The Mallet of Loving Correction Part 11

11.

2011.

For no particular reason, I thought of an observation that lexicographer (and old college pal) Erin McKean had about the word "cla.s.sy," the gist of which was that if someone used the word to describe themselves, it was often quite obvious that they were in fact the opposite. Someone else calls you "cla.s.sy"? Maybe you are. Call someone else "cla.s.sy"? Maybe they are, too. Call yourself "cla.s.sy"? It's what you're trying to sell yourself as, not necessarily what you are.

It occurs to me that this idea has application outside of the word "cla.s.sy," since I've often found that the adjectives people use to describe themselves exist on a spectrum with "aspirational" on one end and "delusional" on the other, with otherwise very little correlation to who they actually are: "I am a humble man."

"I'm punctual."

"I'm a funny guy."

And so on.

As there already exists a "McKean's Law" with respect to words ("Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error"), allow me instead to suggest what I will henceforth label "McKean's Inversion," to wit: The adjective a person says they are is frequently the thing they are not.

To put it in writing terms, it's a fine example of "show, don't tell." Cla.s.sy people don't need to a.s.sert they're cla.s.sy, they do cla.s.sy things. Funny people don't have to a.s.sure you they're funny, they simply make you laugh. Kind people don't need to verbally advertise their kindness, because it's evident in their lives. All of which is to say the way to be seen as funny, or kind, or humble, or cla.s.sy, is to be that thing. And if you are, chances are pretty good other people will note it.

In any event, keep McKean's Inversion in mind the next time you have the urge to tell rather than show what you see as your own best qualities. People may not have a term in their head for McKean's Inversion, but, believe me, they know it exists.

Meanwhile, On the Home Front, I Have Growing Suspicions My Male Cats Are Totally Gay Jan

27.

2010.

It's because in the last several days I have come across Zeus and Lopsided Cat openly and enthusiastically grooming and gently headb.u.t.ting each other in open, conspicuous places, followed by a casual glance over to me as if to say "What? You have a problem with two male cats showing their affection for each other in their own home?"

For the record, I do not. Indeed, I celebrate their feline gayness, inasmuch as two cats who have had their gonads removed can be said to be gay, which I think is a fair amount, since "gay" encompa.s.ses more than physical s.e.xuality and gonads (or lack thereof). And anyway, what sort of hypocrite would I be if I supported same-s.e.x marriage but viewed my two male cats tongue-bathing each other and thought, dude, that's just wrong. It's not. Go, Lopsided Cat and Zeus! I wish you joy.

That said, it is kind of sudden. Lopsided Cat has generally viewed Zeus as something of a nuisance, to be smacked about whenever the younger cat got too uppity but otherwise to be ignored. For Lopsided Cat to go from benign neglect of his fellow cat to open affection seemingly in the s.p.a.ce of a few days is a little weird. But then, I don't speak cat. Maybe this has all been simmering under the surface, like how in all those romantic comedies the leads can't stand each other and then suddenly they're mad for each other. This is like that. With cats. Who may be gay.

I know some of you are thinking, "yes, yes, but what does Ghlaghghee think about this turn of events?" She is perhaps unsurprisingly perfectly okay with it. Ghlaghghee has always struck me as an unusually tolerant cat (although she, like Lopsided Cat, has been known to smack around Zeus when he gets out of line), and so her apprehension of these current events seems to be along the "Oh. Huh. Well, okay, then" line. Which of course is just fine with me. It'd be sad to have to have a talk to her about embracing diversity, not the least because I don't speak cat. So that's one awkward discussion avoided. For which I think we are all grateful.

Middle Ages Me Mar

15.

2011.

Charles asks: If you were born in the dark ages, and couldn't be a writer, how would you earn a living? Technology related jobs are out, because remember it's the DARK AGES. I don't see you as the farmer type, so what would you do?

Well, first, I'm not 100% behind the phrase "dark ages," which implies, basically, that from the collapse of Rome until roughly the time of the Renaissance, there wasn't a whole lot going on in Europe, intellectually and culturally speaking. This is not entirely true, as any student of European history will tell you. Likewise, as French historian Jacques Le Goff reminds us, "Those who suggest that the 'dark ages' were a time of violence and superst.i.tion would do well to remember the appalling cruelties of our own time, truly without parallel in past ages." Look at the last century and see if you can disagree with this point.

As for technological advances, there was a lot of them about, actually, but in a manner we don't much think about. The development of the heavy plow, for example, was literally cutting-edge technology in the 7th Century; sure, it doesn't look like much next to your s.h.i.+ny new iPhone, but on the other hand your s.h.i.+ny new iPhone can't break up the heavy soils of Northern Europe and lead to ma.s.sive advances in the ability of the people there to feed themselves. If you've got any ancestors from above the Danube, you might be glad one of them thought up the heavy plow. Add in the horse collar, which arrived in Europe in the 11th century or so, and suddenly those same farmers could plow the same fields in half the time. No, they couldn't play Angry Birds. But back in the day, they had real angry birds. Stealing grain. So there.

Be that as it may, the question remains: What would the John Scalzi of, oh, let's say, 1011, be doing with his time?

To begin, if he was my current age of 41, there's an excellent chance he would already be dead. Infant and child mortality killed off a large number of folks who would never see the other side of a fifth birthday; add to that the general less-than-advanced state of medicine of the eleventh century AD, and there's a good chance that either disease or injury would have claimed me by now. And even if it had, I would still be old at 41; it seems unlikely I'd have many of my teeth still, my various injuries and years of almost certain hard physical labor would have taken its toll on my body, and so basically I'd probably be hunched, creaky and gumming my food.

And what would my job be? Easy: Peasant farmer.

Which, I know, Charles suggests he doesn't see me as. Thing is, in 1011, pretty much everyone was a farmer. Yes, there were other jobs, and other social strata, but if we're looking at actual statistics, guess what? Odds are, you're probably a peasant farmer. And certainly in my case it seems to be likely. Look at my last name: Scalzi. In Italian, it means "barefoot." Tell me that doesn't just scream "hardy peasant stock." So, yes, if I'm in the eleventh century, and still alive at my advanced age, then I'm almost certainly a farmer. And I probably think it sucks, but then, it's not like I have all sorts of options.

That said, there's a small possibility that at an early age someone saw some small spark of intelligence in me, in which case there's a chance that might eventually find my way into a religious order, which given who I am today might seem somewhat ironic and amusing, but in the eleventh century might strike me as a pretty good deal, all things considered. If I joined an order that followed the Benedictine Rule, I would have some access to reading and the intelligence of the time, and would be in a community of like-minded individuals, and in any event knowing me I would prefer that life to looking at the a.s.s end of an ox for most of my days.

In either case I probably wouldn't have become me-that is, the witty, snarky writerly type you all know and appear to tolerate. But we're talking the eleventh century here. It was not a quality era for snark. I do imagine that in my village or order I would be known for my quirky sense of humor, but I also suspect that's about as far as it would go. I suppose there's some very small chance that I could be something along the lines of a wandering entertainer, going from court to court with my tales, perhaps with musical accompaniment. But I don't exactly see that as a good life, in 1011.

But let's suppose that in my 11th century character creation mode I rolled all natural 20s and ended up having the option of being anything I wanted to be. What then? Well, my first option would be not to be born for another 958 years (or so), because I like me some air conditioning and Internet and human rights and modern medicine. Barring that I would go for, oh, I don't know, a royal court historian somewhere; a gig that keeps me out of having to take an arrow in the thigh (or alternately, running someone through with a pike) in a war, or watching an ox's a.s.s while it pulls a plow, or in fact very many of the really stinky and inconvenient aspects of life in the 11th century. What about being a prince or a knight? Yeah, no. Lots of wars. Lots of death. Lots of being away from family for years while you fight for a boggy chunk of land. Pa.s.s, thank you. Court historian will suit me just fine.

But in point of fact, what I'm rather more likely to be is a peasant farmer, and also, at age 41, stone cold dead. I'll stick with the 21st century.

My Life Is Good But I'm Worried Yours is Better Sep

21.

2009.

Cartoonist Tim Kreider writes over at the New York Times about something he calls "the Referendum," in which people in their early middle age (think 40 to 45) look at the lives of all their friends and try to figure out how their own lives match up to theirs. This is basically indistinguishable from what everybody does all the time-20somethings look at their lives relative to their other friends too, I a.s.sure you, or at least did when I was that age-but Kreider's thesis (or at least what I got out of it) was that at about 40 years of age, this comparison is more pertinent and poignant, because by that time you've already made all sorts of life choices that will define the rest of your life, and in some ways it's just too late to go back and start over.

Essentially, at 40 or so, you've become who you are going to be for the rest of your life. Which means that, when you look at your friends' choices, you do so with some measure of romanticism and envy, because those choices will no longer ever be yours. The only positive note about any of this (or so says Kreider) is that your friends likely look at your life through rose-colored gla.s.ses as well. Basicially, at 40, everyone's over-romanticizing the life of their contemporaries.

It's an interesting thesis, and in some ways dovetails into something I've thought for a while, which is that one's 20th high school and college reunions are really the only ones that one needs to attend, because they're the ones that let you see who all your cla.s.smates became when they grew up. At the reunions before the 20th, people are still figuring out what they're doing with their lives; the ones afterward you show up just to find out who's still breathing. But basically while one always has to leave room for epiphanies, freak-outs and karma, I do think when you see someone at 40, they are who they who they have become and will likely be for the remainder of their time on the planet. I could be wrong on this; ask me again when I'm 50. But it seems that way to me now.

I don't know how much I agree about the rest of "The Referendum," however. Or more accurately I think that I agree that "The Referendum" functions, but only to the extent one is unhappy with one's own choices in life, or sees the choices one's made in terms of what one's lost in other opportunities. I suspect people who are satisfied with the choices they've made with their lives (rather than being resigned to them) look at things differently-they look at the lives their friends have and see the value of them and the cool things those lives offer, but wouldn't trade because their own lives have enough value for them.

For example, this paragraph, in which Kreider, single and without children, discusses his friends with children (and, also, homes): But I can only imagine the paralytic terror that must seize my friends with families as they lie awake calculating mortgage payments and college funds and realize that they are locked into their present lives for farther into the future than the mind's eye can see. Judging from the unanimity with which parents preface any gripe about children with the disclaimer, "Although I would never wish I hadn't had them and I can't imagine life without them," I can't help but wonder whether they don't have to repress precisely these thoughts on a daily basis.

This is a fairly depressing way of looking at life with children and mortgages, and so quite naturally if this is how you're doing it, you'll be romanticizing the lives of your friends without either. But it's not impossible to look at college funds and mortgage payments as part of a long-term process that results in a) responsible, productive adults you've had a hand in creating and b) a place you own and stake a claim to, both of which are in their way laudable and worth the time and commitment. Now, maybe neither of these things are monumental, in terms of asking "what have I done with my life," but it doesn't mean that either is not desirable or worth doing. Not every desirable or good thing in one's life is or should be monumental.

I think the real thing that bothers me about Kreider's "Referendum" is that it seems to deny both agency and optimism, the latter not in the "hey! It's a suns.h.i.+ny day!" sense but in the "work as if these were the early days of a better nation" sense. Our lives are a combination of the choices we make, for better or for worse, and events that are largely out of our control, which we then have to deal with. It's also a continuing process, to which we have to commit every morning when we wake up. I think Kreider's "Referendum" is a tapping into the desire to escape one's life rather than to commit to it. And, I don't know. I think that's not a way to go through life, if you can avoid it.

Now, you may say, it's easy for me to have this perspective because in many ways I have an enviable life. Which is true, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. But, you know, Tim Kreider and most of his pals undoubtedly have enviable lives, too; as one interviewer put it to Kreider, "You draw at home and you hang out with friends and drink and stuff, and then, at the end of the week, you produce a cartoon? And that's your job...Please allow me to congratulate you on having the best life of all time." To be very clear about it, anodyne musing about one's position in life relative to one's chums is the sport of the privileged, like polo or key parties. The issue in this case isn't privilege, it's perspective. It's one of those enviable problems to have.

Or to put it another way, if you're really spending time fantasizing about your friends' lives, and they are equally spending time fantasizing about yours, there's a good chance both of your lives are, you know, pretty good, and maybe you should focus on that instead. It's just a thought.

Neil Armstrong and Futures Past Aug

27.

2012.

I was two months old when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and 43 when he died, and in between those two events the future changed. When Armstrong landed, a human future in s.p.a.ce seemed inevitable-we'd landed on the moon, after all. How long could it possibly be until we had moon colonies, s.p.a.ce stations where thousands lived, stuck by centrifugal force to walls which were their floors, and a second s.p.a.ce race to Mars? Why, not long as all, it seemed, and so I lived the first decade of my life breathlessly waiting for the moon colony and all the rest of it. And also drinking Tang because, hey, I wasn't quite ten, and Tang was pretty awesome when you're that age.

Four decades on, we never did get the mechanistic, physical future required for those moon colonies and s.p.a.ce stations. In point of fact that future was expensive, and once the "landing on the moon" bragging rights were taken by the US, we apparently lost interest. Gene Cernan was the last man on the moon, and he left that orb in December of 1972; we're coming up fast on the 40th anniversary of his departure, and more people seem to know about the Mayan Apocalypse than that particular anniversary. Yes, it makes me sad.

I don't mind too much the future we've gotten so far. I like the Internet, and my cell phone, and my television bouncing to me from s.p.a.ce, and all the other things that have come from what has essentially been the less expensive path of least resistance. I think the things that NASA has done with its robotic craft, which are now on Mars and over Mercury and pus.h.i.+ng through the heliopause at the very edge of interstellar s.p.a.ce, are nothing short of miraculous. This future has been pretty good for me. But I don't think this future had to be exclusive of the future that Neil Armstrong seemed to herald, and for which he was our icon; maybe we could have had both, had our will to go to the moon been matched by a will to stay and build there.

We can still go back to the moon, of course. We can still go and build and stay and use the moon as our first stepping stone to other worlds. Anything is possible. But for me Armstrong's death forever closes the door on a certain possible path the we could have taken, the one where that first small step and giant leap was not essentially taken in isolation, but was followed by another step and another leap, followed by another, and so on, one right after another, without pause and without interruption. Even when or if we return to the moon, we will never live in Neil Armstrong's future.

I wonder how Armstrong himself felt about that. He lived down the road a piece from me; people I know had the honor of meeting him and described him, in so many words, as one of the best of men. Back here on Earth he did not seem to go out of his way to call attention to himself, and while he encouraged people to keep alive the spirit of exploration and service that he exemplified, it doesn't seem that he spent a lot of time beating a drum in public. For all that, I read that when he was 80, he volunteered to be the commander of a mission to Mars, should anyone want him for the job. I would guess he wanted to live in Neil Armstrong's future, too. I'm sorry for him he didn't get to.

The New York Times: We May Slide Into Irrelevancy But At Least We Update Daily Jun

7.

2009.

The New York Times is engaging in another one of those delight-fully pa.s.sive aggressive stories it does about blogs, this time focusing-about a decade too late-on the bloggers who quit blogging when they realize that just because they write something online doesn't mean anyone is going to know it is there. I say this is a decade too late because I certainly remember the grousing in 1999 or thenabouts by folks discouraged that no one was beating a path to their virtual doors, and I remember the newspaper stories about just that fact. What's old becomes new again, apparently.

The Times also notes that of the millions of blogs that exist, only a tiny margin get a readers.h.i.+p beyond the blogger and the blogger's mom ("OMG I can't believe my mom read what I wrote about her on my blog"), and thus as a consequence most are eventually abandoned. But again, this is no real surprise; the numbers are larger now but the percentages of abandoned blogs has been fairly consistent for years. The vast majority of blogs, in fact, have nothing but the following three posts: Post One: "Here's my blog! This is where I'm going to share all my thoughts about life, the universe and everything! It's going to be great and I can't wait to tell you all what I'm thinking about everything!"

Post Two: "Hey, sorry I haven't updated in a while-life's been crazy. But I'll be back soon."

Post Three: "Here's a picture of my cat."

And then it's done.

Nothing wrong with this-writing on a regular basis is work, even when you're ostensibly doing it for fun, and it shouldn't be a surprise not a lot of people really want to work that hard. Also and perhaps more to the point, I suspect many people who start blogging realize fairly quickly that they either don't like sharing all their thoughts to the world, or that their thoughts, while interesting to them, appear fairly ba.n.a.l once they're typed out, and it's better just not to post them for the sake of posting them. And there's nothing wrong with this either, and indeed the blogger is to be congratulated for that bit of personal insight. Most blogs are abandoned because they should be.

The thing about this Times piece is that it feels almost endearingly anachronistic; not to run down blogs, but they're not exactly the hot new kid on the block these days, are they. These days it seems like the only people starting new blogs are laid-off journalists, which says something both about blogs and these journalists. Everyone else has moved on to Facebook and Twitter. Which is something I personally applaud; I like my blog, but I'm a wordy b.a.s.t.a.r.d, by profession and by inclination, and online social networks actually do a far better job of what people wanted blogs to do, which is be a way to act and feel connected online with friends and family. No one gives a c.r.a.p if your tweet or status update is short and utterly inconsequential ("Hey! I just ate a hot dog!")-indeed, that's kind of the point.

So it's worth noting that even on Twitter, with its absolute ease of connecting with people and its inherent design promoting short, deep-thought-free posting, the vast majority of Twitter accounts rarely update, and have fewer than 10 followers. Which is to say the same communication dynamic applies everywhere online, regardless of whether it's a blog, or Facebook page or Twitter account or whatever. It's hard to make interesting content, whether it's a 670 word blog post or a 140 character tweet. People might initially think they're up to it, but they find out quickly enough that they're not. Which, again, is perfectly fine. There's no inherent virtue in being a wordy b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Some people are; most people aren't.

I expect the Times will catch up on this news about Twitter in another eight years or so, a.s.suming (he said, snarkily) it's still around then. Set your timers now.

Next Morning Presidential Election Thoughts Nov

7.

2012.

Last year in October, I did a book tour of Germany. Every night I was there, after my reading, I would have dinner with some of the Germans who were kind enough to have hosted me on the trip. And almost without fail, after enough time had pa.s.sed that they felt comfortable with me, the more-or-less same question would come up. Paraphrased, it is thus: "Okay, seriously, what is going on with your politics over there? You're scaring the h.e.l.l out of us." And specifically, they wanted to know what was going to happen to President Obama, which the Germans, to a person, saw as a reasonable and moderate leader. They were terrified that he would not be re-elected.

Here's more or less what I said to the Germans then: "Look, all the political noise is going to get much worse in 2012 because it's a presidential election year and that's how we get. It's going to get loud and weird and you're going to be much more scared before it's all over. But in the end Obama's going to win, because he's doing as well as he can under the circ.u.mstances, and because things are slowly turning around, and because the GOP is running its B-team running for President. It's going to be close, but Obama's going to do it."

So to all of my German friends: See? Just like I told you.

Four years ago, there were a lot of people who believed that Obama's election heralded a material change in American politics. I would argue that it's this one that's the actual signifier of that change. Look: It's one thing for a black man with a name like "Barack Hussein Obama" to win an election after eight years of a GOP presidency that culminated with two wars and the greatest economic crisis in eighty years. It's another thing entirely for that same black man with a funny name to win a second term in the face of an unimpressive economic recovery and the full, uncontained and often unreasoned fury from his opposing side. For better or worse, Americans view one-term presidents as losers or historical flukes: See Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush as examples of this. Barack Obama, whatever else you will say about him-and many will-can no longer be categorized as a loser or a fluke. He won both the electoral and over 50% of the popular vote twice, which is the first time since Reagan that any president managed that.

More to the point, two years after a mid-term election that swept into office some of the most recalcitrant opposition that any modern president has seen, and after four years of dealing with a GOP whose major legislative goal (as Mitch McConnell so memorably put it) was to make Obama a single-term president, Obama's electoral map was strikingly similar to his first; he lost only two states from 2008. This was a close election, on the popular election front. But after all the noise and thunder and intonation, and a.s.suming Florida falls into the Democratic tally, as it appears likely to do at this point, Obama walks out of the election with 50% more electoral votes than Romney.

This wasn't a squeaker, and Obama didn't just get lucky. To be clear, he did get lucky, most obviously in drawing Mitt Romney as an opponent, who gave Obama far too many opportunities to punch at him, and in a GOP which persists in fielding candidates far to the right of the US population as a whole, giving the Democrats a field of bogeymen with which to scare its voter base. But Obama also won because he was canny: how Obama won Ohio this year will be required reading for political wonks for decades. And he also won because of demographics-a word which is currently being used as code by the right for "people who are not straight white men." Well, as it happens, there are lots of people who are not straight white men in these here United States, and whatever code word you want to use for them, it turns out that their votes count just the same as anyone else's. Unless the GOP is irretrievably stupid, this is the last presidential election they'll a.s.sume they can win entirely white.

And saliently, Obama successfully made the argument that he was doing his job, despite (and sometimes in spite of) a solid, unified wall of opposition from the GOP. At the end of the day, luck, campaign smarts and "demographics" aren't going to make the case for a re-election by themselves. People have to believe he's getting things done. It appears they do.

Obama is not a fluke or a historical blip. You can argue he won his first presidential election on credit, and I'll let you have that argument. It's four years later, and the voters have seen him in action. This election he had to win with what was on his ledger. He won it, and he won it big enough to forestall all doubt. If you are one of those who will persist in thinking he's there by accident or by trivial circ.u.mstances, you're delusional. And you're likely doomed to see your preferred presidential candidates lose. This isn't Reagan's America anymore, or Bush's. It's Obama's. You should get used to that.

For all that, four years ago when Obama won, I offered readers here a reality check regarding their expectations for the man. Here is the reality check this year: * The House is still in GOP hands. In the Senate the Democrats do not have a filibuster-proof majority. We have a divided government, and the GOP standard operating procedure is to oppose every single thing Obama is for. Don't expect that to change.

* You've had four years to see how Obama works and how he does his job. If you're expecting that to change, you haven't been paying attention.

* Obama is not a liberal. He's definitely not a socialist. He's a moderately left-leaning centrist. Anyone who believes (or at least says) otherwise on either side of the aisle is speaking rhetorical nonsense. Obama will lead from the center. That's what he does. That's who he is.

* Those who dislike Obama for whatever reasons they do are still there. And they dislike him even more today. They also dislike what he represents: The end to a comfortable (for them), right-leaning United States. You will not stop hearing from them.