The Journal Of The InnKeeper

You Owe Me

Mon, 06 May 2013 05:10:56 GMT

I appreciate all the ways that technology has made our lives easier, safer, all-around-better. But there are some social trends that have resulted from some technologies that I'm really not a fan of. The cell phone is my main bugaboo.

I've never liked cell phones. Oh, don't get me wrong, I find them terribly convenient. Being able to call my boss when I'm stuck in traffic to say I'm running late has been awesome. Sending a text to find someone at a theme park when we otherwise would have wandered around for hours and *still* may never have found each other - wonderful. Getting a short message in the middle of the day from my sweetie to say he's thinking of me can often make my day. I still don't like cell phones.

The problem I have with cell phones is the immediacy of them and what that does to the people around me. Because everything and everyone is available right now and right here, I find I have a strong dislike of cell phones, primarily because of what they represent.

First is getting people to stay present with me. Thanks to smartphones, everyone around me is constantly tweeting and facebooking and googling all the time. It was bad enough when the phone could ring at any time. Then it got worse when text messages started getting sent all the time and no one could resist checking their text messages and immediately responding. But now with smartphones, it seems as though I can't have a one-on-one conversation with someone without them being distracted by the internet. I don't mean the occasional looking up a fact in question during a conversation - I actually kind of like that. I mean sitting across the table from someone, looking them in the eye, talking to them, and having the conversation interrupted because a text, then a tweet, then a Facebook update, then another tweet, then a slew of texts, then a need to post a picture RIGHT NOW about the food on the table, all happen and the conversation is lost. Nobody is really present anymore. I miss that contact. I miss that kind of contact so much that I find myself becoming very resentful of my partners' phones. I try to cover it by always carrying a book with me, so that I can at least have something of my own to do when they are no longer being present with me. But it irritates me all the same. If I had wanted to read, I would have stayed home and read. The book is just to keep me from staring off into space when my companion finds something else more interesting than me.

The other thing is the expectation that comes with all this availability. When I was in high school (the last time average people weren't easily reached, before even pagers became popular), people had to call the house. If you weren't home, they left a message on your answering machine, and then they waited for you to call them back. Leaving multiple messages in a short span of time was considered very rude. Then I convinced my mom to let me have a pager. I wanted one so my boyfriend could send me numeric messages while I was at school, but I convinced my mom by telling her she could reach *me* when I was out with my friends. So she would page me in the middle of the night to find out where I was. And then she would page me again. And again. And again. I had to explain to her that she needed to give me a minimum of 30 minutes to answer a page because I could be on the road. 30 minutes was the average time to get anywhere in my hometown. If my mom didn't give me time to arrive at my destination, then I would have to pull over and try to find a payphone. Since she was paging me late at night, that meant being a teenage girl getting out of the car at some gas station in the middle of the night - the exact kind of situation my mother was worried about that finally convinced her that me having a pager was a good idea in the first place.

This is the sort of thing I see now, only it's not restricted to worried calls from my mother. If I don't answer an email fast enough, if I don't respond to a Facebook post fast enough, if I don't answer a tweet, if I don't respond to a text in an amount of time that the other person thinks is "appropriate", people get really testy about that. Never mind that I could be hanging from a steel beam holding something very heavy over other people's heads. Never mind that I could actually be out of the house and my computer is still at home and still logged on. Never mind that I could be having one of those intimate conversations where I'm trying to give someone my undivided attention. Never mind that I could be sleeping, or showering, or fucking, or pooping. I have to respond RIGHT NOW.

I'm waiting for some repairs to happen in my bathroom. It will take my shower offline for 3 days, so I've requested that the repairman schedule the repairs so that I can make alternative accommodations for this. Last week, the repairman showed up at my house first thing in the morning. I was still sleeping, having had a late night and still having company. So I didn't answer the door (I didn't know it was the repairman at the time). About an hour later, while I was occupied, there was another knock at the door. 20 minutes after that, I got a phone call that I let go to voicemail from the building manager telling me they wanted to schedule the repairs. 5 minutes after that, my dad texted me, asking if I was OK. Since it was my dad, I texted back that I was fine, and he said that the landlord had called the emergency number to find out where I was. Then I got in the shower. Then there was another knock at the door while I was in the shower (the shower window, by the way, is on the same wall as the door and since the window was open, anyone at my door could tell I was in the shower). Then my dad texted again that the landlord called back!

A mere 2 hours after the first knock, when I was awake and dressed and ready to deal with business matters, I finally called the landlord and chewed her out for coming by a total of 4 times, calling 3 times, and calling my dad twice, all without previously scheduling the repairs as requested. This is what I'm talking about. People expect other people to be available all the time, even without making any arrangements for it. I have an OKC inbox filled with first-contact emails and a second, follow-up email of guys pissed off or hurt that I haven't responded to them. No "I'm sure you're probably busy", no "is everything OK?" - it's all "fine, I can take a hint, the least you could do is tell me that you're not interested and not just ignore me!" Entitlement.

You are not entitled to my response. You are not entitled to my availability. Also, there is nothing about me that is passive-aggressive and even a cursory look at my profile would tell those guys that if I wasn't interested, I wouldn't just *ignore* him. Plus, if I was ignoring him, whining about it isn't likely to end well regardless.

The latest incident was an ex-mistake of mine. I call him my stalker, and it's a long and convoluted story how a stalker is also an ex. The "short" story is that we've known each other since we were 12 and he decided the moment I walked in the classroom door that I would be the girl he married. He spent the next decade putting himself in the friendzone, i.e. a friend with ulterior motives. He was my friend for the purpose of getting close to me in the hopes that I would one day realize that he was my soulmate. I didn't know this at the time. This is the antithesis of being a nice guy, although every single guy who does this calls himself a Nice Guy for doing it. He tried every juvenile trick in the book to get me to date him. Eventually, in college, I did date him, and very quickly learned what a bad idea that was. After we broke up, he put himself back in the friendzone. I genuinely prefer to be friends, or at least friendly, with my exes if we broke up simply because we were incompatible & not because he did something unforgivable, so I didn't see a problem with him trying to be friends with me ... at the time. That took me another 6 years to learn.

By that point, I had discovered polyamory and had moved across the country, so my interaction with him was limited to phone calls. We'd have very pleasant multi-hour-long conversations, until he'd point out how well we were getting along and wasn't that enough proof that we were destined to be together? We'd have an argument, and I mean an ARGUMENT complete with shouting where he tried to convince me that we were two halves of the same whole, that I was doing this poly thing only because I was still searching for Mr. Right and I should stop searching because he was right there and I would yell back that I was not interested, that I loved my then-boyfriends, that I was not happy being monogamous, and that our dating was a mistake I never wanted to repeat.

This is more backstory than necessary (and yet only a fraction of the story), but the point is that I spent the majority of my life being hounded by this guy to marry him (complete with him sabotaging the condoms in the hopes that I'd get pregnant, as I learned later) and yelling at him that I didn't want to be with him. I had finally had enough. In a phone conversation while I was at my then-boyfriend's house (so I have a witness to it), my stalker started in again on being soulmates and I told him that I was never going to have that argument again. I told him that I was not going to contact him ever again, and he could not contact me unless he could refrain from starting that argument, and if he ever DID bring it up again, I was going to change my number so he couldn't ever call me again.

About 6 years has passed and I have not contacted him. He has sent me 2 emails and friended me on Facebook (but not actually contacted me there). The first email was an essay he wrote for his creative writing class where he described our 2-decade relationship from his perspective. I've written about that before and how shocked I was to learn that someone who had known me for years & claimed to love me could know me so little (he still believed that my poly relationships were casual sex and that I only did poly because I was "promiscuous" and wanted to have lots of sex with lots of guys ... how he could miss my regular months-long spans of no sex drive is beyond me, but I digress). His second email was to tell me that his brother had been convicted of murdering his own wife & child, and how my stalker felt his life was falling apart. That's another long story I won't go into here, but let's just say I wasn't the least bit surprised to hear the news. For both emails, I did not respond, since he explicitly said "you don't have to respond, I just need someone to listen". He then promptly emailed me back after both to whine about getting "the hint" from my silence. Both of those I responded in the same way, to remind him of our last conversation and that he said I didn't have to respond.

Yesterday, after I had publicly posted on my timeline that I was unplugging for a while to go be productive, he sent me a message on Facebook. Naturally, I didn't respond, as I had walked away from my computer. He sent me 2 more passive-aggressive messages about getting "the hint" from my not responding. I got the messages this morning and sent him yet another reminder that I wasn't interested in speaking to him, however my "silence" was because I was not at my computer and that I didn't owe him a response according to his time table. It's a funny little quirk I have, not prioritizing responses to guys who treat me as an object, who put me on a pedestal and ignore my own wishes for my life, and who think that arguing with me about dating is a good strategy for winning me over.

So, I am increasingly disturbed by the sense of entitlement people seem to have over other people's time. Maybe people always felt that entitled and the cell phones are merely a new tool to facilitate that entitlement, and I shouldn't blame the cell phone or turn it into a symbol of that entitlement. All I know is that people seem to demand other people's attention, and other people's responses, and any irritation at being so demanded is met with a counter accusation that it's somehow the other person's fault for not being available and the other person is an asshole for having a problem with the demand. It feels as though nothing can wait for more convenient times, everything has to be done now and if you don't want to do it now or, Zeus forbid, you're busy with something else, well then you're a jerk. If you don't want to answer your phone because you're at work, or otherwise occupied with someone else, you're a dick. If you want your partner to actually finish the conversation, or the date, before surfing Facebook, you're selfish. If you dare to walk away from the computer while it's still logged on to email or social networking sites, you're inconsiderate. And if you have the nerve to actually tell people that you have other things to do and can't respond right away, then somehow you are the self-centered prick who thinks the world revolves around you.

So if I don't respond to something you've said to me, or emailed me, or posted to me, or texted me, or called me, it's because I'm fucking busy with other things to do. I'll get to you when I get to you, as I expect you would for me. If what I'm contacting you about is urgent, I'll make sure you know it's urgent. Otherwise, if you don't answer me back, I'll assume that sitting with your phone in your hands waiting for my message was not at the top of your priority list and something else was, something like eating, or sleeping, or any of the dozens of people in your life who are closer to you than I am, or work, or pets, or an emergency, or it was a pretty day outside so you just left the damn phone in your pocket for a while, and NOT that you're sending me some coded signal that you don't like me. Whatever, respond when you have the time and if you feel like it. You don't owe your time to me, but I'll appreciate whatever time of yours you're willing and able to share with me.

FEAR MY WRATH!

Sat, 04 May 2013 01:34:56 GMT

There's this other thing that people are doing lately. Maybe they've always done this, I don't know, but my memories tell me that, "in the good ol' days", when someone said "I'm getting angry, drop the subject", people used to actually drop the subject if they genuinely didn't want to make the other person angry because they cared that someone was not happy and that they were contributing to that unhappiness. When someone said "this is upsetting me, stop doing it", people either used to care that they were upsetting someone and would stop doing it, or they were trying to upset someone, so would keep doing it.

But lately, when I've said "don't push me on that" or "drop the sujbect" or "I'm getting pissed off so stop", the reaction I'm getting is not "sorry, I didn't want to actually make you angry, I just wanted to converse on this subject, I'll let it go now". No, what I'm getting is "ooh, I'm so scared! Joreth might get angry! What are you going to do about it, huh? Yell at me on the internet?" (This is a quote, by the way, and a very close paraphrase of multiple responses).

For some reason that I can't quite fathom, when I say "this is a triggering subject so leave me alone", what people are hearing is "I AM THE ALL POWERFUL VENGEFUL INTERNET CENSOR. YOU MUST CEASE WRITING ABOUT THIS SUBJECT OR YOU WILL FEAR MY WRATH!"

Listen up assholes, I'm not threatening you with dire punishment for daring to have a difference of opinion. I'm warning you that I am feeling emotional, or about to get emotionally upset, and this conversation will cease to be productive. I'm alerting you to the fact that what you are saying or doing is hurtful to me and I want you to stop hurting me. I'm sorry that being hurt results in my inability to ask you politely to stop hurting me, with an appropriate amount of compassion for your feelings about being asked to stop hurting me [/sarcasm], but I am trying to get you to stop hurting me, not threatening you that I'm about to do something bad to you (although yelling at you might be considered doing "something bad", it's a reaction, not a punitive action, and not a particularly dire one in the grand scheme of things).

I do not have a big enough ego to say that being mad at someone on the internet is this horrible thing for the other person. I don't think that I am important enough for it to matter to most people that I am mad at them. I am assuming, obviously incorrectly, that you are a decent person who doesn't actually intend to cause me pain or emotional upset, and that notifying you of my impending or current upset is something you might appreciate so that you will have the opportunity to stop doing whatever it is that is upsetting me so that we can continue or improve our relationship (even if it's just online acquaintances).

But, apparently, you do not wish to be notified when you are doing something hurtful so that you can stop hurting me. Apparently, you are enjoying causing me pain, and the challenge to do so after being threatened with consequences only ups the ante.

What the fuck is wrong with you people that when you are told "I'm getting upset, stop doing that", your first thought is not "I didn't want to hurt someone, perhaps I should table this until she's not so upset or in another forum that is more conducive to discussing this subject", but is instead you think "ooh, I'm so scared, c'mon, whatcha gonna do about it?" I'm not warning you not to poke the bear because the bear will tear you to pieces. I'm telling you that I'm hurting and it's because of something that you're doing, and I'm hoping that you are a decent and compassionate person who doesn't want to deliberately hurt me. Clearly, I was wrong.

Missing The Point Pedantry

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:22:56 GMT

There's this thing that otherwise reasonable, intelligent people do that just really pisses me off. I've started calling it Missing The Point Pedantry. This is when someone who is a generally intelligent person with a reasonable amount of social skills decides to argue some pedantic, specific little detail that someone, who is also fairly intelligent with social skills, said in a conversation or online post that completely misses the point of what was being said. It requires the pedant to overlook context, any knowledge of the person speaking and/or their past track record or tendencies regarding either the subject or their conversation/speaking/writing style, and any social conventions involved in speaking/writing.

So, for example: let's take Devon. Devon is a college graduate with an interest in the hard sciences but a vast experience with the arts and pop culture. Devon can use "totes" and "adorbs" in conversation and not sound like my dad sounded in the '80s when he tried to say "that's totally radical dude!" in an effort to connect with "the kids these days". Devon is well-read in popular fiction, the classics, and non-fiction in some specialty areas of interest. Devon is sex-positive and active in alternative communities like the Ren Faire and the local indie club scene. In other words, Devon is a well-rounded person with general knowledge, some specific expertise, and social skills like current slang and local/cultural body language.

Now let's take Quinn. Other than the specific areas of specialty that Quinn focuses on or hobbies and interests that Quinn has, Quinn is basically the same as Devon - well-read, intelligent, average size social group, etc. Maybe Quinn is a sci-fi geek instead of a Renny or maybe Quinn listens to goth instead of industrial music, but otherwise, they are fairly well-matched people. They also know each other through overlapping social circles and have had direct interactions with each other, but maybe they don't know each other quite well enough to call each other "friend" in the can-call-each-other-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-to-rescue sense. They probably show up at some of the same parties if they're in the same area and they are probably friends on Facebook or something.

So Devon and Quinn are at a party one night and Devon is speaking with some people on a subject that most of the people mostly agree on. Maybe it's the conflict in the Middle East, maybe it's about immigration, maybe it's about pc vs. mac, maybe it's on the inherent privilege that blondes face in this country at the expense of redheads. Whatever, Devon is reasonably certain that most of the people have similar, if not identical, views on the subject and that there are probably people at the party who disagree, but that's not who Devon is talking to right now, although Devon is aware that those people could probably overhear the conversation. Quinn is at the party and generally agrees on the subject, but has different personal experiences of the subject so might have a slightly different perspective, although they both agree on the important points.

Devon starts relating a story about a study on the subject that suggests some really interesting and suggestive trends among, oh, I dunno, blondes. It turns out that when you prime blondes by having them read pro-blonde jokes, they have a tendency to become more hostile towards non-blondes. They answer questions about crime committed by redheads with harsher penalties than blondes, and they want harsher penalties than the blondes who weren't primed for it. The study, and a series of related studies, show some shocking revelations about the privilege of blondes in our country that lend weight to the redhead accusation that hair-colorism is not yet over, it just moved to a more subtle form. Blondes aren't burning redheads at the stake for being witches anymore, but they still aren't given exactly the same treatement as blondes in society, and the redheads aren't just being "overly sensitive" about "seeing hair-colorism everywhere".

Since Devon is not a research scientist, was not personally involved in this study, and is speaking at a party and not a science forum, Devon is playing a little loose with the language. Devon sums up the study instead of quotes it, uses anecdote as illustration to connect with the audience, speaks in the common vernacular and not necessarily precise, scientific language, sometimes uses humor to relieve the tension, sometimes gets a little angry at the injustice of it all and the anger seeps into the tone every so often. But Devon is speaking to peers, who understand the same common vernacular, who are swayed by anecdotal illustrations and have not spent their life-long careers training themselves to recognize personal bias (although some do it as a hobby, they all still understand that they're all at a party and not being hired to review this study), who are also there to just converse with people they like and if they happen to learn an interesting new tip, even better.

As Devon finishes with an anecdote that supports the study's conclusion, in an effort to better connect the audience to the dry data and to illustrate the point and maybe to connect the study to something that was said previously that is related but not necessarily the exact same thing, Quinn jumps in with "well, I'm blonde and I like anti-redhead jokes, but *I* certainly have no problem with redheads! Therefore you can't say that blondes are anti-redhead. If I were to follow your logic where you used a personal anecdote to support hair-colorism, then my experience as a blonde who had a hair-colorist redhead father should lead me to make sweeping generalizations that all redheads were anti-blonde!"

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call Missing The Point.

Of course we shouldn't take our personal experiences and use them to make sweeping generalizations. That's not what Devon did. Devon used a personal anecdote to illustrate a trend that a scientific study suggested. The point of using anecdotes in this context is to make the subject matter relatable to the general audience. People use analogies, similes, hyperbole, alliteration, allusion, and other literary tools to create an emotional response in the audience. That's what people do. The scientific and the skeptics communities are both terrible about not utilizing these tools, and it's one of the reasons why we have a culture of anti-intellectualism. The religious and the woo crowds are experts at these tools and they use them liberally to sway the public away from science, away from reason, away from critical thinking. Science, critical thinking, and reason are hard for humans, in general (don't anyone fucking dare comment about how easy it is for you, personally - that's exactly what I'm talking about). But tell people there's a quantum flux theory that totally explains why hospitals fill up on nights with a full moon because your sister once had a dream about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at exactly the same time you were making one, therefore water that remembers the medicine you filtered out of it but not the poop totally cured your autism, and they'll think you're making absolute sense.

When an individual makes a claim, such as "women are just naturally more nurturing than men" and backs it up with a story about how "every single" woman they know is better with children than "every single" man they know, and has been that way since birth, therefore they can make the claim that women in general, or all women, are naturally more nurturing than men - that's a logical fallacy. The counter to that is a combination of actual science research that says otherwise as well as any examples that do not fit the claim. If the claim is that "all people of X group", then only 1 counter example is sufficient to falsify the claim. If the claim is "generally people of X group", then anyone whose personal experience is that most people of that group do *not* is sufficient to falsify the claim - especially when either case is backed up with scientific data.

In other words, if you say "all dogs have 4 legs", then all I have to do is produce 1 dog without 4 legs and the claim is bunk. If you say "dogs are generally mean and vicious animals", then all I have to do is say that I've worked with thousands of animals in an animal shelter and the vast majority of dogs I've worked with were lovable and sweet, and that the only mean and vicious dogs I encountered were raised by asshole owners who trained them specifically to be mean and vicious to counter the claim that meanness is a species-wide trend.

But when the scientific evidence suggests a particular trend, and a person shares an anecdote to illustrate what the trend is, or to help the audience connect or relate to the conclusion, or to say "I can believe that because this thing that supports the conclusion happened to me", that is not a logical fallacy. That's called being a part of a social species that uses complex language filled with nuance and social context to share ideas with each other.

Most of the time, this Missing The Point Pedantry takes the form of a strawman argument. I have an ex who did this constantly. He once got interested in dating someone that I felt would be problematic because she was opposed to polyamory. I was concerned that she would do typical cowboy or cuckoo things to break us up or drive me away so that she could have him all to herself. I was concerned because she exhibited such behaviour in the past. His reaction was to scoff at me and tell me that he was anti-marriage, so I shouldn't worry because it's not like he was going to run off to Vegas and marry her, he just wanted to fuck her.

Well, no shit Sherlock, I didn't think he was going to run off to Vegas and marry her and that's not at all what I was concerned about. It doesn't take something as drastic as a vehemently anti-marriage man completely 180-ing on his lifelong, somewhat pathological, anger at the institution of marriage to make me concerned about how a new partner is going to affect my existing relationship. Things like refusing to be in the same room with me even at parties forcing him to routinely "choose" between us, calling in the middle of our date night for her weekly emotional "crisis" to have a 2-hour long argument about whether or not he should come home *again* to take care of her, showing up at my house at exactly midnight because "my night" with him is now *technically* the next day, which isn't my night, so he has to come home with her right now, spinning private stories in a negative way to mutual friends to gradually turn those mutual friends away from me and onto "her side" - these are the kinds of things that I'm afraid of. These, by the way, are all things that have actually happened to me and not hyperbole, exaggeration, or strawmen or pulled out of my ass. I don't need to be worried that she's going to kidnap my boyfriend at gunpoint, force him to marry her, and never see me again to be concerned that my life is about to be unpleasantly disrupted by someone with a history of being disruptive.

So sometimes the pedantry is used to pick on a specific detail or pull a loose form of speech to focus on at the expense of all the rest of what was said - the context, the cultural influences, the history of the speaker, and even the non-spoken implications revealed by the language used - to pick out that detail and blow it up to exaggerated proportions so that the original speaker would have to backtrack or renege the point in order to not be associated with the caricature now presented.

But sometimes it's another logical fallacy, and I don't particularly want to attempt to cover every possible fallacy that someone could make in these circumstances. The point is I really hate Missing The Point Pedantry because I have to explain, in great detail and at great length, why this is a misdirection in order to get back on track, which, in effect, is exactly what I'm trying to avoid - being misdirected. Instead of discussing the topic, we get sidetracked onto this other niggling little detail. There's no good way to handle this problem that I am aware of. If you don't address it, a falsehood or a fallacy goes unchallenged, and all that results from that. If you do address it directly, you get off the main topic and start arguing something that wasn't your point in the first place. If you address the fact that it's missing the point, you still get off the main topic and start arguing something else that wasn't your main point, only now you're arguing about arguing.

The people I know are intelligent, reasonable people, for the most part, and, contrary to the mainstream perception of intelligent people, are not actually all socially maladapted misfits like Sheldon Cooper. They are people who understand humor, sarcasm, double entendre, can tell when someone shouts "fine, whatever!" and storms out of a room that she's probably not actually fine and is likely pissed off, can identify "I'd love to but..." as a polite rejection even if the word "no" was never spoken, and a whole host of other social interactions. But, for some reason, all of those interaction skills go right out the window when they seize on a detail that might not be an absolutely, literal, 100% in all cases down to the fractal level, perfect phrase or example.

When most people say "I'm going down to Miami for the weekend", most other people understand that "down" is a cultural slang term that means "south-ish from this point", not that the speaker is literally moving in a downward direction into the planet and pretty much no one tries to correct the speaker. Even when someone says "I'm going down to New York for the weekend", and we all know that "down" means "south-ish" but the speaker will be traveling "north-ish" or "east-ish", most of the time people still don't try to correct the speaker because we grasped, from the context, what the important point was - that the speaker is going somewhere for the weekend. But when Missing The Point Pedantry happens, suddenly I'm faced with, for example, anti-sexist men who want to argue that "she didn't say the word no so it's not rape" or "but men have bad stuff that happens too" or "what's wrong with wanting to protect my primary relationship?" or "if she just knew self-defense, she wouldn't be a target" or "I agree that religion is actively harmful, but do you have to be so aggressive about it?" or "you know that aspirin comes from willow trees, right, so don't do the opposite and assume everything that's natural is harmful" or a million other wacky things that completely miss the point.

No, I haven't actually counted out one million examples. That's a figure of speech and is intended to convey "a lot" in a way that impresses the reader with "really a lot". And that's exactly what I'm talking about - Missing The Point Pedantry. Everyone knows that "a million other things" doesn't literally mean exactly one million other things, and "everyone knows" doesn't literally mean that every person on the entire planet that has ever or will ever live understands that figure of speech. And you, who is doing this, also understand that, in most contexts except for whatever it is about this one that prompted you to point this out. I'm not speaking to Rain Man here, or Sheldon, I'm not speaking to or about anyone who has any kind of actual neurological condition or complication that makes them actually have trouble with abstract thought. I'm talking to and about people who, in most cases, get this, but couldn't refrain from "not getting it" now. I know you're not stupid and I know you're not an asshole, but for fuck's sake, stop acting like it and, by implication, stop acting like I'm stupid by ignoring all the context around whatever detail you picked out to focus on.

Sometimes I Hate Being Right

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 03:31:46 GMT

Once upon a time, I refused to delete a person's post in the group I moderated when that person's partner demanded I do so, because I had already spoken to the person in question who merely asked me to amend the post for her, which I did immediately.

The partner got obnoxiously offended that I wouldn't just do what he said to his partner's post, just because he was the partner. My response was incredulity that anyone couldn't see why it was a horrible idea to just take someone's word on making changes to another person's presence in the group. 1) I don't know who is dating who - it's the poly community and I can barely keep up with my own network, let alone everyone else's; 2) I don't know the status of each relationship and don't know if someone might be abusing the position - worst case scenario could have some psycho deleting profiles or setting their partner up for trouble like with child protective services or something. But *especially* when I had gotten contradictory instructions from the person in question directly, that was a horrible idea. Anyway, I said as much and the partner has been telling everyone what I bully I am ever since.

I saw early signs of him having an abusive personality, but no evidence to actually act on it. When asked, I would admit that I didn't like him and that he struck me as being "wrong", or the kind of domly-dom that I usually associate with abusers who hide their abuse under the BDSM label. But, with nothing more than a feeling and an association, I just did my best to avoid him, except when he directly challenged me online.

Tonight I find out that he has, in fact, been accused of multiple accounts of domestic violence and sexual assault against multiple people. My local area has *finally* barred him from social events, and he is, I hear, moving on to neighboring cities.

It's times like this when I don't like being right.

I have a long history of exposure to domestic violence and sexual assault. I know the signs. I am too much of a skeptic to just start willy-nilly accusing people based on a "feeling" or my intuition, and certainly I can miss people who are good at hiding it. But having to rescue my best friend in high school, literally kidnapping her out from under her rapist father who was about to take her to Canada to escape the charges brought against him, and my subsequent work with sexual assault and domestic violence has made me sensitive to those traits associated with abusers.

I do wish people would take me more seriously when I say someone is bad news, even if I don't have police reports to back me up. I listen to what people close to them say about them, and I watch how people behave around them, and I filter it with an understanding of consensual BDSM relationships so as to not confuse the two, and I connect patterns. When I say someone is trouble, it's not because we had a disagreement once. It's because I think they're trouble.

But it WORKS for us!

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:18:50 GMT

"Our relationship is over! Us in the original couple are in a totally closed triad with no outside partners for a reason and we explained that to our Third when we met her and she agreed back then but now it's over because she wants someone besides us! Why can't she understand that we have a system that works for us?"

Because, honey, that system DOESN'T work for you. If it worked for you, the triad wouldn't have broken up over it. Oh, you mean that it worked for the primary couple! This is a great example of couples privilege - writing up rules that only work for the original couple, and as long as the original two people like it and stay together, that's all that counts as "works for us".

This is the problem I have with Unicorn Hunters (which, I shouldn't have to repeat but obviously I do, does not mean all individual people who think they might like being part of a triad someday) - they're not interested in what works for everyone and they're not interested in accommodating their partner as if she were a full human being with her own needs and desires. They're interested in what she can do for them, and in not having their lives interrupted in any meaningful way while they're getting what they want from her without regard to what "works" for her.

Although, I have to say that it doesn't sound like it's working out for the original couple either, since the two of you haven't managed to make your dream triad work, but that's a whole other argument.

Also, this isn't a straw man. This is a real post I saw in an online poly group.

I ought to make a post or a tag for posts that include things I've said for which people accuse me of straw-manning but are actually real statements, arguments, posts, or claims made by real people. Like the post I saw last week and tweeted about where I said that my hypothetical Unicorn Hunters that I use as examples are never as bad as the real thing because I never thought to prescript the nipple size of the unicorn, for instance. Seriously, the worst of everything I've ever said about Unicorn Hunters, and the reason I'm opposed to them, are both absolutely real examples with no hyperbole and not as bad as some other absolutely real life examples.

I Love You, Just Don't Disrupt Anything

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:32:13 GMT

There's this thing that people who are exploring polyamory for the first time as part of a couple do, and I don't see it happen when people attempt to try polyamory as a single person. It doesn't matter if the "couple" is dating together, dating individually, unicorn hunting or not, or how long the relationship has existed prior to the poly exploration. And there's this thing that a lot of poly "veterans" keep trying to do, but a lot of poly veterans learned the hard way that it's not the most successful strategy so they don't do it anymore. The thing they do is set out trying to find additional partners "without risking or disrupting the pre-existing relationship".

Every time, these new explorations are attempted while simultaneously attempting to keep the pre-existing relationship exactly the same, only, y'know, with more people. I get it, I mean, they love each other, otherwise they'd break up and start dating someone new. Kind of the whole point of polyamory is that you get to start dating someone new without losing anyone old.

Single people, however, don't try to find a partner with the assumption that their life will look exactly the same after they get a new partner as it did before. We seem to instinctively understand that, no matter what relationship type - poly or mono - dating someone new means things will be a little different. Compromises will have to be made based on who the new person ends up being, some plans get put on the back burner, some priorities get reshuffled, some things get given up and some new things get adopted.

Sometimes we can predict which of our things will be affected, like a guy who assumes that he'll have less time for Monday Night Football once he gets a girlfriend who doesn't like it, and other things we can't predict like waking up one day and realizing that we haven't actually touched our scuba equipment in months because our new partner doesn't dive and we'd rather spend time with them. Every once in a while, we decide that our pre-dating proclamation to never ever leave the city we're in because we love it so much, ever, no matter what, doesn't feel as strong in the face of our soulmate announcing their intention to move back to their home country. Some people who thought they'd never even consider dating someone with a kid from a previous relationship find themselves being a step-parent because their True Love just happened to come with a kid. Life ends up looking different than it did before dating, and we all just kind of know that.

But couples seem to think that they can preserve and protect their relationship from experiencing any kind of change or disruption if they just find the "right partner" or if they make a bunch of rules dictating the speed and direction the new relationships are allowed to take, to make the change happen slow enough that it's essentially unnoticeable There's a fundamental flaw that makes this strategy inherently less likely to succeed. Only tacit said it better than I could - I'd ramble on for pages, so I'll let him say it:

There is one fly in the ointment: If you introduce someone new into your life, you DO risk disruption.

A lot of otherwise decent people do many very evil things in the name of protecting their existing relationships from disruption. But disruption is a fact of life. You can't introduce someone new into your life without risking disruption, and that's okay.

Almost everything you do in your life risks disruption to your relationships. Taking a new job. Losing a job. (Couples counselors say that financial stress is more likely to ruin a relationship than any other single factor, including cheating.) Deciding to have a baby. Moving to another city. An illness or injury. Problems in the family of origin. A death in the family. New hobbies. Hell, every time you walk outside your door or step into a car, you're risking serious injury or death, and that'll disrupt a relationship real quick!

We don't live in fear of disruption when we're offered a new job or decide to have a child. We accept that these things will change our lives, and move on. Ethical polyamory is the same thing: you accept that changes in your romantic life may affect your relationship, you resolve to act with integrity and honesty to cherish your partners to the best of your ability, you trust that your partners will do the same thing, and you move on.

There will be disruption. You can't avoid that. Your pre-existing relationship will change. The only thing that trying to prevent change will do is hurt the new person, and quite likely hurt the pre-existing relationship that you were seeking to protect in the first place. Have you ever tried to put ice into a glass of water without affecting the water level? It can't be done. The presence of the new ice affects the existing water. And if it's the middle of winter and you have hypothermia, adding ice is probably going to be a stupid idea. But if it's the middle of summer, and it's hot, and you're sweating, and you take that ice water onto the porch where there's a bit of a breeze, to sip while reading a good book on the porch swing, well, adding that ice makes the water a whole lot better.

It's not a terrific analogy. As I said, I'll ramble on for pages, even after tacit already said all there needed to be said on the subject. There will be change and you can't avoid it. But you might be turning your pre-existing relationship into something better, if you just let the change happen instead of trying to prevent it.

The Annual Florida Ice Cream Festival

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 01:00:19 GMT

http://www.floridaicecreamfestival.org/

I saw this billboard on I-4 about a week or so ago and knew I had to go. Not many people know of my love for ice cream. It's more than a love, really. I won't go so far as to call it an obsession, because I don't actually eat it all that often. But the word "love", with it's usual dilutions when associated with non-human things, is not strong enough to cover my feelings for ice cream.

You see, in addition to it being probably my favorite dessert in all of existence, it also has very strong associations with my dad. That was a *thing* we did. As a "daddy's girl", my dad was the feature in my childhood memories. We hunted together, he practiced soccer with me when I made the soccer team, we fished, we watched football, he taught me poker, and, later, as I got older, we watched what became my all-time favorite sitcoms and action movies together after dinner. And most of those memories had ice cream associated with them. Every hunting and fishing trip required a stop for a milkshake, and every night, in front of the TV, we'd have a bowl of ice cream together - vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup, stirred until all one, consistent, creamy-brown color. My mom *hated* it. The sound of the spoons scraping the bowls during the TV shows drove her nuts. But that was our thing. To this day, when I want emotional comfort, I eat vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup, all stirred together in one big creamy mess.

So there was no way I was going to miss the First Annual Florida Ice Cream Festival.

I want to start out by saying that I loved the food I got and I definitely plan to attend next year. But I have some criticisms, and the nature of this event may not be to everyone's liking. Just remember, throughout the critique, I liked it.

The Good

The event had free parking right on site and was only $3 to get in. By the time I had arrived, they even stopped charging the entrance fee, so win!

The food was amazing! At least, the ones I had were amazing. The prices were "reasonable", and by "reasonable", I mean that they were comparable with any specialty ice cream shop. So I'm sure you can find cheaper ice cream, even really good cheaper ice cream, at the grocery store. But if you go to Baskin Robbins, you'll probably pay the exact same price for a cup of ice cream as the Baskin Robbins booth right there at the festival.

The music was entertaining. If you're a music snob, or you like only niche or certain sub-culture music, then you probably won't like it. It was family-friendly, non-offensive, and designed to keep up people's moods. I like music like that. I heard Beach Boys, The Electric Slide, and something from some current pop artist, maybe Tao Cruiz.

I saw an Indian ice cream booth there! I didn't get any, but I was very pleased to see such an exotic booth. The only flavor I even recognized was mango, and if I had had enough money when I discovered it, I would have tried some.

They had some activities besides just buying ice cream - mostly kids stuff. I saw a bounce house, pony rides, a rock climbing wall, and even a teeny-tiny mini golf course.

The Not So Good
This was the first time this event has been put on. As with all big events like this, it takes some time to work out the bugs. There will be logistical issues and things that didn't get planned for, and these sorts of things will get better over time. At least, if they don't get better over time, the event won't continue to be held year after year. So most of my criticisms are the kinds of things that I expect to be better next year.

They really did not expect the crowds they got and were not prepared. I arrived a little before 3 PM (open until 7 PM) and booths were already sold out, which is why they stopped charging admission.

There were no lines drawn or flagged on the grass parking lot, so the lines of parking were crooked and slanted, and they actually ended up with huge amounts of wasted parking space because it wasn't quite enough room to add another lane but definitely too wide for just a normal driveway.

Lines were long and unwieldy. The layout of the festival did not account for the long lines, so passerby traffic had to cut through the lines, and the lines stretched and curved and leaned into other booths - both next to and across the road. The booths themselves were not staffed to handle such a customer load, so the lines were also slow-moving.

As usual for festival grounds, there wasn't a whole lot of shade. That's less of a problem if you're moving around and can get to the giant "Chill Pill" tent with all the tables, but because of the line problem, we were just standing still in the sun for unreasonably long amounts of time. I know there's not much they can do about that, since festival grounds, by nature, need to be wide open spaces. But maybe putting up a whole bunch of tents right over the road, kind of spaced along the road? Then, as we're walking down the road browsing the booths, we can pass under spots of shade, and people standing in lines that span across the road can maybe be standing under those tents?

They needed more variety of non-dessert food. There was 1 burger stand, 1 Italian sausage stand, 1 hot wings stand, and 1 stand with fries that sold out right around the time I got there. There needed to be some non-dessert options that weren't $6+. The fries were a good start, but, as I said, they sold out early. A corn on the cob stand might have been a good option. A falafel food truck or a burrito truck or hot dogs or something. Anything that could have served some kind of side dish for approximately the same price range as the ice cream and even a single option that a vegetarian could have would have been nice (although they did have non-dairy & vegan ice cream - naturally it was already sold out by the time I got there). I know it was an ice cream festival, but people will be more willing to stay longer, and more willing to buy more sweets, if there are actual meal options that are affordable and options to cut the sweet so that we don't go into a sugar coma.

The drink booth was also not prepared for the size of the crowd. They needed more coolers, more helpers, and more drink options. There was Gatorade, water, Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi. That's it. Canned tea for those who need something with flavor but not more sweet, and Sprite for the non-caffeine drinkers who might want a soda instead of Gatorade or water would have been really appreciated.

Everything was standard specialty ice cream shop sized. I'd rather see the festival organized more like Epcot's Food & Wine festival, where everything is more like taste-sized, so that we can go from booth to booth, sampling a wider variety of foods. $1 shot glasses of ice cream would be way better than $3 cups of ice cream. Also, it might not sell out as fast.

All food was purchased with Moo-lah, fake money that you pre-purchased and then exchanged for the food. I ended up with a Moo-lah dollar that I couldn't spend, because there wasn't anything there for a dollar (well, maybe some of the activities were, I don't know because I didn't even look at the bouncey house or the pony rides or the mini golf course).

Next year, I would recommend, first, arriving early, then only buying your entrance ticket, then walking the entire grounds to decide what you want, and THEN buying your Moo-lah so that you only purchase the fake dollars that you plan to spend. It didn't occur to me to do that until I was already inside & had purchased my fake money, although I knew they sold the fake money inside. As I saw "sold out" signs going up all over the place and lines so long and curvy that I couldn't find the ends, I decided to just jump in the first line that had something I wanted, and each line as I came to it, rather than planning out my spending. I was afraid I would decide on something back in the beginning and it would be sold out before I circled back after looking at everything.

Even better, if you go with someone(s), plan what you want to buy, then split up - one (or more) of you stands in line for food while one runs to a Moo-lah booth to buy fake money. Then the person with the money can deliver it by the time the person in the food line gets to the front. If you can go with several, have one money runner and everyone else wait in different food lines to get everyone's food in each booth. Then meet up at the picnic tables.

Although I liked the flavors of ice cream I got, and although there was a nice variety of brands present, I would have liked to have seen A) more exotic flavors and B) a plain vanilla/plain chocolate option.

I know, that sounds like I'm asking a lot. What I'm suggesting, though, is that this is a festival celebrating ice cream, and all the vendors are local vendors with shops or food trucks here town. We can go to these shops any time we want to. So I think it would benefit them to showcase some of their more unusual, exotic, or specialty flavors as a hook to catch the attention of the thousands of attendees who might be considering the competing shop right next door. But, at the same time, *someone* has to have the old classics for those who attended for exactly that reason. What I'm saying is that I saw the same handful of flavors over and over again - cotton candy, birthday cake, strawberry, chocolate chip cookie dough, cookies N cream, etc.

Don't get me wrong, there were some unique flavors. I had an excellent banana pudding frozen custard that I just adored! And there probably was more variety that I missed because of all the booths that had sold out before I got there. But I didn't get any fruit-based, non-cream desserts like a strawberry popsicle, and the Shamrock Explosion that I was originally in line for sold out 3 people ahead of me, leaving the entire line with only the banana pudding and the coconut custard options. I think this was clearly an underestimation problem that is to be expected with a first-year event. It's very difficult to estimate what will sell and what won't. It's why I use a third-party one-off printer instead of printing my shirts in bulk and handling the sales myself. I've seen too many merchants end up with too many left-over t-shirts and other shirts sell out immediately, all because predicting what will sell is hardly an exact science.

So, it was hot, it was crowded, the lines were long, the food sold out early, and there wasn't enough of the food I wanted. I still want to go back next year. I think pretty much everything I had a problem with is something to be expected for a first-time event, so I hold out hope that every single one of them will improve next year. If outdoor festivals aren't your thing, then you'll probably want to skip this unless your love of ice cream is stronger than your dislike of outdoor festivals. But if you love ice cream, this was a pretty good event. it was relatively inexpensive and I got exposed to a ton of ice cream brands that I didn't even know were local shops. It was a nice day out, if too hot while standing in line in the sun without a hat, sunglasses, or sunscreen on and a poor decision to wear full jeans & a t-shirt with sleeves but that was my mistake, and I liked the music. Really, it's not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and I expect it to be better next year.

But now I need to go eat something with protein & complex starch, to cut all that sugar. Wish I had some salad-fixings in the house - add a little egg & a roll & it would fix the whole thing!

The Trouble With Skeptics

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 15:46:09 GMT

or The Misuse Of The Argument From Authority Accusation

First, a couple of disclaimers. 1) I'm going to use the word "skeptic" in this post to lump everyone from the skeptics, secular, humanist, and atheist communities into a single label. Those communities are absolutely not interchangable, let's get that straight right up front. Being an atheist doesn't make you a skeptic, as everyone's go-to example, Bill Mahr, can attest. Neither does being a skeptic automatically make you an atheist, as our resident non-atheist skeptic, Pamela Gay, proves. Irrelevant for my point here. I don't feel like listing out all the groups every time I reference them, so I'm going to lump them into one place-holder label, and I chose "skeptic" because I say that word often enough that it comes out easily.

2) I am a skeptic, and damn proud of it. I love the label, I love what I learn from both the community and the process of skepticism. I am in no way considering dumping the label. I'm uncomfortable in skeptic spaces because there are certain problems I encounter, but I want to fix those problems so that I can continue to be part of the skeptics community; I don't want to split off into a whole new group that has the exact same premise as the skeptics community but who refuses to be connected to skepticism because of the bad association.

3) This is not the only problem with the skeptics community. In fact, it's not even one of the top 10 worst. It could be considered a symptom of one of the more major problems, but I don't want to hear "that's it? That's your big problem? Why are you bitching about that when there are real problems with the skeptics community that need to be addressed?" This is an irritation that has real-world implications, and this is my journal where I specifically set it up to bitch about things. So I'm going to bitch about it.

So, on to the problem.

Skeptics, overall, tend to be a fairly well-educated, intelligent group of people. When you have a group of well-educated, intelligent people, the arguments have a tendency to take a particular form. People tend to try to remove all emotional content from the argument and argue everything academically, even when the subject is about emotions, is personal, or is subjective. Many times, they will argue something just for the sake of academically arguing it - it won't even be a subject they're particularly invested in exploring, they just want to argue. If that subject happens to be something that their opponent is invested in, then because the skeptics aren't, they have a tendency to, not only be totally unaware of how damaging it is to academically argue about something the opponent is personally invested in, but to also be completely dismissive of the emotions of their opponent because, hey, it's just an intellectual exercise, no need to get your panties in a twist over it.

Now, as an intellectual exercise with no emotional investment in the outcome other than being right, skeptics will tend to throw accusations at each other, and anyone they're arguing with, like they're in the middle of a Logical Fallacy oral exam in school. Except that these dispassionate skeptics are not actually unemotionally invested in the argument. They are, just not in the topic. They're invested in the idea that they're well-educated, intelligent, and not emotionally involved. So any criticism of this really irritating way of arguing is taken personally and defended with great vehemence and their own set of logical fallacies.

Final disclaimer, I'm not immune to the subject of this rant. But I can still be irritated when I see it happen.

So, the one I'm going to vent about today is the Argument From Authority. There are a handful of logical fallacies that are easier to identify and remember than the others, so every time they come up, skeptics immediately jump to accusing their opponent of using said logical fallacy. The Argument From Authority is one of them.

The Argument From Authority Fallacy is when a claim is deemed to be true simply because the person who made the claim is an authority figure of some sort.

The Misuse of the Argument From Authority Fallacy is when someone is accused of using said fallacy when it's actually a legitimate argument.

So, for example:

Quinn: Acupuncture TOTALLY works! You should try it!

Devon: Uh, no it doesn't. Here are citations from well-regulated, double-blind, placebo-controlled, large sample population studies from a variety of research facilities that all confirm there is no measurable effect from acupuncture.

Quinn: Psshhh! My acupuncturist is a guy I've known for 20 years and he's a karate sensei so I believe him, not your studies. Science gets things wrong all the time, but THIS guy knows karate! I think he knows what he's doing with acupuncture!

Devon: *blinkblink*

You might now want to accuse me of Strawmanning by pulling out a ridiculous argument, but this is, I swear, a conversation I actually had with someone. It was a person I know in real life and had the conversation face-to-face so it's not a troll either. This is actually how it went. In order to keep the peace, I had to end the conversation simply by advising him to make sure that his sensei at least uses brand-new needles and wears gloves because of the recent hepatitis scare among acupuncture patients in Florida. Even the thought of getting a life-threatening illness didn't phase him, because his guy is a guy he "knows", who would never do anything dangerous. Karate. Acupuncture Nothing dangerous. OK, I'm done.

So this is an example of a legitimate accusation of the Argument From Authority. Quinn believes the claim that acupuncture works because "a guy" said it does, with complete disregard to the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Here are some examples of legitimate USES of the Argument From Authority:

Paula: As a black trans woman, I've experienced sexism, racism, and homophobia in skeptic communities, so I'm less likely to want to attend skeptic events.

Paul: That's ridiculous, there's no sexism, racism, or homophobia in skeptic communities! We're a rational group of people, we require evidence to hold beliefs, and there is no evidence supporting the unequal treatment of other genders, other races, or other sexual orientations. Therefore, you couldn't have experienced any of those things because we're just not any of those things.

Paula: Look, I'm telling you that I've experienced all of those things. Just because you weren't there or you can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It does, and I've felt it, and so have a lot of other people. That's why there are so few women, people of color, and people of alternative sexualities at your little events - we get treated poorly and we'd rather just not go.

Paul: I don't see you citing any rigorous studies supporting your claim, therefore you're just spouting anecdote, and anecdote does not equal data. You're wrong, it doesn't happen.

Paula: I think I get to be the authority on my own personal experiences and you can't tell me that I didn't have them.

Paul: That's the Argument From Authority! Your argument is invalid!

Jordan: Polyamory is a legitimate relationship style. I love more than one person at a time and polyamory is a valid way to ethically explore those feelings.

Sam: You don't love more than one person at a time, you only think you do. Real love doesn't let you love more than one person at a time, so if you think you love multiple people, you don't really love any of them. If you did really love any of them, you couldn't have feelings for the others. QED.

Jordan: You can't tell me what I do and don't feel! I know what I feel, and I feel real, true love for each of my partners!

Sam: You're just deluding yourself, that's not real love. Dictionary.com says love is exclusive, therefore what you feel isn't real love.

Jordan: No one gets to overrule what I say about my own feelings. I have feelings that I can feel, I am part of a community you've never even heard of before today, and I have an academic sociology background. I am the final authority on what I feel and anyone who says different is wrong!

Sam: Aha! That's the Argument From Authority! Your claim is now invalid - polyamory is not real because you can only support it with logical fallacies!

Before anyone tries another accusation of Strawman, these are also both absolutely real conversations. And both are absolutely misuses of the accusation. There are times when it is completely valid to take an authority figure's word on a subject. It can, and should, be provisionally accepted, but it should still be accepted. When the authority figure is an authority on a subject with actual experience in the subject and not just "I read Wikipedia for hours about it" or took some classes on it, and you're not, you can provisionally accept his word. When the authority figure is telling about her own personal experiences, you can provisionally accept her word. When the authority figure is telling you about their internal feelings, you can accept that they do, indeed, have those feelings (even if you remain dubious regarding the nature of what caused those feelings - i.e. just because one feels attacked, it doesn't mean someone actually attacked them). Especially in the third example, their word automatically trumps everything else.

I have been feeling more and more uncomfortable in skeptic spaces over the last year or two, and the smug and dismissive attitude when it comes to topics the speaker has no experience in that is so prevalent among skeptics keeps me away. I don't even want to bother attempting to educate them, because they're so confident in their own intelligence that they don't think they need education on anything they have already formed an opinion on, even if they formed that opinion without the benefit of any education on the subject or with speaking to anyone relevant to the subject. Even worse is when they claim to have done their own "research" on a topic (it usually means they've Googled it or read Wikipedia) and think they're fairly well-read, but they have no personal connection or experience with the subject and dismiss anyone who is actually living the subject but who hasn't done any formal research on it.

Take Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory - he is constantly lecturing Raj on Indian culture, even though Raj was born and raised in India and Sheldon has never left his own apartment, let alone the country. But Sheldon has read stuff and is smart therefore Raj's personal experiences don't count.

http://youtu.be/KYsH5HxKPw8

So misapplying the accusation for the Argument From Authority pisses me off. If you aren't kinky, poly, female, transgendered, non-white, poor, or anything else that is as much "experience" as academic (if not more), and when someone who is talks about their experiences or their feelings or their own community, your ability to recite all the logical fallacies by heart and have an argument without getting "emotional" does not make your opinion as equally valid as theirs. "There is no authority and all opinions are equally valid" is a classic logical fallacy among pseudoscience cranks. Don't fall into the same trap and don't dismiss personal experience when the subject is a subjective one. We're not talking about the chemical makeup of water or the physics of gas planets. Those have yes/no answers - either something does or does not, and we can test it and find an answer that is right and an answer that is wrong (insert appropriate error bars here, for those who are pedantic). But a physicist with credentials and published papers and a university behind him is probably more right about physics than the guy who hasn't left his basement in 5 years spouting Deepak Chopra and Dinesh D'Souza is, because the physicist is an authority on the subject, and we can provisionally accept his word that cold fusion is highly improbable and that we will never develop a free energy machine that sucks electrons from the ionosphere but that could turn into a doomsday weapon with only a small modification to the plans (again, true story).

Life Update

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 03:46:53 GMT

My life has been filled with change these last couple of weeks. Most people have gotten only bits and pieces and very few people have heard all of what has been going on with me. But I'm told that those bits and pieces have seemed, to many, cryptic or even out of character, and upsetting. So I'm going to elaborate on one of the more disturbing bits I've tweeted about, because people are worried and even more people have completely the wrong idea about what happened.

A few months ago, my landlord decided to sell the house and, thanks to an irritating bit of law, left me with very little time to find alternate housing. So a friend took me in under extremely charitable conditions, only to very quickly make that situation intolerable to me, so I had to move again a few months later. Here is my perspective of the worst of what happened.

I have a terminally sick cat. She has an illness that leaves her underweight, malnourished, and at risk for dehydration. She is on daily medication to try to control her appetite and water consumption, and her ability to digest it, but the medication will not cure her. She will die of this illness, today, tomorrow, 5 years from now, we don't know. Her medication is merely to improve the quality of her life, thereby prolonging it, for a while. She has been sick for over 2 years now, and this worry has taken a toll on my own quality of life.

Right about the time the owner of the house where I was living, and I seemed to reach the same conclusion that our living arrangement wasn't working out, but before I had secured another place to live (or even told him that I planned to move out), my work picked up. I began working 8-14 hour days in 10-15 day streaks (with at least one day that reached nearly 24 hours at work). Now, at this time, the house-owner appeared to cease direct communication with me, so I can only guess at his motivations based on his behaviour, but he appeared to decide that chasing me out of the house by making me uncomfortable was preferable to actually speaking to me directly and asking me to leave. I make this guess on his motivations because of what happened next.

The house had an air conditioning system that actually assigned certain rooms in the house to zones, which were independently controlled. So the master bedroom, for example, could be maintained at a separate temperature from the living room. The room I was staying in had its own zone. The house-owner first started by turning off the air conditioner entirely to my zone. The first time that happened, I thought maybe there was a glitch or a mistake. So I turned it back on and went to bed.

When I woke up in the morning, the room was sweltering. It was so hot that I was actually having trouble waking up and moving, as I do when I get overheated. I had heatstroke several years ago and one of the side effects is being increasingly more prone to heat stroke again with each successive heat attack. So when I overheat, I tend to get sluggish and have trouble with cognitive functions, until I eventually just collapse in a faint. If I overheat while sleeping, I'll just not be able to wake up. That's why I'm always wearing tank tops - I have to have the ability to shed layers at any moment when I start to get too warm. Later, when I did finally get up and moving, as I passed by the A/C control, on a hunch, I checked it and, sure enough, it was turned off again. This happened a couple of times and I noticed that the warming of my room would coincide with his movements downstairs where the A/C control was located.

After a few times of that, the speed at which the room would start to get warm increased while the sound of air coming through the vents was still running. So I checked and discovered that he was no longer just turning off the air, he was turning on the heat. I know this was in February, but this is also Florida. I was leaving for work before he woke up in the morning and not returning until many hours later. He left for work after I did, but he also got home from work after I had gone to bed. So he would turn off the air or turn on the heat after I went to bed and again after I left for the day. The room was also on the second story of the house, with windows facing both the rising and setting sun, so the room baked all day.

This would be merely annoying, even with my own health issues regarding heat, except for my sick cat. You see, I would come home to find the cat's water bowl empty because it had evaporated while I was gone. In the temperature I normally kept the room, the bowl would hold water for more than 2 full days before going empty, but now the bowl was drying out between the time I left for work and the time I got home from work. I would come home to find my cat sitting by her water bowl, meowing in distress. Remember her illness and her dehydration risk? Yeah, she got dehydrated and I had to take her to the vet.

The cat started losing weight again and her diarrhea got worse, and she dehydrated. She had to have a pocket of fluid inserted under her skin, between her shoulder blades, to immediately hydrate her and get her out of danger. The vet was horrified and wanted to call the animal cruelty authorities, except there is no tangible evidence for "he turned off the A/C while I was gone" accusations, and I had finally moved out. Since the cat was already sick, all it would take is a counter-accusation that it was my own care of her that led to her condition, or hell, that it was the condition itself, to result in possibly a lengthy and costly court battle, or more likely, no action taken at all. All my emotional and financial resources are tied up in caring for the cat, so I didn't pursue any probably-futile legal action. Anyway, the room was actually so hot before I found a new place, that I started taking the cats to work with me because it was cooler to leave them in my car in the parking garage than it was in the room, and I could get out to the car every 2 hours (on my breaks) to make sure they had enough water. The thermometer in my room said that my room was reaching triple digits.

So, those of you who read my tweets about "torturing my cat", it wasn't hyperbole. My terminally sick cat was actually being tortured by the deliberate actions of the house-owner. A healthy cat might have been merely discomforted, but a sick cat who is prone to dehydration was actually in a life-threatening situation. Not to mention my own danger with my history of heat stroke. I have trouble reconciling these actions with the self-assigned description of "extremely nice guy" he likes to tell people he is. He also has his own cats, and he's quite emotionally attached to them, so I just can't fathom what could have prompted him to take out his feelings for me on my pets. It doesn't matter how angry I get at someone, or what terrible things someone might have done - I would NEVER do anything to deliberately hurt their animals. The worst I ever do is yell at people on the internet. Hell, I cry at movies where even the "bad" animals get killed, I couldn't do anything that would hurt someone's pet no matter what I felt about that person.

My cat is still not fully recovered, and she may never. And, by that I mean, she may never even recover to the point where she was sick but stable, since I know she'll never actually be healthy again. I have been accused of lying about this whole incident, and of making a big deal out of nothing, since most people would find a Floridian house without the air turned on in February to be quite comfortable. But I have a medical condition where I can't handle extremes of heat (or cold, for that matter, but that's a different story) and I have to look at my cat every day and see her illness in her extremely low weight and the signs of her dehydration in her fur, skin elasticity, and gums. To me and my cat, this was decidedly not much ado about "nothing". This was something very serious, indeed.

The toll of caring for a sick cat these last couple of years has affected me deeply and has changed a lot of my priorities. My ex, who works with the MBTI and other personality systems, has shown me books on how the various personality types react to stress. To people who are not familiar with that specific research - types and stress - many usually think that people under stress behave in unpredictable or contrary ways. The MBTI system actually can predict how each of the types will behave under stress, but the relevant point is that the behaviour is often interpreted as "contrary" or "unusual" or "out of character" to those around them, even though it's not unpredictable at all, if one understands the patterns.

I have been under an awful lot of stress in the last couple of years, with the stress factors piling on in the last couple of months. And I've been handling them pretty much alone. I don't tend to speak out publicly when I'm under stress because I was taught not to "whine" as a kid and not to "air dirty laundry". A neighbor kid once pushed me down a flight of stairs and broke my ankle, and I had to walk on that ankle for a week before anyone took me to a doctor for a cast because I should just "toughen up" and "stop complaining" and don't "make up stories to get out of P.E. class". The only reason I was taken to the doctor at all is because my next door neighbor was a First Aid instructor and, after seeing me limp for a week, asked to see my ankle. He determined I needed medical attention and it was only when he said so, did my parents take my complaints seriously.

So I prefer to handle my stresses privately, and then use the situations to illustrate growth opportunities or lessons after the event has passed. Which is why many people who follow me online may be confused when I explode with something that seems out of context or that didn't appear to have any build-up to it. Things looked pretty fine, until I started tweeting about the house-owner "torturing" my cats. Naturally, several people who knew the house-owner just outright didn't believe it and accused me of lying about it or exaggerating the severity. But it's the nature of Twitter to not have much depth or allow for nuance and detail.

So I'm giving the details here. Things were far worse than just "turning off the air conditioning" in the end of a Floridian winter. The room my sick cat was staying in got so hot that the water in her bowl evaporated, and it was during a time that I was out of the house for many hours at a time and could not refill her bowl regularly. Her condition makes her specifically at risk for dehydration, and the heat and lack of water actually did cause her condition to worsen. She may recover, she may not.

Ever since we moved, she has taken to attaching herself to me the way she did when she first got sick. She was always my little shadow, moving from room to room with me in order to stay near me, but now it's so much more. She doesn't just move from room to room, she actually moves around the room with me. Tonight, I went into the kitchen, drained a bowl of soup in the sink, walked to the trash can to dump out the solid food, and then walked back to the sink to wash it. She actually walked back and forth from the sink to the trash and back again with me. And I don't have a large kitchen - 3 or 4 steps at most between the two stations. She tries to time her litter usage with my own bathroom use, now that the litter box is in the bathroom, presumably because she doesn't want to be separated from me even long enough to use the litter box.

So hopefully that clears up some of the strangeness going on around me lately and hopefully that adds more context to my outraged tweets. If I seem out of sorts, or touchy, these days, perhaps understanding some of the stress I'm going through will help things make more sense. Also, keep in mind that the issue of my sick cat is only one of the major stressors I'm going through and there are several that I'm not speaking about, at least not publicly. Some stressors involve personal, intimate details - some of which are my personal details that I don't particularly want made public and some of which belong to other people and it's not my place to speak of them publicly. If something I say or do seems odd or out of place, chances are that there are other things going on below the surface or other details to the story that you don't know about that would probably explain everything.

It's Almost Time!

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 19:08:29 GMT

Atlanta Poly Weekend is coming up in just a couple of weeks and I'm REALLY excited about it this year! This is APW's third year and, if the trend continues, it should be even better than last year, which was better than the first year.

For APW's first year, I gave several presentations, including why poly people should cooperate with the media and how to get into it, and a panel discussion on the intersection between polyamory and skepticism with Kelley Clark. I also debuted my Miss Poly Manners costume for the first time and held a live Miss Poly Manners Q&A.

Last year I was invited back as one of APW's keynote speakers, where I featured a talk on the intersection between poly and skepticism, and also debuted my own interpretation of the Five Love Languages for polyamorous relationships. I reprised my role as Miss Poly Manners (with an improved Victorian gown) and stretched my range of etiquette lessons to include convention etiquette, not poly-specific etiquette.

This year, Miss Poly Manners comes back once again to kick off the convention with some Con Etiquette, and to participate in APW's newest fun track! The folks in Atlanta had so much great content this year that they had to open up a fourth track of programming, not including the kids-specific track! In addition to three panels simultaneously all weekend long, covering such topics as communication tools, creating intimacy, poly case law, the results of a 15-year long study on kids of poly families, kissing classes, dealing with stress, jealousy, STIs, and special poly celebrity panels, APW will also feature a fun and games track.

Just as polyamory is not ALL about the sex, conventions are not all about the serious lectures. To lighten the mood and have some fun, this year's APW will feature some of our favorite campy game shows with a special poly twist. There will be events like Poly Family Feud and APW's Got Talent and Poly-eopardy and ... Miss Poly Manners will be the center square on our own live version of Polywood Squares! You won't want to miss it!

The highlight of every weekend is the evening entertainment and this year will have another dance with DJ Cat Ninetails. Right before the dance, by special request, I will be teaching dance lessons with Sterling! According to the expressed interests of everyone who says they want to learn how to dance but never get around to taking lessons, we've chosen a dance that will look flashy enough to show off, but can be danced to almost any popular music you might hear at a nightclub, a wedding, an office party, a convention, a party, or almost anywhere out in public. You will learn a handful of steps that can have you dancing that night, with plenty of room for growth to continue learning how to dance on your own, plus a list of resources for practice videos online and where to shop for dance shoes and clothes.

I'll be on the poly & skepticism panel again with Kelley Clark & Shaun Philly, and Sterling will be giving his ever-popular workshop on using personality types to improve poly relationships & communication. His workshop fills up to capacity every time he gives it and everyone who takes it wants to attend it again. And, as a special double-feature, I'll be giving my Five Love Languages workshop again!

For those who aren't aware, The Five Love Languages is a self-help theory developed by Dr. Gary Chapman. The basic premise is that everyone expresses their feelings of love and wants to have love expressed to them in certain ways. Those ways can be grouped into what he calls "languages", because they are ways that we all communicate our feelings of love. But the problem is that we don't express or feel loved in the same ways as everyone else. So we can love another person, and do things that we think expresses our love for them, but that person may not hear that they are loved because they speak a different love language than we do.

When people have partners who do not express love in the way they most feel loved, i.e. in their own love language, then it doesn't matter how much the other person loves them, they won't feel loved. And when people don't feel loved, they end up with what Dr. Chapman says is an empty love tank. When people's love tank is empty, they can act out in hurtful, damaging, even unpredictable ways. We have to learn how to communicate our love for each other in ways that the other person most needs to hear, because this acting out is all about how one feels regardless of how the other one thinks he or she is behaving.

Think about a child who is neglected by their parents. You will often see so-called "troubled kids" that have absent or neglectful parental figures. The movie, The Breakfast Club, is pretty much the quintessential story of kids with empty love tanks and the kinds of trouble they get into when they are crying out for love and attention. Adults aren't any different, although they may act out in different ways. Then again, sometimes they don't. People under stress and feeling neglected, unloved, and alone, often do all kinds of strange things in a reaction to that stress, and they often lack the vocabulary to express what it is they're lacking or how to give it to them. And, sometimes, their vocabulary is just fine, but the person listening doesn't have the vocabulary to understand. Or worse, when both are lacking the words to explain and the definitions to understand.

Many times, one person in a relationship will insist that they are doing everything possible to show how much they love their partner, and their partner complains that they still aren't getting what they need, still feel hurt, and still act out. If you've ever tried every way you can think of to show someone that you love them and they still accuse you of not loving them anymore, this is probably what happened - your partner had a different love language and the two of you were talking past each other, not realizing that you were actually speaking different languages. Learning to speak the other person's love language will often take care of many other problems in the relationship, sometimes things you didn't even know were related.

The Five Love Languages is one tool, among many, to give people a set of vocabularly to help explain how they need to feel loved and what they're doing when they are expressing their love. I've taken out the religious justifications and the monogamous intentions and the heteronormative assumptions and adapted the theory to apply to all genders and all relationships. You'll find out what your primary love language is and how to identify your partners' love languages, and concrete suggestions for expressing love in different languages. You'll also get a handout with summaries of each of the different languages & suggestions to take home for future reference.

So I'm really excited to get to do this workshop again, and to dance, and to see all of my old friends from previous years and to meet new friends this year. I'm terrible about out-of-context meetings, so if you see me there, please tell me how we know each other (if you follow me on a particular social networking site, if we've met before somewhere else, etc.) so I can connect the different contexts. Hope to see you there!

They Can't Post Anything On The Internet That Isn't True*

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:57:18 GMT

Apparently, today's theme on Facebook is "FUCKING READ SNOPES BEFORE YOU POST, BITCHES!" After the 4th post in a row where I was compelled to respond by posting a Snopes URL, I posted the following to my own timeline - feel free to copy & paste (or edit & personalize) on your own social networking sites or in response to emails:

Before you post a link, or worse, a picture with a sob story attached, about evil corporations trying to screw us over, mad scientists trying to poison our food supply, evil strangers trying kill babies or rape women or steal money, hidden needles in food or gas pumps, dead rodents or insects in famous restaurant chains, or strangely generous famous people willing to pay you money for forwarding pictures to all your friends, check it out on Snopes: www.snopes.com

If you don't like Snopes, use www.urbanlegends.com. Both link to the original sources where they get their information so you can verify their conclusions.

If the story does not give VERIFIABLE information - first & last name, city/state/country, date, etc. - then it's probably fake. If the story does give that information, Google it first to make sure those people actually exist and the incident actually happened in the place and on the date the story claims.

More often than not, Michigan University never had a professor named Dr. Miles Pendergrast, so he certainly could not have bioengineered a potent virus that the government bought to implant in our water supply, little Lisa Snodgrass doesn't exist and doesn't have cancer or stayed at the non-existent Our Lady Of Perpetual Fraud hospital, and that scary chemical, dihydrogen monoxide, that kills millions of people every year and is in our FDA-approved food really does exist but it's not what you think it is (hint: dihydrogen monoxide is water).

*The title comes from a TV commercial currently playing on local television stations:

http://youtu.be/X-pHe879l60?t=8s

If you don't want to watch the video, the premise is that a girl makes a wild claim to a guy she knows. He asked where she heard it, and she says "the internet". She then says the the line in the title. He asks where she heard *that* and they both say together "the internet", the guy clearly thinking "I should have known!" Then an unkempt guy approaches and she says something along the lines of "excuse me, I have to go, my date is here. I met him on the internet. He's a French model!" The unkempt guy glares at the guy and says, in an obviously American accent with no attempt to hide his lack of familiarity with the French language, "Bonjour!" and smiles contemptuously and lecherously at the pretty, dumb, girl he snookered while she looks back at the first guy with a sickeningly trusting & triumphant smile and walks off with the jackass. The line that I used for the title has recently come, among one of my circles, to be shorthand for the brand of naivete that results in being taken advantage of by unscrupulous hoaxers and simple internet urban legends and is frequently trotted out to reference both this commercial and this phenomenon.

STD Testing Tips

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 03:11:04 GMT

When calling around in your town to find an affordable clinic that offers all the STD tests that you want, you may come across some clinics with less-than-knowledgeable staff. It is my opinion that the patients should never have better medical training in the specialty field than the clinic or office the patient would like to patronize. Here are some tips for weeding out the questionable offices:

1) On the phone, ask what kinds of STDs they test for. If they say "all of them", repeat the question, emphasizing the word "which". If they still say "all of them" without giving you a specific list, don't go there. The receptionist, at least, has no idea what her office handles and will not schedule you for the appointment you want, leaving you to make it all the way up to the doctor herself before discovering that you just wasted your time and now have an office fee or copay for no reason (or will have to have another set of fees for a second office visit somewhere else).

1b) To really test their knowledge, ask if they have the HPV test for men. If they say yes, be immediately suspicious and ask to speak directly to the doctor. The doctor should know that their phone staff is providing bad information and is about to schedule you for a service that doesn't exist, which will cost you time and money. Then, don't go there.

2) When they list the STDs they test for and leave off "HSV", ask them if they test for HSV. Be sure to say "HSV" and not "herpes". If the receptionist doesn't know that HSV is the virus that causes herpes and that the HSV test IS the herpes test, don't go there, for the same reason as point #1.

3) When the receptionist or scheduler does happen to understand that the HSV test is the same thing as the herpes test, ask which test they offer (hint, it should involve letters like PCR or IgG). If they can't tell you which test, or they are unaware there are multiple tests with different methods and accuracy ratings, don't go there. Even a receptionist who has no medical training should at least be able to ask a nurse or technician the answer to that question, or to ask her office manager what the lab order code says about which herpes test they would be ordering.

3b) If, upon asking which test they offer, the receptionist responds with "what do you mean which one? You either have herpes or you don't!", then don't go there. First of all, that's not true, there is more than one strain. Second, that wasn't the question, and even accurate test results don't give you a binary yes/no answer - it's a probability or a yes/no with an error margin for false negatives/false positives.

3c) If, upon making it clear to the receptionist that there are several different types of HSV tests, and you want to know which one that clinic uses, she STILL doesn't know so she offers to transfer you to the lab, where the lab technician answers and is unable to tell you the name of the test they use, don't go there. I shouldn't even have to explain why this is a problem.

3d) If you manage to find out which type of HSV test they offer, get them to state, unambiguously, whether they will be able to distinguish between the types of HSV. This may not be important to you, but it is important to know if this office knows the limitations of their own tests.

4) When you arrive, if you have the money for the tests you want, and the office offers the tests you want, and the doctor, nurse, or technician tries to talk you out of getting a particular test because "everyone already has it, so don't worry about it" or "if you don't have symptoms, you don't need to be tested for it", be prepared to exaggerate or outright lie about your sexual status and demand the tests that they offer that you are willing to pay for. When I say "be prepared", this means to have the numbers and situations already in mind, and to also be ready to sit there and be lectured about safer sex practices.

Some clinics do not think that a full battery of regular STD exams should be part of one's regular medical maintenance, while simultaneously believing that multiple sex partners automatically equates one with the crack whores who fuck dozens of strangers a day in exchange for dirty needles to shoot up with. So you may have to tell them that you have more partners than you do, or that your partners were exposed to all kinds of STDs and just deal with the judgement and the, probably, misinformation based on a skewed sense of morality that places a person's value on their sexuality, or lack thereof. I once had to break down crying about a cheating boyfriend who tested positive for HSV in order to get an HSV test without symptoms. I also had to break down crying in order to get the 2nd AND 3rd shot in my hepatitis vaccine schedule, which didn't make any sense at all since they gave me the first shot.

Not all of us have health insurance or the money to afford to shop around for just the right health practitioner who will treat us respectfully. Some of us have to go for price over comfort. But we shouldn't also have to sacrifice competence. In fact, it might turn out to be more expensive if you try going for price alone and discover that you didn't actually get what you wanted and now have to go somewhere else anyway.

*This PSA brought to you from direct conversations I've had in the last 2 days with various clinics around town. Yes, I actually had to explain to someone that HSV was the virus that causes herpes when I called an STD clinic.*

The Desert Tortoises With Boltcutters Civility Pledge

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:11:19 GMT

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/?p=9416

Read and add your signature, if you want to. It’s easy and fun, and shorter than an iTunes TOS update!

I pledge not to fetishize civility over justice. I recognize that the very notion of “civility” is defined in large part by those in whose benefit the status quo is maintained. I further recognize that the structure of “civility” at least in part has been created with the express purpose of bolstering chronic injustices. As Malvina Reynolds sang, “it isn’t nice to block the doorways, it isn’t nice to go to jail; there are nicer ways to do it, but the nice ways always fail.”

I pledge to remember that civility and compassion are not the same thing. Executive Order 9066, for example, was an emphatically civil document. There was not a mean-spirited or insulting word in the entire document, with the exception of the phrase “alien enemies.” In fact, it specified that a group of people would be provided with food, housing, and transportation. And yet it was one of the most unkind, uncompassionate acts of the US Government in the 20th Century. Civility is a very effective camouflage for hatred.

I pledge to remember that a fetishized civility is a field mark of insulation from suffering. The cries of the wounded on a battleground may be very unpleasant and uncivil indeed. I pledge to nod sympathetically and help bind those wounds rather than chide the wounded for bleeding so indecorously.

I pledge to keep a sense of perspective. Tossing basic civil rights under the bus in order to maintain a jury-rigged superficial peace in a single-issue movement is a bad bargain.

Rather than worry overmuch about civility, I pledge to be as kind as possible. And sometimes the kindest possible contribution to a discussion with someone acting in bad faith and harmfully is to tell them to go fuck themselves sideways.

Still No HPV Test For Men

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 03:31:46 GMT

As I mentioned in my last post, I had heard there was a clinic who was offering the HPV test for men, but I was waiting for confirmation and more information before I posted about it. I had looked up online on my own and only found more insistence that no HPV test existed except for that used in research. One clinic in California was taking it upon themselves to use that research testing method to conduct their own study, thereby giving men who participated an HPV test.

Well, I found out that the clinic I heard of that may have had an HPV test for men does not, in fact, have an HPV test for men. They seemed to have deliberately misled interested patients, as one particular patient tried to confirm several times, through several levels, that he was scheduling himself for an HPV test, and at each level was either told yes, or given an ambiguous or non-committal answer until he finally saw the physician personally. That physician was the only person to say, flat out, that there was no HPV test for men and that their answering service gives out the wrong information all the time. The person on the phone, the receptionist, the nurse or medical technician who prepped him for the appointment - none of them corrected the patient on the belief that he would be receiving an HPV test that day.

Remember, when you go in to be tested for "everything", you are not tested for everything.

Let me repeat that:
When you go in to be tested for "everything", you are not tested for everything.

You MUST go in with a specific list of tests that you want to purchase and get confirmation from the physician herself that you will be tested for those things. And, more than just saying "I want a herpes test", you have to say "I want the HSV PCR test" or whatever you're looking for. Some STDs have different kinds of tests with different levels of accuracy and expense. Make sure you know exactly which test you want and ask for it by name.

And then be prepared to argue with them over the necessity of getting tested. Many clinics and doctors still take the position that certain STDs like herpes and HPV are so prevalent, that there's no point in worrying whether you have it or not if you're asymptomatic, so you don't need to get tested. They figure that if you don't have herpes or HPV yet, you will soon, so just don't worry about it until you start showing symptoms and need treatment. If you're OK with that, then fine, but if you want to have test results in your records to show prospective partners, then insist that doctors provide the services that they offer to the patients willing to pay for those services, and if they won't, go elsewhere.

It is true that many people either have or will have HSV or HPV, and it is also true that, for the vast majority of those people, the virus is little more than an "inconvenience". It is also true that stress about health and medical procedures can, for some health issues, be worse than the health issue itself. Many people are worse off for worrying about things than they are for having those things, and for a great deal of things, too-often testing does not significantly increase your odds of survival or better health. People who go looking for health problems will often find them, even when those problems are mild or things that the body can heal on its own. Many people put themselves through unnecessary procedures and surgeries to take care of things "just in case" that probably won't hurt them and that are so mild that they'd never know they had if they hadn't gone looking for them.

All of that is irrelevant if you have done your research and you just want to have accurate and update medical records for your prospective partners. I caution people against using test results as a way to justify and entrench their own sex-negative fears. Some people hold onto their "clean" records as sort of a talisman to justify rejecting and being hurtful towards prospective partners who might have an STI. I can't tell you how often I've heard statements like "I'm clean and I want to stay that way". The fact is you won't. STIs should be treated as any other equivalent illness. You will get sick, whether it's the flu, strep throat, the measles, or warts and cold sores. By all means, take precautions, but be consistent. If you're afraid of getting a life-threatening illness like HIV, use condoms, get your flu shots and pertussis boosters, wash your hands regularly, don't go to work sick and insist that other sick coworkers go home, and get your physicals and preventative exams done on time.

Being sick sucks, but STIs are no better or worse than any other comparable illness, so don't use your test results as a weapon against people with STIs, or to look down on people with STIs, or to think you're "safe" from life-changing surprises like illnesses. Get tested so that your partners can make informed decisions, so that you can see patterns in your own health history, and to help you and your physician decide on appropriate medical procedure schedules. If you routinely have abnormal pap smears, for example, then you ought to be getting the HPV test regularly & often, like annually or semi-annually. If you consistently have normal pap smears, have no history of cancer in your family, and your sexual network is fairly static, then you can probably get checked less often, like every other year.

But, yes, definitely get tested "regularly" (for whatever definition of "regularly" fits your particular health circumstances) and definitely insist that your physician provide you with the proper services. Just make sure to use those tests in the same way that you'd use any other health test - to evaluate your personal risk assessment and manage your personal health checkup schedules, not to freak out about being "unclean" or to ward off "dirty" partners.

For a list of the STIs that you can and should be tested for, download the Sexual Health & History Disclosure form, which includes spaces for you to add your latest testing dates & a record of your past and current partners, their testing status, & the transmissive activities you shared with them and can be found here, along with some other convenient charts & graphics http://www.theinnbetween.net/polysex.html

Orgy Or Backstage

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 02:25:55 GMT

So, we're all 13-year old boys at work and sexual innuendo is endlessly amusing. As our boss said today, sex jokes makes the day go faster. Today, we decided to formalize it after I said something that could particularly be confused for something said at an orgy. So now, we are making legitimate backstage phrases that could mistaken* for being heard at an orgy. Here's what I've collected so far:

Everyone grab one and pull!

I need a male to female turn-around.

How many slots are empty over there?

There's room for one more!

Someone help me tie this up!

It's too tight!

Can I use your tool?

Which tool do you need?

I'm getting to old to be working on my knees.

Rub the kinks out of it

This one's not kinked up yet!

My boss just fucked me

Bring it on in! No, wait! Take it out!

Aw, man, who did THAT?

Fuck that shit

Used condoms right here!

Here comes the head!

I need skinny shit to shove in here!

Shove it in the hole!

Bring it!

He's in the right pile.

Gimme the black one

Gotta twist it in.

There's a trick to it. Just remember "twist & jiggle"

I dunno about that, it looks dirty

No, not that one, it's too small. I need the horse cock.

Is that box full?

You just start breaking them and I'll come behind you.

I'm gonna need gak to fill the hole

Fine! Make me bend over!

You sure you can handle all that?

How many holes you got left?

Gonna need 3 guys to grab this fuzzy bitch and flip her on her back.

This floor ain't exactly clean. It's kinda chunky.

I get excited when I see the little ones!

I can handle the little ones all by myself!

Non-lubricated Trojan condoms are the best. (Yes, it's legitimately used backstage for backstage stuff)

My side's in, how about yours?

Need a little more ass on this!

I'm gonna go help her with her fuzzy.

I love doing the movers!

I need more 8-ways.

I can finish this by myself.

Get your fuzzy over there in line.

Make a hole!

Don't forget the nipples.

That's a tight pack right there!

Are you pulling out or staying here?

Watch your back, I'm coming behind you!

Up against the wall!

More subs!

Can I ride on the back?

When you come, go through the rear.

"How'd he get out of that harness so quickly?" "He just slid out." "I'm surprised he's not naked already!"

Now THAT'S well hung!

Are you sure that's rated for that kind of weight?

Just put that anywhere

Goddamn these condoms are tight! Don't we have any bigger ones? They hurt!

"They're all fresh & tight." "We don't get many fresh, tight ones around here."

*And by "mistaken", we don't necessarily mean that, literally, these phrases are common at all orgies (although I have actually heard quite a frew on this list at real orgies). As a person who is part of the poly and kink communities, I, and many of my fellow stagehands, are quite aware that much of what is said at an orgy can be commonplace, blasé, or even totally unusual and not something that one would expect to be said at an orgy at all. That's not the point. Re-read the part at the very beginning about "sexual innuendo" and "sex jokes". Re-read the part a third time about "jokes". It's supposed to be funny, not literal.

Carageenan Update

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 05:53:44 GMT

It was back in July, 2010 that I last wrote about carrageenan, a component of algae found in nearly every type of commericial food, that looks to have HPV-blocking properties. All in vitro testing done up until that post seemed very promising. In July of 2010, a research facility had finally gotten the go-ahead to try a double-blind trial on actual people - testing had only been done in the lab before then. Well, I haven't heard anything new since then so I haven't made any posts about it. I did a cursory Google search for the specific product that I wrote about, Carraguard, to see what happened, but I didn't find anything more recent than that same study. It has apparently concluded and found the gel to be effective, but the conclusion didn't make any headlines that I'm aware of, and no announcements about putting Carraguard into production.

Today I saw that there's another research facility in Canada doing their own double-blind, human study sing a personal lube that is currently available on the market, Divine 9 which also passed all of it's Phase II, in vitro, trials). They will give a very similar gel/lube with either carrageenan or a placebo to be used during sex and then follow up with the women in a year to check the rates of HPV infection. Hopefully something will actually come out of this study, so that we can start seeing products made specifically with anti-HPV properties in mind, and so we can offer a more affordable option to those women who can't afford the vaccine. In the meantime, there are already personal lubes available on the market with high concentrations of carrageenan as a regular ingredient used to thicken products. Divine 9, Bioglide vegan), and ~~Oceanus~~ Dreambrands Carrageenan are all commercially available lubes that the research suggests may be effective and preventing HPV transmission during sex.

Also, I just heard that there is a test for men now, but I'm still trying to get details on it. So far, all I've found is this article talking about a clinic in San Diego that decided, on its own, to start swabbing the urethra opening and performing the HPV test in the context of a research study. According to the CDC, there is still no FDA-approved test for men. Near as I can figure, individual men can occasionally convince a doctor to do the woman's test on their penis. But I know someone who claims to have found a doctor to give him the test, so when I get more information on it, I'll post it here.

Lessons From My Normal Parents

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 03:23:05 GMT

My dad is kind of a laconic man. We never spent hours discussing philosophy or religion or deep thoughts. He wasn't cold, by any means, he just didn't have all that much to say. Most of my memories of my father involve sitting in front of the television watching Cheers or Three Amigos, and sitting silently in a fishing boat trying not to spook the fish, and quietly freezing to death in the bottom of a duck blind waiting for a decent flock of mallards to fly overheard in range of the shotgun. It's probably safe to say that I was the talkative half of this duo.

But I learned some things about life from my dad. One of them happened during one of those hunting or fishing trips. See, I also learned how to drive from my dad. But the lesson extended deeper than simply operating a motor vehicle.

When I was roughly 10-ish, my dad started teaching me how to drive his giant, old, Toyota Landcruiser. It's what SUVs dream of growing up to become. It's not quite as big as a Suburban, but it's in that class from back when trucks were trucks, not overgrown minivans with a Napolean complex.

Anyway, I was too small to see over the steering wheel, however old that was. So Dad started by having me steer while sitting on his lap, as most kids who learn how to drive as kids & not teens did. From there we moved to me shifting gears while sitting in the passenger seat as he steered and operated the pedals. When I got tall enough to see over the wheel, he finally taught me how to operate the pedals and I was driving on my own by age 12.

This truck was a manual transmission and a four-wheel drive, so I had to learn both how to operate a giant-ass truck with manual transmission and no power steering, but also how to tell when the truck needed to be switched from two-wheel drive to four (and in the backwoods where the lakes and duck blinds were located, I certainly had plenty of opportunity to switch back and forth between two- and four-wheel drive).

So, this lesson takes place on the day that my dad taught me how to operate the stick shift from the passenger seat. Since Dad was operating the pedals, I put my hand on the gear shift and he yelled "shift!" when it was time to shift. Now, I'm a pretty regimented sort of person. I know my parents would never believe me, based on the state my bedroom was always in, but I love boxes and categories and organization. I like for things to fit. But even though the gear shift had a diagram of the gear pattern on the handle, Dad was trying to tell me to not worry so much about it - just remember the gears go in the shape of an H and feel the gear shift move because it will naturally want to go in the next highest slot.

I was just starting to get a handle on this whole "don't worry about the diagram" thing and just "feel" the gear shift, because it really did seem to want to go in the right spot with just a little bit of a push. So, now that I had mastered that particular skill, I began to anticipate the next level - operating the pedals.

I asked my dad how he knew when to shift. He tried to explain something about listening to the engine, but that wasn't working for me. I wanted to know which miles-per-hour-tick-mark the needle was supposed to hit that would signal the next gear change. Dad said that it didn't work like that. He tried explaining again about the engine, but I insisted that I wanted to know ... was it at 20 miles per hour? 25? Every 5 or every 10?

Dad eventually sighed and capitulated and told me some miles per hour that I could use as a rule of thumb to shift. But, he said, really, you listen to the engine and you feel the car. The car will tell you what's going on with it, you just have to listen. Driving is more than moving levers and gears. Driving is about feeling the car as if it were an extension of yourself. You have to pay attention to it, and it will communicate to you what it needs. Get to know the physical space that the car takes up as well as you know how much space you take up. Feel the road under the tires, feel the vibration of the engine, listen to the roar and the whine and the growl and the hum. The car will tell you. You'll know when to shift by how the car sounds and how the car feels.

Naturally, I didn't really understand this lesson at the time. I knew how to ride a horse, and how to communicate using very subtle body language, but this was a machine - how was I supposed to "listen to" and "feel" a car the way I could listen to and feel a horse? As I got older, I eventually learned what the rpm gauge was for, and I learned that most people didn't shift based on mph, but by rpms. So I shifted my mental scale of when to shift from every 10 mph (or whatever I thought it was) to when the rpms reached a certain level. But then I started driving on my own.

When I turned 16 and got my license, I started driving my own car (a manual transmission, naturally). And I discovered that my rule of thumb for shifting didn't apply in my little Mitsubishi commuter car the same way it worked for my dad's big, old Landcruiser. I readjusted my rule of thumb for my new car, but I had to adjust it again for every car. And then I learned that what rpms you decide to shift at depends on what you want the car to do. I had to choose a different set of rpms based on whether I was trying to save gas or racing or if I wanted to be first off the line, or even if I was downshifting!

Nothing made sense! Where was my nice set of rules? What happened to the categories, the boxes, the regiment?! That's when I finally groked my dad's lesson from all those years ago. I had to feel the car, to listen to her. She would tell me what she needed. She would tell me when she wanted to shift, and she would tell me when her needs weren't getting met, like oil and gas. All I had to do was listen, and to feel.

I learned that relationships were a lot like that too, and, in fact, life in general was a lot like that. I can make all the nice, neat little boxes and categories and rules of thumb that I want, but when it comes right down to it, if I want to really be a driver, instead of just an operator, I have to listen, and I have to feel. I will be told what I need to do if I just listen to what I'm being told and if I feel the world around me as if it's an extension of myself.

I don't always succeed. I often try to muscle my relationships and the world around me into being operated by me according to rules and boxes and categories. And, y'know, that can work an awful lot of the time, for some definition of "work". But when I do that, I'm merely operating a machine. I'm not getting the best fuel efficiency, or I'm not getting the best performance. I need to feel the car as if it's an extension of myself and I need to listen to what it's telling me. When I do that, we work together and I drive.

Thanks Dad, not only for helping me to become a much more proficient driver than many of my friends, or for instilling in me such a wonderful passion as driving, but for giving me the universe through a way of looking at things that adds such depth and connection that I think very few are privileged to experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQe3DKDQRRs

Religious Survey Archive

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:36:34 GMT

Back in 2010, the Pew Forum did a survey about how much Americans know about religion. In a 32-question phone survey*, they asked people about Christianity & their bible, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Mormonism, atheism/agnosticism, and American legal issues about religion. They found that atheists/agnostics scored the highest average, even after controlling for education & other demographics like race & sex, and did particularly well on the legal questions, questions about non-Christian religions, and questions about the Bible specifically. One of the results that I find particularly amusing is that US Southerners scored worse than those from all other geographic regions on the religious knowledge questions, even after controlling for the demographics

The Pew Survey is completed, however you can take a 15-question version of the survey at Pew's website. Your results do not affect the survey's conclusions and are not counted as data. But you can see how well you do compared to Americans in general and compared to several different demographics including religious groups. The 15 questions are taken directly from the 32 questions used in the original survey. http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/us-religious-knowledge/

You can also take another survey with all 32 questions, just to see how you'd do, but it's hosted by a Christian website and called Are You Smarter Than An Atheist? and provides no way for you to indicate what your religious affiliation is. Judging purely by the way other Christian groups have doctored online polls before, I suspect that they will take the results of their totally unscientific survey (which has atheists as well as people of other religions answering it) to show that "their" respondents (the presumption being that the respondents are all Christian) are smarter than the national average and/or the atheists who took the Pew survey. But I took the survey anyway, just to see how I'd do http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0105/Are-you-smarter-than-an-atheist-A-religious-quiz/

I scored 30 out of 32 on the full survey (the highest average being from atheists at 20.9 correct out of 32) and 15 out of 15 on the smaller Pew survey (better than 99% of all other respondents - no religious affiliations given). I'm archiving the results behind the cut because I'm rather proud of my knowledge and understanding of religious issues. Don't click the cut if you want to take the surveys yourself and see what you actually know, because the answers are given. Also don't bother clicking the cut if you don't want to be inundated with survey data - it's a boring list of numbers and stats that I'm only archiving for my own records and most people are not going to care how well I did compared to other religions on each question.

Pew Survey

You answered 15 out of 15 questions correctly for a score of 100%

QUESTION	YOUR RESPONSE	CORRECT ANSWER	% OF SURVEY RESPONDENTS ANSWERING CORRECTLY
1. Which Bible figure is most closely associated with leading the exodus from Egypt?	Moses	Moses	72%
2. What was Mother Teresa's religion?	Catholic	Catholic	82
3. Which of the following is NOT one of the Ten Commandments?	Do unto others as you would have them do unto you	Do unto others as you would have them do unto you	55
4. When does the Jewish Sabbath begin?	Friday	Friday	45
5. Is Ramadan…?	the Islamic holy month	The Islamic holy month	52
6. Which of the following best describes the Catholic teaching about the bread and wine used for Communion?	The bread and wine actuallybecomes the body and blood of Jesus Christ.	The bread and wine actually becomes the body and blood of Jesus Christ.	40
7. In which religion are Vishnu and Shiva central figures?	Hinduism	Hinduism	38
8. Which Bible figure is most closely associated with remaining obedient to God despite suffering?	Job	Job	39
9. What was Joseph Smith's religion?	Mormon	Mormon	51
10. According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to lead a class in prayer, or not?	No, not permitted	No, not permitted	89
11. According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to read from the Bible as an example of literature, or not?	Yes, permitted	Yes, permitted	23
12. What religion do most people in Pakistan consider themselves?	Muslim	Muslim	68
13. What was the name of the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation?	Martin Luther	Martin Luther	46
14. Which of these religions aims at nirvana, the state of being free from suffering?	Buddhism	Buddhism	36
15. Which one of these preachers participated in the period of religious activity known as the First Great Awakening?	Jonathan Edwards	Jonathan Edwards	11

This online quiz includes 15 of the 32 religious knowledge questions that made up the telephone survey. The order and context of the questions are not exactly the same in the online quiz and telephone survey. To ease the administration of the online quiz, the wording of some questions is slightly different from the wording used in the telephone survey. For the questions used in the telephone survey, see the survey questionnaire.