuckle you all over the ding dong plank.

Dr. Genius and Mrs. Hunh? -- the G4 sleeps tonight

I think I might be a genius, which is a good thing because I need someone around to clean up after the boneheaded mistakes I make.

For instance (and this one gets blamed on both me and Mr. Hunh), we lived in our current house for a year using rabbit ears and watching fuzzy TV before we finally wondered, "Hey, what's that plug in the wall behind the TV for? And why's there a big antenna on the roof -- it doesn't even give us good reception!" When we finally attached a cable from the plug to the TV...hey, look! That antenna works after all!

That's the "What's That Thing?" conundrum that keeps biting us -- we'll notice something we can't explain and then shrug and fail to investigate it for a few years. We're busy, people, we can't be opening drawers in our own house unless it's absolutely necessary. So, What's That Thing that looks like a latch on the utensils basket in the dishwasher? Five years later, we push the latch and realize that it flips the basket open so you don't have to scrape your hands when you unload the utensils. Wow, that's so much easier! I'm a genius!

So my desktop MAC (a G4 -- if you care about these things, start scoffing about not having thousands of dollars to upgrade to a G5 for no reason...NOW. Done scoffing? Feel better? Ok.) had a little problem. The power was wonky, so the USB ports on the back of my monitor stopped working a year or eighteen months into my ownership of the unit, and the USB and firewire ports on the tower eventually became so unreliable that I had to buy new slots and install them, and the computer wouldn't sleep, so I had to either leave it on all the time or shut it down, and it booted kind of slowly, so it was the environment or me waiting an extra five seconds, and I already told you how precious time is to me.

So this has been going on for four years or so, with lots of web searching and macosxhints.com this and osxfaq.com that and Apple support knowledge base and google searches, all looking for answers to my problem. No one seemed to have exactly the same set of problems, specifically that putting the computer into sleep mode would cause it to reboot. I kept searching, tried all the basic troubleshooting (PRAM this, reset PMU that), tried different plugs and cords, etc etc etc. Tried a buttload of things. Considering replacing the power unit, since that was obviously the problem. Oh, and sometimes the Power button on the tower would not so much want to work without lots of pressing.

This weekend, I tackled the problem again, since a mechanical problem MUST have a mechanical solution, right? Dr. Genius put on her labcoat. Hmm, I guess I'll have to replace the power unit after all...I wonder what that'll be like? It'll probably be like the last time, when Apple sent a replacement unit and fan because the fan was too loud, and I switched out the....

Oh. Hmmm. Maybe I should retrace the steps from that long-distant operation and, uh, reseat the stuff I seated anew at the time. And reseat the power button thing, too, while I'm at it. I mean, it's the old Check That Your Cables are Fully Plugged In, step Uno of any troubleshooting, but how silly would it be if that were the prob...

Hey, look! My computer now sleeps again, the USB cables on the monitor work like a charm, the old USB and firewire ports fire up like gangbusters...I'm a genius! And it reboots fast enough even for me (which, alas, gives me less time to wonder What's That Thing around the house, like the black tubes mysteriously poking out of our balcony walls).

How did the old G4 chug along for the last three or four years with this underpowered handicap? I don't know. All credit to Apple construction, I guess.

This is the support article that finally got me on the right track re: reseating plugs and jogged my memory.

And I finally solved the chronic "G4 won't remember the keyboard configuration of my Microsoft Natural Elite Keyboard, so I have to run Keyboard Prefs and Change Keyboard Type every damn time the thing reboots or comes back from sleep, which it now can do, sleep I mean, thanks to my geniusocity" problem by, um, trashing the keyboard plist. Huh. That solution only took me a year or a year and a half to find, but that time is misleading because my computer wouldn't sleep anyway, so it wasn't usually a problem. I finally noticed that the plist file wasn't modified when I changed the pref via System Preferences.

The "Mail.app Smart Folders count does not refresh" problem is ongoing and seems to come down to rebuilding the relevant mailboxes, but I don't care much about that and think it's more an Apple bug/oversight than anything I can fix.

The moral of the story is: I'm a genius. The other moral is: how am I going to put off writing if everything on my computer works now? The third moral is: when people give you the troubleshooting advice of "it's broken, buy a new one", curse at them with your worst, most insulting words and run away quick because they are almost always wrong and also lazy and perhaps also smelly.

Director Ang Lee

If I could somehow steal Ang Lee's talent when he was unconscious, I would push him down the stairs to make it happen. And then I would run. I'm being honest here. It wouldn't be done with malice; it would be the push of someone who is insanely jealous, Salieri-level jealous if Salieri had just been a guy with a blog.

I love Lee's movies so much that I've had the Wedding Banquet sitting downstairs unwatched for two weeks now. I'm afraid to watch it because then it will have been watched. It's the same reason I spaced out the reading of all the Josephine Tey books -- you have to take your time with these things and think about them.

The same person directed Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Sense & Sensibility, and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. That's just not fair. He excels across the genre board because all of his movies are about the only thing that matters: relationships. They are about the people in them and how they relate to other people, and how they think about themselves. They are very humane films without being sentimental or cloy.

None of the characters in his films are there as props or sounding boards for other characters. They aren't plot devices. They're people with their own needs and desires (often painfully palpable and heartbreakingly simple desires). It must be wonderful to act for Lee and receive respect and understanding for what you're trying to do. Many directors hire their alter ego as the (male) star, and a beautiful woman as the male star's accessory. Lee can work with any character of any age, nationality, sex, whatever, because he knows that we all want the same things: love, respect, and understanding.

I never would've thought I'd be on the edge of my seat about a schoolteacher getting anonymous love notes and being flirted with by an exuberant guy on a motorcycle, but there you are.

Maybe I wouldn't push him down the stairs, even in my deal-with-the-devil scenario. Lord knows he might turn and levitate and kick me in the face. It's not worth it!

p.s. We do not speak of The Hulk. We do not think of The Ice Storm. Even geniuses can sleepwalk or go insane or need to pay off their mob debts.

The Universe Told Me To Tell You To Shut Your Darn Yap

So the Universe was like, "Look, I'm being real here, I have dwarf stars and the Pluto planet controversy to deal with, I do not have time for all this I wanna iPhone, I want that hottie, this hottie, that job, money from the sky...I mean, is it me? It isn't me, is it? Dang right it isn't me! I'm not telling anybody anything because frankly, I don't give a sh...oh, girl, you know the Universe doesn't swear!"

And I'm all, "Umm hmmm."

And the Universe is all, "I am tired."

And I'm like, "I hear you."

And the Universe stood up all indignant, saying, "I need an unlisted number, I'm telling you. Like I care about anyone's career or love life that I'm gonna be telling them what to do! Do I look like Ann Landers' twin sister? I don't have time for advice! I've got cosmic concerns -- LITERALLY!"

And then I stopped listening, because, seriously, the Universe can go on.

Lisa Ling Has Balls of Steel

Let's say you're visiting the inmates at animal prison, otherwise known as the zoo. The animals stare dolefully back at you: "We're innocent!" they say, but you know better. "Sure," you say, "everyone here says that. Tell it to the flamingos."

You enter the monkey house and cover your ears. The monkeys are the angriest inmates in there, and they are angry at you because they think like you do. They know that a mere branch or two of the evolutionary tree stands between your side of the glass and theirs. They are PISSED. They scream and bounce off the walls and set up a racket that strikes deep in our homo sapien souls, rattling us to our vertebrate bones with reminders of our African origins and the sounds of the jungle or opposite riverbank or savanna all around us and no walls to keep us in.

That's also the sound of the television show "The View", and the talking head news shows, and "20/20" and so much more. It's the sound of much of television these days, where everyone has both an asshole and a plethora of opinions, and it's hard to tell the difference. The loudest opinion wins. No one feels the need to back their opinions with facts or experience, because it's what they think and they aren't afraid to say it because they are honest. "Honest" is the new "Ignorant".

You can't run a nation on opinions, or it leads you to start disastrous wars and ignore people baking in the Superdome and act with impunity in regards to the Constitution. When citizens learn to value their opinions over their learned judgment, they forget how to vote with their heads. They vote, instead, with their assholes.

Lisa Ling is a young journalist who started as a teenager, reporting for Channel One. That led to her gig on "The View", a show that hoped to give women at home during the day intelligent voices to listen to. It was a show that wouldn't talk down to them. Somehow it instead became a show about screaming over each other and talking about being rich and famous, which represents none of the people watching but provides them with WWE-style entertainment.

Ling was the twentysomething champ-een back when "The View" hoped to represent different generations of women. She was, and is, smart and articulate and funny. She's comfortable in her own skin. She notices the world and its problems and thinks she can do something about them, be actively engaged. She didn't belong on that show.

She left and returned to journalism. I've set up a TIVO wishlist for her name and have thus caught her National Geographic specials on a maximum security prison and another on North Korea, and her Oxygen special on "Who Cares About Girls: Sex Slaves in India".

Watch her work. Seek it out and watch it. I don't tend to eagerly sit down to watch something called "Sex Slaves in India" because of the crushing reality of how fucked up the world is, and for girls and women in particular. But Ling's approach makes it not on bearable but edifying. She's fearless. She stop on a prison yard full of warring gangs and interviewed the gang members. She asked North Korean families about the Glorious Leader. She followed along on raids that rescue girls impressed into sex work from their brothels. She's a young Asian American women who fits in everywhere she goes and can talk to anyone about anything. It works because she's smart, unselfconscious, and genuinely curious. She listens. She probes. She challenges. And she doesn't just seek problems, she seeks solutions. Her reports show us the people who are fighting back, like the Nepalese doctor who performs cataract surgery on North Korean citizens with the permission of the Premier (thus showing the Premier's generosity, of course).

Ling had a chance to have her head turned by the easy money, easy fame, and easy work of "The View", but she wanted to talk about other people instead of herself. How terribly old-fashioned of her! How Bill Moyers! Why don't she and Anderson Cooper has a little "look at us being journalists and going to war zones and not just reporting spin" party in Baghdad or the Gaza strip! And then they could play a round of "The Mole" like the little smartypants they are!

Lisa Ling gives me hope that we aren't really a nation of people with our collective head stuck up our collective asshole, and I can't think of any higher praise in 2007.

I had a great idea

It was so great, it startled me. And this is what happened to my hair.

And then I forgot the idea.

"You can complain, but you can't whine." -- Lessons from Rowing Class

When I lived in Boston, for a few summers I took summer rowing classes at Boston University. These were excellent experiences for the first few years, but the last one was no fun (I had to switch to the morning class instead of the late afternoon one, and those morning people are CRANKY).

Our coaches were either varsity crew members or recent alums, but one summer we had the good fortune to also be coached by a former coach for the U.S. Women's National Team. A real coach! And B.U. has a big time team, so we community rowing joes were getting quality instruction out there on the Charles River. The best thing was that they expected us to WORK, and they yelled at us and everything. It was great!

My fellow (afternoon class) crew members were awesome, especially a couple in their forties who collected Shaker furniture. The husband and I went out in a two-man scull once and kept steering into the shore because we were so unfamiliar with having an oar in both hands. Good times.

The national coach dude was pretty intense, and terribly frustrated when our community-level cardiovascular systems were not equal to the pace he wanted to set. But he was very nice and a good teacher and coach with a good sense of humor. I tried flirting with him, but I didn't get far. It's possible that my flirting may have seemed more like pestering or lingering or maybe a touch of psychosis. Maybe heat stroke.

On one of our first days with him, some of us were maybe exclaiming a bit -- good-naturedly, I'd bet -- about the pace he set. He put his head in his hands and said, "God, that sound! Listen, people -- you can complain, but you CAN'T WHINE. I hate the sound of whining."

Is that profound or what? I took that as my personal motto (second personal motto; first is, "Safety First!"), and have found it to be a good pep talk in moments of crisis and/or self-pity. I can complain, but I can't whine. Complaining is specific and opens the path the solutions ("It's too hot in here! Open a window!"). Whining is the sound of an engine that won't start ("I'm so freaking hot! I can't stand being hot, it makes the back of my thighs sweat, and I stick to the chair! Why are you doing this to me? You hate me, don't you? Everyone does.").

Or maybe it's just that complaining tends to take fewer words, so the duration of a complaint is less than that of a whine. Whines also take longer because the syllables are elongated to demonstrate how much the whiner is suffering. ("It's hot" vs. "I'm sooooo hoooo-ot! I'm go-ING to diiiiie!") Also, whining is close to a dog-whistle pitch, while complaining is bearable for the human ear.

Thanks, Community Rowing Coach Whose Name I've Forgotten. Hope you haven't given yourself an aneurysm or something!