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The indignities will continue until your head explodes

More potential client fun
Apparently the potential client tried to email me on Monday but the message was “returned as undeliverable.” Despite this, it was urgent that I call them…at 12:40 p.m. Eastern time. Apparently these people have never heard of lunch.

So after replying to some on who is on Pacific time ASAP both by email and with a voicemail message (tip of the nib to Jim for the Google voice invite), I still hadn’t heard back from them by 6 p.m. On the west coast.

Oh and did I mention they want another call to discuss how I’m going to do the work? Nor did they send the access information I need to actuall get into their systm to do the work.

Did I also mention that they didn’t even ask where they could send a signed contract?

Yeah it’s going to be like that.

Legitimate excuse to avoid conference calls
I’m not a big fan of the phone.  It’s got all the awkwardness of a cocktail party shrunk down into miniature.  Now I have an excuse to stay off it as much as possible: I can’t really open my mouth.

Yes, it’s rubber band time with the braces.  While I’m wearing the “elastics” as my dentist so lovingly refers to them, I can really only get my teeth apart just enough to wedge in a straw so I can stay hydrated.  Guess I have to do my best not to get sick again any time in the next two months otherwise I’ll sufficate on my on snot.

Hurry hard

I attended one of the Fall “Learn to Curl” classes held by the fabulous folks at the Potomac Curling Club today. Here’s what I learned in both the lessons and our 3 end game.

Ice is hard
You find this out when you start to sweep because the fact is that most of us aren’t used to keeping upright on ice and sweeping requires that you not only pace the stone but that you work your hands while you’re doing it. Our instructor told us flat out that we would fall while we were sweeping. And I did…four times. While I was the first to go down, I feel better about the fact that I wasn’t the only one going home with bruises in embarrassing places.

Curling stone, courtesy wikicommons
Yep, it's made out of granite.
Curling is exercise
It may not look like it on TV but sometimes those 44 pound stones move fast even when they aren’t moving all that fast so there were times when I and my fellow sweeper were practically running down the sheet. Not only were we moving fast, we had to put pressure on the broom and move it in a tight little space to be at all effective. And all that takes not only lung stamina but muscle power.

Flexibility matters
But it isn’t everything. Spending 18 years squatting down behind the plate to catch a softball probably put me ahead of some of the people my age who were in my beginning class. Since curling is billed as a sport you can enjoy at any age, accommodations were made for the people in my group who had bad knees, and for the 68 year-old ladies who drove down from Harrisburg, PA. Oh, and that whole squat and push the stone thing…a lot harder than it looks.

Sportsmanship counts
So does fun. Many of us were just in this for fun and, much like chess, you are playing against yourself as much as you’re playing against the other team. If your sweepers did well, tell them. Even if they weren’t perfect, tell them it’s OK. Oh, and at Potomac the winner buys the first round.

Communication counts almost as much
OK, so for winning the game purposes communication probably counts more than sportsmanship but without the sportsmanship would it really be as much fun? As skip you have to make sure the person throwing knows what you’re calling, and when you’re sweeping you have to make sure you’re coordinating with your fellow sweeper so you aren’t knocking brooms instead of helping the stone move along.

The other thing I learned as we played a game to try to solidify the concepts from the lesson portion of our class: I’ve got the skip’s yell. I doubt I’ll ever be as loud as Eve Muirhead, and I’ll certainly never be able to do that thing she does to the R, but if I ever get good enough to skip at least my sweepers will be able to hear me.

Control is an illusion

America has a split personality. I say this with confidence as the evidence is all around us.

  • We want less government involvement in our lives yet we happily whiz down roads paid with Federal highway money.
  • We think “entitlement programs” should be slashed, slashed, slashed, yet 40 million people are receiving food stamps, 50 million are on Medicaid, and 4.4 million are on welfare.
  • A vocal number of us are increasingly so concerned about “illegal immigrants,” ostensibly because they take away jobs that could be going to “real Americans,” that some of us are calling for building a huge wall between us and Mexico and we’re even willing to flirt with fascism by allowing police to detain people who can not prove on the spot they are in the U.S. legally yet when the United Farm Workers issued a challenge to Americans to “take our jobs” only 16 people showed up (video) out of the 4,000+ applications they received.

The other, more insidious, indicator doesn’t really appear on the news. In fact, all of the more visible indicators are evidence of an underlying attitude dissonance in American philosophical thought.

Here’s the thing: shit happens. And when I say “shit” I don’t mean just any stuff. I mean bad things, things that are scary, discomfitting, and enraging, and often have a direct, negative impact on the quality of your life. There are two basic philosophical approaches to a series of these occurrences in your life: take them personally or don’t.

Take them personally manifests itself in two ways, the most obvious being the victim mentality that is also so prevalent in American society today – this is happening to me because I’m poor/a different religion/a minority and has nothing to do with my heroin addiction or the fact that I didn’t work in school so I now am not qualified for any job at all.

The other less obvious but in some ways more detrimental outgrowth of the idea that the bad things that affect your life are personal is the idea that everything that happens to you is a direct outgrowth of your choices.

The idea that everything that happens to you is influenced or able to be influenced by you is a meme brought to us by the positivity movement, exemplified by the bestseller The Secret, and it is seductive. Right thought leads to right consequences. Concentrate on money and the universe will give it to you. Project a good attitude and you will attract happy people. But the dark side of this is that all the bad things that happen to you are an outgrowth of wrong thought.

If your job sucks it’s not because Management are being total assholes and giving you no support whatsoever, or better still outright abusing you; your job sucks because you choose to work for a bad employer and the consequences of Management’s misbehavior are under your control. If you don’t get a raise it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or “sell yourself” enough. If you get cancer it’s because you didn’t focus on being healthy.

Despite its seductive nature and the ultimate appeal of the lure of control, and despite the small grain of truth inherent in its philosophy because after all actions do indeed have consequences, the idea that we can control or influence the bulk of what happens to us is utterly false. It places the onus of others’ behavior on the person being affected by that behavior which in and of itself is contrary to its own philosophy.

This is Indexed: It’s all more chance than choice. 27 September 2010
Yes, your life is affected by the choices you make and bearing the consequences, both good and bad, of those choices would in a perfect world be your responsibility alone. We don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world with other people and we are affected by the choices they make not only with no malice toward us but often with no idea of our very existence.

The woman who decides to have a second cup of coffee Tuesday morning which means she leaves the house 15 minutes later than normal which puts her on the freeway at a time when she might not normally be there so she is in the path of the tractor trailer driven by the guy who has been up 40 straight hours to just happens to fall asleep and lose control drifting into her lane and pinning her car against the concrete barrier crushing her to death is affected not only by her choice to have a second cup of coffee but also by the choices of the truck driver, and the person in the lane ahead of her, and by the shipper who put the driver’s load on the truck and set the delivery schedule.

And in the world of The Secret she, and she alone, is responsible for her own death because she chose to have that second cup of coffee.

The simple fact of the matter is that life is chaos. We can control what we can control, which is no where near as much as we think or we would like. But just because life is chaos doesn’t mean that we don’t have a right to bitch about it a little when bad things happen to us. It means that we have to recognize when complaining has taken the place of working to change your circumstances.

While they may not break bones, they do still matter

Slovenly language corrodes the mind.
– John Q. Adams

I freely admit that I am a linguistic pedant. I care about how people use words, what words mean and how definitions are ignored or manipulated. Punctuation matters deeply to me, and someone’s written grammar can influence my abiding opinion of that person in the face of many other positive indicators. This is why I get so frustrated when supposedly intelligent people use language in ways that are just plain wrong.

screen capture from Facebook...with strategic blurring
Because if I reposted this exchange as text it would be searchable.

The whole point of Facebook is to share content: what you’re doing; links you find interesting; notes and funny cartoons; and other effluvia about your life. Facebook’s share module allows you to post a personal note with anything you share to, theoretically, make it more relevant to your circle of friends.

A former co-worker/Facebook friend of mine is a self-proclaimed liberal feminist. She has lots of political hot button issues about which she routinely posts articles. These hot button issues include: oppression of women in any form (about which she comments something along the lines of “It’s the PATRIARCHY!“); how bankers and the rich are totally screwing the American public (usually accompanied by some comment about how this justifies walking away from your mortgage); homeopathic medicines (insert angry medical rant about the harmful fraud they are); and, of course, racial injustice (some meant to be ironic comment about how we all don’t totally ignore racism at every turn).

In the past few days her interest in American culture’s embedded racism has manifested itself in her posting of articles about the Oakland transit cop who shot an unarmed teenager and, just today, about the New Orlean’s police officers charged in the shooting deaths of civilians on the Danizger Bridge in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in 2005. It’s the personal comments with these postings that have activated my not so hidden inner pedant.

Connotatively, we’ve all got an idea of what an execution looks like and, hence, what it means. Our mental picture probably involves screaming mobs and guillotines, or possibly one blindfolded guy standing against a wall with a lit cigarette in his mouth. But I’m willing to bet that for each of us that connotative definition of execution involves the element of judgement by some judicial authority, valid or not, prior to death.

Denotatively execution has a specific meaning as a noun and execute has a specific meaning as a verb. Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster agree that when it comes to the meaning of the word execute in relation to killing some legal sanction or political motivation must be involved. For the purposes of this discussion we’re going to ignore the “or for political motivation” aspect of this definition as that implies some sort of organized political rebellion like, oh, the French Revolution.

Legal sanction in these definitions means that the decedents were first involved in some official process that passed judgement on them for violating established laws the outcome of which was a sentence of death that was then carried out with the full weight and authority of the system of laws in our country. Legal sanction implies within the framework of an established legal system. “Legal sanction” does not mean that a BART police officer or a couple of New Orleans PD members decide they don’t like the way someone is acting so they have the authority to decide on the spot to kill them.

But wait, what about the idea that yes, police do have the authority to decide if someone is a threat and to use deadly force to stop an individual? Isn’t that legal sanction?

Yes, it’s legal sanction of a kind which gives judicial seeming authority to individual police officers in the face of manifest deadly force on the part of another individual but if the police had perceived and it could be proven that the decedents were exhibiting such deadly force there would be no judicial trials around these incidents, no actual legal sanction against the officers involved. Everything would be handled administratively and none of these officers would be making their way through the court system. In the particular case of the transit cop in Oakland, video tape of the event, produced by four witnesses, cast enough doubt that the decedent exhibited deadly force that the transit officer involved was tried on a charge of murder.

So, since no legal sanction, either judicial or, for lack of a better classification, administrative was involved in any of these killings, which is specifically the point of the articles on both these incidents, it seems to me to say that the decedents were “executed” is patently incorrect and is being done, quite frankly, for unnecessary shock value.

Sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, and pop culture mavens have noted a trend in the past few years: we tend to restrict our information gathering to sources that already agree with our established opinions. This isn’t surprising given that we tend to form friendships with people who believe similar things as us. Social networking merely highlights this propensity.

Now, if your social network, which already holds similar positions as you do on a wide variety of issues, is so jaded that the idea of police officers murdering unarmed individuals isn’t shocking enough and you’ve got to resort to using the word “execution” to get their attention you’ve got some serious problems. What really bothers me, though, is not just that she is abusing the language for shock value but that she selectively decides when words are important and when they aren’t.

This is a woman who insists on politically correct language when it comes to anything relating to feminism or “women’s issues.” Precision is paramount and yet I’m being asked to “not split hairs,” which is, by the way, just a more polite way of saying “stop being so argumentative” which is something that men often tell women when they want us to just STFU, when it comes to characterizing something as a state sanctioned killing (an execution) versus a murder (a killing outside the law often punishable itself by state sanctioned death). Really? Really?

It also bothers me that this supposedly smart person doesn’t know the difference between a Google search result for a word definition and the definition provided by The Oxford English Dictionary (it’s a link to an “online dictionary” after all).

Maybe I’m giving her too much credit in the intelligence department. Maybe she really believes that our system of laws actually backs up a police officer any time he shoots an unarmed civilian. Maybe she actually thinks that these killings were political acts rather than fear or frustration responses. Maybe she actually doesn’t understand the difference between these ghastly murders and when someone violates our laws, is caught, and a structured system passes judgment on them that the crime was so heinous and the chances of a similarly heinous crime being perpetrated again by the same individual are so great that the only reasonable punishment is death.

Both these incidents, the one in Oakland and the one in New Orleans, were absolutely horrible and I’m in no way justifying or supporting the actions of these police officers. Videotape in the Oakland incident proved to a jury that the teenager who was shot to death likely wasn’t posing a deadly threat and the cover up of the facts surrounding the shootings on the Danizger Bridge leads one to believe that the officers involved knew they did something wrong.

Quite frankly, I’m not a supporter of the death penalty any more either. I think that you should have to work a lot harder to get sent to prison than you have to work now, that prison should be a lot more uncomfortable than it really is, and that there are some crimes that are so repulsive the only way justice will ever be served is if the relatives of the victim get to poke the perpetrator to death with sharp sticks over the course of several days. But even though I don’t agree with it, my country has the death penalty in many places which means it’s important to make a distinction between killing we allow and killing we punish.

So while I don’t disagree with her ideology, perhaps my inner language pedant has provided a path for me to see my “friend’s” political outrage for what it really is: hypocrisy. And that is something that bothers me more than abuse of the language.

* Edited to remove snarky <acronym> comment about homeopathy.