Among Us

This is post 3 in my Coming Out series.

When I first started realizing that I was pan/bi/queer I wanted to write about it immediately.  I process feelings best by putting them down in text, particularly when I am shipping them out to the world.  However, I decided that I shouldn't make a big coming out post until I had actually, you know, had sex with a man.

I should make sure I actually know what I am talking about before I go and make a big scene about it, or so went the thinking at the time.

Trouble is, I started thinking about how I would go about having a first time, and that was stressful and felt bad.  It didn't seem like the right thing to do for some reason.

While I was wrestling with the right way to approach this situation I ended up watching the queer musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  When the movie ended I was awash in tears, struggling to contain the emotions swirling within me.  The base emotion was all about the queer men in the show, feeling connected to their story and struggle, feeling their fear and joy.

That base emotion led to a further emotion of tremendous vulnerability.  Now I have a trait that can reduce me to tears effortlessly, and make me weak to attack.  Now I can be more easily hurt, but honestly I am not worried about people coming after me for being queer.  What hit me hardest was that people could use that as a lever against those I protect.  A cornerstone of my identity is myself as guardian of those I love, and the feeling that now I am worse at that because of my vulnerability was a tough thing to cope with.  My loved ones deserve an invincible juggernaut holding the line, not a weepy mess.

I knew this vulnerability existed before, for other people.  I could have described it clearly.  There is a big difference between *knowing* a thing and *feeling* a thing though, no doubt about that.  I have spent my life having so much privilege, and having some of it suddenly vanish was quite a thing to adjust to.

The next feeling in the cascade was a terrible case of impostor syndrome.  Why do I deserve to claim this identity at all?  I haven't actually gone out and had sex with a man, I haven't been discriminated against because of queerness, how can I be having all these feelings when I don't really belong?  I felt like a ridiculous fraud, trying to be in a space I had no business occupying.

This feeling makes no sense logically.  When I was 19 I had never touched a woman in a sexual fashion, but I sure as hell knew I wanted to have sex with Gillian Anderson.  (Scully from the XFiles).  I didn't need to have sex with her to be sure!  I have friends who are bi/pan/queer who have only had sex with one sex/gender and I certainly accept their identity, because you don't have to have sex to have the attraction.  If someone tells me their orientation I accept it, I don't ask for pics as proof.

So why do I have such a harsh standard for myself, when I would never apply it to anyone else?  I know what I want and who I am, and that is all that is required.

Of course I can determine logically that my feelings are irrational, but that isn't exactly a ticket to not having feelings anymore.

What I can do though is decide that I should write a coming out post regardless of what I have or have not touched.  I can proclaim an identity that I couldn't prove in a court of law, but which I know to be valid and true.  I can also just accept that there is no need to rush, no benchmark that must be met.  I can run out and get it on if I want, or I can wait five years for just the right man to show up and rock my world.

I don't know where the path leads, but I am on it, 'qualified' or not.  Here I go. 

Crooked

In August 2023 something new happened to my brain.  I felt it clearly, and described it as 'A key turning in a lock, and a door opening'.  I felt a clear image of a door slowly rumbling open, looking like a tomb door in an Indiana Jones movie.  I could feel the dust shaking down, and just barely begin to see through the crack... and what I saw behind the door was pretty gay.  Not gay as a perjorative, but gay as in 'Damn, men are *cute* now!'

I have always been straight.  I tried a few experiments with men over the years, admittedly fairly modest experiments, and the result was simply 'meh'.  It wasn't objectionable, it just didn't have the magic.  I have liked the idea of being bisexual / pansexual / queer for a long time, but my instinctive reactions just didn't do the thing.  I figured that is just how I am, the way I got built.  You can be as comfortable with skydiving as you want, but if you feel bored when you jump, find a new hobby.

Over August and September I consciously felt my brain rewriting itself, smashing old pathways down and opening up new ones.  Every week I felt more comfort with attractions to men, more desire to try that out, and identified more with queer men in media.

I haven't even acted on this yet in any physical way, and yet I am organizing queer musical nights, watching Elton John biopics, and then deciding I *have* to get myself some of those clothes.

I have also felt my emotions changing.  For many months now I have been more overtly emotional, more easily brought to tears from shows or speeches, and regularly overwhelmed just by thinking about things in my life that used to be no big deal.  It isn't that I am unhappy, far from it, just that the highs are higher and the lows are lower.  I suppose that might not be linked to the sudden change in orientation, but the timing certainly looks suspicious.

What I haven't done is stopped being interested in women.  I haven't suddenly gone full gay, I just flipped over the menu and saw some great new stuff on the back I never knew about before.

The thing I really want to know is why this happened now.  I have been thinking hard about the various things that happened to me over the past year, and there are a few candidates for causes, but the evidence is circumstantial at best.  I got a rainbow tattoo, at the time as a show of solidarity to the queer people in my life.  I painted the fence of my house rainbow for the same reasons.

That painting job was neat in that the children seeing it loved it, and most of the adults thought it was cute... but a couple adults saw the rainbow and absolutely lit up with joy.  You sure could tell the adults who were queer and got hit right in the feelings.

But none of that is a cause for a brain rewrite.  I just don't know why this happened, and I don't know why it happened now.  I was raised in a homophobic era, with the AIDS epidemic combining with regular old bigotry to make 'that's gay' the standard default insult.  My family was comfortable with touch and accepting of differences, but the kids at school and media at large told me the rule is:  You don't touch another man except with a closed fist, you don't talk about feelings, and you don't ever admit you might be attracted to a man.  Even if you get good messaging at home, that sort of thing leaves marks, and maybe it just took me 30 years to tear those walls down.

Again though, that is an explanation, but there is no proof.

One thing I think about is how my story feels different than most I have heard.  Mostly the story I have heard is 'I knew I liked women, but I couldn't really admit it to myself, and definitely couldn't admit it to others'.  My story doesn't sound like that.  I was straight until I wasn't.  That doesn't make it wrong or anything, just different.

I also didn't hesitate to write a coming out post, even though I haven't actually done anything measureable yet.  Several people who are close to me couldn't quite puzzle through why I would do this.  They don't think I should lie or anything, they just didn't understand why it was anyone else's business.  Nobody should care, and I don't owe the public anything, basically.

I have two reasons for writing this.  The first is my desire to set an example.  Every person who comes out makes it incrementally easier for the next people to do so.  Every example of living loud and proud removes a small burden from those who wish to follow that path.  I don't claim that everyone is obligated to be out - it is a personal choice for each of us.  I, however, have partners who love me, family and friends who accept me either way, and security from the rest of the world.  If anyone should be out, I should be first in line.

The second is that I only want people in my life who know me.  I want to spend my time with those who know all of me and love what they see.  If someone doesn't want to be with a queer man, then I absolutely want them to go away.  I think many people are afraid that is they come out, their friends will go away.  I, on the other hand, am afraid that if I don't come out I will spend time around people who don't like the person I am.  I want to live openly and truthfully, and I know there are people that will want to be with me as I am.

Words can be tricky.  Bisexual is the most accurate, clear term.  Pansexual is pretty similar, but less well known.  Queer has a lot of aesthetic appeal, but lacks precision.  I figure I will use them all depending on the circumstance.

I intend to write more posts about this.  There have been some powerful emotional moments over the past few months and I want to talk about them.  Also this transition has given me new insight that I want to share.  I do hope that the renovations in my brain slow down a bit though - it has been a lot these last couple months.

Fancy house

Shopping for a house was an enlightening experience.  My internal voice definitely yelled 

CLASSISM!!!

many, many times.  The most obvious culprit, I think, was the letter that we were asked to come up with the first time we put in a bid on a house.  We had only been actively looking for a week when an amazing house came on the market, priced way under its realistic value.  It had a ton of room, a basement I could stand up in with room to spare, and was right next to a subway.  We ended up in a bidding war with another potential buyer, and our agent asked us if we wanted to submit a letter to the owner to try to increase our chance of being accepted.

I have to give my agent credit here.  She made it clear that these letters have problems, and in some areas they are illegal, but she had an obligation to tell us our options.  She sent us some samples, and those samples made me angry and sad at the same time.

All the samples were staged photos with staged stories, all saying the same thing:  We are a conventional, attractive young couple, doing a conventional life, and we are so grateful for the opportunity to bid on your home.  The grovelling was the worst.

If I was being honest my letter would say "My spouse, child, and my girlfriend are moving in together.  We are making an unconventional sort of family that makes us really happy, and I think this house will give us a great place to do that."

Sending exactly the right letter can add significantly to the effective value of your bid.  Sending my honest letter could easily erase my bid entirely.  This is why these letters are not allowed some places, of course, because they often end up enabling bigotry.  White people who own houses preferentially sell to other white people.  Other privilege ends up working the same way, naturally, and since straight, conventional, etc. people own a disproportionate share of the houses, this puts another barrier in the way of people who aren't that.

In the end it didn't matter.  The seller and the buyer discovered that their mothers had the same name,  and that was enough to convince them it was fate, and we didn't get the house.  In the end, that was a good thing, as the house we did get was not as good (mostly because the basement is short), but the location is better and the price was far more manageable.  There was no second bidding war as we were the only bidders the second time around, so we didn't have to do face down the letter thing again.

I can see the angles.  I could have just made up the perfect letter, bought into the classist bullshit, and sold my ass off.  I know how to sell!  I know exactly what lies to tell, should I want to.  Instead, all I wanted to do was to write down "I am offering you a ton of money, take it or leave it, but don't expect me to grovel for your damnable charity, or pretend that your house is going to continue on being a bastion of your values."

When we sold the condo our agent told us that the bidder was a mathie of some sort or other.  My response was "I don't care in the slightest.  Show me the money."  It turns out that I am the sort of person that I want to deal with in real estate.  Who knew?

Moving on up

I recently finished the book Exodus - How Migration is Changing Our World.  It is about the movement of people from poor countries to rich ones, and examines what effects this movement has on all of the parties involved.  I didn't agree with it all the way, but I think it does a great job of asking hard questions and looking at the issue from the perspective of everyone affected.  Being as I live in Canada it is no surprise that most of my exposure to immigration discussion has been centered on whether or not it is good for current Canadians if new people move here.  Exodus examines the subject from that perspective, but it also spends a lot of time talking about the effects on the immigrants themselves and the people left behind in the poorer countries from which they come.

In political debate the subject of immigration often comes down to left vs. right shouting matches.  The left wants all the immigration and any opposition to that is racist, and the right wants no immigration and any opposition to that is destroying our culture.  Naturally both extremes are nonsense, and both have some kind of point if you tone the rhetoric down some.  A lot of opposition to immigration within rich countries is based on racism, but there are real concerns about how immigration levels change the culture of the countries people are moving to.

One key topic that is pivotal and controversial is the examination of why exactly poor countries are poor.  Is it just historical, based on past behaviour?  Luck?  Or is it culture, and poorer, worse functioning countries are that way because of the behaviour of their citizens?  Again, this discussion is a political minefield, but the explanation is a bit of all of each of these simple answers.  Colonialism left all kinds of troubles and issues in poorer countries, but some countries have pushed beyond a troubled past, marred by invasion and occupation.  Some countries are lucky to have valuable resources, but those resources do not explain much of the difference in standard of living.

Exodus explains that much of the difference between countries can be explained by mutual regard between citizens.  If you think of everyone else in your country as someone close to you, someone you should respect, and insist on the same behaviour from them, your country will prosper.  When nurses steal all the drugs from hospitals to sell on the black market, the country suffers.  When crime is so rampant that everyone must spend tons of money on security guards, the country suffers.  When bureaucrats demand bribes and squander money via corruption the country suffers.  Countries that are rich tend to have high trust among citizens and people do not overlook transgressions by others, even if those others are close to them.  Of course every country has some degree of corruption, but less corruption is hugely beneficial.

If a rich country wants to maintain its standard of living, then any new arrivals must take on its current culture.  They don't have to have all the same holidays, modes of dress, etc. but they need to buy into the basic ideals and customs with regards to law and corruption.  If they do not, the standard of living in the country will suffer.  It is reasonable to demand certain cultural standards, but it is easy to tip over and demand far too much, and of the wrong types.

I definitely think Canadians need to be concerned about racism, particularly against immigrants.  I also think that we have to carefully manage how many people we bring in to make sure we have the infrastructure to support them, and also make sure that we maintain the parts of our culture that give us the wealth and privilege that the immigrants are seeking.  We can't expect to have open borders and welcome anyone who wants in while maintaining our standard of living, so we need restrictions, and those restrictions are going to be complicated and difficult to decide on.

The simple fact is that immigration cannot be boiled down to Good or Bad.  It is a complicated thing that is governed by extremely complex systems, and how we approach it hugely affects our outcomes.

One thing in Exodus that I was especially interested in is the discussion of nationalism.  I have been wont to say that nationalism is poison, but Exodus does point out that nationalism does have some benefits.  It tends to reduce corruption and increase mutual regard, convincing citizens to do things for one another.  The basic argument is that nationalism is good for the economy.  The author carefully states that nationalism was, in the past, a huge source of wars and conflict, and this is an obvious downside.  He thinks though that this is a thing of the past, and we shouldn't worry much about that anymore.

I think he is delusional on this point.  Nationalism may well improve the economy, but wars are still happening and they aren't gone forever.  Nationalism is a danger to humanity at large, particularly since one of our greatest existential threats, nuclear war, is vastly more likely to occur between two states in the throes of nationalist ideas. I am totally willing to take a hit to my standard of living to push the possibility of war further to the wayside, and it isn't even close.

Anyone who thinks that nationalism isn't setting us on the warpath anymore should look carefully at the US and the wars it has been continuously involved in for the past several decades.  Would Russia have been involved in the military actions it has over the past few years if it weren't so tightly in the grasp of militant nationalism?  I think not.

While I disagree with some of Exodus, I do think it raises a great many useful points.  If you haven't thought a lot about immigration from a variety of viewpoints you will probably learn a few things, and the book is easy to read and clear.  One final caveat though - the author likes to use formulas and graphs to make points, and sometimes they are misleading.  You can't take an enormously complicated topic, boil it down to 2 numbers, and then pretend that putting those numbers in a formula gives you good data out the other side.  Economists are fond of simple math representing labyrinthine issues, and such behaviour should be given a generous helping of side eye.

Fitting in nowhere

The next book in my 'recommended to me' series is Surviving the White Gaze.  This book is beyond the reach of the initial set of recommendations and is part of my new section 'people keep hearing that I am taking recommendations so they shove books at me'.  Surviving the White Gaze is simultaneously easy and hard to read.  It is a series of short, well written anecdotes and stories about the author's life focused around her experiences of race.  She is a biracial woman who was raised in a town where she was the only person who wasn't white.

While the writing is clear and smooth, the stories are harsh and jarring.  She had a tough childhood, being raised by white parents who didn't understand her struggles at all, and being surrounded by people who were constantly racist towards her.  As she got older she found her way into black social groups and communities but this often didn't help at all, as she was too black for the white people and too white for the black people.  I had realized academically that this is a serious struggle for biracial people but these stories brought that experience to life and made it real and visceral.

The stories of racism vary wildly.  Some were outright tales of outright discrimination that I found hard to stomach, and others revealed struggles that aren't necessarily obvious.  For example, black hair is different from white hair.  If no one in your town knows how to deal with your hair, then it can feel like you are inferior when in fact you are simply lacking in expertise.

If you are curious about what racism feels like, or how it plays out, this is a good book.  The author does not attempt to portray herself in a perfect light, and her many mistakes and issues are on display.  You get to see a flawed person struggling in a world that makes it extremely difficult for her, and through that struggle you will get a glimpse into humanity.

The author was adopted by a white couple and mostly raised by them, though she spent some time during her teenage years and adulthood with her birth mother.  All three parents did things wrong and made her life more difficult, though certainly her birth mother was the worst.  (Taking your eleven year old daughter to a bar and leaving her alone, and then blaming her when an old man tries to convince her to have sex with him is beyond the pale.)  She blames all three parents for many of the things she suffered, quite justifiably.  However, she also lays blame in ways that I don't accept as reasonable.

Blaming parents for their children's misbehaviour or suffering is something I see a lot.  My instinct is that this is more of a modern phenomenon, but perhaps that isn't true.  Parents often do this to themselves of course, asking themselves what they did wrong.  Sometimes they did do things wrong, of course, but often had they chosen differently it wouldn't have helped, or it would simply have created different issues.  I don't like blaming people when we can't even be sure that different choices would have improved outcomes.  If you would have been angry even if a different choice were made, then you are giving the target of your anger no right choice, no way out, and I don't accept that.

I am happy to blame parents for bad behaviour, but only if I can see a better way.  I don't toss blame if they just made the best of a bad situation.

For example, blaming her adoptive parents because they didn't give her exposure to black culture, or help her find ways to work with black hair seems quite reasonable to me.  They should have worked harder on that.  Blaming them because they didn't uproot their entire lives to move to a big city from their country residence to put her nearer to black people isn't reasonable.  It was hard on her, of that I have no doubt, but parents don't have an obligation to relocate in the world, especially when they have other kids too.  I understand her feelings, but I don't accept the allocation of blame.

When Pinkie Pie struggles, I worry.  I wonder if I could do something to help her, to fix her problems, to make things better.  I think about the choices I have made in the past.  However, I don't accept that all of her issues are on me.  I have to continue to try to help her, but I won't make it all about me, nor drown in misplaced blame.  No matter how perfect a parent you are, your children will screw up, suffer, and struggle.  You do what you can, but they have to go through things to learn how to cope with them, and you can't entirely avoid that.  Heaping blame on parents in no win situations isn't productive or fair.

Surviving the White Gaze is a powerful book that can give you a visceral understanding of the struggles of biracial people.  However, I do suggest that you take the criticisms of some of the author's family with a grain of salt.

Humans are kind

Next up in my reading series is HumanKind.  This book is about humans natural tendencies towards kindness and helpfulness, and how these tendencies can be overwritten or pushed aside by modern life.

By modern life I mean all life since the invention of agriculture.

Our examples of hunter gatherer societies are fairly small in number but they consistently paint a portrait of cooperation, lack of hierarchies, and group decision making.  This makes a lot of sense when you think about the way such groups would live.  When you move around following herds or harvesting by season there is little to own.  You don't stay on any particular patch of land, and owning it makes little sense.  You can't have more possessions than you can carry, so hoarding wealth is nearly impossible.  Having a standing military is an expense you cannot afford because they can't accomplish anything useful.  This is the sort of environment that humans are mostly adapted to.  The few thousand years since agriculture developed have changed a lot, but that isn't enough time for evolution to have a big effect.

Once you have agriculture the rules all change.  Land ownership becomes crucial.  Hoarding wealth is suddenly feasible.  Increases in food production allow for specialization and pave the way for standing militaries and their accompanying rigid hierarchies.  All of this leads to war and violence.  However, turning highly cooperative nomadic humans into bloodthirsty pillagers requires a lot of change in our outlook, and it turns out the key to that is making us believe that humans are naturally bad, and thus in need of constant control.  We also need to be convinced that other people are evil, and thus it is acceptable to murder them and take their stuff.

This is the key to being a dictator over a huge group of people.  In order to impose your rules you have to make people fear each other so they will surrender their liberties for safety.  There are many versions of this - religions telling people that other people are inherently wicked, for example.  However, there are modern day equivalents like most economics that holds dear the idea of humans as machines that try to maximize their personal power and position.

The book addresses a lot of the ways we try to convince each other of humankind's wickedness.  For example, the bystander effect, in which the death of Kitty Genovese is often cited.  The story that is often told is that Kitty was attacked in an alley, and 38 people witnessed the attack.  They did nothing, and the attacker returned repeatedly until finally Kitty died.  The true story is that the police interviewed 38 people, most of whom were asleep or heard yelling in an alley and thought it was just a drunk person.  Two of them called the police (who arrived too late to help) and one found Kitty and held her while she died.  It is a tragedy, and certainly shows that some individuals are wicked and violent, but it does not teach us that human bystanders are callous brutes.

Similarly the Stanford prison experiment and the famous experiment where volunteers administered shocks that they were meant to think were fatal are often used as examples of humans being basically bad.  The book talks about both cases, and shows how flawed the conclusions are.

Humans are marvellously adapted to cooperate and learn from one another.  These are the things that set us apart from all other species.  The great majority of us struggle to harm others at all.  However, we can be indoctrinated, tricked, and pushed into hatred and violence, and we often are.  We should not imagine that this is inevitable though, because it is not.  The last century shows us that we can get better.  We can reduce war, we can try to help others, and we can break down barriers.  

We aren't perfect, and never will be, but we are slowly fumbling our way towards something better.

HumanKind is an excellent book that will teach you about the ways that we are tricked into hatred, how hierarchies and possessions create conflict and division, and how people use this story of inherent wickedness of humankind to justify atrocities.  Being better is difficult, but this book provides clues as to how we can go about doing that.

Facts, but not all the facts

A few weeks ago I put out a call on Facebook for books I should read.  I got a big stack of them from the library and I am tearing through them.  Yesterday I wrote a post about Factfulness, where I talked about what a good book it is.  Most of the books on my list will be much the same I am sure.  At the moment I am planning on writing a post about each of them, but we will see if that actually happens.

There is one book in that recommendation list that is not going to get a "This book is great!" post.  It is called Black Rednecks and White Liberals.  The blurb on the back is from someone whose claim to fame is "Commentator on Fox News".  Between the title and that blurb source you can guess that it is written to push a right wing agenda, and you would be right.

However, while I could just deride the book as a bunch of evil nonsense, that wouldn't be doing it justice.  It is a classic example of facts carefully chosen and presented to create a specific conclusion.  The conclusion the author is trying to lead you to is that the struggles of black people in the US today are almost entirely their own fault because of their culture.  He has done a huge amount of research in support of this thesis, and as far as I can tell his facts are accurate.  The trouble with the book is not that it lies, but rather that it doesn't tell you the whole truth.

If you look at the edges of right vs. left debate on racism you will see two extreme camps.  One side is dedicated to the idea that racism is over and that any problems that black people have now are their own fault.  The other side contends that racism is the only thing, and if opportunity were equal that black people would succeed just as much as anyone else because their culture has nothing to do with their success or lack thereof.

Both extreme positions are wrong.  Culture matters in success of groups - just look at the incredible dominance of Asian students in math and science.  That isn't genetic, it is a consequence of culture.

Racism also matters, and black people are discriminated against in a thousand ways, large and small.

The author contends that groups throughout history who have venerated learning, hard work, saving, and study tend to become more successful generation by generation.  He also contends that black culture in the US has values that impugne education and support a spendthrift lifestyle.  This is a trend, not universal, of course, but I think he is correct in these assertions.  Just like the trend of Asian parents pushing their kids to do more math isn't true for all, so are these generalizations about black people only true statistically.

Clearly spending recklessly and despising education and study are not black only things.  I know plenty of white people who spend rather than save, and when I was young I was on the wrong end of 'learning is for losers' by plenty of white kids.  In fact the author suggests that these things are common among redneck cultures regardless of race, and has theories that seem plausible about the American South having these traits in abudance among the white population during the times of slavery in the US.  Seeing the way right wing folks talk about scientists and academics it is obvious this is still alive and well today.

The trouble is that people seize on that simple admission that culture matters, and immediately leap to the conclusion that racism is over.  This is nonsense, but I have seen it in my personal life when someone said "There isn't any racism anymore except anti white racism, black people's problems are all just black culture." and pointed me to this book as proof.

One of the core elements of the book is the author telling us of various teaching methods and programs that produced black graduates that had high success rates in employment and earnings.  He waxes poetic about how if you just teach black people to speak properly, save and invest wisely, and value education, they will suddenly be more successful.

Note the presence of the word 'properly' in that last sentence.  What does he mean by speaking properly?  He doesn't define it.  

He means "like a rich white person who graduated from Harvard".

So yeah, if you teach black kids to speak like a rich white guy from Harvard, they will make more money.  But he completely fails to ask why that is, and if the best thing for society is to simply make black people act like white people.  Is that the goal of our educational system?  To force children to emulate the richest and most powerful so they can get jobs?

No, it is not.  If black people not speaking like rich whites from Harvard is preventing them getting jobs, maybe we ought to change that fact directly, rather than simply accepting it and trying to change black people!

(I do think that a cultural norm of supporting and encouraging study and learning is objectively good though, both for those in that culture and those outside it.)

If some black kids tell other black kids to stop studying because hitting the books is just acting white, then that will have negative effects on their long term educational and job prospects.  However, there is absolutely nothing I can do about that.  What I can do is try to push for a society that doesn't disciminate against those black kids so they at least have equal opportunity from outside their own culture.  That is something I can actively work on, so I will.  Assigning blame isn't going to help anyone, no matter who the blame gets assigned to.  All I can do is try to fix the thing that is within my power to affect, so I will do that.

I normally close with a recommendation to read the book I am reviewing.  I won't give that here.  There are some parts of the book that aren't about black culture at all that are interesting and informative, and even if you totally disagree with the author's conclusions like I do, there are a lot of facts you might find useful.  I view it much like my reading of the Bible years ago - I am glad to have these facts in my head now, because it will make me much better at refuting the arguments of people I disagree with.  I read the Bible in part to better argue with religious people, and I read this book to better argue with racist people.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals has plenty of facts.  Unfortunately, it is light on truth.

Heavy

A few months ago I looked at myself and realized that I had put on some weight over the course of the pandemic.  I had noticed a few times that I had a bigger tummy than before, and finally it was undeniable - this was no longer a 'drank a lot of water' or 'big dinner' tummy, but long term weight gain.  Upon realizing this, it was obvious why.  I had spent many months sitting in my chair, not getting proper exercise.  I was still doing all my weight training but I wasn't doing any walking except to go to the grocery store.

I was also getting high late at night and snacking on all the things way too often.  The pandemic has led to me being frustrated and lonely, not able to do the things I am used to doing that bring me so much joy.  My DnD games were on hiatus, my travels for gaming conventions were all cancelled, board game nights not allowed, and even visiting The Flautist was off the table.  That left me feeling blue, and pot and snacks helped dull the pain and upset.

My response was quick.  I needed to get more active and stop piling junk into my body.  I added on 30 minutes of walking every day and cut out most of the late night snacking.  This was good in other ways too, because quite frankly I didn't need that food and the walks gave Wendy and I time together and improved my mental health on its own, entirely separate from body shape or size.

I am one of those lucky people whose hunger effectively regulates my weight.  If I just eat when I am hungry and eat healthy food my body maintains a weight I am happy about.  I don't have to starve myself to get to a good weight, I just have to stop messing with my appetite with drugs.

Over the past 2.5 months my weight has dropped back closer to where it was pre pandemic.  Before I began weightlifting I was at 175 pounds, and over the last five years I added on 30 pounds of muscle to sit at 205.  In March of this year I was up to around 215, and now I have dropped back down to 210.  This got me thinking a lot about how I think about my body and how society thinks about fat.

The most absurd thing is the way BMI scores me.  For most of my life I was extremely skinny and yet I scored right in the normal range for BMI.  The system takes your height into account, but it does it so badly that everyone who is tall is shifted heavily towards the overweight side of the spectrum.  Right now I am officially overweight by BMI, which is absurd.  I am a skinny guy with a bunch of extra muscle and five pounds of extra fat, there is no possible way I should be considered overweight.  This picture, for reference, is of an officially overweight person.

Yeah.  'Overweight'.  Now it is clear that BMI does not take into account muscle mass.  This makes it a stupid system, but the fact that it takes height into account so badly that tall people of totally normal build are considered overweight is pathetic.  We shouldn't be using this system for medical diagnosis, or anything else.  It is a classic case of measuring what we can easily measure and confusing that for measuring the right thing.

Figuring out a simple system to categorize people's weight isn't easy.  I don't have a replacement system to offer.  (Improving BMI to properly take height into account is easy, and the fact that we haven't done it is an embarassment.)  However, if a system is garbage we shouldn't stick with it just because we don't have an easy alternative.  Sometimes you just have to toss the system out when it is crap.

This did get me thinking about why I so quickly decided to change my lifestyle.  The main thing was I could see that snacking and sitting weren't good for me.  That is true regardless of my weight, and adding in extra walking and fixing my diet are good by all metrics.

However, I can't deny that part of the motivation was that I didn't like the way my tummy looked.  I was thinking to myself "Dammit I do 200 pushups, 56 deadlifts, and 56 rows a day.  Shouldn't I have a bloody six pack?"  I have never had a six pack, and at this point I am never going to.  My extra bit of belly still bothered me though, and it shouldn't.

That 10 exra pounds around my middle is not a health hazard.  Nobody needs a six pack, and in fact getting one is actually hazardous to the health of most people.  Our bodies are made to store some fat!  I looked fine.

But no matter that I have tons of muscle, no matter that I looked fine, my brain still insisted that I absolutely had to change things.  Vanity and desire for status clearly drove my behaviour no matter how much I could use health to justify it.

That is the way our society deals with fat in a nutshell.  We moralize over people's weight, and go on about health hazards, but most of that is just denying the truth that we want to be skinny for status, and we mock heavy people for that same lack of status.

It sucks.

No matter that I know all this, no matter that I don't want to villify fat, I still made a swift and binding decision to change things when I got some of my own.  

Running it twice

Child rearing is a rollercoaster of emotion.  Sometimes, like in my last blog post, you have to watch your kid go through wretched stuff that you wish you could defend them from.  Pinkie Pie had an adult man approach her and try to rope her into a 'relationship' on the street.  Many people messaged me or commented hoping that the police would get involved and do something, but the reality is that when I called them I got redirected to a nuisance line and left on hold.  After a long time listening to 'hit X for graffiti, hit Y for parking issues' I finally gave up.  The police do not have the time or inclination to do anything about this, in large part because no actual laws were broken.

It is tough to tell your kid that an evil predator is out there and that the people charged with protecting us from such predators will do nothing.  I don't blame the police in this case though - I wouldn't want to try to give the police enough money to be able to put tons of hours into every case of some asshole being awful to someone else, and I don't want them to have the power to smash into people's lives when they don't have any reason to think a law was broken. 

Sometimes you just have to tell your kids that bad stuff happens, and that you will do what you can to protect them... and sometimes what you can do is little to nothing.

But there are good times.  For example, today I realized that Pinkie Pie had never heard the Boot To The Head skit by the Frantics.  If I said Boot To The Head, she wouldn't understand what I was talking about!  This cannot stand, obviously, so I found it on youtube and got her to listen to the clip.

Apparently the original Boot To The Head contains an anti-gay slur by Ed Gruberman, the jackass in the sketch. Thankfully the version I found does not have that phrase, as it has been changed. I don't know if the version I first heard many years ago was the original or the new version, but I hope it was the new one. I certainly wouldn't share it with her in the same way without that alteration.

There are many hilarious things that have a wonderful first time experience.  You can't get that again, but sometimes the process of watching somebody else have that first time experience can be almost as good.  Watching Pinkie Pie giggle and twitch with joy at Boot To The Head was so good for me, and now we have another shared bit of culture we can enjoy.

I have her trained to say "Party on Garth" after I say "Party on Wayne".  She has never seen the movie in question, and indeed I can barely remember it.  Still, those little bits of shared memory are a source of happy feelings, and I like that she is happy to be a part of nostalgia she doesn't quite understand.

Parenting a teenager is not the easiest thing, but I gotta say, it is *so* much better than parenting a toddler for me.  There are still struggles, but the good parent moments are superior when the little person can actually grasp what I am talking about.

So you want to talk about race

I read the book So You Want to Talk About Race recently.  I picked it up in part because I have been having some difficult discussions about race with people I know and I wanted to look for suggestions that might help me get my point across.  I try to start off arguing carefully, knowing that "Wow, you are super racist" usually doesn't put people in a receptive mood.  However, after awhile, I end up saying "Yeah, actually, the things you are saying are racist, and your beliefs are extremely destructive" and then no more useful conversation happens.

You see, being called a racist is pretty much the worst thing that can happen, which means that since white people get called racist, racism is mostly a thing that happens to white people.  Or so it has been argued at me, at any rate.

ARRRGGGGHHHH.

This book is a useful tool when having these sorts of discussions.  It covers a bunch of practical topics like microaggressions, the model minority myth, police violence, and many others.  I already knew the great majority of the facts the book covers, but I did find the model minority chapter quite informative.  It isn't a deep dive into any one topic, and it isn't a scholarly work.  It is a simple book for the average person who wants to learn about the subject, and it fills that niche cleanly.

This is one of the few books that I will give an absolutely unqualified Read This Book rating.  I agree with all of it, and I want everyone to have this information.  It is quick, well written, effectively organized, and informative.  If you want to have a conversation about race, this is a great place to start, particularly because the author aims parts of the discussion at white people, and parts at people of colour, with the goal of helping either of those groups improve understanding and communicate effectively.

Sometimes people are convinced by research.  Sometimes they are convinced by personal stories with high emotional content.  The book has both things, covering all the angles.

Next time I have someone ask me for a recommendation because they want to understand the subject better I will definitely tell them to read So You Want To Talk about Race.  Better that then trying to learn by listening to an angry white guy, methinks.  I have all the vitriol, but not the qualifications.

Yelling at people

I have been hunting for an online home in World of Warcraft.  Finding the right guild to settle into is not an easy affair because there are so many things that can make a guild a bad fit for me.  You need to make sure the people in the guild are playing for the right amount of time, at the right time.  You also gotta find folks that are doing the sort of playing you are doing, at the right level.  Matching all the basic logistical bits is tricky.

But those aren't the only sort of considerations.  I had been in a guild for six weeks or so with everything seeming quite reasonable and then it went from fine to disaster in a tiny span of time.  One raid night one of the raiders starting telling risque jokes, which generally I am fine with, and then graduated to telling jokes bashing gay people and people with disabilities.  I got pissed and told him to stop.  

I don't have any sort of authority in the guild.  Other people can ignore me unless management is willing to step in, and management seemed to have nothing to say on the matter.  Still, apparently my grumpiness was intimidation enough, and the jokes stopped.  Temporarily.

The next raid he started up again, and after the raid I wrote a post talking about how much I cannot and will not tolerate such things.  Both on a political / philosophical level, and also on a deeply personal level.  Even if I would be fine with gay bashing jokes generally (I am categorically NOT fine with it) there is no way I could tolerate it because of the people close to me.

The guild management made it clear to me that they were going to make gay bashing comments now and again, and I could either be cool with it or leave.  They also made it clear that I was making people uncomfortable by calling this sort of thing out, and they weren't happy about it.

You see, they play WOW to relax, and they don't want to feel judged while playing.  They want to be a fun, no politics, no drama sort of guild.  That means gay bashing has to be tolerated, because after all, it is crucial that the guild be a easy, welcoming place for straight people who want to be bigots.

They also chastised me for thinking only of myself, and not taking anyone else's feelings into account.

It made me sick to my stomach.  Obviously that attitude is wretched, and I am well rid of them.  However, I hate having to find a new place to hang out, and I hate not knowing if I am getting into a nest of vipers when I am doing it.  Guilds all claim to be fun, easy going places.  Nobody advertises "We are a bunch of bigots, come take a dump on minorities here."  Nor do they say "This is a place where we do not tolerate bigotry."  They just talk about raid times and what bosses they have killed.

In both board games and computer games I keep seeing this idea floated that gamer communities are the most accepting communities.  It is so obviously nonsense.  They *are* the most accepting places of being a gamer, that is for sure.  Accepting of other things though?  Not so much.