Today I Learned...

I have a new pet peeve, and with it, a new resolution. The pet peeve is a common American phrasing that takes some set up to explain. Suppose something could be A or B, with B being either an opposite of A, or clearly bad when A is good. Instead of saying "This is B", people will say "This is not very A." For example, if you go to Hawaii and it is mysteriously freezing, people will say "I was planning on something warmer" rather than "I'm freezing my balls off". Other variations include:

• "That's not my favorite" = "I find this actively unpleasant"
  
• "This is not necessarily what I planned on" = "I wanted the opposite of this"
  
• "Weren't completely relevant" = "Were irrelevant", "Weren't very relevant"
  
• "Wasn't exactly a model" = "fat"
  

I find this actively annoying. We all know what people mean, but... no, we don't. There's still a lot of ambiguity and suddenly it's on you to guess where. It makes it a lot harder to answer follow up questions. In the particular case of my boss telling me "not necessarily what we wanted when we started this project" (not my project), it makes it harder for me to ask follow up questions about things that were poorly done, versus things that had to be changed because the plan was based on incorrect facts.

I have tried to stop doing this myself, and it is hard. It feels harsh and mean. I try to stick to it because I think verbal imprecision is disrespectful, and that is worse than mean, but it is very hard. I haven't even attempted to fix my use of the word "maybe" to mean "definitely", but I think that is the next step.

yay, I have HBO and can watch things that have generated hugely divided critical response, like Girls, and then I can have opinions on them. Before the DVDs come out! Hurray!

For context, I had mostly read Ta-Nehisi Coate's posts + the comments section, plus brief mentions in other blogs. If I could summarize the criticisms: Girls is frivolous, it lacks diversity, and it claims a universality it doesn't have.

I have a couple of thoughts. One, Girls captures some very deep things, but it doesn't explain them very well. A commenter on one of TNC's posts derided the characters as having first world problems like too nice a boyfriend. What actually happened was a girl who stayed in a relationship way past its expiration date but stayed in it, tormenting everyone involved, due to a combination of feeling like she needed a reason to leave, and fear of being alone/the initial depression following even a very necessary break up. That has been an important pattern in many of my friends lives- male and female- and it doesn't show up in art very often. You see that same needing-a-reason in this monologue where Hannah, the protagonist, is getting an STD test*

[summary: Hannah almost kind of wants AIDS so that she has a reason to be mad at the guy she is fucking, because although the relationship is shredding her emotionally, he hasn't done anything she feels she has the right to be mad about]

I will buy that Girls falls short of explaining this feeling to people who haven't experienced it. I don't think it's even what I would point to if I wanted to demonstrate the phenomenon to someone. But that doesn't make it valueless. It doesn't even make it not art.

I will totally validate complaints about how very white Girls is. On the other hand... most of TV is whitewashed, and it doesn't get the same vitriol. The problem is not with Girls, it's with the television industry as a whole, and the solution is more POC and female writers and show runners, not forcing people who can't write good black characters to force them in anyway.** Similarly, you can complain about Hannah being unlikable, and I will immediately agree, but she was always intended to be unsympathetic. Just like every male lead on every art show. Now, Hannah is considerably less awesome than Don Draper or Vic Mackey or Tony Soprano, but I think the stories of people who are just quietly to blame for their own problems are undertold.

They also do a bang up job on weight, with Hannah (played by show runner Lena Durham) being American-normal television-fat, and complaining about it, and her very thin friends trying to comfort her, and yet clearly still believing she's fat. They nailed another character's anxiety over being a virgin in her 20s. The demographic of girls- white, female, early 20s, creative types in NYC- are overrepresented in television, but their problems are not.

Also, this is a fucking brilliant demonstration of male entitlement



Unfortunately, the show takes a deep dive in the second half of the season. They use the man-Hannah-is-fucking
in too many different roles*** so while her reactions to specific are very authentic, his character is a mess. They clearly wanted to the show consequences coming home to roost for the manic pixie dream girl, but don't quite make it work.**** So if the problems I've listed above resonate with you, watch and enjoy. But if you're looking for something to explain those problems, go read The Fate of Mice. Actually, everyone should do that, The Fate of Mice is both shorter and better. But you can watch Girls afterwords.


*which weirdly involves a pelvic exam even though they can test for everything with blood alone.

**I knew that one of the show's writers had, in response to criticism about the show's whiteness, tweeted "What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME." That was problematic, but I was willing to overlook it as an attempt to be clever in <140 characters. But while researching this, I learned that she refers to shitting as "taking Obama to the White House." So one hand, I'm even more glad that I was that this lady isn't writing black characters. On the other hand, they should probably fire her and replace her with someone who can.

***( spoilers )

****This could be resolved in season two, or it could get a million times worse.

Capitalist is a weird word, because it can mean "pro-capitalism" or "an owner of capital". Neither communism nor feudalism have this problem, and I think it muddies up the waters quite a bit. I have no particular affinity for the owners of capital. I don't think it makes them* morally better than non-owners. Policies designed to give people with more money because they have money seem prima facia stupid to me.

What I do have an affinity for is markets. Markets are clearly neither feudalism nor communism, so we'll call them capitalist, but one of the things I like about them is their disregard for who has the capital. Centrally designed systems tend to pick a winner and stick with them, and this helps the rich get richer. Markets, in which ideas compete freely, are much more open to the latest good idea. IBM had a good idea, but it stopped, so it withered away. Markets do end up creating owners-of-capital, but I see that as a side effect of their actual point, which is to give people choices. Note that once people acquire capital, they often favor anti-market practices, like tariffs and overly restrictive licensing.

Side note: This is why privatizing government functions while retaining the monopoly is the stupidest possible plan. There's nothing magic about a private company, what I want is *competition* that lets people choose between multiple options, leading the lesser options to die or improve.

This is tangentially related to my latest book Hungry Ghosts, which is about the famine caused by China's Great Leap Forward. Without knowing much about the subject, I had assumed that the famine was caused by Communism's edict of "to each according to their needs" creating a tragedy of the commons, in which no one had an incentive to work. This is incorrect. The famine was primarily caused by the government taking all off the food. Initially people in the cities ate fine because they were given grain rations, but the government insisted that the peasants were hiding grain and thus took everything they could find. In later years the famine did spread to the city, not because the farmers were freeriding, but because many of them were dead of starvation or torture. The communists' belief that their ideological purity allowed them to improve agriculture in ways those bourgeois scientists and farmers could not did lower the crop yield, but if the crop had been good, they would have just stolen it and sold it overseas. Also, I have trouble taking seriously the idea of "according to their needs" when the government mandated abandoned children be left to starve, because it would only encourage people to abandon their children.

So ideological Communists? I'm officially allowing the argument that the Chinese were not practicing real Communism and thus don't count as a failure disproving Communism. I still think Communism is a terrible plan, but it's not the terrible plan the Chinese were following.


*As a net saver, technically I'm an owner-of-capital, although like many rich people, I don't feel rich.

This is a trick I have used with landlords, co-workers, and other assorted types. Say we are debating something, and I am right. I have explained my position, and they have explained theirs, and no one is budging.* They attempt to break the stalemate by repeating their position, loudly and with increasing implications that you are an idiot for disagreeing. You could respond in kind, but if you are female you risk being written off as hysterical, and even if you're male proof by intimidation is just a horrible way to go through life. But if calming stating your point worked, the problem would already be solved.

The trick I have found is to let them yell for as long as they want, saying absolutely nothing. They may talk for a very long time, but eventually they will tire themselves out (often much faster than if you interrupted them, although it won't feel that way at the time). Continue not talking. If you are there in person or on a webcam, look at them, but say nothing.** Eventually they will crack and attempt to solicit you, with something like, "okay?" or "so you're on board?". And you say "No." Depending on the situation, you may elaborate just a bit, with something like "no, for the reasons I've listed." but don't say anything more than that.

The benefits of this are manyfold. First, sometimes the other person will give in just to stop the silence. Second, even if you end at a stalemate, you deescalated the situation without giving anything up. You can come back- in a few seconds or a few days- with new thoughts*** or a letter from your lawyer and you haven't haven't said anything they can use against you, legally or socially. Third, regardless of where the argument ends, you don't leave it with the icky feeling you got bullied into something.

I am trying to think how I would feel if this technique was used on me. I think anything that slows down the pace of emotional arguments is a good thing. And I would like not yell, but if it's bad enough that I'm yelling am maybe not going to take correction very well; a long pause for me to slowly realize what I just did seems like the gentlest possible way to tell me. So this technique even passes the "do unto others test".



*the landlords may well have known I was right and been trying to intimidate me into backing down, but I assume good faith on the part of co-workers. That is the brilliance of this: it works either way.

** I like to think this is when certain co-workers being to realize how stunningly unprofessional they just were.

***I originally discovered this technique when I decided I was going to take as long as I needed to think of my response, and if that led to an awkward silence, so be it. The mindset of "I am thinking" over "I am waiting" may be important to its success, although "my co-worker's unprofessional behavior has literally shocked me into silence" also works.

I think the commenters at boing boing are accusing wal-mart of free riding, by paying a wage that qualifies its employees for aid. That just seems sort of weird to me. It's predicated on the employees' health being a public good, a thought I find profoundly disturbing. In fact, it creates that same sort of unease when I heard people describing individuals' health as a public good to justify government funded medicine. It's just too close to owing other people your health.

It's also a little frustrating when people justify high taxes on the rich by saying it will be invested in public goods like health care, and then object when the rich actually receive some benefit from it. That just seems unfair to me.

And if you want to argue that Wal-Mart is able to offer lower wages because of that aid... yeah, that's plausible. Libertarians and conservatives have been shouting about that for years, only we/they were using it as an argument against the aid. Don't call me mean for pointing out the rain and then get mad when you get wet.

As I mentioned in my review of The Abyss, I am horribly affected by pets being hurt, killed, or threatened in stories. Cat deaths are especially bad (see: Battle Royale, Rifter's Trilogy, and The Filth, all of which are about truly awful socities), but I got emotional watching the fish deaths in A Fish Called Wanda too. It's not so much a trigger as a place completely without armor.

I think part of what bothers me is that 1. pets are our responsibility and the trust us and 2. we (I) can't explain what is happening to the pets, which Peter Watts covered better than I ever could in this eulogy for his cat Banana:

He tried to run, you see. Something happened, inside; something broke, and he felt it but he had no way to parse it except that somehow there was a mortal threat and he wasn’t equipped to tell the difference between the things that kill you from the outside and those that kill you from within. All he knew was that his life was in danger, and he reacted the only way he knew how: he tried to run away.

. The fact that something I pledged to love and protect is suffering and I know what the stress chemicals are doing to it but I can't fix it- may even be causing it- tears me up every time.

I was discussing health care and end of life care with a friend today, and realized that this is really present in my feelings on dementia as well. One day you're an entity (or caring for an entity) that can think and plan and rationalize short term pain for long term benefit, and then you're not. And you're left with something that looks like a person but is missing one of the hallmarks of humanness, who is just aware enough to know they're missing something but not what or how to get it. I would be less afraid of Alzheimer's if it didn't make you so mean. Losing your mind is terrible, but senility led to Down's syndrome like behavior, it would bother me less, because you're happy and, while there's some burden of care on your loved ones, they're receiving love and kindness in return. Alzheimers, most other forms of old age senility and dementia, and most forms of mental retardation leave you just aware enough to get angry and hurt the people who love you the most. And I don't see why anyone wants to maintain that, much less force others to do so.

First, read Arabella Flynn's post on Russel Brand's post-modern chivalry. She is better than this than I am. But I have things to say on this clip of him on Never Mind the Buzzcocks as well. For those who can't watch the video: Brand is on a team, seated between a singer almost certainly chosen primary for her looks, and another stand up comedian. The other comedian sexually assaults the girl (not exaggerating. He even refers to it as making love. Do you know what we call surprise love making with someone who hasn't consented? Rape). Brand does something really really interesting.

We talk a lot about how creepers get away with it because everyone involved would rather not acknowledge what is happening. Even when it gets called out in the moment, the emphasis afterwords is on smoothing it over. Brand acknowledges it and will not let it drop. He can do this in part because he's extremely funny and charismatic, but that's not the only reason. What he's doing is subtly different from white knighting. I'm not positive on this, but I think it's because he puts so much more emphasis on the man's behavior than the woman. He is not outraged by who the other comedian did this to, he's outraged that he did it at all.

The show host does accuse him of doing this solely to get into the woman's pants. From what I've seen of Russel Brand, I assume he would love to shag her, but I'm quite sure that's not why he's doing it, which is good, because I don't think it would work. If he challenged the man to a duel and ran him off, the strategy might work, but he is pursuing a path of making everyone involved very uncomfortable. If it were me, I would feel safer around Brand as long as the asshat was around, but it generates a bit of an ugh field. Also, he doesn't seem to be checking for her approval after doing things like calling the other man a rapist.

Lastly, I notice that Brand is being very physical with the asshat. A few months ago, there was a party. In attendance were a semi-close male friend of a mine and a guy with a history of creeping on me. I enlisted male friend ahead of time to help. Unfortunately for the purposes of this anecdote, we were never all at the party at the same time, but what my friend described to me sounds very much like what Brand did: getting really close and physical with the guy. The stated reason was so that he could slip between me and the creeper should it ever come up. Especially after seeing Brand do it, I have to admit this was a really good plan. Being cuddly and protective with me (which is something we frequently do) creates a warm and inviting environment for onlookers, including creepers. Invading the creeper's personal space puts him on the defensive and inhibits him from cuddling up to anyone else. (In Brand's case, he's also acting as a physical barrier).

Now, having decided I like Brand and hate the other guy, there is some questionable behavior on Brand's part I'm ignoring. I would be super uncomfortable with him putting his hands on my arms like that, but that's a particular pet peeve of mine. He's keeping his center of mass *very* far away from her, which he can pull off because he has scary long arms. His need to be the center of attention is not as charming when not being applied to shaming molesters. But I get the very strong feeling that if I told him to stop touching my arms, he would do stop and be mortified that he had done so. The other guy would take it as a challenge.

Just watched Orgasm, Inc, a documentary on the creation of the diagnosis Female Sexual Dysfunction and the search for treatment (verdict: decent, but not spectacular). My short thoughts:

• If 80-something percent of people who can have the diagnosis do have the diagnosis at some point in their lives, it is probably worth reevaluating the concept of what merits the dysfunction label.
  
• There was a woman who had new wires put into her spine in order to correct the deficiency of being unable to orgasm from penetration. Goddamnit doctors, you should not be so bad at this.
  

My longer thought involves the (long term) use of testosterone to treat FSD. Testosterone is a critical chemical in many biological pathways. Using it to treat one very localized problem seems like using a sledgehammer on a fly. On the other hand, testosterone seems like an excellent treatment for low testosterone levels, for which low libido is definitely a symptom. Because of the way medical patents work, there's no financial incentive for a drug company to investigate what a normal testosterone range is, and what symptoms indicate a person would benefit from more testosterone even if their numbers look normal. This seems like an excellent thing for the government to invest in.

My dental surgery was originally scheduled 5 weeks in advance. The pain got worse, they gave me antibiotics. The pain still got worse. It felt like biting tinfoil, which meant whatever it was was interacting directly with the nerve. This would make me nervous if I didn't already have a broken oral nerve. The periodontist agreed to work outside her usual hours to fit me in in a week (three weeks earlier than scheduled). The pain did get better, but it came in waves and I decided I didn't want to reschedule again, so I didn't tell them. The surgery was today.

In many ways, it was the best possible outcome. 30 seconds after cutting (just long enough to clear out the pus), she found aberrations big enough to cause the problem, but no bigger. There was a sliver of broken tooth, presumably left over from my wisdom teeth removal (which was over four years ago), and a lesion that is assumed to be a bacterial cyst unless the biopsy says otherwise.* The lesion was within a few millimeters of the nerve, but not touching it. This is good, because if it was on the nerve my choices would have been nerve damage or never clear the infection.

I don't have good data on this and the doctor was patently uninterested in playing what-if with me, but it certainly seems plausible that the three weeks between the new date and the old would have been enough to grow the cyst all the way to the nerve. I already have nerve damage on one side and it's awful, I don't know what I'd do about both. it's entirely possible the reason this got so bad was that I'm so good at not hearing pain from my mouth that I didn't notice it. I know I didn't report it to the dentist at first because I was too fucking stressed out to deal with it, I just wanted to do the right thing and get my teeth cleaned and I'd deal with the chronic stuff later. If I hadn't gone in for the intensive cleanings, who knows when this would have been caught? So there's two paths that lead to nerve damage.

I think this got treated faster in America than it would have in any other country. As I understand it (and good data is woefully hard to find), countries with national health care operate on a pretty strict queue system, and doctors have no incentive to work extra hours. I assume you can jump the queue if you can prove you have a more serious problem, but because the cyst was soft tissue it didn't show up on an x-ray; the only metric we had was my pain. While my periodontist believed me enough to reschedule the surgery, it was clear that seeing the size of the cyst** caused her to retroactively give my complaints a lot more credence. A queue that can be jumped by claiming more pain won't do it's job, so in an NHS world I probably would have been stuck with my original number, which undoubtedly would have been longer than the 8 weeks between my dentist popping the first (smaller, exterior) cyst and now. Socialized medicine could easily have caused me permanent nerve damage.***

On the other hand, I only got seen and operated on that quickly because I have money. Lots of money. Enough money to see my dentist 16 times a year, to take the first available periodontist appointment without worrying about paying for it, to take the first available surgery slot without worrying about paying for it. More subtly, having and growing up with money makes it easier to have the entitled attitude that led me to tell the periodontist this couldn't wait. When I told (not asked) my boss I needed to move the surgery earlier, but this was better timing for the company anyway, he said "well, it really doesn't matter how the timing affects us, if you need it now you need it now." This exactly the sort of care you can make yourself believe doesn't need to be treated right away, giving the infection time to spread. People die of this.

I prefer a market-based health care system not because our system is working particularly well, but because I believe it has to capability to improve in a way the NHS does not. This ability to change comes at a terrible price, and no matter how much money I donate to dental charities, I'm not the one paying it.



*Me: so is there anything the biopsy could reveal I should be worried about?
doctor: no.
Me: Then why are we doing it?
Doctor: something something best practice

I assume that there is a small but present chance this is something awful, like cancer, and she doesn't want to have to talk to me about it until we have actual data. Which I'm sympathetic to, but I'm also pissed that I was being asked to decide whether this was worth my money and the cost of a false positive while I was under a quarter milligram of a benzoate, massive amounts of whatever local anesthetic they gave me (which does make me feel mentally weird), and the stress of surgery. This was a predictable outcome of the procedure and they should have asked me ahead of time.

**Biggest she'd ever removed. She had to leave behind a plug so the gum tissue wouldn't collapse in on itself, any bigger and it would have required a graft.

***Possible relevant and even more frightening: antibiotics would not have fixed this. My cyst was that huge despite me finishing a course of amoxicillan a week prior.

I've always defended Sex and the City and the much lesser known Lipstick Jungle against charges of frivolity, because they covered some very important topics that no one else on television touched- women's invisibility as they age, an honest look at what kids cost you in terms of career, and careers cost you in terms of kids (and not in a "ha ha, we're so busy" way. In a "fuck, having this baby will mean never advancing in my career" way). Yes, they also covered frivolous things, and the writing was sometimes terrible, but sometimes it was really good. I'm not saying they're equal to the high concept cable shows like The Wire or The Sopranos, but I am saying it's unfair that they're reduced to walking punchline status, next toJackass or The Jersey Shore. I'm also saying it's a little weird that every single one of those high concept shows has a male lead and a predominantly male cast.*

With that in mind, I'd like to share the following quote from Single Female Laywer Ally McBeal:

. Society drills it into us that women should be married. Society drills it into us: smart people should have careers. Society drills it into us that women should have children and mothers should stay at home. And society condemns the working mother that doesn't stay at home

You could call it trivializing that Ally responds with "We could change it, Renee [...] I plan to change it. I just want to get married first." I call it using humor to acknowledge truths too unpleasant to be faced head on. And from what I've seen (12 episodes in), that seems to be a pretty accurate summary for the show as a whole.


*Although, to be fair, the female characters they do have tend to be extremely well done. And I originally named Mad Men before realizing that was not going to be a winning example of art TV ignoring women's stories. But you'll notice that even Mad Men has a male lead.