3days4nights

I'm back to livejournal after quite a long absence. In the interim I have conceived and given birth to our second daughter, Rosemary Melissa and have started building a new house. Well, I'm not actually building it, just doing all the paperwork and miscellany purchases that come with it. I did, however, help my father put in the wiring and I did all the computer/phone wiring myself (I have 21 lines running to the router; my philosophy was to use up all of the 1000 of cat5 wire). In the last year I've also stopped working and had my good friend Michelle move away. This is certainly a downside to living in Houghton. Most of our friendships are of a transitory nature. Now that the pregnancy/new mother hormones are waning, however, I'm going to try to get back to writing again, and not just livejournal. Future posts to look forward to: My adventures with a nearly 90 year old Jehovah's Witness and my first meeting (as a skeptic) of HAPI - the Houghton Alliance of Paranormal Investigators.

Jim's Foodmart (or Ji 's Foo Mar for a time when the sign was partially burnt out) carries probably the best selection of candy in our area. When I was in there earlier this week grocery shopping, I scanned the candy bars for my traditional post-shopping snack and came across this dandy.



Notice it's not "For Boys," just, "It's Not For Girls." Why would a candy bar be not for girls? Does it have a dose of "Just For Men" in it? Did they have a large batch of chocolate tainted by some industrial testosterone that happened to be lying around the Nestle factory in a 55 gallons drum and, oops? Did a janitor lean too far over a vat and get cooties in it? The female cashier guessed it was because the bar had about a million calories in it, (366 to be exact). Maybe Nestle is trying to market chocolate to young guys who have grown up thinking that chocolate was only for girls, especially at certain "special" times. Whatever their logic might have been in marketing a bar this way, it worked on me. I bought it, took it home and shared it with Tim and Sam. It tasted like chocolate to me. Tim said, I quote exactly, "it tastes like chocolate." Sam took a bite and then said, "Chocolate, mmmm." None of us seems to have developed any secondary male sexual traits, except for Tim and I'm pretty sure he had them before eating the chocolate. One last note: This is an imported item and was not packaged for American sale (they had to affix a sticker on the back with the US required nutritional information).

A question for my readers...What other food(-like) items should be labelled "It's Not For Girls." I'm thinking Mountain Dew, but really the label for that should read, "2 Liter size available only to role-playing, computer-programming males between the ages of 13 and 25."

LiveScience.com posted an article today: "Modern Humans Retain Caveman's Survival Instincts". The findings they detail are that humans detect and are more wary of animate objects, such as tigers, dogs and spiders than of inanimate objects such as a "stapler or wheelbarrow." Most dangerous of all we "are more likely to meet death via an SUV than a charging wildebeest," but our instincts are more attuned to seeing and avoiding the wildebeest. Therefore, to reduce the dangers posed to us by our modern, unnatural environment, I propose that all SUVs manufactured henceforth be in the shape of a charging wildebeest. That way our primitive instincts will serve their purpose and protect us from these modern killers.

 
Looks a bit pleiocene. I've noticed my eyes have felt colder lately, too.

Going to the styling salon is always a little bit of a gamble. You'll come out looking different than when you went in but there is always a chance of looking worse. I went in on Tuesday to get my hair cut and, while I was there, I had my eyebrows done. In the past eyebrow work has entailed picking off the little stray hairs that have forgotten their proper place in life. This time, however, I spontaneously added, "and you can be a little more aggressive this time," as she daubed on the wax. She ripped and plucked and was quite proud of herself when she was done. The angry red puffiness over my eyes made it difficult to assess immediately afterward but, as the color faded, I saw that I had been bereft of most of my luxurious thick eyebrows. Now today, all day long I've been glancing in windows, car mirrors and every other reflective thing I come across and I've decided that nature intended me to have more eyebrow than this. The missing hair gives the effect of making me look a bit Neanderthal while simultaneously affecting the visage of a shrill, severe woman. Smiling doesn't seem to soften the effect much. The hair that's left streaks across my face in a line of uniform thickness making me look a bit artificial, as though my lines were drawn on auto-cad. These little guys also send the false message that I'm way more girly than I really am. I wouldn't want anyone to look at my face and think, "There's a woman who can't change a flat tire after a night of camping in a field with a shotgun next to her sleeping bag," because not only can I do that, but I have! I'm glad hair grows back and all my good friends (that's you guys) will be sympathetic and not laugh too hard when you see me next. By the way, mark your calendars for October 5 - 6pm. I'll be buying everyone pizza and beer at the KBC for my birthday.

I hope you've all heard the news about the hypocritical senator from Idaho who was arrested in a men's bathroom in the Minneapolis airport. Although it happened a few months back, the story was just recently made public. To give a quick synopsis, Craig hovered around another man's stall, then entered the stall next to it and gave "signals" which included tapping his foot then moving over and touching the other man's and running his fingers along the underside of the divider. The other man turned out to be a plain-clothed police officer on a stake-out who then arrested Craig. We're all rightfully angry with Craig because of the immense hypocrisy of a man who voted for men like himself to be booted from the military (Craig's arrest would have ended a military career) but continued working for his sector of the government. But the arrest itself is another matter. How is it that toe-tapping, footsie and fingers slid under a stall divider in a public restroom can be an arrestable offense, especially considering the charges were "lewd-conduct". It may not have been nice what he did, or sensible, but who would consider any of those actions as lewd? While we're all grooving on our schadenfreude we should consider that perfectly nice, non-hypocritical fellows are being arrested and levied fines for this same behavior. If two men want to connect by signaling in a bathroom and then go off somewhere else and hook-up, then good for them. If they want to have sex where children and unwilling witnesses have to do their duty, then arrest them. But the intent - whether it be hand-signals, semaphore or interpretive dance moves - does not constitute lewd behavior or an arrestable offense.

Well, August 1^st was my last day of work. I’ve been in the lab since January of 2002 with a bit of a break when I had Sam. I think Chung-Jui was getting tired of me working part-time and the problems we kept having with the transformations didn’t help. Tim does well enough I don’t need to scramble for a new job but I’ve already started doing work editing documents for faculty and students who aren’t native English speakers. I certainly won’t miss dinking around with in-vitro plant cultures all day but I enjoyed getting out of the house and making enough to give our income a little boost. The timing is good, though; day care closes for the month of August so now I don’t have to try to work evenings and weekends to make up for being at home with Sam. We’re also starting the new house this spring so I’ll be able to dedicate the time it will require to be our own contractor. I’d like to start some of the work this winter, like building some of the bookshelves. Bon Voyage forestry!

The new Harry Potter book is out, a slab of a volume that even Wal-Mart presented promptly at midnight on the magical release date of July 21. Rowling put a nice finishing bow on her creation, tying up all the questions of Dumbledore’s past, Harry’s relationship to You-Know-Who and the whereabouts of the Horcruxes (which I’ve been dubiously pronouncing hoar – cruises, which makes the dialogue a bit unreal).

 

The Potter-verse is a bit quirky and inconsistent. Why wouldn’t magic people know about Muggle goings-on? Wouldn’t they take an interest in Iran’s possession of a nuclear bomb? Wouldn’t they watch Dancing with the Stars on television? (Maybe they possess a talisman against such things). They’re obviously a minority people lodged in a much larger population. How could they remain so isolated? It’s really a stupid question, though, and an unnecessary one. Rowling created the her world around Harry Potter, not the other way around and the charm of the thing would be lost if we became mired up in questions of magical involvement in the Holocaust or the Geneva Convention as it applies to Azkaban.  

 

Her characters, as little as they may be involved in the Muggle world, however, are still very much human. They are people, like you and me, but plus some. They get married, make babies, have murderous rages, have careers, play sports, get jealous, write newspaper articles and, in general, participate in all the trappings of an average life and perform magic. If they’re up to all the normal human pursuits, what else might they be doing? Imagine what’s likely going on between chapters: Smoking pot, looking at porn (remember their pictures can move and talk), betting on illegal dragon fights and having orgies. They’re only human after all. But they’re only human with some really, really cool special abilities.

 

And this brings me to Poly-Juice potion. If you don’t know, this is the drink that, with a hair from your target subject, can turn you into that person. In the book it’s only ever used in order to sneak around incognito with some caveat to explain why people aren’t forever downing the stuff but, my goodness, imagine the possibilities! Hermione, among others, takes some to turn into Harry. She’s completely nonchalant about the transformation but I, in her position, would have immediately (and purely in the interest of education) looked down my pants.

 

I certainly don’t have penis envy but what an opportunity! I’d be excusing myself to the bathroom (um… I’ll be back in 5) to have a once in a lifetime learning experience. Imagine the fun you could have with the stuff at home! Husband and wife I now pronounce you wife and husband. Supermodels could sell strands of their hair for exorbitant prices. (What would the children sired from such unions be like?) Old people could become young (and horny) again. Could you dig up some strands of, say, Herbert Hoover if you happened to have a thing for, say, Herbert Hoover? Hermione’s transformation to a cat in an earlier book didn’t go so well but for a furry it would have been perfect (and, my god yes, I spared you from the pun). And this is just the polyjuice potion!

A number of articles have pointed out that Potter fans have grown up with the book and now, in college, are seeing their children’s fantasy come to an end. Maybe it’s time for Rowling to work on some sequels for Potter, some for her grown-up audience.

 

PS – I have a challenge for my readers (all five of you). Think of a good name for a Harry Potter themed porn movie. The winner will get a vat of polyjuice and all the hairs out of my vacuum cleaner bag.

            The storm approaching was the type only produced in the sprawling open country found in the center of the North American continent. Moisture laden air, which has been heated by the unrelenting summer sun, has been driven high into the sky where, encountering the repressively thin and cold upper atmosphere, it has its water wrung from it in the first few hesitant drops. The heat of condensation produced by this encounter, however, further warms the air mass, driving it higher still, until far below the intense low pressure creates a great sucking center where the surrounding air is drawn in at high speeds.

To an observer on the ground the first forewarning is the flushed darkening of the swelling summer sky. Blue, bruised clouds amass, a sheet slipping up over the landscape concealing the throes to come. In the last of the stillness, (the winds haven’t reached yet), sounds move thickly and with great gravity, reminiscent of the belly of a fat man jiggling in slow motion. A majestic green color overlays the darkening horizon and a guttural rumble of thunder can be heard. The first winds bring a keen coolness and the trees, stirred into unease in the full leaf of summer, create a raspy, breathy sound that seems disproportionate to the delicacy and limpness of the leaves producing it. As the blowing grows harder, lightning appears, putting a startling glow in the mouths of the clouds while a few outlying streaks can be seen naked and white, groping at the ground. The first of the rains fall like light, wet kisses before the storm deepens and the drops become fuller and more meaningful, threatening to knock blooms from flowers and producing the first few puddles in low spots.

With shocking speed, the storm lays its full weight on the land. The wind, rain and lightning in turn become more frenetic and violent, as though goading each other on and competing for the affections of a masochist. The leaves shake and twist as the wind grows to full force, causing them to indiscreetly expose their fair colored undersides. Rain pelts against every surface augmenting the horizontal push and thrust of the wind with sharp downward blows from the thick droplets. Flashes of lightning brighten the dark scene unnaturally as though the sun were distending itself and bursting in lines running from the sky to the ground. The most distant strikes have a palpable pause before the groan of thunder is heard but the closest hits instantly reveal an intimate buzzing sound produced from near their core.

As the storm crescendos, rain is driven up under shelters and the wind and lightning make even the sturdiest of foundations questionable. The sound is now overwhelming and to be heard and heeded our observer would need to shout from deep in the diaphragm, with full lung and open mouth. The three forces of wind, rain and lightning cannot maintain their frenzy, however, and an anticlimax of tapering off occurs quickly. The trees stand upright again and the buffeted leaves now hold quite still as though catching their breath and the rumbles of the lightning become more distant, like footsteps shuffling off down an empty hallway. The finality of the end is sealed by the first calls of reappearing birds and children, and the warm, post-coital blush of sunlight streaking down through the clouds.

 

A friend posted that she has recently re-discovered the value of good friends. I would concur. In fact, today, as I was bouncing around on the riding lawn mower and chomping down on my cigar, I thought of it this way:

A good friend is cheaper than a psychologist and more responsive than God.

I want to ask everyone a question. When I say the word (name) “Lolita”, what do you think of? A book? A girl? A specific type of girl, right? The town of Lolita in Jackson County Texas made a failed attempt to change its name within a few years of the release of Nabokov’s book because the association, presumably, was a source of shame and embarrassment. Strong feelings indeed for a name that rolls off the tongue like confetti at a parade.

 

Now, let me guess your answer to my question. It was something like this: a sexually precocious pre-teen female who understands the power of her burgeoning sexuality and uses it to club and control weak men around her. Without ever having read Nabokov’s 1955 bombshell Lolita, I had picked up this definition from the cultural references the book has engendered in the decades since. Although I knew it was considered a classic, the hypocrisy of the archetype left me somewhere between disgusted and frustrated. Without ever cracking a page open, I felt I would hate the book. A week ago, however, I reluctantly bought a copy so that, if nothing else, all these references I keep stumbling upon wouldn’t have, in my mind, to rely only on earlier references to make sense. I wanted to go to the source.

 

The book is good. It is damn good. Nabokov has a touch with the English language (not even his native language!) that contorts it to your pleasure. He’s the kind of author that could have written the AAA guide to the motels of the Midwest and still kept you up past midnight reading it. But I was shocked to find that the common consensus concept of Lolita has nothing in common with the lovely tragedy that is Nabokov’s Lolita. If you love The Mythbusters, who bust pseudoscience at its source, then give me a few more paragraphs to bust this literary myth.

 

Lolita, the girl, is on the losing end of the adult-child covenant. Her father is dead, her mother resents her and she is careening through life trying to suck up what affection and sense she can. Her mother dies (car, dog) and all she is left with is a pedophile who, in non-toxic doses, has given her a simulacrum of the love every child needs to thrive. But with the death of the mother, the pedophile takes her into an isolation where “she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” Yes, she had participated in his brand of love, but it can only remind one of the conundrum expressed by many child victims of sexual abuse, “I didn’t like what he was doing, but, well, I liked the attention.”

 

To put the final cement to his control over Lolita, the pedophile tells her that turning him in will be a worse experience for her than him. He tells her, “You will dwell [in state care], my Lolita will dwell…with thirty-nine other dopes in a dirty dormitory…under the supervision of hideous matrons.” What does she, a twelve-year old girl, have in the world? The ledger would be sparse: Pedophile – 1, Friends – 0, Family – 0. She has so little and yet she believes it’s possible to have even less. She lets him do what he wants, but we have to ask what choice does she have? I don’t mean to say that she has to trade sex for the necessities of basic survival, (although she does for the simplest of luxuries: a trip to the movies or to go roller-skating); she takes sex as the only form of affection that is offered up to her. She needs love, as do we all, and sex is the price of admission.

 

Where is the manipulative siren who understands the ruin she is heaping on this man? She’s in a mountain meadow; “the operation [sex] was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms; - a salutary storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her…”; she’s in a kitchy motel lost in the American wilderness, “[sobbing] in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep.” Why does she wait until he is asleep? Because, in the absurdity of it all, she doesn’t want him to know she is unhappy.

 

Lolita does twice, in the hundreds of times they have sex, initiate the act. She knew, though, the Siamese-twins of love and sex come as a pair, or at least with her pedophile the deal clearly worked that way. I would also like to remind everyone that courts of law do not (expect in exasperating exceptions) try twelve- or thirteen-year olds as adults. The covenant between the adult and child is clear: the adult is the regent for the child, making decisions that the child does not possess the wherewithal to make, preserving the safety and dignity of the child until the child steps into adulthood. With this in mind, Lolita could have been salacious as a smiling stripper and still have been wronged by this forty-some year old man.

 

The Lolita of the legend, the myth, is nowhere to be found in the pages. Nabokov’s writing, however, is so dense and so filled with meaning that the hundredth reading of the book would be as meaningful as the first. Maybe the Lolita, the cock-tease that sweaty half-awake men love and ridicule, is hiding somewhere in this book. But we’ve all been pre-teens, (boy or girl, it makes no difference), and we understand that the frailty of the first spark of our sexuality is not yet ready to join the conflagration of our need to give and receive love. Lolita, however, was alone, completely alone, and had to take her warmth where she could find it.

 

The next time someone uses the term “Lolita” wrongly, wherever you are wandering on whatever continent you happen to be, please correct them.

 

When I first heard of the shootings at Virginia Tech I was, like most every normal human being, appalled and disgusted. I also felt bad for everyone, not the hand-holding cande-light vigiling students; no, not them. I felt bad for the people who were dead and for those who loved them.  It was a tragedy, it was senseless, it was stupid. I considered all of this for a minute or two, then I continued with my work for the day.

The national moment(s) of wallowing that followed seemed to be part of a vicarious suffering competition. The half-staff flag at the local Perkins restaurant left me wondering if I should be upset because they were making a mockery of the whole thing or that one moron could get his most gleeful desires fulfilled by convincing everyone everywhere that they were very truly and completely upset. It's a cliche but it's worth repeating: People die stupid, senseless deaths everyday. The only difference between those deaths and these deaths is that it was sexy in a way that the media loves. 

I considered writing a long essay on all of this but I came across an article by Christopher Hitchens that put my feelings into solid, coherent words in a simple and elegant way that was much more articulate than what I could have produced. The link is below and if you, like me, felt a sinking disgust at the reverberations of this shooting as much as at the shootings themselves then I highly suggest taking a few minutes to read it.


http://www.slate.com/id/2164914/?nav=navoa

This is a short story I'm submitting for publication. I'm not sure if this counts as publishing so all of you keep mum, it could be worth tens, maybe even twenties of dollars! Enjoy and let me know what you think.

 

I stood in the Atrium and everywhere I looked windows were lighting the room brilliantly. Smiling polite people were milling around, stopping when they recognized someone or introducing themselves when they didn’t. I was situated on the periphery watching them, considering jumping into the current of the crowd but dawdling instead.

I was cozy with the afternoon sun coming in brightly through the windows. It was a chance to knock-off of work for awhile and it was breaking the monotony of the day nicely. A well-groomed young man, only a few years younger than myself, pulled out of the stream of people and stood near me but not next to me. He probably wanted a break, too, a chance to absorb some of the warmth coming in through the massive windows next to us. I was looking at him because I knew him. He was rocking slightly on his feet and his head was turning slowly in an arc surveying the crowd. I didn’t mean for him to, but he caught me from the corner of his eye and so, to be polite, turned his head the rest of the way and gave me a brief smile. I smiled back and looked away quickly but we were caught in a socially awkward moment. I didn’t really want to speak with him and he probably would have preferred to be standing there by himself. We couldn’t pretend to not be there near one another, though, and so he said with a neutral friendliness, “This is a great turnout.”

The term is old-fashioned but he looked dapper in his dark suit and striped tie, his hair neatly groomed and his face handsome and kind. “It is,” I replied. I added on, so as not to sound abrupt, “This is a great room for holding events like these. It’s no wonder they always like to come up here for these functions.” I gave a little laugh and he smiled a little wider and stopped rocking on his feet. He opened his mouth to speak but shut it again. Then he turned slightly to face me and said, “I think I know you.”

            “You do,” I replied. He looked nice, most everyone there was looking very nice and the dazzling winter sun gave everyone a loving glow. “I went to Fall Camp with you – fall semester of ’96 I think.”

            He smiled with an open mouth and let his head roll back, “That’s right, I remember that.” He looked away, toward nothing in particular and said, “I dropped out that semester, I was only there a few weeks.” He looked at me again and added with some reserved pride, “I ended up in the college of business and now, well, this.” He spread his hand out toward the crowd and chuckled again politely. The sun, where barred by the window frames, made stark shadows on the floor. My back, which was facing the row of windows, felt warm, like someone had wrapped a soft heavy blanket around my shoulders. I wanted to say it and so I did.

            “I know you probably don’t remember but one day, on a field trip when we were all standing around, I was near you and a group of some other guys. I was standing in front of you all, about ten feet away maybe.” He stood there patiently smiling while I spoke. “You were talking to these guys and you said something quite…” I cocked my head and looked up toward the skylights in the high ceiling and rolled my hand while I searched in my mind for the words I wanted, “quite disgusting and vulgar and… well, shocking, in a way.” I looked to him and he had become serious and concerned, the muscles in his face tightening slightly. I continued on, “whenever I happen to see you around all I can think about is what you said that day. I don’t really know anything about you or what kind of man you’ve become since then, but that moment is all I can ever think of when I see you.” He was gazing at me respectfully and directly now. I finished by saying, “I’m sorry, actually, you’re a whole person I realize – but to me, for the rest of my life, you’ll just be those few sentences; that will be everything you’ll ever be to me.”

            He said quickly and sincerely, “I’m sorry.”

            I felt a little bad. I looked circumspectly at his face. “It doesn’t matter,” I laughed a little, “I’m just one person, and one you don’t know anyway.” A car that looked like mine drove past the window and I thought happily I’d be going home soon and that tomorrow I’d be working on some samples from the greenhouse. He looked unsure and repentant and had started rocking on the balls of his feet again. I looked down and kicked at the grouting between the tiles under my feet and said with a friendly shrug of my shoulders, “It’s not that I’m mad at you. It’s just that it stuck in my mind. I don’t know why but sometimes I think of it and when I do I see your face. I’ve always wanted to tell you about it. You look so different now but all I see is that kid.”

            He wasn’t looking at me anymore - he was looking down to the earthy-colored tiles on the illuminated floor. “I don’t remember this at all. What did I say?”

            Before he could even finish the questioning lilt at the end of the word “say” I said consolingly, “It doesn’t matter at all. I’m not even sure why I said anything.” We stood there trying to think of words for to make an exit.

“Well, I need to get back to work,” I said. As I took the first few steps away from him I added stupidly out of habit, “See you later.” I went up the stairs and down the long hall to the greenhouse where I swiped my card-key to get in the door. The sunlight was even brighter here than in the atrium and the water in the soil, the pools of it on the concrete and the drips coming from the spray-nozzles created a moisture that gave the heat a fullness that worked into my clothes and lungs.

Tuesday ,March 6, 2007, I attended a lecture in Fisher Hall at Michigan Tech and wrote this response, which I am working on getting published in the Michigan Tech Lode. 
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Tuesday evening I attended a lecture sponsored by the Michigan Tech Muslim Students Association titled “Islam and Science”. The main speaker was Ali Sadun Engin of Harun Yahya International, an organization whose mission is, in part, to 

…recall various crucial facts, which people are led to disregard and even deny under the influence of the turmoil of the modern age. One of these basic facts is that of creation, that the universe, living things and man, are not self-existing entities, but the artifacts of God, the Supreme Creator. We are all created by Him and to Him we will all return. The allegedly "scientific" challenges to this fact — like Darwinism and other materialistic dogmas — are nothing but deceptions… 1


The late naturalist Stephen Jay Gould placed the domains of science and faith into what he termed “NOMA”, non-overlapping magisteria, with science being the magisteria addressing the “how” of our world and faith being the magisteria which addresses the why. He believed it was not appropriate, or even possible for that matter, for either side to trespass into the philosophical realm of the other. The Tuesday night lecture, however, was something of an attempt to reconcile these two seemingly irreconcilable magisteria: faith – the knowledge of the existence of a higher power that requires no proof, or alternately, is its own proof, and science – knowledge that comes from observation of the tangible world.

To those who have considered Christian creationists and ‘intelligent design’-ers, the arguments presented Tuesday evening are well worn and already well-refuted. Mr. Engin, during the course of an hour, presented two main points: proof in nature of a designer (god) and proof that the Qur’an (Koran) was divinely inspired by said designer. He opened his lecture with a video of a picturesque beach scene - waves lapping onto the golden shore scouring swirls and patterns in the wet sand. He next presented us with a picture of a sandcastle on the same beach and stated the obvious: A person who happened upon this structure would not assume it was created by the chance action of water but would assume it was built by people. Extrapolating to the universe, Mr. Engin posits that we are something like cosmic beachcombers surrounded by galactic sandcastles and that everything around us (especially living things), by virtue of their very existence and the improbability of their being created by chance, give proof of a designer who must be divine.

Richard Dawkins, in his book The Blind Watchmaker, tackles this same question: Do all creations require a creator? He deftly explains how life, and the process by which it developed – evolution, are not driven by chance at all, but by a biological system where advantageous traits are preferentially selected for and accrue over many generations. Can waves make a sandcastle? They can if sandcastle-like traits are preserved (genes) and non-sandcastle-like traits are destroyed (natural selection) with the continuing action of water and wind. A succinct example of this principle of non-chance is to imagine tossing pennies in the air. What are the chances, if 100 pennies are tossed simultaneously, of all of them landing face up? The chances are very small, indeed. In fact, you could probably go at this all your life and never get the whole of them to land face up. What if you impose a type of natural selection on this process, however, by tossing the coins, setting aside all those that land head-up and then only re-toss the losing tail-landing coins? The system becomes self-correcting and within minutes you have 100 pennies, all of them face up. Evolution, like selectively tossing these coins, is not at all ‘just chance’.

In the next portion of Engin’s lecture, he presented us with a natural history of honeybees. The gist of this rather large portion of the lecture was to say that honeybees are incredible, no one can explain how they do all the things they do and therefore god must have created them and be guiding them. Imagine using this type of logic in our daily lives. I can’t imagine how my car keys got into this drawer, therefore god did it. I don’t know how my DVD player really works, therefore god makes it work. I don’t know what’s been eating the peas in my garden – therefore god has been doing it. Of course, in these examples the true answers are: I put my keys in the drawer but forgot I had done it, the way a DVD player works is difficult to understand but not unknowable and yes, it could have been God in my garden, but logic would indicate a more mundane causal agent, like a rabbit. Just because at this moment in time a phenomenon may seem miraculous or unexplainable, there is no cause to drag a supernatural tinkerer into the explanation or to assume we cannot study, analyze or theorize a more rational explanation. Had our ancestors been content with the “god must have done it” answer to everything, science and study would have been made useless and no progress toward improving ourselves and our knowledge of our world would have been possible.

Mr. Engin then moved onto proving, through science, the hand of the divine in the Koran. The whole logic of his thinking here brought back to me memories of reading Eric Van Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods as a teenager. Van Daniken, who was out to prove all sorts of madness such as extra-terrestrial visits to primitive humans, used as proof of this alien interference the notion that our forbearers were too stupid to know, understand and create the extraordinary edifices and objects they left behind. The pyramids of Egypt are really complicated, his thinking went, way too complicated for those ignoramus humans to have built them; therefore aliens came down from space and did it for them. When citing scientific knowledge in the Qur’an, Mr. Engin runs on the same type of argument, except he takes the supposed stupidity of pagans who were contemporary to Muhammad to be proof of God’s (Allah’s) existence, not meddling ET’s who have an urge to build large stone structures. How could these ancient people of the Middle-East have known the Dead Sea was a “low land”, he asks? They couldn’t have, he responds, they were too ignorant. Van Daniken and Mr. Engin need to give the human race some credit. Is it really implausible that people could work hard and move stones or that travelers descending 1371 feet into the Jordan Rift Valley wouldn’t notice they were entering a “low land”? Mr. Engin is painfully forcing his point here, the ancients may not have understood the world as we do, but they were far from being idiots, either.

Another subterfuge of Van Daniken’s was to over-interpret the writings and artwork of historical peoples by superimposing modern notions onto them. For Van Daniken this was nonsense such as reinterpreting an Aztec carving to be of an astronaut and the Nazka Lines geoglyphs in Peru to be landing strips for alien craft. Mr. Engin does the same when he gives Qur’an verses such as 75:36-37, “Does man reckon he will be left to go on unchecked? Was he not a drop of ejaculated semen?” He makes much of the word “drop” to imply the Qur’an correctly describes the biological process of fertilization at a cellular level: a single sperm creating (with an egg, of course, but the verse fails to mention this) a new person. Focusing on the word “drop” is reading a great deal into the meaning of one word. We must ask, if the Qur’an was written to create an understanding of human reproduction, why is the wording so brief, vague and open to multiple interpretations? Likewise the verses 96:1-3 speak, Mr. Engin stated, of a “leech” as being the beginning of a man. He gives this as proof of knowledge of implantation of the embryo in the womb and its nourishment there, like a parasitic leech sucking blood from its victim. (Interestingly, when I looked for this verse in English editions of the Qur’an, I found multiple translations, with “clot of congealed blood” not “leech” being more commonly given as the meaning of the Arabic word “Alaqa”. This is quite reasonable given that the influential Greeks, most notably Aristotle, believed that fetuses arose from semen mingling with congealed menstrual blood.) Even if one were to concede “leech” is the correct translation, is this single fuzzy verse really providing adequate proof of the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient god? One would do well to remember the maxim, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,” and calling a fetus a leech (or congealed blood) is not extraordinary (or even mediocre) proof.

Most all religions play this game of “spot the science in the scripture” and they are all about equally good at it. Humorously enough, the sticky point arises that they can’t all be divinely inspired given that, as defined in the “divine” books themselves, these religions are mutually exclusive. It’s one thing to meticulously refute the sloppy logic of these creationist theologians but it’s another to hand them Stoner and Newman’s Science Speaks: Scientific Proof of the Accuracy of Prophecy (a Christian book), John Widtsoe’s Joseph Smith as Scientist (a Mormon Book) or Harun Yahya’s The Qur’an Leads the Way to Science (an Islamic book) and let them see their logic make the same conclusions about a different religion.

Ultimately, this lecture violates the boundaries Stephen Jay Gould sets in his construct of non-overlapping magisteria. Religion, whatever strain it may be, is absolutely willing, when it suits them, to commandeer the good reputation of science in order to prove their own existence. When science, however, makes the same incursion, bringing logic and reason into the domain of religion, the cry of “foul-play” is heard and scientists are told they must respect the diversity and sanctity of faith. Consider the opinion of Reverend Raymond Lawrence who wrote in The New York Times concerning a scientific study of the efficacy of prayer:

Responsible religious leaders will breathe a sigh of relief at the news that so-called intercessory prayer is medically ineffective....But if it could ever be persuasively demonstrated that such prayer "works," our religious institutions and meeting places would be degraded to a kind of commercial enterprise, like Burger King, where one expects to get what one pays for. 2

It’s difficult to imagine religious leaders having remained equally ambivalent about science in religion had the prayer study turned out differently.

Richard Dawkins is not content to keep the magisteria of science and faith separate: “The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice – or not yet – a decided one.” For this moment, however, I am content to give faith a rarefied space at the table of ideas, no matter how incorrect I think they may be. When they cross into the domain of science, though, they should not be upset or surprised to see me crossing the same divide.

1. http://www.harunyahya.com/m_about_site.php
2. The New York Times, April 11, 2006

On my way out of class in the Walker Humanities Building I spied a poster that tantalyzingly read "Writing Contest". This is what a closer inspection revealed:

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Design with Women in Mind: A Writing Contest

Ah, Michigan Tech, a school infamous for its disproportionate male-to-female ratio. It could be fun to ponder what Tech would be like if the ratio were reversed -- but that only switches who sets the tone, style, and agenda from one group to another and doesn’t work toward a campus that's equally comfortable for all genders.

So we're asking how Tech could be designed to be more comfortable and appealing to all genders.

Although women should be equally represented throughout the year, as should everyone, in honor of Women’s History Month, TBT is seeking thoughtful, clever, witty, and tasteful essays (written and visual)depicting Tech if it were designed to appeal more
broadly across genders. We recognize the efforts and support given by many on this campus in advocating and promoting women’s equality -- and so we are simply indulging in creative fun.

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I thought, "I have a strong opinion on this!" Then I went home and wrote an essay. After getting the guidelines emailed to me I realized I didn't read the criteria very closely. My essay was based on making the Tech campus more friendly to women. Oops. I have to admit I got a bit catty in my rebuttal. But all was not lost! I rewrote the thing into something a bit nicer. They talk a lot about fun and creativity in their guidelines but I plowed through it like a suffragette on a humor strike. Fun and witty it's not, informative and thought-provoking I hope it is. Wish me luck, a hundred buckaroos are on the line.

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When I think of ways to make the MTU campus friendlier to all genders I’m reminded of my reaction to the recent election of Nancy Pelosi to Speaker of the House and the announcement by Senator Hilary Clinton that she’ll be running for office. None of the newscasts and stories, in all their reams of paper and hours of airtime, failed to mention that both were the first women to do what they were doing. It’s nice for women to be finally reaching these levels of responsibility in our nation, but as a child raised in a post-feminist era I can’t help but to think, “So what?” To me, it’s no news at all that a woman is doing any of these things; this is the world I live in and have always lived in and this is what I expect of it. I feel as though in our moment of stepping forward sprightly we are shuffling backward slightly. “A woman has done it, did I mention she’s a woman?”

If I were to sit down with a very small piece of paper and the challenge to fit onto said paper the few words that sum up who I am, that describe my vision of myself as an independent thinking entity, the word woman would probably not make the cut. Being a woman is a part of who I am and it certainly does affect my life, (I have a pregnancy and a daughter who can attest to that), but it is not the defining essence of being for me. I’m sure Nancy Pelosi and Senator Hilary Clinton, who had to sit through all the accolades of being “the first” with their politician grins firmly in place, felt much like I do. Maybe Nancy Pelosi was thinking to herself during these ceremonies, “I suppose I am woman, but don’t you know it’s about the economy, stupid?” Perhaps Senator Hilary Clinton was zoning out during the back patting thinking, “How am I going to rectify the Democratic anti-war stance with my strongly stated approval for the war when I voted for it back in ’02?” Out loud she may have said, “Woman? Oh, yeah, gee, thanks.”

So now I’m pondering how to change our small, rural campus to one that is “friendlier to all genders” and I’m thinking of all the things that for years I felt needed improving: the cold walk through campus, the exorbitant fees tacked onto tuition, the wildly mixed quality of instructors students are subjected to, the petty fiefdoms extraneous administrators create and on and on. And as these grievances percolate out of my memory and take form I realize that none of them really have anything to do with being a man or woman and everything to do with being me the (graduated) student, me the libertarian, me the secularist and me that collection of thoughts, memories and emotions that make me a human being.

All the women I have encountered on this campus over my many years here are intelligent and have deeply held beliefs and opinions. In no way at all, however, have these beliefs and opinions been homogenous nor have they even been close enough, ideologically speaking, that they could even wave hello to one another in the distance. Were you to divide the campus into groups, for example: Democrat and Republican, religious and atheist, or Coke and Pepsi, I suspect that for almost any criteria of separation you could imagine, each side would be a hodge-podge of gender, age, race and disposition. A campus that is friendly to any given gender, therefore, is a campus that is friendly to all; there is no way to differentiate the two. Human beings are so many wonderful things, “endless forms most beautiful” to borrow from Charles Darwin, that to put the question of friendliness with gender seems artificial and unnatural. Open discussion, free exchange of ideas and an atmosphere that encourages self-reflection are what we need. These things foster an environment where women and men, but more importantly all people, can thrive whatever their opinions and ideals.

I’m taking a humanities course with a Brit who’s jolly even for a jolly old Brit. I’m not really taking the course, I’m just showing up and learning on the sly because I’ve gotten to the age when I’ve come to appreciate the education I didn’t appreciate when I was younger. The class is British Literature II and we’re nominally covering approximately the Victorian age – some Keats, Byron, Lamb and other Brits who were beginning to have the sensitive and enlightened spark of modern man, (the honor of first modern man, however, goes to Oscar Wilde who lectured for years on aesthetics and beauty only to go on to spend two years in hard labor in a gaol, that’s jail to us really modern men and women, on charges of sodomy that he practically brought against himself).

The instructor has a form and face that could’ve floated through Tolkein’s dreams. He has a longish face that starts with his receding salt and pepper, brushed back hair and ends somewhat mysteriously hidden in a bushy beard that clearly betrays a Viking romance far back in his lineage. He hobbles into class each day, (he recently had surgery on both knees), cane and tote in hand and then, plop, down he goes into the plasticky mass produced seat at the front of the class, (thank you, Charles Eames for a good idea that nonetheless leaves my bottom numb). Papers, some of which are related to class, get shuffled onto the press-board table in front of him. As the students meander in he calls some of them by name, usually preceded with a genial Mr. or Ms. that, for all its formality, seems quite cozy and warm coming from him.

We were all given syllabi in the first week of class but early on it became clear that class time was a far more flexible ideal than just dead page numbers. “Turn to page 395, hmmm, no, no, we need to do the Industrial Revolution first, page 270, then.” Swish, swish, 30-some ultra-thin pages in 30-some copies of the door stopper that is our textbook get rolled and flipped and shuffled under thumb. He reads quickly, practically speed reads, (wouldn’t Evelyn Wood be proud), through a paragraph or two then stops. This is the best part.

The editors of the book did a commendable job writing introductory texts that are accessible, well-structured and pertinent. It’s not juvenile or condescending to the reader but it doesn’t suffer from the pedantic streak of an academic who, no matter how old he or she gets, is always and forever trying to impress the 5th grade teacher who called him stupid, the father who was always comparing him unfavorably to an older sibling, or some other figure who has become lodged in his psyche in a state of grandeur never attained in real life. For all the noble balance and discretion of the text, however, it’s not alive. Our instructor now looks up from his copy of the text and draws a breath. And he starts to talk, not so quickly now.

He has lived a long life, he has known so many people, been so many places but more than this he has read so, so, so many books. The two paragraphs he just read get filtered through this screen of neurons that constitute a life and we get the full benefit. A few words, a mention of a place, well up memories of dates and names and places which are networked to more names and dates and places inside his head and with this we are off. We are caught up, pulled away and carried off with the Old Man Syndrome. No conversation, text or image is exempt. It, all of it, has on it the pressing weight of a lifetime wanting to be related. Nothing can pass without conjuring up an association that comes of a life lived and living.

Imagine your favorite landscape painting; bucolic hills, primeval forests, light dappling muddy ground through dry autumn leaves. Imagine whatever it is that makes you catch your breath and wish there really was a heaven. (I feel like I’m channeling the spirit of DH Lawrence, the painter that is, not the supposed pornographer, although in private I channel him, too.) Now imagine yourself walking through this painting, the palette and brushstrokes before you. And now I give you a companion – a young man. He is full of determination and power and willfulness, he looks around him, finds an objective and works toward it. To him, the future is ahead and everything is something that is going to happen. If you were walking through this landscape and had, say, a broken leg and very badly needed a doctor, you would want this focused young man. If you were seeking a hidden treasure behind one of those far hills, you would want this strong young man. You could count on him to see your picture as not yet finished, he would not hesitate to put brush to it and will it to his vision.

But now let’s pull this companion and substitute his future, an old man. Every step you take with him is loaded and alive. The path you are on is a poem by Carl Sandberg, the trees are the life’s work of Shelley and the dappling sunlight, the wooly flock on the hill and the falling lonely stream are real people who lived real lives, icicles that grew inside someone’s very drafty windows, the smell of bacon wafting across a lake on a long ago fishing trip. Our painting picks up a third dimension and more, a tangible thing filled with emotion and consciousness. This may not be the companion for a broken leg or a hidden treasure, but this is the companion for Depth and Understanding.

We’re back in class and in the throes of the Syndrome. The wind is carrying the lecture. Now we’re in the Netherlands at a museum in 1973, then we’re looking out the window of an English school room at the smoke stacks in the distance. Do I have a point to this? Of course not. You begin unexpectedly and end abruptly and in between try to keep your head above the waves and enjoy the trip.

I work in a lab with a real rainbow of people. Chinese, Taiwanese, Kenyan, Indian. It'd take me about $30,000 to visit them all at their original homes if I so had the urge to fly the half a million or so miles that would probably be involved. We all get along just fine in our happy little workplace, although the Taiwanese and Chinese, I notice, avoid talking politics and the fellow from Kenya will only sheepishly admit he has a mother and a father and a mother back at home. Usually our communications move along the same wavelength. I'd like to say it's because of some intrinsic sameness in all of humanity but mostly it's because everyone has been primed for years back in their home countries by American television, movies and the other bric-a-brac that washes up on their shores. They've seen enough of it to really, well, grok American culture.

Sometimes, though, sometimes, something goes wrong. They're saying things, making sounds, but the words go flying past like a squirrel bailing out of a tree that's just been chain-sawed: it's this crazy, furry, cartwheeling mass that goes zipping by your head and you know it is something but what that something is, well, usually you just stand there dazed thinking, "What the hell was that?" Today I had one of those precious moments. I had just printed out a picture from my recent vacation to the Bahamas where I unintentionally intentionally swam with some tame dolphins (it's a bit of a story). My American friend Michelle was the intended target of my picture viewing but a woman from China stood nearby and so I showed the picture to her, too.

"I swam with a dolphin over my vacation."

[Chinese woman] "Was it a girl dolphin?"

Right away I was already seeing the squirrel, way up in the tree, picking out his trajectory.

"Yeah, actually it was a female."

[Chinese woman] "That's good, otherwise your husband might have been jealous."

Blammo, there it was, the thing was whipping past my face and I was stupidly thinking, "Huh, what?" when I should have been thinking, "Aaaahhh, a squirrel's about to smack me. Duck! Duck!"

What could I say? I looked to Michelle. Wow, I thought, that squirrel damn near hit her, too. She was looking away and shaking ever so slightly with her hand up to her mouth.

"Uh, yeah, I guess it was a good thing."

Maybe dolphins have a very, very different reputation in China. Maybe over there only loose women swim with male dolphins. I don't know and I'm not about to bring it back up with her for clarification.

I got Michelle alone later and said to her, "What the f*** was that all about?"

Her reply: "I have no idea."

January 25 of 2007 the Christian Science Monitor had an opinion piece by Dinesh D’Souza titled, “War on terror’s other front: cleaning up US pop culture”, which is frightening enough in it implications for Western values and our future relations with Islamic radicals to be worth discussing. Like many who pen opinion pieces that get flung at major news sources, he did it to promote a book he has just published. “The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11”.

To begin with, I agree in part with some of D’Souza’s complaints: US popular culture is filled with vulgar sentiments and shallow pandering to our baser natures. When I’m at the gym, the televisions there display it all at its worst. One television show had, as the crowning achievement of the half-hour, dumping a car in a pond, which I admit was more interesting then their earlier focus on drunkenness and public urination. Another show, purportedly educational, was a sad-sack excuse to give prurient views of a nearly nude woman bathing in (artificial, of course) blood. It would be useless for me to go on giving examples. To live and breathe in the 21st century is to be privy to such degrading images.

Where I have to disagree with D’Souza, however, is on his proposed solution. He asks, “So what should America do about this [corrupt American morality]?” His answer is sweeping but circumspect. He says,

The restoration of America’s culture will be a moral boost to its children – and it will help the nation’s image abroad. As a practical matter, of course, such a cultural restoration will not be easy. At the very least, it is a task that will take decades.”

He doesn’t say we should change our culture or how we should make that change. He jumps to the assumption that some sort of restoration must occur and then starts defending that position without even putting it on a foundation. It’s the equivalent of asking when a new cancer patient will be going in for euthanasia.

He believes the attacks of 9/11 were caused by Muslims who feel we are infiltrating and destroying their culture. Thus, these put-upon masses are defending themselves with violence. In regard to their violence, I can imagine him chanting those words of apologists everywhere, “I don’t think it’s right, but…”

I’m reminded of a gay friend who had befriended a college student who was having some doubts about his sexuality. This student was torn up about it, unsure and uncomfortable with his own feelings. Their relationship after a time took a bizarre turn; the student started to become agitated around my friend and accused him of trying to “make him gay”. My friend’s offense, ultimately, is that he was gay and his presence alone pushed an issue to consciousness that the student was desperately trying to suppress. America does not have troops coming out of Hollywood spreading movies, magazines, radio shows or music by force on the world. Other nations are readily and voluntarily taking up what is for sale in America and then accusing us of trying to “make them bad”. In this extreme case, however, their agitation has become violence and the cause of change in their culture has been personified by the “Great Satan” (that’s us).

“We must preserve our cultural heritage.” I hear that all the time from every kind of group that fears every kind of change. Where I live it means preserving every derelict eyesore building that was associated with our copper mining past. For fundamentalist Christians it means returning to a theocratic past that really only ever existed in their imaginations. For hyper-moralist Muslim terrorists it means returning to or holding onto a religio-fascist state of oppression. It is frightening but inevitable, however, that all cultures are in constant flux, that we experiment with improving ourselves intellectually, morally and materialistically and change in the process. When D’Souza says “the restoration of America’s culture” he is not only asking us to move backwards, but is also asking us, likely, to return to idealized existence, an amnesiacs Utopian past. Imagine a young woman in an Islamic nation reading “The feminine mystique” and finding in it ideas that inspire her and change her outlook on life. The Islamic terrorists see this as an assault on their traditional values. The individual has collided with the heritage collective and the choice to the zealous becomes this – allow the individual to expand beyond the limitations imposed by tradition, thereby destroying the force of tradition in the process; or forcing the sublimation of her spirit into the “cultural heritage”, thereby destroying the individual for the sake of the whole. Preserving culture in this case, means forcibly putting people into a state of arrested development. Most people would agree this is one of the principles we are fighting against in Afghanistan and Iraq, the right of the few to rule over, in mind and body, the many. D’Souza, however, is proposing that we do exactly this at home.

D’Souza states, “By proclaiming our allegiance to the traditional values of Judeo-Christian society, we can reduce the currents of anti-Americanism among Muslims…” He terms this the “culture war” in America and links success in it to success in the war on terror. In order to make ourselves safe from terrorists, he implies, we must roll over submissively to the demands of our enemies. To do so is to assault one of our most cherished rights, that of free-speech. Implementing D’Souza’s plan to “[restore] America’s culture” would put institutionally appointed men and women, using arbitrary standards set by a few, in control of all expression in our country. Additionally, prettying up American culture so that people don’t want to hurt us will only draw more demands on us. How much are we willing to compromise to buy our security? I’m reminded of a line from a song, “Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”

There are many aspects of the culture I live in that I abhor. I accept, however, that these standards are my own and that it is a small price to pay to live in freedom. I turn off the television or the radio or refuse to buy and support endeavors that do not reflect my values. It is not my role, or anyone else’s, to make these choices for others. D’Souza, however, is using the fear of violence by outsiders as a pretext to create a state conforming to his own vision of how things ought to be. We should not change for D’Souza and we most certainly shouldn’t change for terrorists.

A short note: Monday morning I discovered a stomach flu, probably a rotovirus, had made the rounds through all the kids at daycare. Given that everyone else was sick with similar symptoms, it probably wasn't the oranges after all. I'm not sure if it makes me feel better or worse about the whole episode but at least I can enjoy clementines without fear again.

Yesterday I ate a bad clementine orange and spent the night in agony. I'm no good as a sick person, I wallow, moan, complain and work myself up into such a frenzy that my thinking becomes befuddled and I forget who and where I am. If a pain like this had been inflicted on me purposefully by another person, it would be called torture. When it happens accidently, though, people just laugh and make jokes about it. Regardless of the source, however, I did feel as though I were being tortured. I cursed the human lot that gives us such means to experience such terrible pain and I pondered whether it is right that we should have to suffer so. Modern medicine has made great strides in easing suffering, yet some types of pain are taken for granted or dismissed as simply being part of life. I would have given anything of mine, turned traitor on anyone, to have stopped my misery last night. Childbirth I felt the same way about. Just because it is a common occurence does not at all ease the suffering of the individual woman. In another context, the same level of pain would be decried and charities and citizen's groups organized to stamp it out. Why, then, do we just shrug off certain types of pain? Why are some types of suffering noble while others cause us to wring our hands and call for an end? A few years back I had an incredibly nasty bout with food poisoning from meat. I have to admit I could do no more than to sit in the bathroom, repeating like a mantra, "please stop, please stop, please stop," over and over again. Were I laying somewhere with a broken leg or discovered in a sadists chambers, good people would be clamoring to help me, to give me something to "ease the pain." But that night I had no recourse, I just had to "tough it out."

Ultimately this brings me to the idea of hell. Hell, to me, would be the pain like I experienced last night, childbirth, and food poisoning all rolled into one, forever and ever. In my more lucid moments during these episodes I thought to myself how I could never inflict, actively or by inattention, this type of pain on anyone. I don't care what they had done to me or anyone else or what it would save, this type of pain surpasses normal human concerns and, because of its nature, is nothing more than wrong. If I were a Christian, the idea of hell, more than any other piece of doctrine, would fill me with a hatred of God. If the idea of an enemy inflicting this pain, or allowing it to be inflicted, is so wrong, how can someone who is supposed to love us as his children allow this to occur? The apologists can go into contortions about free will or destiny but... I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. If there is anyway, in the infinite vastness of God's power that he could stop this pain, then to not do so is to be as evil as the torturer himself. Is he omnipotent and omni-powerful? If he is, as the Christians say, then any differentiation between him and the devil is an illusion. I, a simple human being, would certainly never allow this to happen to my enemy, let alone my child, yet we are told that one whose love is never-ending and all encompassing can, in righteousness, allow such suffering to occur.