All My Heroes are Assholes

A friend of mine recently told me she felt like she had finally found her people.  I knew just what she meant.  She was referring to a group of friends we have in common.

"Intellectual degenerates" she called them, or I did, or maybe it was intelligent degenerates.  I don't remember specifically who or what.  I was drunk.  It's the general idea that's important.  

The truth is most intellectuals I have ever met have been degenerates.  That's what I love most about them.  Most intellectual people I have ever read about have been degenerates.  And smart people always suffer from mental illness, or what appears to be mental illness to the masses.  Everyone seems to know this, and yet, we are somehow always surprised to learn it.  

It seems like I have always known, since I was very young, that most of the good people in the world, your teachers, police officers, clergy, politicians, have all been assholes and hypocrites.  That's the reason I have always had a "problem with authority."  Because I have always known this.  I still know it now.  Kids like Holden Caufield call them phonies.  He knew.  And we love him for it.  We don't even realize it's probably us he is complaining about.  And even at the end of that novel, we rarely understand that he will grow up to become us.  

I first found my people in San Antonio, roughly a decade ago, when I was close to her age.  That's why I know exactly what she means.  And now, years later, I seem to have assembled a very similar set in Sacramento.  Or maybe they found me.  

There's little magic in the world for us.  We are cynics and skeptics.  We drink and carry on.  We disassemble social systems.  We construct incredible alternatives.  We burn those down.  We do it again.  

We turn Gods into men, which is the worst thing you can do to a God. 

We've been around forever.  

We always have the most fun.

Poor Holden couldn't even have heroes.  All my heroes are assholes.  

Just Used Enough to be a Keeper

Marcus told me today that his friend Mick has a theory, which is more of a generalization really, that women who are our age and single either want to be single, or should be single.  

 

Marcus and I  are thirty-something.  I imagine Mick is also, though I don’t know him.  We are divorced and therefore single, and we seem to have a little more time on our hands than we once did.  We all seem to be insanely busy in our twenties.  Somehow, in our thirties, we just aren’t. 

 

Perhaps it is divorce that does it.  This is certainly true for me.  All through my twenties I was married, building a career, taking care of babies and a seemingly perpetually pregnant woman.  I also somehow managed to complete graduate school.  That’s exactly the kind of crazy plan I wouldn’t even consider trying now.

 

When I was married I used to be jealous of single parents.  This was my secret guilt.  My sister was a single parent, and we were all supposed to feel really bad for her.  Everyone thought it was terrible the way she had to do everything on her own.  She apparently had to be both a mother and a father.  I used to think that she was the worst pair of parents I ever saw.  Also, she was able to leave her kid with my parents, or other people any time she needed to go out with friends. She had help doing lots of things.  Everyone was supposed to help her because they felt bad, because it is so difficult being a single parent. 

 

And I was at home every night with the wife and kids as I thought about this.  I never got to go out with my friends.  I had too many things I needed to do every night.  My wife and I were often both overwhelmed.  And we never found ourselves with a break of any kind.  It was supposed to be easier for us, because there were two of us. 

 

And I secretly envied every single parent I knew, because they  all got a break sometime. 

 

And now I am a single parent.  And my sister is not. 

 

While my kids are usually home with me, they do spend some time with their mother.  I get breaks.  I have time for hobbies.  

 

I don’t call it a victory. 

 

So Marcus and I were busy in our twenties, doing different things in different places.  His story is different than mine, but similar in many ways. Sparing the unnecessary details, we both gave our hearts and lives to unkind women who subsequently treated us badly. 

 

Because we are both heterosexual and because we are both single, we spend time talking about women.  We talk about women we know, and we talk about women we don’t know.  We talk about the type of women we would like to meet, and the types we hope to never meet again.  We talk about the perfect woman, and we don’t believe that she exists. 

 

And this isn’t just a stereotype.  You will be forced to believe me when I tell you that Marcus and I are not stereotypical guys. 

 

We both realize that our perspectives may be skewed.   But we wonder where all the good women have gone. 

 

We spent some time thinking that we must have just been blind when we were younger, when good women seemed to be everywhere.  Perhaps we were just too naïve to see back then all the things we see now.  I mean, we both chose badly the first time around.  This makes sense to us.  Add to this that the major difference for all of us, between out twenties and our thirties, is a creeping unwillingness to compromise.  In our twenties, we do crazy things for love.  We will move to new places, give up friends, give up family, change our interests, listen to new music, try fruity new drinks, watch foreign films, listen to country music, go vegetarian for a while, quit smoking, start smoking, call our mothers every once in a while, put up with in-laws in any way, work the night shift, get a dog, get rid of a dog, eat Ethiopian food, drive a mini-van, and any number of other insane things to try and please the people we love.  It all seems so romantic and worthwhile to gamble everything on “the one.” 

 

In our thirties we won’t do any of that shit for any reason.  And this makes us all a little less compatible.  This unwillingness to compromise alone significantly decreases the probability that we will ever again find anyone with whom we are even remotely compatible. 

 

And yet we know that it sometimes happens to people our age. 

 

There must be good women out there.  But this is what I think. At our age good women are busy staying married, taking care of their families, and not cheating.   These are the good women, who in their twenties, married good guys. 

 

Many women our age who are single are women like our ex wives, damaged, dangerous, and not interesting anymore.  At least they aren’t interesting to us anymore.  We have had our fill of interesting, quirky, and damaged women. They are too much trouble. It didn’t work out the first time.  These women seem to be well- liked by guys who are still single in their thirties.  They probably deserve each other.  They can have each other. 

 

There are other women our age who are single and have never been married and well, there is usually a good reason for this, not always, but usually. 

 

It also stands to reason , that women like us exist.  I don’t mean a pair of women who look like a gay odd-couple everywhere they go.  That would be too much like us. 

 

But there must be good women who chose unwisely the first time around. There must be women who gave their hearts to unkind men, and are now divorced as a result.  Women whose heart’s have been broken like ours.  There are women who want to be true, who want to be kind, who want to be devoted, and they have suffered for these wants.  But they have become strong  and wise for the experience. These are the women we are looking for.  We even have a term for them.  Marcus once referred to such a woman as being “just used enough to be a keeper.” 

 

These women are precious and rare.  Most people who know Marcus and I consider us to be a little rare.  I just don’t think we really meet people like us every day.  And we don’t meet people like each other every day.  We are very different from each other and each of us is pretty unique.  So women like us must be rare indeed.

 

And if they can be found has too much damage been done?  Can two people who have seen what once appeared to be love disintegrate into a thousand hateful pieces ever trust anything they feel again?

 

These days, I consider myself unavailable. I am busy raising my kids and doing some other shit.  But even I have to admit that there is an instinctual draw toward coupling.  Whether a result of nature or nurture it is there. I liked being married. That lifestyle works for me.  

 

When I was a kid I figured that people like me now should just forget about it and leave love to the young. 

 

Marcus thinks women don’t like him much. He is wrong. They don’t know him. The women who do get to know him remain fans for life.  He notices this but maybe doesn’t always consider it in context.  Looking in a mirror is easy.  Seeing something in a mirror can be extraordinarily difficult.

 

But still we both keep our eyes open, disregarding probability, hoping to catch a glimpse at that rare woman, who is just used enough to be a keeper. 

Only Stupid People are Breeding

I found myself recently involved in a conversation on Facebook surrounding a status message posted by one of my friends about the Duggars.  I mentioned there that I don’t really know much about the Duggars except that they have a lot of kids and people seem to really hate them.  This led to a broader conversation in which I wrote something that probably seemed like a joke.  It occurs to me that many serious things I say probably seem like jokes.  Conversely many jokes I tell are mistaken as serious statements or opinions.  Apparently I don’t even know if I am serious or not.  So, because I love to waste time and procrastinate, I thought I would expand on my thoughts.  No one reads this stuff anyway. 

When I was a boy, I dropped out of high school and I went to community college. I am proud of this.  See, that seems like a joke right? But I am fairly serious.  During my first two years of college, before I went to real college, I majored in behavioral science.  No I really did.  I have an Associate’s degree to prove it.  I took a bunch of classes in psychology, sociology, and anthropology.  I came away from those studies with three concrete beliefs that changed me forever.  First, I realized that there was no such thing as a pure language.  The purpose of language, oral or written, is simply to communicate, and therefore rules of grammar and usage are arbitrary and subject to constant revision. This is evidenced in everything I have ever written.  Second, I learned that there is no such thing as a pure race, because deep down inside we are all black Africans.  I am blacker than most, but that is an aside.  The third thing I knew for sure, is that when human beings are born we only know two things.  We know how to suck, and we know how to grasp.  Everything else is learned. 

I was what psychology types might call a behaviorist.  I was sure that aside from the two things mentioned above, all other skills, actions, tendencies, thoughts, feelings and characteristics that define a human being are learned after birth, and are therefore completely a product of the environment in which a new person lives and grows.  I was sure that every little thing to which a new person is exposed has the potential to shape his or her thoughts and personality.  This was a radical departure from the things I learned as a child.  The religion in which I was raised taught that people are already complete and complex intellectual entities before conception, and that children in fact play a role in choosing their own parents.  Naturally I argued the points of my new position with my parents.  They laughed at me and just told me to wait.  They do that a lot. 

But let’s get back to breeding for a moment.* There exists a cliché in our culture, which is the title of this essay.  It suggests that most of the children born into this world, are born with stupid parents.  Sadly, I believe this to be true.  I also think it is a problem.  In case you didn’t read it into my previous comment about the “out of Africa” theory, I will just tell you that I am a Darwinist.  Because of this I tend to consider humanity, and my place in it, on the largest scale imaginable.  I believe that what happens now affects the future of our species.  I am moved both spiritually and emotionally by the notion that some very brave ancestors of ours came down from the trees, mastered a tight upright pimp roll, got busy with civilization, and ultimately made it possible for me to have an iPad.  

Historically, upright, bipedal hominids have had as many children as they possibly could.  They have done so for a couple of significant reasons.  First, they really like to fuck.  Second, they know it is important for the survival of the species.  This second part is why we nurture our children, particularly for so long, as opposed to just turning them loose or leaving them somewhere.  Even before culture and religion, people cared for and raised their children.  Of course until very recently half or more of the human children ever born died during their first five years of life despite the best efforts of their parents.  I imagine this problem really contributed to the collective wisdom of the time, that having as many children as you can is a good idea. 

But these days everything is different.  There are so many people on the planet that we worry about its ability to sustain us all.  Many people are concerned about pollution and waste and the impact mankind is making on this billions-of-years-old rock of ours.  Many people, particularly smart, educated people, are choosing not to have children, or are severely limiting the number of children they do have, often waiting until later in life to have any children at all. This is regarded as a lifestyle choice.  It is widely regarded as a very responsible thing to do. 

I think it might just be a little selfish and short-sighted. 

Now I am not saying this just because I have a pile of kids and I am trying to justify my own actions.  I understand better than anyone there is no justification for most of my actions.  And the reasons why I have so many kids, if there are any, will remain undisclosed. 

As it turns out, I have learned a lot from my kids so far.  Mostly, I have learned how much I don’t know, regardless of what I thought I knew.  I learned that there is no way to predict what they might do next.  They always surprise me.  And I learned that, despite my best efforts as a parent** they will always, always do something stupid.

And now I know that kids do come pre-programmed, to a certain degree.  My  experience as a parent, as a student of culture, and as an observer of humanity has led me to new conclusions about children, and about parenting, that are the dead opposite of what I believed when I was in college, and what I believed when my oldest kids were babies.  These are somewhat random and I think best expressed in the form of a list, in no particular order. 

• There is no “right” way to parent, and as long as you care about your child and have his or her best interests in mind, there is probably also no “wrong” way to raise children. 

• There are just too many factors to consider to ever be sure that you are doing a good job as a parent.

• Kids are tougher and smarter than we think.

• Parents are dumber and weaker than we ever thought we would be. 

• Children are born with a unique personality, including a gender identity, and sexual orientation, and outside of real, blatant abuse, there is little that any parent can do to change those things. 

• The way that children react to their environment has as much to do with the unique characteristics of the child as it has to do with the efforts and intentions of that child’s parents.  You may take your kid to the circus because you want to encourage cheerfulness and wonder, but they only end up scared of clowns. 

I am not saying that what my parents taught me was right.  It wasn’t.  Kids don’t get to choose their parents in heaven before they are born.  I know because my kids are way too smart to have had any part in choosing their crappy parents.  But I wasn’t right either.  Everything isn’t learned.  And I will change my mind again later, as I learn more from my kids, and as my apparent failure as a parent becomes more obvious.

You need to love your kids.  You need to give them attention.  You need to teach them important things. But the degree to which they need individual attention from each parent as opposed to attention from siblings, or others, or as opposed to freedom to just wander and learn on their own, as opposed to solitude, just can’t be known.    And it will differ from child to child, and from moment to moment for each child.  I have seen parents I really considered to be “great” and caring parents produce some real assholes.  And I have seen parents who, by all standards and measurements just suck at parenting, produce caring and productive human beings.  Ultimately I guess I believe that kids with clothes and shelter, who are fed and cared for by someone, and who have opportunity to learn something useful, will probably be okay.  Or maybe they won’t.  But the specific way in which they are raised probably won’t have anything to do with it. 

I am sure there is a probability to it.  Children raised by caring and loving parents are more likely to become caring and loving people themselves.  Consequently, children raised by assholes are more likely to be assholes.  But even shitty parents probably love their shitty kids. 

And some things are genetic.  I think intelligence is one of those things.  I do believe that when intelligent people have sex with each other they are more likely to produce intelligent children than stupid children.  I am not talking about education, or opportunity, or anything learned.  I am talking about raw processing power.  I am talking about potential.  I am talking about the kind of intelligence that we are born with, and with which we may or may not do anything useful.  I am talking about the kind of intelligence that can be used for good or evil, depending on one’s tastes.  I think this kind of intelligence is critical for the survival and continued “success” of our species.  I care about these kinds of things. 

I also think that these days, that kind of raw intelligence, while it occurs everywhere, is probably most concentrated among that population of people who have decided, for the good of the planet, to severely limit the number of children they may have, to the detriment of the species.  I think they probably haven’t thought about it this way.  Or maybe they just don’t care what happens after they are dead.  I don’t know.  I am not one of these people. I am one of the assholes. 

I think this is a problem.  I think stupid people everywhere are breeding like crazy. Smart people are not breeding so much.  This will not create a favorable situation for our descendents. Intelligent people really need to just suck it up and get it on.*** But they shouldn’t literally suck it up when they get it on, if you know what I mean, because that’s not how you get pregnant, and that also might be part of the problem.  If smart people can’t outnumber the idiots, they at least have a responsibility to produce children who can be their overlords.  Someone will need to manipulate and exploit the stupid masses of the future.  That is a fact.  It can’t be argued with. If your children or grandchildren don’t do it, because they were never born, because you wanted to drive a hybrid and save the planet, who will?

I am serious. 

*This is my second-favorite sentence in the whole essay. Also, that’s what she said.

**The author may or may not, in fact, have made many, or any, efforts as a parent, and should in no way be confused with a good parent, ever. 

***THIS is my favorite sentence in this essay. 

Get Off My Lawn Already

One of the major benefits of aging is getting cranky. I know what you are thinking. There are so many benefits to aging, how can I choose just one to appreciate? Well kids I m not just picking one to appreciate. I am picking one to appreciate first. I suspect there is only one natural limit to the amount of appreciation I can assign aging, and I figure that is still sixty years off for me.

My regular readers will note that I was born a little old man. I have always been way too old for my age. This has been both a source of amazing opportunity and terrible frustration. It was great as a kid, when at holiday gatherings I typically joined the grown-ups for after meal conversations about the news and what not, shaking our heads while the children ran wild. It was frustrating as a teenager, when I was an adult but no one believed me. I was very excited to turn thirty. I am very excited to be turning forty before too long. And I simply can't wait to be a mean old man.

I am going to be the crankiest, meanest old bastard anyone ever met. My kids think I yell a lot now, and I kind of like my kids. Wait until my grandkids get a load of me! I can't imagine liking them very much. I don't even know them.

Truly I have in several ways already begun my descent into madness. Many commonly tolerated social behaviors and conventions have really come to annoy me lately, much to the chagrin of anyone who must hear me rant about them. Though apparently to the joy of anyone who reads me ranting about them. After all you are still reading this.

One very common yet little discussed social problem which is really chapping my hide lately is four-way-stop-waving. By four-way-stop-waving, I mean the tendency of some drivers (you know who you are) who when faced with the terror of a four way stop and another car waiting to cross in front of them apparently have no idea what to do, panic, make eye contact with the other driver and then wave at them indicating something to the effect of "you go first while I just sit here."

These people have become intolerable to me. And there seems to be a few distinct varieties of them.

The first kind is as described above. they are easily intimidated drivers who truly do not understand when it is their turn to go, so they wave everyone else by until they are alone and no longer need to make a decision. These are the least offensive of the wavers. One mostly feels sorry for them as we say "whatever" and drive past about our business. They are annoying, but certainly not the worst offenders.

The second kind is really just an extension of the first kind. I suspect they started out as the first kind of intimidated driver and as they became more comfortable and confident behind the wheel over time they just made a habit out of waving people on at stop signs. While the first variety may wave on several cars until they are alone, this second variety of waver will typically just wave one car by, perhaps as a means of securing their turn next, then will proceed as normal. While this second type tends to cause less confusion than the first type, they are more annoying because they should be confident enough to not do it, but they made a habit of it and now can't help themselves. They really need to help themselves.

The third kind is the most offensive. The worst stop-wavers are the ones who do it habitually because they think they are doing you a favor. Fuck these guys. These guys really piss me off. Larry David teaches us that society has rules for a reason. That even the smallest and seemingly least significant of social contracts is a critical part of the structural foundation of society. If people stopped standing in line for things everyone wants, the chaos would begin, and the world as we know it could begin to crumble into anarchy and its ultimate destruction. Without realizing it, these assholes who wave people on at stop signs because they think they are being nice are actually working to make Larry David's worst nightmare a reality. They are threatening to fuck everything up for all of us with their smug little assault on the social contract.

Fuck you! I don't need YOUR permission to drive through a fucking stop sign. I KNOW when it is my turn to go and I will go whether you give me permission or not. Assholes.

Seriously, these people need to knock that shit off.

Restrooms have also come to piss me off lately. Not restrooms themselves specifically, they are really just a symptom of a larger issue. And not all restrooms, just most public restrooms. Let me explain.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the role of gender in our society and culture. And I don't get it. I understand conventions around gender are changing all the time, which is a good thing. Women and men are no longer relegated to "traditional" roles and each of us can do most of the things the other can do just as well. Childbirth and opening jars seem to be the most common exceptions.

But I really think we still place way too much importance on gender as a people, and restrooms are the most common manifestation of the problem.

One of the things I do in my real life is work with human data. When we collect information about people, certain demographics are always a central part of the process. We have all become conditioned to this. Each of us has been asked many times to complete forms asking for certain information about us, most commonly race, ethnicity, and gender.

Theoretically this information is collected for the express purpose of ensuring equality among these various groups. And in my experience this is usually what the information is used for. People want to know that members of all races and both genders are being treated fairly and equally for whatever purpose the data is being collected. But this is not always how the data are used.

I remember being an undergraduate sociology student years ago, and realizing for the first time that race and ethnicity statistics were sometimes used for the opposite purpose of that for which they were designed. On the same day I learned that the overrepresentation of black men in prisons had more to do with the type of crimes to which they have access rather than the rate at which they actually commit crime (think drug-offenders who serve prison time vs. Wall Street types who don't) I saw something astonishing on the evening news. A man was arguing for more social regulations based on race and ethnicity because as he explained, numbers don't lie. He pointed specifically to the fact that prisons were crowded with black men as evidence that black men committed more crime than other kinds of people.

That was when I first really understood that in fact numbers do lie, if we want them to. I knew that man was wrong. And I knew that other people would believe him anyway.

But we weren't talking about black men in prison. We were talking about public restrooms.

The point of that aside is to demonstrate that our craze with collecting information on race and ethnicity is not necessarily proving to be as beneficial for society as we want it to be. In fact, it is often being used for the direct opposite purpose.

If this is true of race, it is also true of gender.

A while back, events in my family caused me to really think long and hard about the role of gender in our society and its actual relevance versus its perceived relevance. When I really think hard about the types of social situations in which it is really truly necessary to differentiate people based on gender I come up nearly blank. This startled me the first time I tried it. But outside of a few healthcare applications, I can't think of many situations where a person's gender bears any relevance at all. Seriously. Think about it.

And yet we seem to always want to know. Why?

I have come to believe that statistics on race/ethnicity and gender may not be worth collecting. This is a big statement for me because collecting and analyzing these statistics is a fairly significant part of my actual employment. And dumb essays don't really pay the bills. I really think that by collecting gender data and placing so much importance on it we may be creating a problem more than solving one. Because I can't see how gender matters in most things. If we want true gender equality why not just make it the expectation instead of the goal? We are creating a false dichotomy.

And now I am angry at the men's room. First because I am a cranky old man. Secondly because we don't need the label.

As it turns out there are, and always have been, a number of people across all walks of life who don't specifically identify with either gender as we define them. The gender dichotomy is false because it is not a dichotomy. There is a plurality of gender identification out there. And we are being dicks about it when we ask everyone to identify what kind of body parts they are concealing (we all conceal them) when they choose which room to enter to relieve themselves, particularly when modern equipment used for doing so is largely identical in both rooms.

It is completely unnecessary to have men's rooms and ladies rooms. Think about it a while. I promise it will start to annoy you. We don't segregate restrooms in our homes by gender. And even port-a-potties, arguably the most public of all restrooms, are gender-neutral. So-called "family restrooms" at airports and the like seem to work fine when either mom or dad wants to change a baby, or when Dad is out with his toddler daughter and doesn't want to subject her to the men's room, or send her into the ladies room alone. So why the fuck do we build them the other way?

I am always pleased to see gender-neutral restrooms. It is a fairly modern trend, becoming more common all the time. It really warms my heart. It just makes so much more sense than what we have been doing all these years. I think, at least here in California, most new buildings are being constructed this way and I for one would like to see more older buildings retrofitted this way.

Recently I was at an arguably progressive restaurant with gender-neutral restrooms labeled "robots" and "aliens." One pauses to think for a moment before deciding which door to enter, not that it matters. I worry about the impact the false and unnecessary dichotomy of restrooms may have had on our collective psyche. I worry about ways that it may have stunted us. Perhaps restroom labels are the entire reason we are all so hung up on gender. I wonder how we might be different now as a people if right from the beginning our restrooms had been labeled "robots" and "aliens."

I was thinking about this as I left the restaurant and some asshole waved me through a stop sign.

I am getting old fast, and bitches really need to stop telling me when and where to go.

Sex, Lies, and Algebra. We're Doing it Wrong.

Almost every adult I know tells me they are bad at math. I work with some pretty highly educated people. They all tell me they are bad at math. They never hesitate or speak in low voice when they tell me this. They are not embarrassed.

I used to hate math, that is, before I knew I love it.

I was always into words. From the time I was a small child I knew I wanted to be either a teacher or a writer. And like a true American, I earn my living doing neither of those things. In school I excelled in English, and like all kids who excel in English, I barely passed math. I wrote poetry. I even published an underground art and poetry magazine at one of my high schools before I dropped out. I took Algebra in 8th grade and 9th grade, then Geometry in 10th grade. In college I took Algebra three more times as an undergraduate, dropping it twice and barely passing the third time with a C, the lowest acceptable grade for collecting credit in the course. The point is I struggled with algebra all five times I took the course. I obviously didn't really learn much algebra any of the times I took the course.

So I was only mildly surprised, after finally passing, when I moved to "upper division" math courses in quantitative reasoning and statistics, to find that I did not struggle in these new math courses. In fact I found the upper division math courses required for an undergraduate degree in Arts and Letters to be among the easiest courses I ever completed as an undergraduate. It's not because the courses were designed to be easy. Statistics is statistics. But for some reason these courses just made sense to me, and every answer to every problem on every assignment and on every exam just seemed to so simple and logical to me. After struggling with algebra for so many years, and thinking that math was supposed to get more difficult as one progressed in the study, I should have been very surprised by the seeming ease of the upper division courses. But I was an English major by then, with an eye on a teaching credential. All I wanted to do was finish all my required math courses so I could concentrate on all the literature courses I needed to complete for my major. I was just glad the last required math courses were easier than the first ones.

As it turns out, it took a few more years for me to be really surprised.

NPR did a story not too long ago about a rapping math teacher, who was apparently reaching his inner-city students in a creative way. The story stuck in my mind because it was one of the stupidest fucking stories I had ever heard in my life and I was embarrassed to be listening to it. The story was stupid and offensive on a number of levels. I won't go into them all here. As thinking people my readers will no doubt find their own offense. Aside from the fact that there is no way a rapping math teacher is really making inner-city kids love math, and aside from the fact that if we believed he was doing such a thing, simply by rapping about math, it would by definition mean we have a very low opinion of inner-city kids, there was a bigger problem with the way the story was reported. At one point the journalist presenting the story discussed the origin of the teacher's rapper name, which he referred to as an alter ego, 2 Pi. I remember that he called himself 2 Pi because I thought that the obvious name for a rapping math teacher was MC squared, and I couldn't believe this guy missed that one, and instead went with 2 Pi.

Anyway when describing the origin of the name 2 Pi, the journalist explained that 2 Pi was taken from a mathematical formula, but that he (the journalist) "wasn't going to try to explain what it means."

I know right? That's what I was thinking. What the hell? A presumably college-educated professional journalist whose work is heard and respected all across this country can't even begin to explain the formula for finding the circumference of a circle? Is that how far we have fallen as a people? He can't explain 2(pi)r? He should have asked a sixth grader. Because here in California, sixth graders are required to know and use formulas for finding the circumference (and area) of a circle.

So why does this adult, professional journalist think it is okay that he can't explain something so simple to his audience? And why do my friends and colleagues think it is okay to be bad at math, even if they excel in other areas?

It's because of the way we have been teaching math for fifty years.

And no, rapping about math is not the solution.

After I finished my Bachelor's degree in English I started teaching. I had been a substitute teacher for a while when I got my first summer school job - teaching Algebra. It didn't matter that my only degrees at the time were in Behavioral Science and English. It didn't matter that I had taken Algebra several times myself before barely passing. This was the job available. My principal seemed concerned only that I was an adult who could be in a classroom all summer. As a substitute English teacher I had attained a reputation for being able to "handle" a class of high school kids without sending many of them to the principal's office, and that was apparently enough to qualify me for the position. I had a pregnant wife at home and no better prospects for summer work so I grabbed the opportunity. Carpe fucking diem.

The interesting part of this story is not what I did for my students. Because I did teach algebra that summer, even if my student's didn't learn any algebra. I promise I never did anything for them. The interesting part of this story is what happened to me, in my head, which changed my perspective on math forever.

I taught myself algebra. I stayed more or less a chapter ahead of my students all summer. Each day of class I taught them what I had just learned the night before. But I found, unlike the many frustrating years I spent with Algebra early in life, that it wasn't really that hard to understand. I just needed a reason to understand it. And while in my case the reason to finally learn Algebra was to collect a badly needed paycheck while (hopefully) not actually damaging children, the specific reason, as it turns out, is not important. Any reason would have done. I finally understood algebra as a concept, and I knew what it was good for. When I was finally forced by my own reasons to just figure it out, I was able to do what I now wish I had been able to do as a child. I was able to learn and understand the concepts of algebra, not just the process.

All of us who were raised in American public schools clearly recall spending hours in rows of desks while a felt-pen wielding numbers-chef hovered tirelessly above an overhead projector. At least half of us remember also being bored, confused, disinterested, or stoned (the stoned kids don't actually remember). Very few kids in those classes were clearly engaged and understanding what the teachers were teaching. I know this because most of us, as adults, still don't understand the processes we were taught for adding and subtracting polynomials, or for solving systems of linear equations. Even now as intelligent and professional members of modern society we don't exactly recall why we would even ever do any of those things. And we aren't worried about it much. Because it is okay to not be good at math. Everyone says so.

I mean not me. After my major breakthrough in algebra I understood why those "upper division" math classes had strangely seemed so easy to me. It was because in those classes I was taught concepts, and the processes worked themselves out. I know now that I am a conceptual learner. I am a big picture guy. I want a reason to do something. I want madness to go with method. I quickly enrolled in graduate school and went on to study some fairly high-end statistics and psychometrics. That's the kind of badass I am.

In America we teach math as a process. Starting in elementary school, this seems to be the only way we teach it. Even today, math teachers, whether first-grade teachers teaching math alongside other subjects, or high school teachers who teach only math all day long, start with a chapter in the district-adopted textbook, and move sequentially through the chapters throughout the school year. This is the process for teaching a process. It is very linear. It starts with simple problems and builds to more complex problems. Kids practice the procedures they learn every night by repeating them over and over again until they hate math for the monotony, if for no other reason. As it turns out, not all kids are procedural learners.

Don't get me wrong, some kids are procedural learners. This works for some kids. It is usually the cooperative kids who like to please adults. The kids who do what they are told without asking too many questions. And that's fine. Those kids grow up to be math teachers. And they teach math to new kids using the same process. It's like Amway with a track team.

But most of us get lost in those classes. Maybe we were sick the day we learned to find the greatest common factor. And after that little else makes sense. So we are lost, and we stay lost, because the teacher has moved on to another chapter. And our grades sink lower and lower, and we learn to hate math, and we think we are not good at it. Because when we teach math as a process, and we miss an important part of that process, it is hard to make sense of what comes next in the process. And so it goes.

So now after fifty years or more of teaching math this way we have a serious problem. We have a serious problem in our culture when we all think it is okay to be bad at math. In this modern world, it is clearly not okay to be bad at math.

This would never happen with reading. It is decidedly not okay to not be able to read in our culture. Professional adults do not proudly proclaim that they are bad at reading without lowering their voice. The same is true with students, and kids get the message early.

First we lie to them. From the earliest ages we teach mathematical lies to children. We teach them plus and minus instead of positive and negative numbers. We tell them zero is the lowest number. Anyone with a checking account knows that is not true. We teach them that "diamonds" and "balls" are shapes, because we think they are too stupid to understand words like quadrilateral and sphere. And we persist in these lies for years, all while they are learning to like school and trust teachers. And then they get to about fourth grade and everything starts to change. We tell them that zero is not the lowest number, that a diamond is not a shape, that multiplication is not denoted with an x but instead we use parentheses, and the second-grade teachers they loved as much as their mothers LIED to them. It is a cruel world. And to make matters worse, this is the age where most kids discover that their parents can no longer help them with their math homework. For many years both state and national test results have shown that this is when kids start being bad at math. It's no wonder.

When my oldest son was in second grade he was having some trouble reading. His teachers quickly held a series of parent conferences and got a district reading specialist involved. He was pulled out of his regular class a couple hours a day just to work with a specialist on his reading. The effort was complete and everyone participated. Even at home, his mother and stepfather removed all toys and games from his bedroom, leaving only books for him to discover. It worked like a charm. In a matter of months he was reading at grade level, and soon beyond.

Stories like this happen all the time in public schools. Because everyone knows that reading is important. Everyone knows that to compete for comfort and prosperity in a global economy one must be able to read and retain information. Unfortunately this never happens when kids fall behind in math. Not the same way. We all seem to recognize that math is important. We even seem to recognize that we have, as a nation, been falling behind other industrialized nations in math knowledge for more that 20 years now. We recognize that the future of technology and information processing completely dependent on math knowledge. We import many thousands of engineers and other mathematicians from countries whose students are far outperforming our own children in math. And still, it is okay to be bad at math.

I don't have the answers, as usual. But it does seem to me that it might be reasonable to try teaching math a different way, and see if more kids catch on. We should teach math as a concept, not just a process for illusory ends. It worked for me. But no matter what, we must stop just accepting that math is too hard for most of us. We need to stop teaching in the manner we do, where by high school neither students nor adults really care whether anyone is good at math. We need to stop just accepting that most kids will not be good at math. Because by not changing our actions and attitudes, that is exactly what we are doing now.

Stop saying it's okay to be bad at math. Stop being proud of that.

Or don't. As it turns out I don't actually care that much.

Power to the People? Are You Sure?

I have a standard line I like to use when I am approached by people outside grocery stores.  It is genius.  My kids and their friends are highly amused by it.  I will share it with you now.  Whenever someone comes at me with a pen and asks for my signature on some petition, I always respond very simply and very clearly “I am a convicted felon.”

This is a lie.  As it turns out, I am not yet a convicted felon. 

But this is a good lie, and a funny one.  As I have explained to my surprised children and their friends more than once, a convicted felon cannot legally vote.  Therefore the signature of a felon on any petition targeted at a ballot initiative would certainly be invalidated.  Signature collectors, who in California are universally collecting signatures for some ballot initiative, hate when their carefully collected signatures are invalidated.  They never bother a convicted felon more than once.   

It is also a good segue into that awkward conversation all parents must eventually have with their children regarding their own troubled pasts.  For me this is an opportunity to share with my children the story of how I came to realize how bad an idea direct government really is.  Because there is nothing kids love more than to hear an old man ramble on and on about blah, blah, blah blah, blah. 

That’s what my kids are thinking right now if they are reading this. 

I remember being a 17 year old college freshman sitting in my very first political science course when the instructor asked me if I thought the California Initiative was a good idea.  I was stumped.  I had never considered it an option.  Growing up in California it had just always been there.  Every election I had ever been aware of had been surrounded by messages urging “yes” or “no” on some obscure proposition and its assigned number.  Much like fast food in my family, I had never really considered if it was a good idea or not, it had just always been there. 

My stunned silence earned me a topic assignment for my next paper.  And when that paper was due I submitted an extremely well researched argument that the California Initiative was in fact the greatest and most important example of government of the people, by the people, and for the people ever known to man.  It was in my mind a cornerstone of what I considered to be politically important, namely power to the people. 

Kids are dumb. 

As a grumpy old man I now clearly understand the California Initiative to be a really bad idea.  Don’t get me wrong, the Initiative is and has been a really great experiment in direct government. Therefore, it is a truly terrible idea.  I know it seems like a good idea.  But it isn’t.

As a pretty good experiment with a long history, even a cursory review of available data shows pretty clearly the real problem with the California Initiative (and similar ballot proposition processes in the 24 other states currently following a similar course to cultural devolution) .  I am sure countless graduate students have completed countless thorough and legitimate studies of the positive and negative effects of the Initiative process, but I prefer to cut straight to the useful information to illustrate what I mean. 

A quick scan of Wikipedia shows a list of the following “notable” (read: most talked-about) California Ballot Propositions:

Proposition 6 (1978) (defeated) on barring homosexuality in the public school system

Proposition 13 (1978) (passed) on property tax; imposing 2/3 requirement for budget vote, tax increases

Proposition 187 (1994) (passed, then declared unconstitutional) on denying illegal immigrants eligibility to receive public services (immediate stay was federally imposed and is still in effect)

Proposition 209 (1996) (passed) on banning affirmative action in public sector (employment, education, etc.)

Proposition 215 (1996) (passed) on legalizing medical marijuana

Proposition 22 (2000) (passed, then declared unconstitutional) on a statute banning same-sex marriage

Proposition 8 (2008) (pending appeal in the courts) on a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in order to override the In re Marriage (Proposition 22) decision earlier that year that legalized same-sex marriage

Proposition 19 (2010) (defeated) on the legalization of marijuana

Direct governance seems to bring out the worst in us.  As it turns out, any asshole with a couple hundred bucks and a pile of signatures can get a law on the ballot.  I mean an actual law, which needs to be enforced.  And regular people vote on this law.  No elected officials are involved.  There is no debate amongst any legislative body. 

In fact the process is so simple and straight forward even the stoners have managed to successfully organize efforts to get a couple initiatives on the ballot.  They apparently forgot to remember to vote for the last one but that is not the point.  Stoners can get laws on the general election ballot.  I hope that statement is as terrifying to my readers as I intend it to be.  They even managed to pull it off in Washington and Colorado.  If even stoners can be successful in this process imagine what someone like Hitler might be able to do with it?

And that brings me to my point about the California Initiative being a bad idea.  As you can see from the list above, more often than not, the asshole with the signatures just wants to use the Initiative process to be a dick to someone else. 

I am convinced that this is the reason our founding fathers designed the US government without a direct government initiative process.  I used to think it was just because they lacked the technology for direct government, or because they were lazy.  But this is not true.  I now think they understood that we don’t really want to give just any asshole the power to make laws.  Those were wise men indeed. 

It seems to me there is an additional amount of consideration that goes into the more traditional process of passing laws via elected officials.  Debate is good. Even competing special interests can sometimes inflict more reason and understanding on the process of creating laws than can the ability of any average Joe, and I do mean average, to simply vote yes or no.

And it is usually so easy to get people to agree with your misguided opinion this way.  Think about how it starts. If the average registered voter puts any  careful consideration at all into the votes they cast on ballot propositions, that consideration is entirely absent at the time they sign that petition outside the grocery store.  That petition is important, and we really should all think carefully before we sign them, but we never do.  In fact I contend that each of us more or less universally does the same thing.  If you are the type of person who gets annoyed at strangers asking you about something important when you are only thinking about what kind of bread to buy, you probably never sign any of those petitions, even if it is for a cause in which you believe.  Similarly, If you are the type of person who hates to be approached and who is uncomfortable saying no to a stranger, you probably always sign, because what the hell.  It is easy for you and it makes them happy.    

 
Even my own canned and lazy response to petitioners outside the grocery store is applied universally, for better or worse.  It got me some funny looks recently when I was asked by some particularly short activists if I wanted to buy some Girl Scout cookies.  Apparently “I am a convicted felon” was not the response they were looking for.

The Benefit of Being a Fat Asshole

Women are kind. I know this is not universally true. Nothing is universally true. There are no absolutes in this universe.  Still, when I think of women, kind is the first word that comes to mind.

The reasons why I believe, in spite of my own unfriendly history with several women, that women in general tend to be kind, are not important.  It may be a result of my relationship with my own mother, who in spite of the fact that I am and always have been particularly difficult to deal with, and not always very nice, has demonstrated only the finest example of maternal love and caring throughout my life.  It may be because most of my closest friends have always been women.  It may be because I have spent my career in a field dominated by women and have known many amazingly intelligent and talented women over the years.  But who really cares?  Why doesn't matter.

Women are kind, particularly in contrast with men.  Men are not kind.  And as a result I am not kind.  I am mean to my kids (just ask them).  I was a terrible husband.  I am selfish, lazy, and unapologetically unsympathetic. I ignore people's birthdays and hope they ignore mine.  I like neither kittens nor puppies.  I am a holiday grinch. And generally I can't wait to get old and yell at kids to get off my lawn.  Even women who know me well know I am not kind. I have been accused, recently, more than once, by close female friends, of being a misogynist, and it is probably true.  Again, why doesn't matter.  That's just how I roll.

I am also fat and bald.

The first time I got divorced I was 30 years old.  I had spent my teen years being a heavy-metal teen dad.  I spent my twenties as a 1950s husband and father, working for the man and bringing home the bacon to my perpetually pregnant stay-at-home wife and mother of my small children.  When I was suddenly single at 30 (and it was sudden for me, even if it wasn't for her, because I am selfish and insensitive and I never saw it coming), I had no idea what the real world was actually like.

One night, out at a bar with a friend, a couple of her friends, and some younger guys who were working hard to impress the ladies I was with, I had one beer too many, and spoke up in what I assumed was a fairly obnoxious manner.  These kids (the younger guys), in an effort to sound intelligent to some older ladies, attempted to wax philosophical about the beat generation. The only problem was they had no real understanding of how the movement fit into our culture chronologically or influentially, and they misunderstood, and subsequently misrepresented the major contributions of one of the movement's key players on our cultural psyche.  Basically, they had just read On The Road and considered themselves big fans of Jack Kerouac.

But really they were dumb kids who clearly had not even read the Cliff's notes.  Maybe they thought that merely mentioning a key novel and writer would help charm the women. They clearly knew something about women which at the time I had not understood.

I was drunk, and sad about my divorce, and I didn't give a fuck. Also I had an actual  literary degree from a college and had recently read and studied much of the body of work left by Kerouac, Cassidy, Burroughs, and Ginsberg, including their overlap and extensions into the work of Kesey and Wolfe.  Shit I had a recording of Howl on my iPod in my pocket. So I corrected them.  I stood, somewhat stumbling, ranted for about ten minutes about the actual societal contribution of the beats and specifically of Kerouac and On The Road, payed the collective tab, and split. I left to smoke and brood alone in the parking lot, generally feeling sorry for myself.

That was when shit got weird and my limited and naive understanding of women changed forever.

First the kids came out and found me.  There were three of them.  Each them shook my hand and proclaimed me their personal hero.  I guess they struck out but enjoyed the time regardless.  Thinking back now I think those kids were okay, and I probably didn't need to be so hard on them.

Next the ladies emerged and since they were my ride they directed me to the car we had arrived in, because I could not have found it on my own.  As we all shuffled in to the late model VW sedan I found myself in the backseat with a young teacher, a friend of my friend whom I had just met.  She was thin and pretty and I had not thought about her at all, considering her out of my league from the time of our introduction.

So imagine my surprise when by the end of a twenty minute ride back to my friend's house I found this young woman on my lap.  We were making out like teenagers.  I had no idea what had happened or how, or why, but I didn't really feel like asking any questions.  I just went with it and spent the next twelve or so hours with her.

Later I understood what had happened. Having had no interpersonal experience with single women since I was a teenager, I had assumed that at 30 women were more or less the same as they had been as girls, shallow.  I was wrong and it opened up a whole new world for me.  In fact the young lady I described was not even 30 yet.  She was several years younger than me.  She was different from most women I thought I knew, but I know now not terribly different from all good women.

It turns out she was attracted to intelligent men.  This is not news to anyone, except for me at the time.  In this particular case, it just happens that she is really into american literature, and Kerouac was her favorite writer. She knew those kids hitting on her had been idiots, though she didn't speak up like I did. She wasn't drunk like me.  The point was my little rant at the bar had not just earned me the respect of the guys at whom it was directed, but she admitted later that she was immediately more attracted to me than she could ignore.  The fact that I was fat, bald, drunk, and sad made little difference.  She was the first woman I knew explicitly to overlook all physical characteristics because there were other personal qualities in which she was more interested.

And she really liked me a lot for a little while.

Once I understood that unlike my tragic time as a teenager, which was the last time I had been single, grown women really appreciated intelligence and charm, I used it to my advantage, particularly following my second divorce.  I started writing a blog regularly and met a lot of new friends.  I took plenty of time to practice my barroom rhetoric.  And it all worked in my favor.  Using the same basic model, I have managed to have a pretty good time now for a lot of years.

Years later, a friend noted that being divorced in my thirties hadn't really damaged my social life said to me "being fat doesn't seem to slow you down that way."  I took this as a great compliment, because he was right, being fat and bald doesn't matter at all in my relationships with women.

This would never happen in reverse.  That is the sad truth.  While personally I like women with a little meat on them (I sometimes think it is because I am a vegetarian now), I still have fairly shallow standards for physical appearance. I suppose all men do, and even if our individual preferences are a little different from each other, it is a universal truth that when we describe what interests us most in women we always begin with physical traits.  Because men are shallow. I am shallow. I often describe the kind of woman I am interested in as having a pretty face, comically high intelligence, and a really sick sense of humor. That's all I am concerned with.  And while those last two traits may somewhat unique to my own preferences (and may also actually be a single trait), I still start my list with a pretty face.  I am not as good as the women who have liked me. I would have a hard time really appreciating a fat, bald woman no matter how smart or funny she is.

I understand that some women are shallow.  I know this.  In fact I might even assume that half of all women are shallow.  It may be that fully 50% of all adult vagina holders in this country would not give me the time of day, simply because of my appearance.  But that doesn't matter, because the other 50% will at least listen to (or read) my bullshit rhetoric.  And the good news is these two halves of the feminine population are not divided by any sort of type, some women of all varieties will prefer humor and intelligence over other characteristics.

This is the reason why when another friend asked me recently if I would consider online dating I immediately answered with a definitive negative.  Because I know in my heart of hearts that the type of women who are attracted to a fact-and-photo-based browsing service are the shallow ones.  Even if they are not shallow they are far too practical.  I look terrible on paper.  Combine a photo of me with just one basic fact, I have six children, and no woman on any dating site will ever look further than that.  I always say I don't "date" as a matter of principle, which is true, because I think it is dumb to pretend at my age.  But the truth is, fat, bald guys with six kids don't date, regardless.

If I am going to meet women, I need a chance to charm a bitch.  And sometimes I do.

This is how I know women are generally kind.  They are the better of the genders.  Women place value on all the important characteristics in a way that makes life easier for a guy like me.  Women are good, and so I don't need to be.

This Is Not About Robots

“Stop bitching about robots already.”

This is my twelve-year-old son London talking to me.

“I am just saying we should have way more robots by now. It’s 2013 already.”

That was me. And it’s true.

Those of us who were children during the cold war, an era which featured a nearly unprecedented growth in technological innovation, came to have a lot of expectations for our personal futures. We are all currently disappointed one way or another.

We have all seen the memes recently asking where our flying cars are, or jet-packs, or Marty McFly’s hoverboard (not to mention his self-tying sneakers). And we really were supposed to have all those things by now. As late as 1985 we were all positive that we would have them all by “the year 2000” let alone by 2013. But we don’t have any of them. And these are all now great examples of our collective disappointment.

But these are not my personal disappointments. Even when I was ten years old I knew those things sounded too good (read: far too dangerous) to be true. I understood enough about the regulatory nature of the American people to know not to expect the freedom to zoom about the skies at will like some kind of over-sized Alabama firefly orgy. I was a strange kid. But I did believe the future would be saturated by two things: Velcro shoes and Robots. Seriously, why would anyone ever tie shoelaces when Velcro exists in the world?

I live in a fairly large house with five transients. Sure, technically these proto-hobos are my children, but they are not like me. I sleep in the same bed in the same room every night. I like to think I don’t always sleep there alone, if you know what I mean, but really I pretty much do. My children do not. They are children of divorce. They each have a bed in a bedroom in our home, and they more or less keep all their stuff there, bathe there, make messes there, “forget” to brush their teeth there. But they don’t always sleep there.

Every night some of these children will sleep in the spaces I provide for them, but almost every night some of them sleep somewhere else as well, presumably with their mother. And while there is a nearly recognizable pattern to where each child may be and when, it is not a pattern one would want to use to make any kind of reliable predictions. It is a sort of controlled chaos. The uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics tells us that it may be impossible to observe the specific location of a particle while also knowing how fast it is traveling. I find this to be true of my children. If I know where one is, I can’t know when or how fast he might be going, and vice-versa. This is either because the field of quantum mechanics deals in the basic building blocks of the universe and so its probabilistic rules naturally extend to describe even complex organisms operating within the universe, or because I have too many kids. To a certain extent, divorce has made my children free as birds. They have options I never had.

I knew from a pretty young age I would not share my parents’ particularly behavioralistic religion in my adult years. It never made any sense to me. It still doesn’t. I used to spend hours daydreaming and imagining what my future might be like, because I knew it would be different from the way my parents lived. I made plans. I set goals and worked toward them. I was a chess player as a kid, and I heard someone say once that in a chess game, if you can think just twelve moves ahead, and imagine all possible outcomes, the best moves would become obvious and you could never lose. I know this now to be both incorrect and more or less impossible. But I believed it at the time, and from an early age I have always tried to think twelve moves ahead in life, and have always tried to imagine all possible outcomes. I was sure I knew, at the very least, all possible options for my future, so that one of the outcomes I imagined would be correct, and hopefully one of the good ones.

But the thing is, kids are dumb. I never imagined anything like the reality I am living now.

I still tie my own shoes, with laces, exactly the way I learned to do it when I was four years old, way back in the 1900s. Today I am wearing a pair of boots with one of those laces where the aglet has come off one end, and so to properly tie it I have to twist the end of the shoelace into some half-assed point and sneak it through the eyelet. It is 2013, and Velcro still exists in the world.

 I also spend a lot of time cleaning my house, doing dishes and laundry daily, and constantly sweeping floors, because five transients make quite a mess. These things piss me off on a daily basis, not because I hate the work, and not because I resent my kids, but because it is 2013 and I should have fucking robots to do chores for me. I was positive that by the time I was 40 I would not need to cook or clean or do any of the time-robbing daily maintenance which currently consumes my evenings. Just like the innovative sewing machine and the subsequent ability to purchase mass-produced clothing on the cheap freed up several hours daily my great-great-grandmothers once used to make clothes for their families (allowing them more time to pursue racism), robots were supposed to free me from the mind-numbing drudgery of my household chores, allowing me more time for drinking and watching reality TV (which is definitely better than racism?).

What did we get instead of robots? The fucking internet. And we never even saw it coming. I am not complaining about the internet, it is really great and all, and it is the only reason you are even reading this crap right now anyway. But the internet can’t take the clothes from the washer and put them in the dryer (and why the hell do we still have two separate machines for that?). In just twenty years internet technology has improved and changed our lives in ways we couldn’t have imagined just ten years ago. And yet the best robot I can buy will only vacuum my floor. No doubt if robots were useful for masturbation we would be awash in them. Pornography drives all relevant innovation. Think about it.

But even back in the day I knew, even without the robots I would at least have a wife. And yet here I am, thirty years in the future, a single, male, domestic slave.

 London doesn’t know that it’s not really robots I am bitching about.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, if it isn’t truly descriptive of the nature of all life created by assemblies of the particles whose irrational behavior it describes, is at least a pretty good metaphor for life. In my life it is doubly effective. It seems I can know neither where I am nor how fast I am traveling. The only thing I know about the future is that it will not be, in any way, how I imagine it will be. The only thing I can be certain of is that my predictions are wrong. And strangely that works for me now. I am just sweeping the floor, waiting to see what happens next.

Don't Worry, I Have a Plan

I read an article from the Huffington Post this morning about why women should not get involved with attractive men. It was all in reference to the Weiner scandal, and cited a bunch of previously published information about how attractive men are statistically more likely to be unfaithful and how the happiest couples tend to be those where the woman is more attractive than the man. It all sounded terribly reasonable to me, so I shared it on Facebook.

A friend later mentioned to me that though she didn’t disagree with the analysis she thought the whole situation was particularly unfair to women. She reasoned that because beautiful women can, and often do, find themselves attracted to all manner of men, the hot ones and the ugly ones, less attractive women were more likely to suffer because even ugly men believe they can score a hot chick, and will hold out for that rather than settle for the company of a great personality.
I also found her assessment to be reasonable and true. I do think it is fundamentally unfair that ugly women suffer. I am not going to change my own behavior or anything. Guys like me tend to reap the most benefit from the egalitarian nature of beautiful and intelligent women. But I did spend some time thinking about it sympathetically, and I have developed a plan that we as a society can implement to help make everyone happy, hotties and uggos alike.

The first thing we need to recognize is the most obvious conclusion drawn from the research cited on the subject. Attractive men are the worst people in the world. They are all terrible, and they should suffer for their good looks. It is critical that we, as a nation, accept this natural and obvious fact. It is the only way for us all to win.

The next step is a critical one which will involve significant cultural engineering. We need to make sure that all beautiful women only involve themselves with ugly men. Some beautiful women already love ugly men, so we are part of the way there. Women like Shannon Tweed, Julia Roberts, Christie Brinkley, and Mia Farrow, for their selfless willingness to bang ugly dudes, need to be celebrated as shining examples of feminine beauty and grace. This, in combination with the systematic demonization of all attractive men should create significant enough social pressure that all beautiful women will pair up with ugly guys. A nice additional step might be a media propaganda campaign promoting fat, bald guys as the world’s greatest lovers, and the men most prized by beautiful women worldwide. I for one, as a patriotic American, could really get behind something like that. We must do what it best for the greater good, and what is best for the country.

The final step really takes care of itself. Once attractive men are successfully demonized, and hot chicks and ugly guys have entered into an exclusive agreement, hot guys will go all in for ugly chicks. And it is about time our ugly chicks got what they deserve. They have long suffered under the oppressive regime of attractiveness. Now they get their pick of all the hottest dudes. And we all live happily ever after.

Everyone wins.

You’re welcome.

Dumb Notions about Humans as Animals - Part 1 of several

My mother thinks I am a nice guy. At least I think she does. Her whole attitude toward me seems to be sympathetic of a nice guy who has somehow been taken advantage of. She really seems to believe this no matter how many times I tell her to shut the fuck up and make me a sandwich.

I am charming. That is a fact.

It is interesting to me that pleasant and intelligent women don’t seem to always be aware of the qualities in a man to which they are attracted. Perhaps they are aware, but are not willing to admit. I could respect that. Mystery is a quality men find attractive in women, though we aren’t typically aware of it, and wouldn’t admit it if we were.

There is a biological basis for all this.

Women always say they like nice guys. They vehemently work to dispel the notion that “nice guys finish last.” Single women seem to constantly wonder why they can’t find a nice guy. The truth is they probably can. There are a lot of nice guys out there. And women probably really do like nice guys. Unfortunately though, they are not actually attracted to nice guys. And that is the key. The qualities in men that women say they want, and actually believe they want, are not necessarily the qualities they are actually attracted to. Human beings can use logic and reason to imagine the qualities they think would make a good mate. We do this all the time. But logic and reason cannot overcome biology. The kind of person we think we want to find, may not be someone to whom we are physically attracted.

This is the reason dating web sites never work the way we want them to. This is also the reason therapists are so popular and earn so much money.

I contend, and I am obviously not the first to do so, that women believe they want to find a nice guy who is responsible, caring, and sensitive. Unfortunately women are attracted to men who are confident, intelligent, strong, and aggressive.

Why is this so? Because we are Great Apes. And we are slaves to biology, evolution, and natural selection.

In our culture, more often than not, men who are caring and sensitive are not very confident or aggressive. Also, unfortunately, in our culture, being confident and aggressive almost always makes you an asshole. Women believe they want to be with nice guys. But they are attracted to assholes. They can’t help it.

Aggressive males are alpha males, and in the animal world they are leaders, and generally make better providers and protectors. This is why women are attracted to assholes without even knowing it. Biology is telling them that the asshole is likely to be a better protector and provider. Biology tells them this by making them tingle a little more in the right places when they are with assholes than when they are with nice guys. Even if women know logically that assholes will hurt them. They just can’t help it.

We are not as evolved as we think we are.