For the next person that tells me about "The Liberal Media"

WALTER PINCUS: We used to do at the Post something called truth squading. --President would make a speech. We used to do it with Ronald Reagan the first five or six months because he would make so many-- factual errors, particularly in his press conference. PRESIDENT REAGAN: (3/6/1981) From 10 thousand to 60 thousand dollars a yearÂ…

WALTER PINCUS: And after-- two or three weeks of it-- the public at large, would say, "Why don't you leave the man alone? He's trying to be honest. He makes mistakes. So what?" and we stopped doing it.

BILL MOYERS: You stopped being the truth squad.

WALTER PINCUS: We stopped truth squading every sort of press conference, or truth squading. And we left it then-- to the democrats. In other words, it's up to the democrats to catch people, not us.

BILL MOYERS: So if the democrats challenged-- a statement from the president, you could-- quote both sides.

WALTER PINCUS: We then quote-- both sides. Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Now, that's called objectivity by many standards isn't it?

WALTER PINCUS: Well, that's-- objectivity if you think there are only two sides. and if you're not interested in-- the facts. And the facts are separate from, you know, what one side says about the other.

I'm still reading the transcript of this, but it talks about an issue near and dear to the heart of a former journalist

More light reading...

As it turns out, our many Web 2.0 revolutionaries have been so thoroughly seized with the successes of strong collaboration that they are resistant to recognizing some hard truths. As wonderful as it might be that the hegemony of professionals over knowledge is lessening, there is a downside: our grasp of and respect for reliable information suffers. With the rejection of professionalism has come a widespread rejection of expertise—of the proper role in society of people who make it their life's work to know stuff. This, I maintain, is not a positive development; but it is also not a necessary one. We can imagine a Web 2.0 with experts. We can imagine an Internet that is still egalitarian, but which is more open and welcoming to specialists. The new politics of knowledge that I advocate would place experts at the head of the table, but—unlike the old order—gives the general public a place at the table as well.

This is hot off the press from Edge.org. Yes, it's long, but in the ongoing discussions about what we believe vs. what we know vs. what we think we know, I think it brings some food for thought to the table.

Atheism causes Anorexia???

Again, the link to the full article is in the title.

Girls Inc. just published the results of its depressing, nationwide survey called "The Supergirl Dilemma," which reveals that girls' obsession with thinness has gotten significantly worse in the past six years. Despite the efforts of the Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty – well-intentioned, though undeniably market-driven – and Love Your Body Day events sweeping every school from San Francisco to Syracuse, 90 percent of teenage girls think they are overweight today, compared with 24 percent in 1995, according to a recent ELLEgirl survey.

So what gives? Is it our celebrity-obsessed, extreme makeover culture? Is it the newest version of the age-old story of dysfunctional family relationships? Is it peer pressure – mean girls critiquing one another's every lunchtime indiscretion? Is it the $30 billion a year diet industry?

It is, in truth, all of the above. But there is also another profoundly important – yet little noticed – dynamic at work in the anxious, achievement-oriented lives of America's perfect girls: They have a sometimes deadly, often destructive, lack of faith.

So many perfect girls were raised entirely without organized religion, and the majority of the rest of us – I reluctantly admit to my own membership in the perfect girl club – experienced "spirituality" only in the form of mandatory holiday services with a big-haired grandmother or unconscionably elaborate and expensive bat mitvah parties, where everything but the Torah is emphasized.

As a nontheist that could stand to lose a few pounds, I'm pretty sure I disagree.

How others see US

The link thing in the title will take you to the full article.

It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

This is from an article in today's Guardian. Agree? Disagree? This is how a lot of countries perceive the US right now. If they are wrong, how do we change the perception?

On Nothing or The Long-Awaited New Age Blog

My mother died when I was four. That is the most fundamental fact of my being. Everything about who I am and what I am goes back to that moment 40 years ago when a drunk driver ended my mother’s life. Sure, I’m a big girl now and that happened a long time ago, but that doesn’t change the fact that it shaped the 40 years that followed it. Without that one event, I don’t get an abusive stepmother, I don’t have to live with an alcoholic grandmother, and I don’t have to essentially raise myself beginning at about 9 years old. Lots of things don’t happen, happen differently, or even if they happen the same way, I have a mother to help me through them. I didn’t know what that meant until I became a mom myself. I felt the hole in my life, but I never saw the magnitude. It’s what I imagine it would be to live on earth your whole life and then finally see it from space. People can claim I’m being disrespectful for saying some of the things I’m going to say here, but whatever you believe, whatever you think I’m disrespecting, using your same assumption of its reality, it disrespected me first, 40 years ago.

I explain all this, not to venture in the “Dear Diary” territory of soggy blogging, but to allow you, dear reader, to understand when I say that when it comes to looking for answers, to trying to figure out how things work, what the meaning to it all is, I guess I have as much vested interest as anyone. I have looked for the answers, in religion, mysticism, fatalism, nihilism, cynicism, dogma, karma, palm readers, tea leaves, and Elvis on black velvet. A lot of people give up on the religion they were raised on. I guess it’s kinda uncool, having Dad’s religion, a lot like driving Dad’s Oldsmobile to the prom or something. If you are a certain age, maybe you gave up on “Western” religion and sought answers in the mystic east, which, if you think about it is almost as condescending as thinking that only Western religion has the answers. I explored a lot, looking for something that could answer the fundamental fact of my being. Something that made sense, something that could say, “This is why a 4-year-old child loses a mother and goes on to having the life I’ve led.” If the big G god was working in “mysterious ways” I wanted an explanation. I spent quite of few years being really pissed off at the Big Sky Daddy because I couldn’t think of an explanation that qualified as good enough.

Enter the New Agers and their promises of ancient wisdom, untapped potential, cosmic harmony, and all the rest. Just like with religion, I was ready to believe anything that could answer me, could explain my pain, and the pain of others, because it wasn’t just about me now. How do some people get everything by being greedy, corrupt, even criminal, while kind, fair, just people are starving, dying in civil wars, languishing in poverty? Why does the Big Sky Daddy give some people miracles, let other score touch downs, but I couldn’t keep my mother? New Age belief said there were no coincidences, everything had a purpose, and everything sought balance. And best of all, the New Age said we could affect the balance in our lives, we could change it, improve it. So, I meditated, I paid attention to the coincidences in my life, I wrote things down on paper, I embraced my inner child, I healed and purified, it was practically a full-time job. The universe would take care of everything; the whole great interconnected universe was there to do for me what the Big Sky Daddy did for everybody else.

Did it work? No.

So there came a time, what we like to call a bump in the road, or a rough patch, one of those times when everything that can go wrong does and then some. Big things and little things, some that probably didn’t matter as much as I thought they did and some that to this day cause me pain. I tried everything. I prayed to the Sky Daddy, I journaled, I meditated, I took pills, I sent my thought energy out into the cosmos – something was going to make the pain stop, right? No. There, at the edge of the abyss, I realized I was waiting for something to help me that didn’t really exist. At the very brink of madness was the sudden clarity that said none of this is real. It was all created by people just as scared as I was. These were their answers to fear and pain, but they were all inventions. It’s all magical thinking. It’s all based on a desire to not be alone. It’s all based on what we want things to be and not on what they are. I stopped looking into the void seeking an answer and finally saw the void itself.

That’s what there was. Void. Nothing.

Believing in Nothing may not sound, on the surface, like such a terrific system. And it isn’t that I reject all belief without considering it. It’s funny, but I miss believing in something. But every time belief presents itself, or I find belief sneaking into my thinking, I look at it, I look in the mirror and say it out loud, I compare it what I know about life. I look at it and think about it, and I wonder if it fits the truism I tell my daughter when she gets scared of the dark at night: “There’s nothing there in the dark that isn’t there in the daylight.” The minute I sniff that there’s something supernatural to process, something that wouldn’t be there in the light of day, I retire its number and move on. But Nothing, to date, has proven 100% effective as a belief system. It’s got a better batting percentage than prayer, positive thinking, tea leaves, and Elvis on black velvet. Nothing is never wrong. It’s amazing. And there’s a kind of comfort in the reliability of Nothing, not nearly so alluring as the great interconnectedness where there are no coincidences, but a basic inner beauty. It’s so consistent and in keeping with what we know about the universe, most of space being made up of empty space and all.

In science, an equation, a theory, must account for all variables, or it is flawed. I’m not saying we should worship at the alter of science, but I think a belief system should be held to some standard of accountability. Nothing has accounted for every variable I have encountered. It’s still a theory, but it’s a good theory. Nothing says my mother died for no very good reason other than there was a drunk driver on the road that night; that these things happen. They are unfair and unjust, but we pick up and move on because there’s Nothing else we can do. And best of all there’s nothing in Nothing that points fingers. In Nothing, bad things happen because they happen, not as punishment, not as a failure to measure up. And there’s Nothing to keep each of us from trying our best to change things, to be good, fair, and just people, from falling down and getting back up again, from failing or succeeding, from being amazed at being alive, or gazing in wonder at what life offers. That’s the magic of Nothing.

Dead Man Walking, "What am I supposed to do now?"

Yes, I know, I said I was doing the New Age next, but this popped into my head. -- Mother.

Ian Hunter does a wonderful song called "Dead Man Walking," the lyrics of which can be found at: http://www.hunter-mott.com/lyrics/rant.html#DeadManWalkin
It's a brutal, honest look at being a certain age. It's a great wallow song if you feel like wallowing and has some lovely piano bits.

I bring this up, because I have been reading of late of people who find themselves lolling the doldrums, maybe because of age, maybe because of natural temperament. I read their words and I hear "Dead Man Walking" in my head.

If I could speak to them though, I wouldn't quote lyrics at them. I would remind them first of all they have and shouldn't take for granted. You have a job, think of those that don't, who worry about how to keep the lights on and feed their kids. You have a home, think of those that don't and will be sleeping on the sidewalks tonight. You have food and health and the your nation, however divided, isn't being destroyed by civil war. There are many who can't say that. I'm sure they know those things, but being reminded never hurts.

Given all that, humans are basically selfish creatures, so even being "comfortable" when others lack basics, they are still apt to look at their lot and find it lacking. I have, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that, so a reminder of all that is good is good, but it isn't enough.

Want to get rid of your over-abundance of possessions? Don't go on e-bay, call a charity. Got too much time staring you in the face? Volunteer teaching people to read or teach English to immigrants. Join a Guide dog training program and bring an animal into your life that, if you both work hard enough, will become the eyes or ears of someone who needs them. Volunteer to answer phones at a crisis hotline. Go to a convalescent hospital and offer to be a companion to someone who has no one else in their life. Your life will have meaning and you will be helping others. You will also have less time to wonder whether or not your life has the degree of happiness that our Western consumer-based culture promises you will have if you just buy the right products, pills, and services.

Still not enough? Then look at all the things you have not tried. Here's a partial list of things I have not tried. You can borrow it if you like: Canning preserves; yoga; quitting smoking again; reading Don Quixote; watching the AFI Top 100 films of all time; travelling to about 100,000 places I want to see in my lifetime; cleaning behind the refrigerator (ok, I have done that, but not in this millennium); trading my practical car for a roadster before giving up my car and relying on public transport; volunteering to work on a political campaign; finding just the right version of that cool-whip and jello pie I loved as a kid; learning to play chess well; meeting in person all my friends from the internet; writing a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That should be enough to get anyone started and everyone, if they think about it, has their own list. If you truly have no list, you poor unfortunate soul, you best start making one.

And finally, quit waiting for "the right time" to start living your life. So often I have heard people say they will get on with their life goals when the time is right, when they have the money, when the kids get in school or out of school or out of the house, when they meet the right man, woman, or llama, when the stars are aligned just right and guarantee the success of their endeavor. THERE IS NO RIGHT TIME! Keep waiting and you'll be laying on your death-bed wondering what you did with all those years you spent waiting.

Friendship

No matter how bad a situation appears at times, I'm always amazed at how some friendships can remain, and how others can fall apart.

Add into that the complexity of the written word, and the anonimity of the internet, and the potential for a relationship to disolve is multiplied exponentially.

So when I have troubles with a specific person I expect the worst, skeptic that I am, and I'm always delighted when my fears are proved unfounded.

Mother, you define "friend" for me. We butt heads. I piss you off. You frustrate me. I fuck up. You accept me for what I am. We never hold grudges. We accept our differences. We communicate. We always seem to move on, and move past our differences. The road is bumpy sometimes, but there's always a road there somewhere.

In the end, we remain friends. It takes work, and sometimes it's not easy. Sometimes it hurts. But damn, the end result is always worth it. There's always something to learn. About yourself as well as others.

I've been lucky to have met a handful of people like that over the internet.

I just wish more people could examine their issues and troubles, and agree to accept differences while enjoying the act of communication and friendship as we have.

There are some really special people out there. I feel fortunate that through nothing other than luck, I've met a few remarkable people.

Listen

Monday the 23-year-old Cho Seung-hui shot and killed 33 people, including him. The news had barely hit the air before people started to talk about stricter gun laws. Being from a country where it’s not legal to own a gun, I’m all for gun control, but would stricter gun laws have helped Seung-hui? It would probably have helped the 32 others, but there would still have been one victim too many. I know the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” saying. It’s true, but as Eddie Izzard says “I’m sure the gun helps.”

Today I read that the police are looking into a theory that Seung-hui was copying scenes from the movie Oldboy. He might have been, but does it matter? At worst the movie could have given him some for of inspiration to how he wanted to it, but it didn’t but the supply him with the motivation to do it. And the motivation is all that matters. What makes a 23-year-old shoot that many people and then kill himself? How can anyone get to a point where life seems so hopeless and find so much hate towards everything? It’s not gun laws; it’s not movies, music or games. But people would like to believe it is, perhaps because those areas are easier to fix. Perhaps because we then know that we don’t have to blame our self. It’s easy to say after this, that Seung-hui was disturbed; Seung-hui was in pain. There where signs, people where worried about him. But no one had the ability to do anything.

I saw the clip that was released and I can’t get anywhere near the core of what he is saying. Comparing himself to Jesus and saying this could have been avoided. Saying they forced him. I’m sure all this made sense to him. I see that tape as his surrender. He realized that he had lost some battle that was going on in his head, and the killings were his last stand. I don’t know what he was fighting; I don’t understand the war he lost. I’m sure there are people who fight the same battle every day; I’m sure there are people losing the same battle every day. Seung-hui just made the battle visual, how many others die in silence? Now people would like to silence Seung-hui too, but I think he should be heard. He chose a terrible way to deliver his message, and I don’t think it should be condoned, but with so high a cost for a message, can we then truly allow our self to not listen? We owe it to the 32 killed and Seung-hui to listen and to try and understand. We need to look the horror in the eyes and understand. We need to ask Seung-hui the questions in death that we forgot to ask in life.

What will we learn from this? Nothing. People don’t want to learn, they want to live their sheltered life. They want to believe this guy was a psycho, he was evil. They want to believe he was everything but what he truly was; depressed, alone and a victim. A victim of a world than celebrate murders as long as they are performed by soldiers in other countries; A world where one half is dying of starvation and the other half of obesity; A world where you can walk among 26 000 people on the same campus and not find a single person who reaches out and touch your life in a positive way. When we meet each other we ask how we are doing, but we don’t really want to know. It’s a world of egos. If it’s not about me, why care. Why is it not okay to go over to a stranger and hug that person and say “it’s going to be alright” or “can I help you”? It might seem stupid, but who knows what it might mean to someone else, to be shown that there are people in this world who care. I know we are far away from a day where people will think like that, so I’ll leave it at three words:

Watch and listen.

The Partial Sabbatical of a Tree-Hugger

Remember back in the 80s, Shirley MacLaine and her New Age memoirs? I confess, I read “Out on a Limb.” I tried, Shirley -- really I did -- I tried to believe. Be that as it may (yeah, there’s a blog there, but not today’s), I liked the saying behind the title, “To get to the fruit of the tree, you have to go out on a limb.” I feel like I’ve been out on a limb for a long time. Hell, I know I’m different. I’ve been standing out like a sore thumb since I was head and shoulders taller than everyone else in my kindergarten class, and the only one whose mother had died. I’ve been a freak since that night my mother died. That’s 40 years of freak-hood. My version of life isn’t like most people. I have issues with trusting women. I have issues with American men. Let’s face it, I have issues.

But the other thing I have is, if I might be immodest for a moment, a way with words. Having a way with words, makes you sort of a commodity in cyberspace. If you can put words together, people want you to put words together for them, fill their web-pages, fill their blogs, fill their forums. Your words make them look good, and they aren’t the ones out on the limb. You are. You, me, and Shirley MacLaine. Now there are three of us out on this limb and Shirley and I aren’t as thin as we used to be.

Now, there’s the safe way to do this: make up cutesy names and talk about fluffy bunnies and sporks. It’s funny and clever, if a bit juvenile, and there’s zero risk involved. Or you can put yourself out there, be honest, talk about what matters to you, knowing you are a minority voice, knowing it stamps "freak" on your forehead in great big day-glo letters (mine are pink). How long can you stay out on the limb, even having me and Shirley MacLaine to give you some cover, before you start wondering who’s really benefiting?

One day you start thinking, “What the hell am I doing? I’m sitting out here on this limb with an Oscar-winning actress and a neurotic blonde with a way with words and it seems like the only fruit I’m getting is what’s being chucked at me by some guys on motorcycles.”

Well, what did you expect? Even though people stopped roasting cats for entertainment years ago, there’s still a large number that enjoy making fun of freaks. Look at the fun I’ve had writing this at the expense of Shirley MacLaine? Honestly, I thought she was fantastic in “Some Came Running” and “Sweet Charity,” and her book, while nothing I can give credence to, was pretty well-written. So while I poke a little fun at Ms. MacLaine, it is with affection and respect for her talent. I also have had some fun at my own expense, which I do frequently. If I laugh first you can only laugh with me and not at me.

So who benefits from this circus act? People looking for others to laugh at so they can feel superior, they get a good show. All those cyber proprietors who would have nothing but empty space if you weren’t filling their sites up with bits, bytes, pixels, and what-have-you, they get ownership and possession of your well-crafted words from now until the day of the great server crash that sends your handiwork to electronic oblivion. And you, you get eternity out on that limb with me and Shirley trying to rub the day-glo marker off your forehead and wondering what you were ever thinking that made you climb up here in the first place.

Well, I think it’s time I asked Shirley to move to one side for a couple of minutes because I think I’m gonna climb down for awhile. I’m going to take my way with words and put it in my journal where it belongs. I might lose something in the translation, but I think I’ve earned a rest. And after a rest, maybe I'll just climb up on this low branch here. There still might be people waiting to lob produce in my direction, but the climb down is shorter and there's a little more cover. I won’t be any less of a freak, but I’ll smell less fruity and maybe I’ll finally get this pink marker off my forehead.

Monogamy, an essay in three parts

Part I -- How It Started

If you plan on reading Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" be warned that a small spoiler is contained below.

In the middle of Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" there is a love story. World War I has exploded across Europe at long last and our young lovers are fleeing across the countryside seek a safe haven.

Pretty standard fare...except this is Pynchon who never does anything standard. Our young lovers are Yashmeen, a European heroine with a head for numbers; Reef, rugged American adventurer from a very colorful Colorado family, and Cyprian, the Brit who has mooned after Yashmeen since college days despite the fact they were both, for most of their lives, confirmed homosexuals. It does change things, doesn't it? Except...it doesn't. Sure, at first Cyp is there more as an audience and Reef, he's sure he's far too macho to ever be gay, except, by the time Cyprian leaves the other two, it's very plain that all three love each other very much.

While I have mixed feelings about "Against the Day," I really enjoyed their story and, to no one's surprise, it got me thinking. When did we decide that love was a two-way street; that it needs to be confined to two people and two people only? Yash, Reef, and Cyp get away with it because the world's gone to war and no one is really paying any attention to them. They also get away with it because they are fictional characters in the book of a very liberated author who will let them. Still, Cyprian, realizing the world won't let their relationship survive the war, stays behind in a monastery so the two people he loves most can continue to be together.

Ok, I hear you, gentle reader, saying how could anyone so hard-bitten and cynical even have been interested in a love story? Is there really something that softens Mother's heart? Whether it's a combination of primary and secondary sexual traits that attract someone and makes them want to procreate and continue the species, or whether it's the compatibility of life scripts between people so that each individual finds and bonds with people they perceive as meeting their pyschological needs, let's acknowledge that we are attracted to some people more than others, that we emotionally bond with other people, that we find other people physically attractive, and when all of that comes together and is mutually held, we call it love and it is a good thing. Is it limited to couples only? Is that a blessing or a curse? Is not the companionship of more than one person better than the companionship of only one person? If romance between two people is good, would not romance between three be even better?

In my very unscientific sampling of my THH guinea pigs, I mean research group, it appears that most people, regardless of their other beliefs, have some need or desire for monogamy, here meaning a single relationship between two people. Even the resident anarchist leans towards monogamy. Two people. One life-time commitment. Exclusivity. But we didn't start out that way. Like most mammals, we started out a much less discriminating species.

Part II -- A Brief History of Monogamy

Back in the early days of humankind, groups divided themselves into men and women and pair off collectively, meaning all the men were one half of the couple and all the women were the other half. But then, we got civilized. One of the first things we did as civilized beings was to decide that property needed to be passed down to our progeny. For that to happen, we had be certain of who our progeny were. Thus, the male-dominated relationship wherein women could be killed for infidelity was established. Men had to have some degree of certitude that they were passing on their property, title, wealth, etc, to actual, real, blood descendants, and the way to do that was lock up and repress the women. So, we all got civilized and each man got to marry and bind his women to him, which eventually became just one woman. And thus all the wealth did stay in the family and life was good -- for men and their first-born sons anyway.

And what were women told? Women were told about true love. They were told fairy tales about how if they became submissive slaves, cheerfully doing all the household drudge-work, their prince would come and carry them off because he had a castle that needed a good cleaning by a cheerful submissive…or something like that, sometimes I get a little fuzzy on my fairy tale details. They were told good, virtuous, lady-like women put up with their men folk so they could experience the rewards of child-bearing, and that their men, deep down, loved them. If their man beat them, it was out of love. If they fooled around, well, it was probably something you as an ignorant woman did, so you better do better next time. What you didn’t do is get out and get yourself another man. Only brazen hussies and wicked, fallen women did things like that. Nor were you able get out and get by with no man at all. Good women did what they did for “love,” but it also kept them from becoming paupers, because they had no means of self-support. Remember, all that wealth, property and so forth was being passed down to male heirs. So good women did what they were allowed to do. They met a man, they got married, and then they had kids.

And that is where monogamy came from. Sounds romantic, doesn’t it?

Part III – The Wow Finish

But wait! ‘Cause here’s where it gets interesting! In the post-WWII era, suddenly corporations discovered what valuable assets women are. Women are able to earn their own money, they can hire their own cheerful submissives to do the drudge-work, and have their own property, wealth, etc. to pass on to the progeny, and they know which kids are theirs because child-birth isn’t something you forget easily. What happens? In the words of Tammy Wynette, “Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E becomes fin-al to-day…” Half of all marriages famously end in divorce. People wait longer to get married. Fewer people get married.

We’ve been conditioned to still want, based on my unscientific sampling, one person to love us and choose us above all others. Yet, the reality for a lot of us isn’t a single life-time marriage, but serial monogamy, consecutive true loves, mates for every age and stage of adult life. How great of a leap is it, then, from consecutive relationships to concurrent ones, and if we can accept concurrent relationships, how far is it from there to shared relationships? Personally, I think it’s damn near impossible to find one person to love who loves you back. Finding two people to love you and to love each other: It seems like such a long shot. Thinking back among the world’s great lovers there are Neal and Caroline Cassady and Jack Kerouac; Anais Nin, Henry Miller and Mrs. Miller. Then there are all those so-called adult films that aren’t really very adult at all, and that 80-year-old man and his three young bouncy blondes on late-night cable. Doesn’t sound like a very promising group. But when you are going against a society that insists on pairing people up two-by-two, you are bound to run into difficulties. That isn’t to say that I don’t believe it could happen, but it would take an evolution of society far beyond what we’ve reached today.

Concurrent relationships would require less sense of ownership of another person than anything we’ve had since our cave-dwelling ancestors. Don’t we still make remarks about “sinking her claws” into a man or “slipping a ring on her finger before she gets away”? They would require a re-shaping of our mythology about true love, something else the unscientific sampling was fond of. To maintain our belief in true love, we will tell ourselves that only our mate is attractive to us and only our mate meets our emotional needs. Until that relationship falls apart and we go looking for another. And we will ignore the possibility that if we can love consecutively, we also are capable of loving concurrently, that there’s more than one true love out there, there may be a lot more true loves out there.

To get all the way to a shared relationship, we also would have to reshape the idea that there are straight people and gay people, and accept that there is straightness and gayness in all people, including ourselves. It has taken years to get some people even to accept that there are gay people and they have a right to exist, and there are still those clinging to the notion that there is something “evil” about homosexuality. So, yes, I think society will keep embracing monogamy, though I think it will become even more of an ideal and even less of a reality, and we will beat ourselves up about our failure to find it. Three will be kept in the domain of certain adult films, half-crazed literary figures, and the characters they create. Society will continue to enforce an antiquated system of ensuring that the only seed that finds its way to a womb is planted by the rightful owner and we will call it true love.

Eating with Chopsticks (left-handed)

The child, being mine, is as comfortable with chopsticks as she is with a fork. We go out for various Asian foods regularly and she’s offended if the serving staff brings her a fork, assuming she’s too young or too Caucasian to handle sticks. She learned from me and I learned so long ago I can’t remember when I learned. I said this to a friend of mine who then issued a challenge: next time I was having fried rice try using my non-dominant hand. It’s a good exercise and a good allegory.

Doing anything left-handed if you are a right-handed person, forces you to not rely on reflex, memory, or habit. You have to think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. You have to pay attention to the choices and decisions you’re making. You end up, not only with a lap full of food, but with a new or improved perspective of something that was so automatic you had stopped thinking about it.

Too often, life is about getting to that level of comfort that allows us not to think. We get there and suppose we’ve arrived. We equate mastering one set of skills done one way with mastery of all. We get into ruts, routines, quagmires of boredom, both mental and physical. Let those ruts get deep enough and we can start missing what’s around us. Breaking away, taking a second look, following a different path keeps the view fresh and the mind sharp.

Here are a couple of examples:

I live in the suburbs and usually commute to my job in downtown Los Angeles on the train. From the sidewalk, downtown LA is like a small town. The buildings don’t require street addresses, they are known as Library Tower or Wells Fargo or Arco Plaza, and they can all be recognized but their sculptures or entrance ways. At sidewalk level everything is cozy and small, but every so often I have to drive into work and the whole landscape changes. Two-way sidewalks turn into one-way streets, and suddenly everything looks so big, one huge wall of concrete and glass adjacent to another. Looking out the windshield my little village becomes unrecognizable. I have to look for street signs instead of landmarks because a newsstand or a fountain disappears at 30 mph. It’s a reminder that where I work really is the second largest city in the country.

I’m a life-long liberal. I’ve always thought of liberals as the good guys. Or I did. One day, while surfing through the usual assortment of What Hath George Wrought, I see an article on one of the left-wing blogs about Massachusetts governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. The author claims she is aghast that Romney is not putting for position papers on the hearing of Warren Jeffs of the Fundamental Latter Day Saints, a very small, fringe religious group that was alleged to be engaging in forced arranged multiple marriages between older men and underaged girls. The hearing was to determine if there was enough evidence to charge Jeffs. She wasn’t asking Barrack Obama or Hillary Clinton to jump in with opinions about something that hadn’t gone to trial, hadn’t resulted in a conviction, but Romney, she insisted, needed to take a stand. Why? Because Romney is a Mormon. Forget how the left railed against people who thought John Kennedy’s Roman Catholic faith would affect his ability to fairly govern the country. Forget how the left has fought to keep religion out of politics and out of government. Because Romney is a Mormon. Forget even that it has been more than 100 years since the Latter Day Saints Church renounced polygamy and that the Latter Day Saints Church as nothing, zip, zero, zilch, nada to do with Jeffs and his group, because Romney is a Mormon. I read her tirade and it was my turn to be aghast. I don’t want Romney to be President for a lot of reasons, but being Mormon is not one of them, anymore than Obama’s race or Clinton’s gender are reasons they should not be president. Liberals don’t generate this kind of guilt by implied association. And yet, there it was, in pixel and bits on the computer screen, a liberal behaving badly. Worse than badly: unconscionably. Being Left is not the same as being right. Lesson learned.

Maybe I’d starve if I tried to eat every day with chopsticks left-handed, but looking at what we know we believe, what we believe we think, and what we think we know, can nurture us in ways we never imagined.