Path to Enlightened Insanity

I’ve always found it ironic that the day after Thanksgiving is the start of “the holiday shopping season.”” As if to say we’re not really sure everyone thought we were sincere on Thanksgiving, so we’re going to have a frenzy of buying to try to convince everyone we’re really thankful for them.

I just overheard some coworkers talking about a sale at Penny’s. (My coworkers will always be enshrined as Penny’s sales shoppers, like Johnny from Airplane, “There’s a sale at Penny’s!” Theres a flamer if I ever saw one.) Okay, but what I’m really looking forward to seeing is that abomination of commercialism the Thanksgiving Day newspaper hawking goods sold at a loss to get people in the door. But what is even more amazing is everyone falls for this price kangaroo fest, trying to convince their relatives they are thankful for them instead of spending the precious Thanksgiving Friday off with them.

I for one will not be one of those minion consumers directed by the marketer’s whim. I’ll be visiting with my sister who will be here from out of town.

What am I getting everyone for Christmas if I’m not going to be a marketer’s minion? Its going to be a light christmas, I’m spending $5 to $10 on each family member and making them a gift. (Hey, I’m just trying to make up from last year when my grand idea fell through and I got them nothing..)

Oh, also check out Buy Nothing Day. Its a group that advocates spending nothing on the day after Thanksgiving.

I’m starting a stock research effort right here, right now. Instead of dealing with pesky numbers, sales efforts, and business plans I’m going to focus on what really matters culture. (Because you know that twenty fifty seventy percent of those pesky numbers can be easily faked.)

I’ve been seeing at least a few emerging threads that lead me to believe culture is the most important thing. Margaret Wheatley in A Simpler Way and Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World argues that our businesses today look like large machines, plodding along moving in cog like motions, similar to how we used to view biology and physics. She suggests we look at recent discoveries in biology and quantum physics and allow ourselves to play and have flexibility. What I’ve read of the cluetrain manifesto they urge us to look at all ranks of the company and open them up and utilize the contacts within and without the company. Quite similar to this is Market Intelligence, a marketing concept that advocates utilizing information at all levels of the organization.

The company in question utilizes none of this wisdom. They have the most structured and hierarchal organization. Half of their documents have “Highly Confidential – Proprietary Information” written on the bottom of them. The people who actually do the work are seen quite frankly as replaceable commodities, despite that they’re the all important glue that brings the service together and delivers it.

Luckily they’re not in ecommerce or something like that, that requires them to pay attention to their customers.

Who are they? What do they do? I won’t tell but I wouldn’t expect those who can’t hear to hear a pin do anything, let alone drop.

Its time for a simple title.

I’ven’t gotten my news reading cycle yet. (I read news about once every three or four days, because I read such a large variety of sources it takes me 1-2 hours to get through it all usually.) But, I have caught wind of the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling instructing the legislature to legalize gay marriage within 180 days. With clockwork precision both the Governor of Massachusetts and our illustrious President denounced the ruling, wow that was surprising. Bill O’Reilly of course took on the issue; he has some interesting things to say.

First, it is my understanding that the ruling at hand only affects governmental actions regarding marriage, it does not affect religious institutions directly in any way. As private entities they reserve the right to discriminate, as it should be. Unfortunately many people believe that we should force private institutions to be nondiscriminatory even when they are not accepting governmental money. The right of any group to choose who they associate with must be protected. I will be one of the first to support the right of groups to choose their association. (Well behind the religious righters who are already lining up to fight a nonexistent fight.) I support the Boy Scouts right to prevent gay people from being allowing gay scouts to serve in leadership positions. I don’t like it, but I feel that is their lawful right. We live in a democracy with freedoms. (Just like the people of Iraq to paraphrase a recent line, just forget the US troops occupying and enforcing order.)

Next up, there is this little matter of “preserving the institution of marriage.” I want to get married some day, I’m just working on finding the right man. I am disturbed though that by the time I’m ready it might not mean anything. I’ve written before on a personal case of marriage not being taken seriously. I personally know of a few cases where the divorces almost preceded the wedding. But unfortunately people do not put enough stock in marriage. I honestly believe we do need to educate about marriage, and bash into people’s heads that they are entering into a commitment that supersedes their individuality. (For those of familiar with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine marriage is like a Trill who has chosen to be joined, its not a light decision and it cannot be reversed easily.)

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A quick note about divorce statistics. I have a not so sneaking suspicion that the figure’s we’ve been seeing aren’t lying but the liars have figured them to support their argument. I went looking and found that the government no longer collects detailed marriage and divorce information but I found reasonable set of statistics. At first glance its easy to assume that most marriages last about 7.2 years, but if you look farther you’ll note the “Average length of first marriages which end in divorce” is 11 years. I surmise from this that while there are a good number of divorces, a significant amount of them are from shorter marriages. I’ve got a librarian out finding a frequency chart for length of marriages that end in divorce/death, she needed more time to find it.

Addendum: While I was working on this my librarian came back with a few answers. While I’ve not fully combed through all of them there was one page with an interesting chart. Given that it is from a site named biblenews1.com I trust the statistics are not overly liberal. What shocked me at first was that the divorce and marriage rates have similar shaped lines. The important shift came during 1975 to 1980, where the divorce per marriage rate gained a higher ratio, but since then the percentage of people getting married has been reasonably matched with the percentage of people getting divorces. Wow, where is the crisis?

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Good now that nasty statistical matter is generally over.

Marriage has grown to an unmanageable tarball. There are 1,000 rights and responsibilities at the federal level that come with marriage. This figure surprises me and I would expect it to surprise many married couples, who haven’t looked into the issue. Quite simply this is like the cable or telephone company deciding that everyone must buy their top of the line over $100 package, instead of offering several choices that allows you to get the best fit. There are several broad categories of rights and benefits my (incomplete list) includes:

1. Parental rights (including foster care and adoption)
2. Fiscal rights (bank accounts, employer benefits, life insurance, social security, student loans, governmental loans)
3. Medical rights (you gain the ability to make decisions regarding your spouse if they are incapacitated, right to be at someone’s bedside)
4. Judicial Protections (including right not to testify against spouse, immigration rights)
5. Religious rights/responsibilites (varies by religions)
6. Social recognition of peers

I’ve deliberately chosen different categories than the GAO. The first four categories are rights generally given by the government, the other two are non-governmental and as such I won’t examine them.

I believe that instead of getting the “whole package” you should be able to pick which responsibilities and rights you want. Either of the first three could be entered into independently or jointly. Entering into the judicial protections should require you to have executed either the fiscal or parental rights clause. (To prevent people who are under criminal investigation and single from getting them as a legal shield.) Religious rights and responsibilities of course would be the responsibility of each religion to determine, and they could require entering into the other agreements. Social recognition is just something that will and has come about.

A word about parental rights, they should not be a given. The rights of the child should always come before that of the parents. I will defer to William Irvine’s books, Doing Right by Children and The Politics of Parenting. They are both excellent and accessible philosophical works concerning the history and philosophical responsibilities of parenting.

Finally you could terminate any one of these agreements via legal proceedings, as you currently can do.

But why divide marriage up? I think the best reason is that it makes people aware of what they are getting, and in addition untangles and should clarify the issue, and could reduce divorces. You may love her and want to raise kids and have her make decisions for you, but you want nothing to do with her finances. You could just get medical privileges because your past child bearing age and your finances are set.

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Concerning the predictions that the world is going to depopulate because people have said that:

Marriage is not a lifestyle choice, but a “public commodity,” critical for the survival of the human race, he said, adding that it deserves special supports and incentives.

“If there is no next generation, we are gone, we are dead,” he said.

Honestly he doesn’t understand that nature has made sex pleasur
able, there will always be a next generation, regardless of the state of marriage.

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Okay to wrap up my wandering diatribe on marriage I would like to credit Google for being invaluable in finding information, David Lauri’s blog which got me started, and the digraph “th” which occurs the most of any digraph in this entry. (See for yourself)

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But, I’ve neglected the two most important features of any marriage: love and commitment. Every marriage should have these, even if the government doesn’t recognize them.

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I’m stopping here. I believe I’ve attempted to bite off more than I can chew, so next time I’m going to attack an easier subject like world peace. Or I could sum that up too, “All you need is love”

I’m shocked. I was listening to The World on WYSO today and I listened to Bush’s speech from England. He actually sounded intelligent. This means one of

1. England makes people more intelligent
2. Bush’s speech writers think Brits are more intelligent and write up to them. Ergo, they think Americans are dumb. (unfortunately probably true.)
3. A British speechwriter rewrote Bush’s speech for the British audience

Whatever the reason, I’m for moving The White House to London.

Maybe I’m preluding my next Halloween color. I was the blue for Halloween 2002, I was the color red for Halloween this year, so maybe I’ll be green.

I got myself a pair of Celtic Green Chuck Taylor All Stars. Well actually mom “bought” them for me for my Birthday. She provided the money and i purchased.

I’m quite happy with them, they’ve got that dorky but slightly sophisticated geek look to them. Ehh more embracing my geekyness.

This eJournal entry feels important. No its not my one year anniversary of my first entry. I’ve actually started up an email list attached to my eJournal. I’ve even had a few takers! Wheee!!

Okay. Here are several things to get me started:

• I stayed late at work not on paid time, but we had a carry in dinner, and I wasn’t scheduled as late as I usually am so I stayed later to eat and chat with those around at work.
• One of my kitties is sitting on my desk, leaning forward to cuddle every time my hand wanders near the trackball/him. (His brother on the other hand is out on a Safari outside probably hunting something, but I digress)
• I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Mian Carvin’s fight concerning visitation rights for her child that she raised with her lesbian partner although she is not the biological mother.
• I’ve been remulling my criticisms of suburbia (1|2|3)
• I’m also considering the cluetrain manifesto and their thesis that markets are conversations
• I’ve been listening to Tick, Tick… Boom! (Amazon|iTMS) Jonathan Larson’s hour musical about life after 30 in NYC and his experience in theatre
• Discussions that go on about Apple computers on lists and weblogs
• My recent and spontaneous desire to vacation/move to San Francisco

So now you have a glimpse of the muddy thoughts that I’m working through at the moment. These are all linked in an over stretched concept map to community and the desire for community and companionship.

I once had a teacher in high school ask me why my generation was so depressive and negative. I didn’t quite have an answer for her then; I might have one now.

Our communities, our need for communities , and the ability to have conversations within those communities has been horribly overlooked. Over the past 100 years or so we’ve moved from a societal structure where you were only interdependent on the people within your local community to today where we’ve come to a point where our webs of interdependence are extremely wide. The actions of some electrical grid operators in Ohio blacked out NYC. Nineteen people can ground every airplane and wreck havoc throughout the country. But while we’ve become infra-structurally independent we’ve also replaced our communal activities with individual activities. We’ve replaced theatre and movies with television that we watch alone, and DVD’s that get consumed individually. Our conversations about one local newspaper have been replaced by everyone consuming an increasingly large multitude of growing news sources, but having fewer and fewer people with whom to discuss topics. We’ve beaten community down so far that we now we need a website to build a book based community.

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Random Aside: I think this is one of the reasons why Howard Dean’s campaign has caught so much momentum, he’s focused on building community.

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I’ve gotten lost a little bit in my thoughts, I’m just attempting to weave too many threads together. Like a good procrastinating college student I started reading web pages. I came across the key paragraph on a rant on working for AOL:

AOL is about centralization and control of content. Everything that is good about the Internet, everything that differentiates it from television, is about empowerment of the individual.

In addition because the Internet individually empowers individuals it also empowers groups of individuals, but at a level where we’re still individuals and not demographics.

The promise of the Internet is not that it brings us into the future, it empowers us to return to our tribal roots, organizing around common interests and beliefs, and helping each other.

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Additionally, the ever present chasm that must be navigated though is self empowerment of the individual at the expense of the community. I firmly believe we have to carefully balance our needs versus the needs of our community. There has been an unfortunate rise in people valuing their needs above all others, and as such as caused unfortunate social conditions such as divorce, poor child raising, and a decrease in meaningful civic activity.

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We are sinking, seeking community but we’re often too self-centered to truly devote ourselves to community.

Brad is nothing, if not frustrating at times.

We’ven’t talked recently and I just sort of was done with him, assuming he was too busy to date really.

He just told me today that he’s dating someone else that he dated before me.

I’m a little pissed, but at least he told me and was honest, if not a little late. My theory, he just didn’t want to tell me because he knew it would hurt me. And you know, that is sweet, it really is.

I’m frustrated. The poor excuse of a cable company, Time Warner seems to be content with allowing their service to completely stop every week or so.

Its not that amazingly bad to lose television, but we’re dependent on them for internet access too. I’d give up my cell phone before I’d give up my internet.

But, back to the point. This is the company that is planning on asking people to be dependent on them for all of their wired communication services (Internet, Television, and Telephone). The telephone if you think of it is the one service we depend on just to work. Period.

I hate to speculate about why we’ve had such spotty service, but if you ask me its because their servers (which do run the television services) are on Windows XP. A poor excuse for a critical task, such as running all your customer’s services.

When I was a little younger one of the things I found (and currently do find) extremely frustrating is the lack of diverse, images of gay men and honest realistic images of gay men and gay life.

(I will readily concede that all media images of hetro and homo attracted people are distorted.)

I sometimes really get this feeling I’m a bit of lithium in a sea of water, out of place desperately seeking a sea of lithium or maybe even just some kerosene to reside in. But for now I’m stuck sputtering, sparkling and flaring up every once in a while.

I don’t think I’m alone in my desire to be around a bunch of homoattracted people. The concept of the “gay ghetto” is well established. I was even once chastised by the GLBT community at Wright State because I TiVo’d Scrubs, but not Will & Grace. The GLBT people in question assumed that because I’m gay that I’d watch it religiously. But it doesn’t interest me, because really it is a distorted view of life, like many sitcoms and is overly dependent on stereotypes. For example:

• Grace – She is the classic fag hag, slightly in competition with Will, but always supportive of him.
• Will – The obstinate professional who is a lawyer first and is perpetually dating, clumsy and single.
• Karen – An often quirky hetro attracted woman, who is too cartoonish to exist in real life. Arguably she exists to mellow out the portray of Jack. (more on that in a moment.)
• Jack – Quite frankly is one of the most egregious portrayals of a stereotype, he is a fun loving, moderately irresponsible, always funny and artistic to a fault portray of a gay queeny fairy. He exists as the musing entertainer. Sean Hayes’s performance, while faithful to the character as written, echos of the blackface of the Blackface Minstrelsy in which Black entertainers in order to compete with the black makeup of white imitators darkened their skin, in order to fit the role as modified by their white imitators. Sean Hayes in the same way plays Jack with reinforced gayness, the same way as a hetro attracted actor would play the character to ensure that no one would mistake his intentions.

These characters simply put are unrealistic extremes. To state that Will & Grace represents gay life is the same as saying that The Simpsons represent Middle America. They’re both funny and insightful in their own way, but ultimately they’re just cartoons.

But, I have digressed from my initial purpose. I have longed for a love son from one man to another that doesn’t involved AIDS, death, or other depressive subjects. I have finally found one, Hitchhiking Across America (iTMS|Amazon), composed by William Finn and performed by Lewis Cleale. It is a beautiful song, simple but moving. I wish I had heard it when I was 17.

I cannot wait to find another.

Okay. I’m in one of those pissy ass moods.

What did this? Before I came into work I was happy and talking with Jenni at Starbucks. I talked a little too much and arrived at work 6 minutes late, which is 3 minutes past the end of the 3 minute grace period.

Given that being late knocked 25 cents per hour for the month off my performance bonus which at 40 hours per week is a cut of $40.00 or so.

So those three minutes end up being valued at $798 per hour. ($40 lost/3 minutes=$13.33 lost per minute. $13.30 lost per minute x 60 minutes=$798 lost per hour.)

So now you know why I’m pissed I lost my performance bonus. I know there is no way my company can honestly say that our work is valued at $798 per hour. I know at our most profitable operating peak we’re pulling in $49.20 to $75 per hour. But usually we’re rarely at our most profitable.

So now you see why I’m a little pissy ass. But it is all good. I just got 100% on one of my two monthly surveys. Maybe I could convince them I’m worth $798 per hour. Then I’d always be on time.