Adventures in Xenophobia

So I went to the grocery store today.

It happens; you decide you would like nothing more than a doughnut and a pound of peas and you leave with two extra bags of crap. Annoying, but whatever. I tend to get carried away when it comes to fresh produce and nice cheeses.

But then I find myself waiting for the train in 90-degree heat, carrying a grocery bag on each arm and cursing my taste for good food. This business man butts in front of me just as the train pulls up, but whatever. I bite back my desire to tell him the Heavenly Father would not approve and take a seat behind him.

I then see these two quite beautiful North African women running to catch the train and I press the button to hold the door for them. They take seats in front of Mr. Business and proceed to have a lengthy, joyous conversation in what would seem to be their native tongue.

As the train rolls down the street, past the library and towards the middle of downtown, I find myself staring at them, admiring their beautiful headscarves (hijab). This is when Mr. Business, obviously made uncomfortable by these exotic people, leans back and says to me, I shit you not, "They should learn English."

I stare at him for a moment, horrified that this severely-sheltered white-bread-eater would have the gall to say something like that to a complete stranger in public. I can feel the back of my brain itching to introduce his face to my fist. (It is worth noting here that I have had almost no sleep in the last forty-eight hours and I am operating entirely on caffeine and spite) Instead, that clever demon that resides in a special corner of my brain takes over.

I frown at him and reply, "Je suis désolée, mais je ne parle pas anglais." ("I'm sorry, but I don't speak English")(It should also be noted that the previous French statement is written technically; the colloquial pronunciation varies more or less)

Lucky for me, the train pulls to my stop, and I exit, hopefully leaving that belligerently ignorant man-child horribly confused.

Thus is one of the most shocking problems our nation faces. We are so absorbed by our own small corners of existence that we neglect to really take note of those around us. Instead of seeing two fantastically-dressed Muslim women, this man saw Outsiders, people of another culture who refuse to conform. What he fails to recognize, however, is that English is not the technical native tongue for a large portion of the US's residents. Many of us are German, Spanish, Italian, French, Greek, et cetera. This kind of blind xenophobia is not only unsympathetic, it is hypocritical. Chances are good that we all have at least one ancestor whose origins were not in North America.

Did he need to share his personal views with me, a complete and total stranger who he neglected to take note of until I was convenient? Of course not, but he was seemingly so enamored with his own wit he felt the need to share.

Let us envision the situation, had he noticed me from the beginning. If I had taken his seat, and he took mine, I would have been free to sit by the women in question, and he would have been able to continue his existence in his pitifully-small bubble. If he's going to have irrational prejudices against people he doesn't know or bother to understand, why share that with me? Did he really think I would have anything beyond disdain for him? I can't help but suspect it wasn't about making an impression on me; it was about hearing his thoughts aloud, regardless of who they might offend.

It's like when I see someone at the store with a sandwich and Coke, and I have two weeks' worth of groceries. I let that person go before me in line because it is a way of making everyone's life a little bit better. When you demonstrate consideration of others, they (hopefully) will continue that act somewhere else. It benefits me personally to be courteous towards others.

So, do I have a moral to this story? Not particularly, because I try not to tell others how to live their lives(and I tend to fail at that, but moving on). But the next time you're getting in the elevator and you see someone running to catch it, maybe consider holding the door for them. Not because it's the "right thing to do," but maybe because you're going to affect someone else's day whether you act or not. Which impression would you rather leave with that person?

A fabulous little paragraph that deserves recognition.

This is great, and I cannot take credit for it. (author unknown)

Why are fire engines red?

Newspapers are read, too. Two plus 2 is 4, 4+4 is 8, and 8+4 is 12. There are 12 inches in a ruler. Queen Mary was a ruler. Queen Mary was also a ship at sea. The sea has fish, the fish have fins, and the Finns fought the Russians. Russians used to be red, and fire engines are always rushin’.

That’s why fire engines are red.

That is all.

Idiotic Beauty Contestants Insult My Science

Let us talk about evolution.

Of course, when I say "let us talk," I mean that I'll write nonsense and you'll read it. I am the enlightened despot of this here blog, and you are the voluntary citizenry.

Anyway, evolution. When Darwin studied it in the Galapagos, he described the observance of the variance of particular genetic traits in a population of finches, and how these traits proved to be more or less successful, depending upon the availability of certain types of food. That is evolution, in fact- the comparative success of certain genetic traits in a population through time, based upon the varying conditions of the surrounding environment.

Other non-science venues, however, insist that evolution means that "apes turned into men." Well, as a student of physical anthropology, I feel comfortable in saying that's a load of crap. There were no magic wands, and we were not magically transformed into people from something else. We trace our genetic history backwards through the history of Mammalia and further back. This is established; we have mapped out much of the human genome and discovered that we've inherited a surprising amount of coding from other species.

Let us get a few things straight. There is no "other side of the story." Evolution is not a theory in the common linguistic sense; it is a theory in the sense that gravity is a theory. It is quite uncommon to hear someone say "I don't believe in gravity," so why can someone "believe" in evolution? It's ludicrous to claim that evolution and "creation myths" are even on some kind of playing field. Creation myths are cultural legacies, cultural understandings of the world. Evolution is a scientific concept, a hypothesis that has had the scientific method repeatedly applied to it.

Yes, the scientific method, that thing you learned in school that involves making a hypothesis, testing it under controlled conditions, observing the experiment, analyzing the results, making a conclusion, and modifying the hypothesis if necessary. These are the standards you use in elementary school, and they're the standards you use when you're in college. These are the standards used to test evolution. Evolution is not something people just noticed and said, "hey, let's make that a thing." The scientific theory of evolution represents over a hundred years (at least) of research. To claim that something like the Book of Genesis is at all comparable to evolution is insane; there is no way to test religion using the scientific method, therefore, it cannot be treated as science.

I agree with people who say that evolution and religious theories should be taught in schools, but not because I think they're somehow different sides of some coin. Evolution should be taught in schools simply because it is a part of science that is a foundation for entire fields (physical anthropology, for example). Religions of the world ought to be taught in school too, albeit a different class. Religion is not science; science is not a religion. A person can have a scientific view of the world and still be religious. This is not a "one-or-the-other" situation.

Therefore, it is personally insulting to me when someone says "I don't believe in evolution," as if it is something in which a person can believe. Evolution is not a belief system- there is no Church of Evolution. Evolution is part of biological science. You can believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, love at first sight, and Peter Pan, but you can't believe in evolution. Like any science, you can understand it, you can respect it, and you can build a career out of it, but it's not something you "believe in." It simply "is," and that's all there is to it. Whether you grasp it or not is akin to whether or not you grasp cellular biology.

Thus the question stands: should evolution be taught in school?

Well, if we have to have classes like technical reading and writing, we had better damned have evolution, too.

A Year in Salt Lake

Moving to Salt Lake was probably the most daring thing I've done in my life.

I'm not kidding; the last time I'd been in Salt Lake, I was eleven and going to the Olympics with my parents. I had never really been here before. I'd never seen the University of Utah, and I had no clue what my apartment was going to look like. I truly moved here on a whim; Portland wasn't working out, and I wanted somewhere bigger than Boise, so (with the suggestion of a few friends) I picked Salt Lake.

I'll never forget coming around a bend near Tremonton and seeing the Wasatch for the first time. It was love at first sight; I'd never seen mountains so breathtaking before in my life. I'll never forget driving down South Temple for the first time on that hot, muggy day in June and seeing the view I now see every day. My father and I carried my belongings up those god-awful stairs, and I was in love with my apartment. It was quirky, and it was old. It had personality. I moved there without having ever seen the building previously.

I had no preconceived notions about what my experience would be like, and maybe that's what made it all so great for me. I came here because I hadn't liked Portland or Portland State, and I've never been so happy about a choice made at random. Instead of envisioning all of these plans for the future, Salt Lake was a kind of blind restart for me, absent of anything I'd planned.

Living here has taught me a lot over the last year, too. I've learned that living in the moment, with few expectations, is better for a person than trying to live for the future. I've learned from the Mormons that taking yourself too seriously just makes you look ridiculous. Most importantly, I've learned that when something isn't working for you, you have every right to change it.

I've loved this last year of living in Salt Lake. I'm sure there were moments I didn't like, but I don't remember them. Enjoying the adventure of living here has been so much more important to me than dwelling on the little things that go wrong. I love Utah, and I love Salt Lake. It was an impulsive choice that paid off, and I am so glad I had the balls to take that chance.

Back Pain Inspires Political Ravings

It's been awhile.

It happens; you get to doing all kinds of crap and while you see plenty of things to write bits about, you decide against writing. Which is not to say that I haven't been writing; come on, me not writing is like me not breathing. I haven't been writing in my blog for various reasons, mostly because I have summer school.

Well, today I'm not at school because last night, I somehow completely wrecked my back. Don't ask me how, because all I know is that I woke up around three and realized I could hardly move. So now, I'm sitting on the couch, wincing often, Icy-Hot patch and ibuprofen applied. I ought to eat breakfast, but that's looking like a long, uncomfortable walk to the kitchen. I'm sort of in a foul mood, and there's not better time to write than when you're caught in the midst of a smoldering temper.

Let's talk about Sarah Palin. If you haven't heard, she's an idiot who refuses to acknowledge that she's an idiot. She tries to dismiss her gaffes as "technicalities." Recently, she was quoted talking about Paul Revere, and how he (apparently) sounded bells and horns to tell the British that we were there.

Upon watching this clip of Palin's idiocy, I felt annoyed. Why is it that people with no real education can get this far in the political sphere, all the while spewing this kind of crap and being smug about it? Palin isn't the only one, either; in the midst of telling people Americans need to read the Constitution, one politician cited "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," a well-known quote from the Declaration of Independence.

Is this the new standard? Have the anti-intelligence masses become such a majority that well-organized, thoughtful arguments are a thing of the past? In any other developed country on this blue planet, those who are well-educated and worldly are considered far superior potential leaders than those who use blind, irrational fear to gain popularity. In any other country, people like Sarah Palin would be laughed out of town.

So is this what America has become? Is this the other side of democracy? We now consider people who don't even know their own country's history to be legitimate contenders. These are against people who have taught American law in universities, people who hold doctorates in political theory and have made a lifetime career of understanding the complexities of the US government. This is insanity, but it is also the reality of a democracy where the citizens have become lazy and uninformed.

Alas, I am in pain and I'm cranky. I'm missing a class I like and I'm going out of town on Thursday. Packing whilst suffering from back pain is akin to throwing myself down the stairs repeatedly. I'm not looking forward to it. And I suppose that's the problem with the nation in general- we all have stuff to do. The economy's weaving up and down like a drunken sailor, unemployment grew slightly, everything's on fire or everything's flooded. This, however, is the price of living in a country run by the people. If we are unwilling to pay attention to what's happening, who is left to maintain the watch? Not anybody we want to leave in charge, I'll tell you that.

For Edward Lahey, my grandfather

If there is one regret I have, it is his absence from my life.

There is no beauty in the image of the starving artist, let me tell you. There is no elegance in the tragic life and death of an underappreciated poet, and those who go in search of some kind of meaning in that are fools who have never seen such a thing first-hand. These people who romanticize the idea of being a tortured creative genius have never felt the pain inflicted on the family of sad genius. But there is a kind of magnificence in the kind of artist who suffers as he had and still makes art of it.

I don’t intend to glamorize his life in any way, because it’s not my place to do so. I never knew him on a personal level, not in the same way my mother, my aunt, or even my sister knew him. I didn’t have much of a relationship with him, and while maybe some of that is based in the lack of opportunities I had to be with him, it’s mostly my fault. It’s mostly because I viewed him as being old, and frail, and a broken person who was not worth my time. I was in the pig-headedness of youth, and some strange person with whom I’d had little personal contact was the furthest of my interests. He wrote me letters, and to some I may or may not have responded, but the vast majority were read and put away.

In my defense, I kept every letter he wrote me, so maybe that counts for something. I’m not sure why I kept them; perhaps it was easier to keep them to throw them away, but I think it’s more likely that I kept them to have some proof that he was in my life. He was in my life, even if it was merely in words written on paper.

I do not remember the sound of his voice. I do not even remember just how tall he was, or when I saw him last. I don’t remember the last time I spoke to him. I remember only snippets of the times we visited him, and even these are too abstract to place chronologically- there was a carousel one time, there was a stream with a foot-bridge over it another. I only have a handful of gifts from him, and of these I don’t particularly remember when I actually received them.

The way I know him is the way I would like to think he would prefer to be remembered. I know him because I know his writing. I know the cadence of his language, his choices of vocabulary. His writing speaks a kind of poetry that is not flowery or weak; it is concise and speaks in the voice of a real person, someone who sees the exquisite detail of the world, but trusts that the reader to see it, too. His writing is sensitive, and it is crude. It is a full-bodied range of emotions which few writers ever manage.

I would like to think this is a trait we share. I would like to think that when I write, I write as he wrote, with an exactness that leaves a certain amount of detail up to the reader. I would never claim to know him the way others knew him, but I would claim to know him in a way others did not. I think that writing for some people, for people like him, and like me, is not just a hobby, or a talent, but an extension of the brain. I write when I am upset, when I’m happy, when I’m angry or insecure, and my writing reflects my emotions in ways I could never convey any other way. I think that this is how I knew Edward Lahey- when there was no way to describe something in person, there was always a way to write it. Even if I didn’t speak to him, his writing spoke to me. His life was a hard one, and that shows through in his writing, but what shows through more was that it was a life. Behind those words, there was a person with thoughts and feelings. While I may not have appreciated him as a common person, I appreciate him for his writing, and for the unique artist that he was. It pains me to think that there are no more words that he will write. I don’t write to speak for him, but I certainly write because of him. I write because I was inspired in his manner of recording the world he saw. His view of the place he called home will be missed, and it will never be replaced.

Dads

So I'm reading Bossypants, by Tina Fey, and it is hysterically funny.

Normally, I don't go out and buy memoirs of celebrities because chances are good that it was written by someone other than the celebrity, but Tina Fey is a writer. Not to mention, there was a plethora of great reviews for the book. And I would like to think of myself as having the same kind of strange, sarcastic sense of humor as Tina Fey. So I bought her book, and I'm reading it like reading's going out of style.

She has a chapter about her father, Don Fey, and the kind of man he is. According to Tina Fey, her father was a pensive, deliberate kind of man who took shit from no one but did it in a good-natured enough way that people tended to be impressed by him.

Her description of her father, of his viewing everything as defective if he has to read the instruction manual, of his strings of well-chosen curse words when something goes wrong, and of his general attitude, reminded me (with a pang of homesickness) of my own father.

My father, of course, has some definite differences from Don Fey. My father, for example, cracks highly inappropriate, often semi-politically-incorrect jokes that make my mother say, "Michael!", make my sister blush and groan, and make me roar with laughter. My dad believes in DIY projects, and has a colorful array of swear words seemingly set aside just for those occasions. My dad is tough, not in the "military-father" kind of tough but the "oh-ten-below-zero-isn't-that-cold" kind of tough. He's the kind of gun owner who is extremely responsible about being gun owner (which kind of tends to be rare). His version of hunting does not involve ATVs; it involves hiking a billion miles up a nearly-vertical slope to get his elk, and when he does, he's going to carry that fucker out and harvest everything he can, by god. When I was a kid, and we'd be in the car going somewhere, I'd ask him to tell me things about the pioneers, and about wolves, and about everything else I could think of. And he usually came up with some pretty good responses.

One time, when I was in junior high, my friend and I were followed home by some strange guy. My friend, god love him, chased the fucker off when we reached my house. When my dad got wind of it, though, we got into his car and drove around the adjacent neighborhoods. My father was going to find that creeper, god damn it. I wasn't sure what scared me more; the idea of being followed by some strange man, or what my dad was going to do to that strange man.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, we didn't find him. But that was one of those teaching lessons where I really understood that my dad was a very nice person who took shit from no one.

It is from my father that I learned you do not have to beat people up to prove you're not one to be messed with. I've never had to beat anyone up in my life, never thrown so much as a punch, because I learned that as long as you have the right sort of attitude, people will respect you. My father isn't a violent person, not any more violent than I am. I've never seen him physically harm anyone. This aside, people tend to be impressed by him. Not because he has gun rack in the living room, or a tattoo across his chest that says "Badass." (In fact, it is from him that I got a deep fer of needles) He doesn't act like a kid because he's afraid people won't notice, he does it because that's who he is. He's comfortable being who he is, and he doesn't act like he's got something to prove. He has nothing to prove. The rest of the world needs to prove their worth to him.

And these are the attitudes that I have adopted, for better or for worse. I love the outdoors. I have a knife collection, and I'm comfortable around guns. I'm proud of being one tough bitch, and like my dad, I'm tough because that's who I am, not because I'm trying to make myself feel better.

I love my whole family, and my mom has done just as much for me as my dad has. But in reading that chapter about a father who knew who he was, I was reminded of my own father who knows who he is. And it's my father who made me the man I am today.