respect

Four Words That Make Me Suspicious of Myself When I Say Them

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There are a few words that raise a red flag when I catch myself saying them, at least when I’m not totally preoccupied.

Not that all instances of these words are dubious, but I do find I that whenever I need to make use of them, there’s a good chance I’m being at least a little presumptuous, simple-minded, or sneaky. They raise a similar red flag when I hear or read them too.

They aren’t “bad” words, but they do lend themselves to a certain kind of self-deception. They often hint at more going on.

“Wish”

I find myself using the word “wish” when I’ve decided I don’t like something the way it is, yet I’m not actually doing anything about it. There’s no real reason to declare my wishes. Whenever I start a sentence with “I just wish…” feel free to ignore me, I’m only wasting your time. My whiny face has probably made you tune out anyway.

Whenever I let the phrase “I wish” escape my mouth, all I really have to say is this: “I’m not happy with things the way they are. I would be happy if they were like this. So there.”

Not only is it useless for changing the circumstances, but it reinforces the myth to which I’ve momentarily fallen prey: that my happiness is dependent on my circumstances only and has nothing to do with my attitude. It’s a bitter little plea that life isn’t what I want it to be in this particular moment, and a dead giveaway that I’m not prepared to do anything about it right now.

Wishing is a desperate, self-defensive behavior. It gives you a little hit of relief from a reality you don’t want to deal with, but it sure doesn’t move things along.

Of course, in those moments, I’m too consumed by my fantasies to see that my attitude is usually the biggest and most damning feature of the present circumstances. If my attitude sucks, the circumstances suck. But acknowledging that would mean I have to be responsible for it, and it’s easier to instead wish for the cavalry to appear on the horizon and save me.

“Try”

I don’t know about you, but I know I insert the word “try” into a sentence when I’m not actually willing to take on the responsibility of promising I’ll do something. Yet I’m still willing to pretend I at least have the intention of doing it — somewhere in my mind.

I’ll try to call and ask about that. I’ll try to exercise every day. I’ll try to get it done on Friday after work.

It means: I might end up doing that if it’s easier than I expect it to be. Read More

by David on April 25, 2011
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7 Reasons I Never Went Vegan

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At its simplest level, the notion always made some sense to me: we hurt and kill animals for our pleasure and convenience, and we don’t have to.

But I’ve always held so many levels of resistance to veganism. Surely it’s not that simple.

I bring up the topic now because I’m about to give it a whirl, not as a response to any kind of ethical crisis, but instead as a health experiment. My diet has been without any hard edges for a long time. Nothing has been off limits, and as a result I’m steadily gaining the 1-pound-a-year perma-fat that the experts say will continue to bog down the typical adult until they die.

I ate about nine chicken taquitos at a get-together not long ago, and I think it was a cry for help. I want to put some strict boundaries onto my diet, if only so I become more conscious of what I eat and so I can practice that “just say no” reflex. Just for a month, to see what happens.

I was going to do the paleo diet, since that’s the thing these days, but to be honest the “on-limits” foods instantly depressed me. I don’t want to eat shrimp and avocado omelets, with berries and balsamic as a snack. Paleo looked like it would prescribe an increase in the animals foods that have had me feeling a bit, uh… clogged these days.

So I’m going the other way, and swan-diving into the plant kingdom. Besides, I’ve had it on my bucket list for a while now: try out a vegan diet for 30 days.

But what about the social ickiness I’ve always felt about veganism? Well I went over my long-standing reasons for steering clear of it, and I have to admit they’re looking a bit wilted since I last checked:

1) It’s too hard.

I know more former vegans than vegans. The unwillingness to live a cheeseless life seems to be the primary reason my once-vegan acquaintances quickly backpedaled to the more moderate vegetarian camp.

Usually restaurants have between zero and one vegan dishes, so that’s what you get. The world is made for omnivores, so you’re painting yourself into a pretty tiny corner if you only allow plants into your body.

While researching this post I kept running into the same surprising anecdote: when people go vegan, they typically wind up expanding their palette. They end up doing a lot more cooking, trying a lot more different goods, and learning a lot more about nutrition in the process. After the initial restocking of the fridge, and a crash course on vegan staples, finding something to eat isn’t so hard.

Ok, so it’s harder than what I’ve been doing, which has basically been doing whatever’s easiest and most gratifying to me. Maybe “hard” is just “harder than the easiest possible approach.”

2) It’s too idealistic.

Oh, I don’t want to hurt anything, so I’ll only eat plants. While I’m at it, I’ll never get angry. I’ll never drink. I’ll never swear. I’ll never take a pen from work or listen to burned CDs.

Life feeds on other life, and that’s a reality we all have to accept. Animals kill animals. We’re animals. We kill other animals too, and we couldn’t have gotten to where we are today without doing a lot of killing and dismembering of animals that really didn’t want to get killed or dismembered. Yes, it’s ugly, violent, bloody. It’s nature.

This was another argument I’ve used to veto the idea of going vegan. Just because I find nature’s violent side a little disturbing sometimes, does that mean it’s wrong to kill animals for food? Mother Nature creates horror on a daily basis. The spectacle of a predatory cat ripping its prey apart while it’s still alive is something most people would hide from their children. Most nature shows won’t even show it. Just because it’s unappetizing and disturbing, does that make it bad or wrong? Read More

by David on February 21, 2011
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I Don’t Want Stuff Any More, Only Things

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I have been a bad parent. I only did what I knew, but I can no longer deny it: I never gave them a good home. I never made them feel useful or showed them any respect.

Today I dropped off hundreds of former possessions at the Goodwill shop. Maybe they’ll find adoptive parents who will be better than I have. I don’t even remember ever deciding to take them on as my dependants. They just happened. But somewhere along the line, all those things became stuff, and lost my respect.

Most of us live amidst stuff. We do have a few things too — well-used, well-enjoyed, and well-respected items that have an established place in our lives. But most of it is stuff.

Stuff makes us feel bad. It fills the mind with fading hopes about what we might one day do with it, taunts us with our obvious inability to manage it, and gives us the ominous sense that we’re losing track of something crucial, either in the physical mess of stuff itself, or in the mental mess it creates in our heads.

I don’t want stuff anymore, only things.

My black, square coffee table in the center of my living room is a thing.

My set of puke-green plates, which sit on the shelf above the nice white plates I actually use, are stuff.

My stainless steel water bottle, only four weeks old but already a close companion, is a thing.

My Beatles Jigsaw puzzle, which I got as a gift and immediately loved the idea of — but never assembled — is stuff.

I donated about a hundred pounds of stuff today. Sometimes it’s sad to get rid of some items, particularly if you had high hopes for them, if they were a gift, or if you associate them with someone you miss.

But how much sadder is it to hoard something in your home for years for some inane psychological reason, without actually putting it to use or giving it a proper place?

If I’m going to own an item, the least I could do is be a good parent to it. And the most fundamental responsibility of a parent is to give your children a decent home.

Stuff doesn’t usually have a home. Items of stuff are transients, surviving day-by-day in a temporary stack somewhere, leaning sadly against a garage wall, or sleeping in the darkness of a junk drawer, never sure of their fate or purpose. A particularly fortunate piece might get a chance to hibernate in a half-full cardboard box in the storage room, with some other hard-luck outcasts.

Nor do they have jobs. Just ask my broken acoustic guitar. Sorry, pal, but as a chronically disabled possession I just can’t keep you busy here. But feel free to mill about the closet behind the well-employed shirts and pants. I’m too insecure and sentimental to boot you out, but maybe one day, by some unlikely turn of events, you’ll become relevant again. Read More

by David on January 19, 2011
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A Shocking Revelation About Human Nature

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The results were horrifying. Nobody suspected it could be that bad, not even close.

In 1961 a controversial experiment was carried out that made some chilling discoveries about human nature. Psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to know how it was possible that so many people co-operated to commit the atrocities of the Second World War. They couldn’t all have been sociopaths, yet thousands and thousands of people did unspeakable things to innocent people, and millions more looked the other way.

Is it really that hard to stand up to authority?

Milgram devised an experiment that went like this:

Forty subjects were recruited to participate in an experiment “on learning and memory”, having answered a newspaper ad offering a modest payment for an hour of their time. Each of the subjects were informed that they would be compensated fully as long as they showed up, regardless of their performance in the experiment.

Upon arrival, each subject met with two people. The first was a man in a white labcoat purported to be the scientist conducting the experiment. The second was another person who was supposed to be a fellow subject, but whom was actually an actor. The two subjects drew slips of paper to see who would be the “teacher” and who would be the “learner” in the experiment.

It was rigged: both slips said “teacher,” so the real subject was always given the role of teacher, though he was under the impression that he’d had an equal chance of being the learner. The actor always played the learner.

The experimenter then announced that the learning was to be reinforced by electric shocks, which would be administered by the teacher on the learner whenever the learner gave an incorrect response to a simple memory test. Each teacher was given a 45-volt sample shock to get an idea of the shocks they would be giving.

The teacher was intentionally allowed to witness the learner being strapped to a chair, with electrodes fixed to him, before being ushered into the adjacent room, where he would be stationed in front of an electric shock generator. The experimenter sat behind the teacher, holding a clipboard. Read More

by David on October 27, 2010
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Do You Make a Moral Issue Out of Being Inconvenienced?

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I think I inherited it from my Father’s side. Nothing makes me lose my mind more than when I’m walking through the mall and somebody steps out of a store right in front of me and walks slowly. Why didn’t they look? I would have looked. I do look.

It might only take less than two seconds for me to skirt around and resume my regular mall-cruising speed, but that’s enough time to make my eyes harden and my teeth clench. It’s enough for my mind to start getting self-righteous.

If I’m not careful, I end up in an internal dialogue about certain basic courtesies people should uphold in public, or maybe a half-daydream about how the oblivious lady in front of me must live a life of total obliviousness, wandering into busy streets or onto active construction sites, all without a clue that she may be affecting people’s lives with her deplorable lack of awareness. In either case, I end up feeling agitated, and slightly better than her.

The basis of my internal rant always seems to surround how people ought to behave in public. In other words, I make a moral issue out of it.

In a situation like that, my distress seems to be that I am simply yearning for a world in which people don’t stand in the way on sidewalks or step out in front of people at the mall. But it’s really a clever self-deception; what I am really yearning for in those moments is a slightly easier version of my present moment — one in which there is nothing in my way.

Though I’m not always aware of it, my own personal inconvenience is what I’m really railing against, not some worldwide epidemic of rudeness. My objection is purely selfish, under the guise of a noble appeal for a better world. But I’m not really looking for a better world, only a moment that contains no difficulty for me — no oversight I must excuse, no mistake I must forgive. Read More

by David on September 28, 2010
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The Only Reason to Behave Ethically

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At playtime in the early grades, teachers always told us we were supposed to share our toys.

We always did it grudgingly. None of us actually wanted to share them. But we figured there would be consequences if we didn’t, just as there were for not doing anything else they told us we should do.

“It’s not nice not to share,” they would say. And why should I find it preferable to be “nice?” Nobody ever explained that.

Whenever I inquired, I’d hear things like:

“Because it’s important.”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“It’s the right thing to do.”

I always knew what I was supposed to say, but inside I knew would rather have the firetruck to myself than take turns with some other kid, and nobody ever gave me a meaningful reason why there was something wrong with that.

We grow up with this rigid idea that we should behave ethically, as if the word “should” itself is all the reason we need. Few of us were ever given a genuine reason for why we should want to do “the right thing”, without the implicit threat of being punished or ostracized for not doing it. Read More

by David on August 2, 2010
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Aliens Exist, and We Should Avoid Them if We Want to Live

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earth

This week celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that alien life almost certainly exists, and humans should do everything we can to avoid contact with it.

He reasons that contact with aliens would probably be fatal to us, likening it to the European conquest of the New World:

“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans. [...] We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

Ouch. I’m not sure why I was so surprised to hear this point of view from Dr. Hawking.

I suppose, in the absence of any actual information about alien species, my entire concept of them is built from movies and TV shows. In those shows, aliens tend to do one of two things: extend a gesture of cosmic friendship and love, or violently abduct/dissect/probe us and vaporize our cities. I always thought the movies that portrayed aliens as senseless killers (Independence Day comes to mind) were not as “realistic” as ones in which the aliens strike some sort of rapport with us humble homo sapiens (think Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)

One ridiculous feature of movie aliens is that they almost always look something like us — bipeds with eyes, nose (or at least nostrils) and mouth. Sometimes they add some slime or mucous to make them a bit more foreign. These depictions are dazzlingly unimaginitive — it’s really incredible how we can’t seem to let go of the idea that sentient aliens would just be “men from outer space.” Truth is stranger than fiction, and since we have no real knowledge of extra-terrestrial life, we have no starting point for imagining them, other than ourselves.

But that’s movies, and I guess I never really thought one of the world’s top scientific minds would conclude that aliens would indeed try to kill us if they had the chance.

It made me think: is that what humans would do with aliens if we found them? Sure, we’ve destroyed all sorts of terrestrial species (usually without trying) and sure, we destroy our own kind on a regular basis, but I think humanity at large would regard an alien encounter as an opportunity to connect, rather than conquer.

No, I don’t think we’d be as cold-blooded with our galactic neighbors as Hawking believes they would be with us. For all the nasty things humans can do, there is an earnest quality in us that respects life and wants to see it do its thing. We are fascinated to witness rare earth animals in their natural habitats, and I think we’d be more likely to value and study alien life than to barbecue it. Read More

by David on April 30, 2010
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How to Improve Your Handwriting (or Anything Else) at Will

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When I was taking French classes a few months ago, we were each asked to write a composition in French and pass it to another classmate to read. It struck me then that I very seldom write more than a Post-It note’s worth these days. By the end of a paragraph, my hand is cramped and sore.

And what an ugly paragraph I created. My letters were inconsistent and strangled. To this day, after nearly twenty-five years of handwriting experience, I suck. With considerable shame, I passed my composition, which demonstrated both the penmanship and language skills of a six-year-old French boy, to another classmate.

As if to redeem me, I received an even uglier paragraph from the student to my left.

My generation is lost for handwriting. I’m a computer person. I write thousands of words a week, almost entirely by pushing buttons. My penmanship skills are rarely called upon, and I know I’m not the only one.

After a few weeks of class, I had a chance to see everyone’s penmanship at least once. It ranged from virtually indecipherable to pretty good, but none approached the elegant cursive one might see in a Christmas card from an aunt born before the war. Read More

by David on October 15, 2009
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A New Relationship With Food – Experiment No. 4 Results

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light meal

Another experiment has come to an end, but as usual, I’m not going right back to what I was doing beforehand. Just like my last experiment, 30 Days Without Drugs, one of the habits in my life has been permanently renegotiated.

To recap, a month ago I decided I’d go thirty days eating defensively. That means no indiscriminate eating. I defined four rules to govern my eating during that month:

1) Eat whatever you like. There are no foods to be avoided outright, except foods that make you feel sick. Listen to your body.

2) Never eat until you are full. Always stop at a moment when you still want to eat a bit more. This is the most important part of the diet. Again, listen to what the body says, not the mind.

3) Eat only when you are hungry. Never out of comfort or boredom. Do not eat within sixty minutes of the last time you stopped eating.

4) Water is the only drink. You may still consume any liquids you want, but they are to be treated like food.

These rules served me well, and prevented a lot of needless and excessive eating, but each had its loopholes and grey areas. Read More

by David on October 5, 2009
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Should We Have Compassion for Killers?

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jail cell

Last week, convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was released from prison by the Scottish government, on “compassionate grounds.” He is dying of cancer and has less than three months to live. Initial reactions were strong, but deeply divided. Here are just some of the millions of opinions that flew back and forth on Twitter, in the hours that followed:

I hope his plane falls from the sky like the 283 people 20 years ago.

~ Tony Callaghan

Lockerbie …. I hope everyone in SCOTLAND gets cancer.

~ John Wright

Lots of anger about Lockerbie bomber release. Worth noting that the case against al-Megrahi was always somewhat dubious.

~ Matthew Pallas

Why did they release that bloodthirsty killer MEGRAHI? COMPASSIONATE GROUNDS! What about compassion for the Lockerbie victims families!

~ Henry William Louis

So Megrahi is released. I am proud that we are capable of such humanity even as we still grieve for those lost at Lockerbie.

~ Clare Meikle

Oh Scotland, may I remind you that Muslims have no concept of compassion and mercy. Freeing Megrahi will be a show of weakness in their eyes.

~ Rachel Hunter

Mind is changed on Megrahi, [Scottish Justice secretary] MacAskill made good points…. Hopefully this will help build bridges with the East.

~ Thomas Scott

Totally and utterly shocking that #megrahi – mass murderer – is now FREE!! Where’s the justice??? I’m ashamed to be Scottish today!! >:-(

~ Colin Sales

“Where’s the justice” is a good question.

I contend that there is none to be found here. How do you make the deaths of 270 innocents just? What action could one possibly take at this point to create justice out of this, or this? Read More

by David on August 27, 2009
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