Now, please answer the following questions as best you can. For the assertive sentences, please indicate your general level of agreement (strongly agree, agree, have no opinion, disagree, strongly disagree).
I found this survey in the following way:
I have heard of the band "King Missle".
I have heard other of their songs.
I am familiar with a lot of their early music.
My impression of "King Missle" is favorable.
I listened to the song, but I didn't read the lyrics.
I read the lyrics, but I didn't listen to the song.
I listened to the song and read the lyrics at the same time.
I listened to the song and then read the lyrics.
I read the lyrics and then listened to the song.
I have heard this song before.
I last heard this song within the last week/month/year/five years.
I think this song is sweet. sarcastic. annoying. offensive. funny. sad. (rank these terms)
I envy Gary and Melissa.
I think they had a healthy relationship.
I think they were perverts.
I think their relationship lasted a long time.
I think they became bored with each other very quickly.
I think they were shallow people.
I think Gary and Melissa loved each other.
I think they were just using each other.
I think the moral of this song is that sex without love is an empty experience.
I think the moral of this song is that the secret to life is to enjoy it until your time runs out.
I think their death was tragic.
I think when they died, they got what they deserved.
I think Gary and Melissa went to Heaven.
I think Gary and Melissa went to Hell.
I would like to have friends like Gary and Melissa.
I think they were obsessed with sex.
I have felt the same way about someone in my life that Gary and Melissa felt about each other.
I would like to feel the same way about someone in my life that Gary and Melissa felt about each other.
posted at 7:18 AM |
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"Judge not, unless you judge that you're right."
"Love to hate your enemy."
"The last shall be last."
"Suffer, little children!"
"Blessed is the Peacemaker."
"Let he who has a stone cast the first stone."
posted at 11:55 AM |
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| Occupation | Advantages | Disadvantages |
| 50s Housewife | well-defined role | no gays |
| Army Basic Training | be all that you can be | no gays either |
| Boy Scout Master | relive lost youth vicariously | no gays, no atheists |
| Catholic Priest | judgement, exorcisms, incense | no gays, no atheists either |
In 1967, Senator John McCain heard about a publishing crisis that was the result of thread shortages due to the intensifying police action in Vietnam. In his spare time (which was plentiful in those days) McCain developed what is now known as "McCain" stitching. Although adoption of McCain stitching was slow at first, it has become an increasingly popular option for binders of books of 500 pages or more.
In contrast to canonical stitching, in which each signature is attached to every other signature (allowing a very strong, supple spine and facilitating a flatter spread throughout the book), McCain stitching attaches a signature only to its two neighbors (the first and last signatures are double-stitched to the signatures next to them). This allows a book to use about 60% less thread and 2N fewer total stitches (where N is the number of signatures) than with the canonical method.
Because there are fewer stitch points, McCain stitching must be performed under considerably higher tension than other methods of stitching. This results in a more "brittle" feel to the user and does not allow such a flat spread. However, after extensive tests and lobbying efforts by the textbook industry, McCain stitching was approved by NASTA in 1978. It is now almost as popular as other "alternative stitching" methods in the major binderies across the United States.
posted at 1:40 PM |
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"
Want of knowledge troubles a mind in doubt:
Did our world have begetting and beginning?
And is there a limit, too, to how much stress
and strain and shaking the walls of the world can stand?
Or are they, by gift of god, forever hale,
and glide down endless tracts of time with power
to scorn the bludgeon and blow of boundless time?
—Titus Lucretius Carus
The State Department Anthology of American Writers was recently published by—you got it—the U.S. State Department. It includes essays by Michael Chabon, Billy Collins (the current U.S. poet laureate) and others. The link above is to the complete text of this anthology, but the U.S. government is prohibited by law from distributing the link or the publication within the United States. That's because the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act prohibits "domestic dissemination of U.S. propaganda."
The link again is
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/writers/homepage.htm.
posted at 7:52 AM |
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The two most-requested commencement speakers for college graduations in 1972 (in order):
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
—William Butler Yeats
New: Order, Order
posted at 8:00 AM |
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Words are deeds.
—E. M. Forster
Vacation, day one: Drowned a squirrel.
posted at 7:11 AM |
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From: Dar [mailto: ]
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 2:27 PM
To: dlarge@ Subject: stuff for you
1) [omitted]
2) I saw a car commercial on the TV last night. The plot was basically that the couple driving some high mountain pass had just left a bad restaurant with a snooty maitre-d and they were on the way home to a catastrophic fight between their cat and their dog, which were smashing all their lovely things. (No children, apparently. The tag line was, "Right now, though, the moment is perfect" (I guess because they're driving in their fabulous luxury car that they got for $0 down on some crazy lease). What struck me about this commercial was how blatantly it eulogized process--becoming over being, movement over stillness, and the trip over the destination (home, in this case). If it's worth the going it's worth the ride, but if the dinner isn't worth eating then is it really worth the trip? (And notice that this is really a theme of a lot of car commercials--guys who run errands for their wives at the slightest provocation just so they can drive their new car.) I wonder what it means?
posted at 11:09 AM |
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Can you have more than one best friend at a time? I think so.
posted at 9:44 AM |
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I need to tell you this story. When I was a little boy I came across (I guess it was at the library) a book published by UNESCO; it had hundreds and hundreds of science experiments and techniques for all sorts of cool things. (I think this might have been where I got the idea to cut glass jars by plunging a red-hot poker into them while they were full of cooking oil; it didn't work, but my grandmother--my father's mother--yelled at me for wasting the oil (it was her oil). She estimated that the oil I'd ruined cost about $2 and asked me if I had any money. I was, like, 9 or 10 years old at the time. My mom didn't approve of her yelling at me and I got off scot free aside from the yelling.)
Anyway, one thing I remember from the book is the part about making an egg incubator. I don't remember if I ever actually made one, but I certainly never successfully gestated any chicken eggs, and I'll bet that if I tried to, they were just eggs from the grocery store. But the point is that I would flip through this book and daydream about all the cool experiments I wanted to perform, and in the back of my mind I knew that I'd never really get to do them because they were so sophisticated and expensive and dangerous and I was just a kid anyway. I always had a vague thought in the back of my mind, "Someday I'll be able to do cool stuff like this." I spent a lot of my time daydreaming as a kid.
Years pass and A____ and I break up. She works at P_______H and I've quit Dell so I have a lot of time to kill. One day I'm in Barnes and Noble looking at childrens' science books and I see the UNESCO book. I'm so excited--I had no idea it was still in print. It's basically the very same book I read as a child, just with a new publisher and a new cover (a dust jacket--fancy!) with bright colors and a photograph on the front.
I want to buy two copies, but I figure that's kind of silly. Now that I know it's there I can go get it whenever I want, right? But I do buy a copy for A; I figure it might be a good resource for her to use as a science textbook editor. I give her the book and I'm sure I tell her a little about the story of my encounter with it as a child.
Anyway. I work at PH and A has quit (we worked together for about a year; she was my boss at PH until she quit). One day I'm looking on my boss's shelf for some reference book or other and I see the UNESCO book up near the top. I figure, "Wow! I don't know why I never noticed before that he has it too, but that makes sense. It's obviously some sort of classic." Every time I go looking in his bookshelves I find something cool anyway, so I figure, mystery solved. This book isn't such a rare and personal gem of my own so much as it has an objective sort of value to the bigger world. This makes me feel good as it's basically evidence that I'm not an idiot. [*idios* Gr., own, private] I leave the book on the bookshelf for the time being because I have a lot of work to do.
A couple weeks pass and I have nothing to do. It's lunchtime on, I think, Wed. Nov. 13 of 2002 and I remember the book so I go grab it to read at my desk while I eat. I open the book and see A's full name on the first sheet, in her handwriting. This is the copy I gave to her. This is the copy I bought for her and didn't buy for myself because I couldn't afford to buy two. It's been in my boss's office for how long, I wonder?
Well, after I get finished crying, I hide the book under my editor's desk. For some reason I remove the dust jacket and squirrel it away somewhere on my bookshelf spine in so no one will see what it is.
When I leave work that day I bring the book home (with the dust jacket) and when I curl up in bed to read it I open it and see her name again. This just isn't going to work so I tear out the page (there's nothing printed on this sheet--it's a blank at the very beginning) and burn it in the toilet. Now the front of the book has a jagged remnant of a sheet there, but at least I won't see her name every time I open it up to read.
[700 Science Experiments for Everyone, compiled by UNESCO. ISBN: 0-385-05275-8]
posted at 6:54 AM |
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*Last week*, did you notice that, when John Allen Mohammed was first brought before a judge in Maryland he looked fit, well-nourished, alert, and neat, but that after a week or so in custody when he was removed to Virginia and was arraigned there that he seemed to be disoriented, confused, haggard, and fatigued? HMMMMMMM. Maybe we could get him to try to represent himself! [Full disclosure: I've been reading Les Miserables and listening to Bill Hicks in the last few weeks.]
posted at 7:38 AM |
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Who cares about Moussaoui?
An analyst on the radio this evening said that if the gov't does drop charges and take Moussaoui (a French citizen) out of Virginia to Camp X-Ray (in Cuba) or to wherever they decide to take him for their tribunal, Judge Brinkema would still retain some jurisdiction (because trial proceedings have alreday begun), and that Moussaoui could file for a writ of habeus corpus to basically challenge the gov't's right to remove him from her court.
As an NYT article alludes to oh, so elliptically, successfully removing Moussaoui to a military tribunal and trying him as an unlawful combatant (that is, as in violation of the law of war) may require (but who can stop them?) the gov't to build a persuasive case that on the morning of September 11, 2001 (or possibly earlier, because Moussaoui had been detained three weeks before then and was in custody at the time) the United States was in a recognizable state of war in which Moussaoui was involved.
I can almost, but not quite, understand why this isn't bigger news.
Now. Although Moussaoui's trial isn't scheduled to start until next June (because the judge gave him time to review the evidence against him that he's been supplied), the gov't will probably make some sort of move well before then: they will soon either have to refuse access to suspected al Qaeda members who are detained in other countries, who the gov't are trying to use to link Moussaoui to the events of September 11, 2001, and who Moussaoui has requested access to (in an exercise of his constitutional rights to review the evidence brought against him) or grant the request. This news story has been leaked to "test the waters of public opinion" (here and abroad) to determine whether the potential outcry is a price worth paying for trying Moussaoui in a military tribunal in which he would not have access to all the evidence used against him and in which he may not have access to the lawyers who, although he is refusing their help, are still on the case by Judge Brinkema's orders in case he should at some point be declared unfit to defend himself. He probably would not have access to all of the equipment and room that Judge Brinkema has ordered supplied to him in order to review the evidence that he has already been granted access to. He would not have the right of appeal. If he were to plead guilty (again) because he was confused about procedures used in U.S. court system(s) he most likely would be allowed to enter that plea; if he were to make some other legal blunder in the course of his trial he most likely would have no recourse whatsoever. If Mossaoui ends up being tried in a military tribunal I will bet anyone who reads this dollars to donuts that he'll be executed within one year of his conviction.
Zacarias Moussaoui is the only person to date who has been charged in connection with the events in New York City and elsewhere on September 11, 2001.
posted at 10:58 PM |
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Nevada:
Ballot Question 2: Gay marriage ban
Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to provide that: "Only a marriage between a male and female person shall be recognized and given effect in this state?" ... The proposed amendment, if passed, would create a new section to Article 1 of the Nevada Constitution providing that, "Only a marriage between a male and female person shall be recognized and given effect in this state."
Yes: 67% No 33%
My friend Keith points out that we wouldn't even be seeing these initiatives if people didn't think gay marriage were a real possibility to be defended against. My take on it is that, before you win a debate you must engage your opponent, and before you do that, you have to get them to articulate their position for you to refute.
posted at 5:46 AM |
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A straight fertile friend of mine, who is a Gentile, recently married a man who is a Jew and who is, as far as we know, also fertile. Be fore the wedding I worked up a rough function of my friend's mother-in-law's preferences of spouse for her son as a function of three independent variables; the results are included here.
(See attached file: preferences.xls)
Note: Since the wedding things seem to have changed dramatically, and the mother-in-law seems to be genuinely happy at the the unholy union her son has insisted upon.
posted at 7:22 AM |
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The thing about this movie is that it's a romantic comedy; something that I'm not quite sure whether people are getting. If you were to say that Barry Egan (Adam Sandler)
is too violent
is a liar
is crazy
is stupid
is someone Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) should avoid like the plague
then I'd recommend you walk to the nearest video store and rent the first movie you see with Meg Ryan on the box. It is vital that you understand that I have nothing against Meg Ryan.
Barry Egan never, ever hurts anyone except as revenge for giving his girlfriend a concussion, and even then he makes sure to return the property he borrowed.
Barry Egan comes clean with his lies at the earliest possible opportunity, and, given the chance to tell white lies, he more often than not tells the truth even when it would be to his benefit not to do so.
Barry Egan isn't any crazier than anyone else in the movie, and in my opinion, he's coping incredibly well considering the circumstances.
Barry Egan figured out how to travel around the world for the rest of his life on pudding. Have you ever done anything that smart? Do you own your own successful business?
Be honest. When you think of Tom Hanks or Michael Keaton or Hugh Grant, what, really, do any of their characters have over Barry Egan? Are you sure you want to say that he doesn't deserve the girl as much as they do?
Paul Thomas Anderson has demonstrated over and over again his command of Hollywood convention, even when he really would rather do something else. But, as is especially evident in Punch-Drunk Love, when his heart just isn't in it, rather than stoop to sarcasm or talking down to his audience, it's more as if he just says, "This is the part in the movie where..." and moves on as quickly and as seamlessly as possible.
This is, it is important to note, quite different from the disregard Anderson has for unity of time and place. The only reason the dislocations are more visible here than in your average romantic comedy is that they stand out in contrast to the human truth that soaks every frame. And in the meantime, we're treated to a carnival ride in a movie.
If you think Adam Sandler has no business being the male lead in a true-blue romantic comedy or in a movie directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, then either
you haven't seen any of Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, or The Wedding Singer, or, if you have, then you really should think about why you see movies like that. Adam Sandler is clean-cut, funny, and he inspires the sort of feeling in any onlooker that he clearly inspired in Lena Leonard when she saw a photo of him with his sisters.
Why is Emily Watson British? Rather, why is Lena Leonard, the character she plays in the movie, British? Is it a senseless affectation? Is it a cheap way to lend her character worldliness and mystery? If the answer to either of those questions is, "Yes", then, well, we still haven't dropped below the Meg Ryan line, let us remember. More likely, however, it's because Emily Watson really talks that way, and she's beautiful and deserves every chance she gets to take the female lead.
(I heard a rumor that Jean-Pierre Jeunet originally wrote Amélie in English for Emily Watson, and when she backed out of the project, he re-wrote it in French. On the whole, I think the way it turned out was a wash; we get one fewer movie with Emily Watson, but we got one more good French film.)
Incidentally, if you liked Punch-Drunk Love, my bet is that you'll also like my favorite Meg Ryan movie Joe Versus the Volcano, which co-stars Tom Hanks. In fact, I urge you to see it next; these two movies have more in common than you might think.
I think the real reason people don't get that this is a romantic comedy is that it's so stressful (something that owes a great deal to the amazing sound editing). Sure, romantic comedies are stressful, but they're not supposed to be too stressful, and they're nowhere near as stressful as real love. That's part of the point! That's part of the reason they make such good date movies, because it helps make all the effort seem a little lighter for a while. Punch-Drunk Love doesn't pull any such punches; instead of having to take the man's word for it that he'd crawl through broken glass for the woman he loves, we just by God see him doing it over and over again.
—Darien Large
posted at 4:49 PM |
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From a story on NPR yesterday about American Muslims who study abroad:
*begin quote*
It's also true that some of these young Americans abroad could encounter Islamic militants who try to recruit them, as happened with John Walker Lindh. It raises the question: should the U.S. keep a closer eye on American Muslims who study abroad, to look out for others like Walker Lindh, or the accused Ahmed Bilal? ...
"We're not after Muslims, we're after terrorists," says Paul Bremmer, who was top counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration.
"The fact that young Americans want to become Muslims is not a problem. The fact that some of them want to go study in other countries is not a problem. The problem is if they then decide to become terrorists, and that ought to be our focus. Our focus is on people who want to become criminals and conduct criminal acts against the United States."
Right now, he says, the US government isn't very good at picking out those people from among the masses of law-abiding Americans, and he says the recent terrorism involving American citizens have only confirmed his belief that the US needs a domestic intelligence agency to do a better job.
*end quote*
Now, two things: One, the story makes a point (thanks!) of mentioning that most Americans who study Islam abroad are African-American. Two, last I heard, "wanting to become a criminal" was not a crime. Of course, I don't always keep up with the news, so maybe that's changed recently.
posted at 7:53 AM |
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New: Human Nature Rules
posted at 12:40 PM |
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A low wall says, while you were gone,
"Another soul moves here,
at home and full of things that are
nothing to do with."
A low wall says, while you are here,
"Enter, move softly, sit,
Think, speak, hear.
Welcome!"
—Darien
posted at 5:05 AM |
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A Zen student to her child when the child was upset after making a mistake:
Dust is also Buddha.
posted at 7:49 PM |
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It's not that people are stupid, it's just that they're easily confused.
posted at 8:30 AM |
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Ooh! More from September 24, 2001 (grafitti in the men's room at Aranda's):
FUCK CHICANOS
AND GRINGAS
STOP WRITING
SO WHACK
posted at 7:40 AM |
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This happened to me on September 24, 2001:
A guy in the elevator on the first floor kept pushing the button for "1" and saying, "This elevator isn't working!"
posted at 7:37 AM |
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"
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula—for that was his name—was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher, or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex—just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
"
—Douglas Adams
posted at 6:24 AM |
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Yesterday? a strange lady instructed me (since I held a door open for her) to inform my mother how like a gentleman I had behaved.
posted at 10:05 PM |
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Controlling others is much, much less difficult than self-control.
posted at 8:32 AM |
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Dar's Bibliography
posted at 11:08 AM |
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"
Time comes into it.
Say it. Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
"
—Author unknown
[but I do remember that I was in San Francisco, and I have a vague idea that I saw this written on the side of a bus or that it was stapled to a utility pole]
What I never thought until now was that
stories are made of atoms.
However, is it not true that atoms have stories.
Rather,
fundamental particles are so identical that
some scientists believe that there is only one electron in the whole world.
posted at 7:46 AM |
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I just spent some time this morning throwing away old bank statements, old utility bills, and stuff like that. I did keep anything with remotely sentimental value, of course. Amazingly, it occurred to me that posterity may regret my tossing the bank statements. Fuck it. I'm sure the bank has backups, so I'm going to let posterity figure that out when the times comes.
posted at 7:29 AM |
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Here's my response to my friend Keith's entry of September 21, 2002 at his weblog The Complex Now. It's a bit strident, but I can't really help that when I start thinking about politics these days.
That's very good!
I'm appalled by the US right now in just about every way I can imagine. Bush is a puppet and his puppet masters are evil, evil people whether they intend to be that way or not. I don't really have "more than a superficial understanding of the Gulf war", but that hasn't really hampered me in my assessment of the situation now (though you might not agree that that's possible), and I've come to basically the same conclusions you have. I don't think I've ever been sadder to be an American than I am now.
Things just get more and more surreal. I can't believe what I hear on the news lately. American citizens are being held in jail because they *might* pose a terrorist threat, and the cops admit without a trace of shame that they don't have any evidence that they've committed a crime or are conspiring to do so. I wish I could say I didn't see this coming, but they way things have been moving since a year ago, it was only a matter of time before we started jailing AMERICAN CITIZENS IN AMERICA in an end-run around civil liberties. How will this end?
Best for "the administration" is that the shit doesn't TRULY hit the fan until after Bush has been safely re-elected. If his handlers can manage to keep him from slipping his leash too often then they have a real shot at pulling that off, but Bush is really his own worst enemy in this regard because he swallows the pap that they're trying to feed to the rest of us. Best for *us* is that he'll continue to stay riled up and keep a coherent foreign policy from really gelling. If we can just stay muddled for a year or two more then we might get out of this without triggering a nuclear event.
That's probably not going to happen, though. Americans are more willing now than ever before to suffer casualties, in this new "war on terrorism", and that's a big thing that's a lot worse than it was in 1990, in my opinion. And hell, if we're willing to die for it, we sure as hell would be willing to make some Israelis and a whole lot of Iraqi citizens die for it, too.
I guess the thing I'm most thankful for *now* is that this didn't happen in 1983, because then we probably wouldn't even be around to complain about it.
posted at 6:29 AM |
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Why do I feel as if my emotional attachments are under siege? Why do I feel defensive about the feelings I have about Willie (my sick cat)?
It's probably mostly internalized. It's probably something I'm creating myself--the idea that other people don't take my feelings seriously; in fact I have no reason to think that. Rather, it's really *me* who's having trouble taking them seriously. Chalk this up to another reason why I need to cultivate more patience--for myself as well as for other people.
Anyway, when I took Willie to the vet for the second (or was it third?) time, I sat in the parking lot after I dropped him off and bawled like a new mother. I estimated that I felt somewhere between 25% and 50% of what a parent would feel for their infant child in the same situation. I've believed this for a while now, but only recently has it affected me so personally: there's really no doubt that animal companions of humans ("pets", if you like) are good for you. People with animal companions live longer, they're happier, they're more able to cope with stress, they recover more quickly from illness and trauma. This is no longer really in dispute, in my opinion. It's no longer merely anecdotal lore--it's established fact.
Psychic plants, well, that's another story.
posted at 1:31 PM |
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NPR : All Things Considered for September 19, 2002 Your Soul
Commentator Hollis Gillespie says her mother didn't buy religion, but she did believe in repentance -- in a small way. (3:15)
posted at 1:21 PM |
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When the surgeons saw the new heart, they cried because it was so beautiful.
posted at 7:30 AM |
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From: Darien []
Sent: Saturday, August 17, 2002 11:08 AM
To: 'mellis'
Subject: FW: My quote
I talked with A about some of this just the other day. As you know, this is one of the subjects we're usually not capable of discussing without both of us getting really defensive and argumentative, even when we're not disagreeing. But it suddenly struck us both as quite odd that we'd never said some of these things to one another before now. And she agreed with me, when I said, "If we had met when we were 17, I think I could have turned out straight." At first I was very gratified that she had the insight to see that, but later I realized that it probably just confirmed her view of sexual orientation as a religious mystery, in the presence of which one's only proper response is to avert one's eyes, and never to examine.
This is getting onto a bit of a tangent now, but in talking with Bob and relating this story to him he helped me realize a sadness that arises here and in other places--something I'm sure you can relate to very well. I am a reasoning creature. Reason is a deep, deep, thread in the weave of me and that is never going to change. So when A takes my garrulousness in these matters as a combative move or as an attempt to dishonor her somehow, it hurts me because she isn't meeting me where I live and where I want to be met: in reason and in love of understanding, in awe of the human ability to comprehend without turning away from mystery. Mostly when people do come to see how deeply important reason and knowing is to me, they (sometimes with justification, I admit) assume that it's a defense against feeling, that it's arrogant, that it's disrespectful of them, that it's a denial of their right to be who they are. But that's not what I really want from reason-- its proper use is not a club, it's more like a telescope, something I use to gather, to focus, and to encompass the unfathomably huge for just a few moments before I put it away and marvel once more.
-----Original Message-----
From: Keith
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 6:12 PM
To: Darien Large; Erin
Subject: FW: My quote
In contrast, my best friend, a gay man, found that although he fell in love with and lived with a woman for three years; in the end he really preferred having sex with other men.
So, in both of these cases, our own experiences have been more characterized by biological determinism. However, neither of us are happy with the determinist "party line" and we both speak out against it not infrequently.
-----Original Message-----
From: Darien []
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 9:12 PM
To: 'mellis'; Erin
Subject: RE: My quote
Ah, now you *have* got my attention.
Let me tell you the opinion I've formed over the last few years about my own situation, orientation, what have you. I've come to believe more and more that I *could have* ended up a happily straight person.
Almost from the first time, at age 17, that I admitted to myself that I was gay, I would look back on some formative experiences that I'd had in that direction and try to make sense of them -- they always seemed strangely contingent to me, as if the point that I'd arrived at was the result of chance. It was like I was in the middle of a random walk, but I'd stumbled onto a one-way street.
I'm not going to try to be persuasive; I'll just give you the fully-formed story that I've settled on for myself. (I'll be happy to argue it later, I'm just not in a very rhetorical mood right now :) I started out with a very, very slight inclination towards homosexuality, or perhaps it was simply that I started out with a bit more sexual openness than is typical (in the latter case, this openness could be part of my upbringing, my "environment" just as much as it could be part of my temperament); subsequently I encountered a few opportunities to express or explore my sexuality in a homosexual context and the results were favorable. I gotpositive reinforcement enough times, and negative reinforcement seldom enough, that I continued to move in that direction during a key developmental stage. At the other end, around puberty, out pops a homo.
I admit that this story has been fairly colored by the things I've learned in the last few years about development in the individual organism (biologically speaking; also culturally in a somewhat social species like humans). Many things have the *potential* to turn out any way at all, but once they being developing -- since they can't develop in all directions at once -- a path is chosen somehow or other; and once that happens, it's very difficult to rewind. Think about the acquisition of language in humans, for example. The human brain has an equal capacity to learn *any human language*; but the vast majority of human brains only learn one during the developmental years. Once that stage is over, it'simpossible to attain the level of fluency one has with one's native language.
I think I've expressed to you one thing I've learned about myself and people in general since the time I quit Dell and started having sex again. I've learned that people develop at different rates, and different aspects of their selves develop at different rates within the individual. I joke about it and I exaggerate it to the point where I tell people that I hit puberty at age 30; but there's a grain of truth to that. Extrapolating backwards, I could posit that I went through some key developmental stages as a child at a laterage than most people do, and perhaps that contributed to the feeling I have that my orientation was completely up for grabs until late in the game.
Contrast with some gay people who say that they knew they were gay at age four, or three -- or even younger! One must take these claims with a grain of salt, but I do know that people become aware of (or develop) different aspects of themselves at different ages. (I don't remember *a thing* until around age six.) And you hear these stories often enough that I don't think one can dismiss them entirely.They're talking about *something*, even if they're not talking about exactly what they claim to be. If it can work in that direction, it can certainly work in the other.
This just feels right to me. I don't think I've ever regretted that I wasn't bisexual (or, Heaven forbid,straight!) the way you do, but when I examine my emotionaland sexual makeup, and when I pay attention to the vestigial responses I sometimes have to the opposite sex and recall what it was like for me as a preteen and a teenager, this is the explanation that makes the most sense. And needless to say, there's A. The fact is that we would have broken up even if she was a man; it just might have taken longer. While I was with her, especially at the beginning, the sex was *right* -- and yet, I *never* wondered whether I was bisexual. That's very difficult for people to understand, and part of the explanation is that we were in love. But I know believe that another part of the explanation is that, for the time we were together, I was exploring an alternate world for me; one that could have been, it just didn't happen to be.
So, for me, it could be biological *only* in the sense that perhaps I started out somewhere closer to the middle than is typical. I *don't* think that I started out with a biological factor that means I would have ended up gay with a high degree of probability, and I *don't* think I ever had any chance -- to tell a still-common story -- of ending up thinking I was straight until age 35 with a wife and kids, and only then discovering that I'd had it all wrong. If I'dstarted out down that road instead, I'm pretty sure I'd have ended up a happily well-adjusted hetero.
Well, at least as far as sexual orientation goes.
yr friend Darien
posted at 6:28 AM |
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