Pride or Respect

After three years of regular weekly training I am no longer an actively training martial artist.

The bare facts for my quitting are unarguably petty and stupid.

I was trying out a Filipino stick fighting class that I was planning on attending in addition to mixed martial arts, and they required a badge be sewn on my pants.

Simple enough, my MMA class is so laid back I figure I could just add it to those pants and nobody would care, and I was probably right. But, just to be safe I emailed the head instructor asking about it, since the exact policy wasn't entirely clear, and no one seemed to know definitively.

I wrote, what I thought was an enthusiastic and deeply respectful email chock full of verbal cow-tows. His immediate response was annoyed and didn't directly answer my question, so I apologized for contacting him.

The resulting disastrous email thread is likely familiar to anyone who uses the Internet and has a temper and/or drinks too much.

One of his replies in particular was so petty and disrespectful that I just couldn't take it.

If it happened under the fluorescent light of the dojo maybe I would have taken it on the chin. But in the light of day, with a clever t-shirt on it just seemed too much.

I have some breathing tricks I use to calm down, and I immediately got up and walked around downtown Hopkins. It was a beautiful day and my adrenaline was pumping from sparring with my deadly word foe. I walked until I my body settled down and reassessed the whole thing.

My options seemed clear, either I was going to just stomach the fact that I would continue to pay $100 a month to an unrepentant asshole, or I'd quit.

I have issues with pride, I often take things the wrong way and get combative. I know this and it is something I try to keep in check. I have a mantra I recite to cooldown that specifically highlights the importance of not being an ass.

So I really didn't want to succumb to that. On the other hand, I just couldn't see myself rolling over for this "instructor" who had so thoroughly destroyed my enthusiasm to train with a few flippant emails.

I'm a student, it isn't my job to be patient. It is my job to ask questions respectfully, which upon rereading, I think I did.

However, this is complicated by the fact that one of the things I honestly enjoyed about martial arts training was how terrible I was at it. It was difficult, I had no aptitude for it, the warm-ups would leave me exhausted and stupid, I would constantly forget basic things and have to be taught them again and again.

Confused why that is fun? Think of a golden retriever's exultant and desperate dog paddle, his head just out of the water.

This latest weight though, felt like it dragged my mouth and nose under the waterline, the only choice left to learn to breathe water or get out of the lake.

In the end, I politely told him to go fuck his own face, and it felt suspiciously awesome.

Whether it was because the vengeful demon in my heart was happily chomping on the steak I had thrown it, or it was the swell of self-respect for having properly addressed a grievous insult like a 19th century Englishman I still don't know.

I strongly suspect the former, but maybe that isn't all bad. If a broken clock can be right twice a day, why not a bloodthirsty rage?

Facts

Facts are soft things.

There have been studies done on the reliability of witnesses as well as the propensity for the brain to ignore facts that don't fit its view of the world.

My very first memory was of waking up in an oxygen tent in an unfamiliar room. My father was there, telling me that he had to leave but would be back soon. Terrified at being abandoned, I clearly remembered plotting to pounce on his arm and not let go. To immediately feign sleep. I awoke the next morning still clutching his arm.

Almost 25 years later, my mother corrected me, clarifying that it was definitely her, not my father whom I had clung so desperately to that night.

Truly Backwards

I rifle through the unfamiliar kitchen drawer until I find some food scissors. I dutifully cut up the homemade eggroll into 3 pieces, revealing the unmistakable pink meat of pork at the center. I should have known from the bite of the first eggroll as it had been too savory to be vegetarian, but at that point I was distracted, lifting the shirt of the doctor examining his chest for any signs of internal bleeding.

This struck me as odd, since that seems to be the sort of thing a doctor would suggest, but from the look of pain on his face I didn't think he was thinking very straight.

"Eat, eat, or it'll all go to waste!", he tells us.

Max and I exchange uncomfortable glances. We are both strangers in his house, and I hope to avoid the awkwardness of explaining our presence here upon his wife and children's return.

LTMS: On Happiness

In this edition of "Letters to my Son", I advise him on how to be happy.

Or, at minimum, describe the stuff I've tried to do to be happy that is entirely counterproductive.

Dance like your drunk aunt

My wife has been kind enough to keep me up to date on the issue of How kids these days are dancing

First off, before I begin, I feel it necessary to come clean about my initial reaction to this new trend of lap dancing. From what I understand, the evolution of it seems to be the girl grinding on the boy while both are standing, to the girl grinding on the boy while the boy is laying down.

Laying supine on a dance floor seems to be stretching the limits of the verb, but what had initially bothered me much more was that it had apparently become possible for a girl to dry hump their boyfriend in public, without any sort of social slights or sentencing of fabric letters.

And indeed, my first ugly opinion was that while sexual freedom and liberation has been the goal of our fairer sex for some time, this seemed to be a bit of a slice off the goal into the rough.

Luckily, battling against inches of hardened driveway ice gave me plenty of time to ruminate on this conclusion, and I eventually identified it as not belonging to me, but belonging to the angry old man I was to become years in the future. Someday I may very well clutch to that opinion as if it were an american flag that had been my comfort blanket, but in the meantime I identified it for what it was, snippy and mean-hearted woman hating.

Blaming the woman for this act which logistically requires a plurality to accomplish is just straight-up unfair. Especially if her peers don't slight her for it. I mean, high schoolers will flay your corneas off if given a chance, so clearly there had to be something else afoot in here. A cultural truth I lacked the perspective to see.

Other people, such as the guy in this video brought out all the old standbys: "Unknowable generation gaps", "Kids like to shock us" or "They don't know how else to dance"

But I don't buy it.

Then I remembered something I learned while in Miami checking out a datacenter. I was talking to the marketing guy assigned to wine and dine me while down there, and conversation turned to our children, and he mentioned he had a 15 year old daughter, and he mentioned something very interesting, and seemingly completely at odds with the thrust of the "each generation of kids do more perverted stuff" explanation.

The way he painted dances (which he chaperoned) was that the kids mostly clung to the sides, sitting, texting one another. Barely dancing at all.

This thought saddened me at the time. Not because I was ever a fan of dances, in fact, I most likely chose video games or roleplaying games over them more than once. In fact at the time I might have been somewhat bitter towards "those kids" who gleefully attended every dance, especially the boys who were well-groomed enough to warrant female attention.

But on a macro scale, teenagers are at the height of their passion for each other. Their brains bursting with chemicals encouraging them to mindlessly rut at any chance. To have that force tamed by the safety of exchanging naught packets of information with each other seems like a conquering of something greater. The taming of a piece of humanity that ten years ago I would claim could never be caged.

It was then that my opinion of this new "dance fad" changed completely. Since now I thought I understood who the couple on the floor were dry humping for. Surrounded by dimly lit faces staring down into screens barely a square inch, these brave kids did what had to be done to get the attention of their despondent classmates. An act that would force them all to look up, thumbs stilled, and take in a site of mock coitus that was sure to redirect some amount of blood to their nethers.

The dancing pair are not perverts, but rather perpendicular heroes. The woman not one of ill-repute, but a torch standing alight, the same passed down for millennia from each harvest dance. The yearly expression of our lust for life, and the desperation we share to find another to share that with.

If getting to second base on the gym floor is what it takes to blow some fresh air of the dying embers of the vis vitae of humankind, I say to you crazy kids, hump on!

That said, you're still completely wrong about Twilight.

Someone set us up the...

According to this recent CNN Poll 71% of Americans think Iran already has nuclear weapons.

My immediate thought was "oh boy, I guess we're in for another war". Although then I had to remember that all the justification for preemptive war is to *stop* people from getting nuclear weapons, so if they already have them... The whole thing is just confounding.

I wanted to blame this on the media somehow, or our culture of sound bite politics, but I'm honestly baffled by who would benefit from spreading this misunderstanding.

I understand that spreading the meme that "Iran is dangerous and might obtain The Bomb if we don't act fast" is useful to some people's agendas, but that they've already gotten there... Bald manipulation of the public I understand, but this result, almost seems like showing off.

"Fooling the public into supporting a war based on false pretenses was way too easy"
"Agreed. This time, let's first make them believe the exact opposite of the reason we'll give to goto war, and then try to get them to support it!"
"You're on!"

In my lifetime, I've gone through the following political realizations:

• 1st through 8th grade I was blindly rooting for the political team my parents did
• 9th grade I thought communism was the awesomest
• 10th grade through college I grew to understand and the arguments and beliefs that many Republicans held, and why they held them. I still disagreed with many of their conclusions, but understood how and why they arrived at them.
• In 2002 I began wondering why the Republican president was acting like a lunatic instead of a conservative.
• By 2004 I no longer understood the logic behind voters supporting the so called "Republicans", but I at least understood the emotions behind it, and I definitely understood the rather base motivations of the politicians themselves.
• By the end of 2009 I wondered what, exactly supporting Democrats was, in theory, supposed to accomplish. Although the fact that things stopped getting more bat-shit crazy was nice.
• And now, here we are, amongst a populace seemingly criminally ill-informed about a country in between two other countries we're occupying.

I now imagine 71% of Americans as one of those wax-Neanderthal at the science museum. Me looking up at them from behind the velvet divider, wondering how much alike we are, how they managed to survive on a day to day basis. Except of course the tables are reversed, and homo-doesn't-believe-stupid-shit-for-no-reason is apparently the one on the road to extinction.

Goodnight Economics

Several years ago my first nephew was born, and so my wife and I bought him a book. We chose "Goodnight Moon", because it was pretty much the only modern kid's book we'd heard of.

Later on we heard that, of course, they had received several, several copies of that book because it was very popular. I felt kinda sheepish.

So when I had a child, I steeled myself to receive at least three to four copies of the book. Imagine my surprise when we got *none*.

In any case, to my great shame we had to actually *purchase* Goodnight Moon from amazon, which I figured was something only single parents with no living family would have to resort to.

I'm glad we did, my son loves the book very much and can already recite some portions of it unbidden, so I'm glad we did. But the whole situation made me wonder about this sort of economic phenomenon.

How could it be that years ago that you could receive any number of "Goodnight Moon" books, and this year you receive none?

Clearly this is some sort of new and undiscovered economic phenomenon which should be named after my dog.

Essentially, I imagine other people did exactly what I did, or heard from other people about how many copies of "Goodnight Moon" people received, and this essentially formed a feedback loop that prevented anyone from even considering purchasing that book as a gift afterwards.

I tried thinking of other examples, and the best I could come up with is Netflix gift subscription. Five to eight years ago these "three months or one year of free Netflix" was a common gift to give to introduce people to the service and to get to try it out, but these days it would be a ridiculous gift to give since the odds of someone already being a user are very high.

I'm sure there is a proper name for this phenomenon, when a commonly gifted product becomes so ubiquitous and popular that people essentially stop buying it, and until I do a proper Wikipedia search and find it, I declare it "The Moya Effect".

Honorary Economics Phd please!

You get this.

I got a mention on My Friend Kamil who has a better blog than mine's blog. Guess I've really hit the big time!

My friend Jason who doesn't have a blog pointed me towards this blog post by a fantasy author whom I respect greatly, saying that he thought the tone and subject matter reminded him of mine. I am flattered, and the author equally shamed by the comparison. In any case, it is an amusing read.

Finally, I leave you with the ultimate CAPTCHA which can discern if you, yourself are a robot.

I'll be thorax.

Sometimes I wish they would hurry up and invent actual size remote control metal ants.

That way I'd be forced to address the moral quandary of whether I'd allow my son to play with one to engage in one to one combat with actual ants.

In my youth I was unkind to ants. The classic example is taking magnifying glasses to them of course, but I found the Minnesota sun never seemed to have sufficient results, , it would just make them scurry faster. Not to mention, killing one ant seemed strategically useless, I was more one trying to block their entrance, or flood their whole colony, etc. Large scale attacks that might take out the entire organism.

Of course at the time I didn't realize that the ant system was likely a full 4-5 feet deep, with the queen all the way at the bottom.

It isn't hard to imagine a remote control ant allowing a sort of "Ants and Dungeons" type game where you guide your ant down the main sand chute, attempting to navigate yourself all the way to the queen's chamber, ruthlessly dispatching of the soldiers and drones who foolishly try to stop you with mandibles made of non-metal.

However, it seems clear that this is a different type of "killing" ants than stomping on them or funneling bleach into one of their sub-entrances. It seems more personal, and a bit horrific.

Luckily for me, the technology doesn't exist yet, so I don't have to address whether such a thing might be harmful to my son' emotional development quite yet. The down side being the technology doesn't exist yet, so I can't have one and try it for myself...

Fully Incorporated Citizens

So the Supreme Court recently ruled that the free speech provisions of the First Amendment apply to political ads purchased by corporations.

Personally, I don't think they went far enough. Free speech isn't the only clause of the First Amendment which has excluded corporations for so long, what about free exercise of religion?

According to my research 100% of corporations are functional atheists. Not a single one of them are circumcised, baptized, confirmed or otherwise indoctrinated into a single major religion. How else can you explain such a statistic other than the fact that there is a widespread movement to deny corporate participation in religion?

You may say it is because corporations are undying autonomous machines of perpetuating greed, who worship their stock price above all else. However, who are we to say that they aren't that way *because* they have been denied the chance to participate in religion?

After all, if the Supreme Court thinks that corporations have an innate yearning to express themselves, doesn't it stand to reason that they also desire to become better than they are, that they desperately wish for a way to overcome their own innate flaws and vices?

Also, if no corporations have accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, it follows that there are no corporations in heaven. Which means that heaven currently resembles one big long Marxist bread line. What is the point of heaven if everyone there is equal regardless of station, work ethic or amount of inherited wealth received?

So not only do we owe it to free the corporations from their godless and pointless existences, we owe it to Jesus, who is surely up in heaven right now fighting a harried counter-insurgency against the Marxist state heaven has become since we have failed to spread Christianity to a single one of the siege engines of capitalism.

So there are some strong legal and theological arguments to be had for doing this, but the strongest of all seems to be that of equality.

Free Speech for corporations is just a single step, until corporations can freely be accepted by all religions, have the right to marry, adopt children and serve in our armed forces, they are destined to be forever branded "second class" citizens, which in this day and age is simply unconscionable.

Blog Plug

I have goaded my friend Kamil who has a Better Blog Than Mine into ending his 6 month hiatus from blog posting, and he has now pledged to post once per day for the month of Feb.

So if you gave up clicking that link long ago like I have, you may want to reconsider.

Unsupported

According to the receipt I just dug out of the trash, as of 9:52 am this morning I became a man conflicted.

It was at 9:52 am on the morning of Jan 30th this morning that I purchased my very first "cup" from a local sporting goods store.

On Authority

I have a very old habit. Whenever I encounter an unusual truth I find myself mental describing it as if to my son.

For much of my life this "son" whom I mentally imagined hanging on every dispensed nugget of mine wisdom, was entirely theoretical. Which unfortunately for my less than theoretical child, I never once jotted down any of these seemingly notable epiphanies, and in fact, forgot the contents of nearly all of them to the one.

Which is just as well, since this exercise in retrospect seems to resemble more of a day-dreamed fantasy of being old and wise enough to be listened to by others, than about producing a body of "street wisdom" to pass onto my subsequent generations.

So when I next go the itch to perform one of these one-man "life seminars" for an audiance of myself, I decided to try to commit it to paper. If only to see if the thoughts seemed as important as they seemed reflected in the dreamy and engaged fake child in my mind seemed to think they were of if they truly were a weak pretense at mental masturbation.

I now present to you, what may, or may not become a recurring segment "Letters to My Son" on the subject of Authority. I warn you not to attempt to follow this advice, as it assumes the audience is a bit off like myself, and is unlikely to be of much use to most normal people. (more)

Life's Odometer

So it is a new year, and that can only mean... that I have some crazy new resolutions!

My resolution from last year, to only eat one sweet thing per day was going pretty well, until around March, when I kind of let it go and let myself eat all the comfort food I liked. Which was fine anyway, since my wife was not a fan of it.

I was tempted to try it again this year, but with the year only a dozen days gone I have been continually blundering into minefields of delectable sweets that are seemingly tiled to the walls about our house after the holidays. They are swiftly eaten by someone who doesn't seem to care what I think on the matter.

A similar resolution in similar shambles is the idea of not eating after 8pm, a concept that I am gleefully defying even while writing this. It also encountered wife opposition, presumably because a startling percentage of our 10 year relationship involves snacking on the couch next to each other.

So that leaves but one contender oath left that seems to bear any chance of long term cohabitation in my brain and with my wife.

Boring Administrative Note

I upgraded the blog software, reenabled the captcha software that broke after the server move, and cleaned out many thousands of spam posts.

This is one reason people are giving up blogging and turning to twitter and facebook instead. 06 Jan '10 - 20:35 | Kyle | General | 2 comments | Permalink