Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 637

Iowa goes the way of the bigots

Zach Wahls, a 19-year old engineering student who was raised by a lesbian couple, speaks against Iowa's proposal to outlaw gay marriage.

He is both succinct and brilliant.  An unusual combination. 

And yet  the Iowa House of Representatives voted 62-37 in favor of Joint Resolution 6, thus prohibiting legal same-sex marriage in their state.

Someday we will look back on legislation like this and wonder how so many bigots could get elected to a state legislature at one time.

Not that hard and not a liar

A report on the possibility that "parental happiness is a psychological defense—a fiction we imagine to make all the hard stuff acceptable" opens with the following paragraph:

Raising children is hard, and any parent who says differently is lying. Parenting is emotionally and intellectually draining, and it often requires professional sacrifice and serious financial hardship. Kids are needy and demanding from the moment of their birth to . . . well, forever.

I can't tell you how much this annoys me. 

Beginning with the moment that Elysha became pregnant, scores of parents seemed hell bent on telling us how difficult and dreadful parenting would be.  They inundated us in the stories of sleepless nights and terrible toddlers and rampaging teenagers, as if doing so somehow unburdened them of their own parenting woes. 

Clara is now two years old, and so far these prognostication have proven to be unfounded, as has the first paragraph of the Association for Psychological Science's report, which calls me a liar for stating otherwise.

"Raising children is hard," the report claims. 

This is not how I would characterize my experience as a father thus far.  And it is not how I would have characterized the ten years I spent as the step-father to a girl ages 6-17.  I have endured hardships throughout my life.  Honest-to-goodness calamities and years of seemingly unending misery. 

Nothing about my daughter has compared. 

"Parenting is emotionally and intellectually draining," the report claims. 

While parenting can be emotionally and intellectually demanding at times, it has hardly been draining.  It is not close to draining.  It is not in the same universe as draining. 

"…it often requires professional sacrifice and serious financial hardship," the report claims. 

I have experienced serious financial hardship.  I grew up in the teeth of financial hardship. I wore hand-me-down canvas sneaker for entire winters and was hungry for much of my childhood.  Having to manage our household budget on less money than we are accustomed can be difficult at times, but I am not living in my car (as I once did) or sharing a room off the kitchen with a goat in the home of a family of Born Again Christians (as I also did). 

And "professional sacrifice?"  I've continue to teach at what I consider a equally high level of skill.  Actually, I think that having a daughter has made me a better teacher.  I have a greater understanding of a parent's point of view, and I think this has allowed me to forge more meaningful relationships with the parents of my students.  

And I've also written four novels and continued to run a small business in the time that my wife first became pregnant. 

Some may say that my wife has made a professional sacrifice by staying home with our daughter for her first eighteen months, but I think my wife would say otherwise.  She has returned to work in a position that makes her extremely happy and is positioning herself to assume an even more appealing position once we're done having babies and they are all off to preschool. 

Having a child will ultimately assist my wife in transforming her career into something new and exciting, and when she returns to work fulltime, she will be happier than she has ever been. 

"Kids are needy and demanding from the moment of their birth to . . . well, forever," the report claims. 

This is simply not how I would characterize my daughter.  In fact, in the last thirty minutes that I have spent writing this post, Clara has been playing with blocks in the other room.  I have wiped her snotty nose twice, helped her open the bag of blocks, and only been distracted from my writing by my own choice to watching her build towers. 

Sometimes I can't resist.  She's too damn cute. 

See where she was sitting?

Clara brings me so much joy that to characterize her as needy or demanding would be absurd.  For every diaper that needs changing or every nose that needs wiping are more than enough moments of happiness and fun to tip the scales well in my favor. 

The researchers might say that I am suffering from "cognitive dissonance"—the psychological mechanism we all use to justify our choices and beliefs and preserve our self-esteem.

I would say that not all parents are alike.  Not all kids are alike. 

Perhaps the fact that my wife and I are both teachers with more than 25 years of combined experience in educating children has made a difference.   

Maybe our relative lack of materialism has allowed us to deal with the financial constraints better than some. 

Perhaps the presence of exceptional friends and family has made child-rearing much easier by providing us with a wealth of experience and knowledge from which to draw.   

Maybe my previous parenting experience has played an important role. 

Maybe the strength of our marriage had helped us to work together better than some.

Maybe Clara is simply an easy, happy, compliant child and we are damn lucky. 

Regardless of what factors have played a role, parenting for us has not been hard, and my reaction to this piece would be considerably less visceral had the author, Wray Herbert, left out the line implying that to state otherwise makes me a liar.

Perhaps Herbert is engaging in his own brand of cognitive dissonance, blind the reality that not all parents and children fall into the neat and organized categories that he would like.

Not a phone but very cute

My daughter really loves her grandparents. 

When she hasn't seen them for a few days, she'll try to find anyway she can to communicate with them, including… picture frames?

I was suspended for inciting riot upon myself, but it turns out that this was not a legal suspension

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines riot as:

"in criminal law, a violent offense against public order involving three or more people."

This information would have been helpful in 1985 when I was suspended from school by Vice Principal Powers for "inciting riot upon myself."

Powers suspended me in order to keep me from attending the Freshman-Senior get Acquainted Dance, and it worked.  My mother was informed that I had been suspended for actions that prevented administration from being able to guarantee my safety.

I had rejected the hazing of the seniors throughout the fall, refusing to carry their lunch trays or wear their signs around school. 

I had also been non-compliant at band camp during the previous summer, which only served to compound my problems (I joined the marching band when I was in eighth grade, allowing me to make enemies even earlier than most freshmen).  As a result of my refusal to bow to the whims of the upper classmen, I spent the week learning about the joys of being ringed, dough-boyed, handcuffed to a moving bus and having fire extinguishers blasted at my exposed limbs.

After several beatings during the month of September, I showed up at school one day wearing a Seniors Are Wimps button (I still have it).  I stood at the front doors of the school before the first bell and handed out flyers explaining how seventeen and eighteen year old seniors thought they were tough because they could gang up against a fourteen year old freshman and cause him harm.

It didn't go over well.

Later that year I would be sent to the hospital following a beating that took place during track practice.

It was a tough year.   

But according to criminal law, I would have needed at least two accomplices before I could have been suspended for rioting. 

I should have been allowed to attend that dance.   

Unfortunately, my family owned a half-set of Funk and Wagnalls, letters A-M, and though I had read most of the volumes we had on hand (there were very few books in my house growing up, so I read whatever I could find), we did not have the R edition of the encyclopedia, and so my illegal suspension went unchallenged.

If I remember correctly, Peter Archambault was made King of the Can at the dance instead of me.  He was paraded around the high school cafeteria in a garbage can, apparently second on the seniors' freshman hit list. 

My mom, feeling bad for me, took me out for ice cream.

Hazing, of course, was made illegal by the time I was a senior, though I doubt that I would have participated in it.

By the end of my freshman year, I had experienced enough hazing to last a lifetime.

As a result of this research, I intend to spend hour upon hour playing videogames with my daughter

The Wall Street Journal reports that researchers found that girls aged 11 to 16 who played video games with a parent reported better behavior, more feelings of familial closeness and less aggression than girls who played alone or with friends.

Hooray! 

"It's the face-to-face time, the interaction, that matters," said psychology professor Sarah Coyne, the lead author of the study. "Videogames are kind of an adolescent thing. When a parent says I'm going to sit down and do what you're going to do, that sends a different message entirely."

For boys, playing with a parent, though, didn't seem to have any measurable benefit.  That's probably because the time boys play with parents is just a "drop in the bucket," compared to the overall time they spend gaming, Coyne said.

While I'm pleased to read these findings, I'm not surprised.  As a child, I spent hours playing videogames alongside my mother.  On our Atari 5200, we mastered Pac-man, Defender and Dig Dug among others. 

My mom's love for Pac-man was so great that she named our dog after the game. 

And while it's true that I played videogames without my mother during my teenage years, my hardcore gaming didn't really begin until I had moved out of the house at age eighteen and games like Warcraft (the original), Unreal Tournament, and Diablo were released to the PC.  For most of my teenage life, I was playing videogames in the living room, either with my mother or with her in the next room.

So unlike the boys studied in the recent research who spend the majority of their time playing online or with friends, the great majority of my gaming was done with my mother.  So the effects that the researchers found in girls may well have applied to me as well.

Except they didn't. 

As far as better behavior goes, I was not well behaved in my teenage years.  I was sneaky and subversive and fairly clever, but I still received my fair share of after-school detentions, and my behavior outside of school was atrocious. 

As for more feelings of familial closeness, I moved out of my parent's house upon graduation and returned less than half a dozen times over the next three years (skipping Christmas twice) before my evil step-father lost the house to foreclosure.

And in terms of less aggression, I played a lot of pick-up football in those days with the sole purpose of hurting people.  I also learned to punch people between the eyes rather than the mouth when engaged in a fistfight.  You can cut your fist on someone's teeth while your knocking them out of your opponent's mouth, and the blood that fills the mouth as a result can lead to a surprising amount of rage that your opponent can use to fuel his internal engine.  Between the eyes is always the way to go.   

Needless to say, I was aggressive as a kid. 

But there were other benefits to my mom's love for videogames.  As a result of her near-obsession, she was quite familiar with the video game lexicon, and we possessed a shared experience that allowed us to talk about gaming at the dinner table or in the car for hours. 

She also had the ability to sit down and laugh with her no-doubt surly, rapidly retreating teenage son for hours at a time.

How many mothers of teenage boys can claim this? 

I tend to think that my mother's proclivity toward videogames had more to do with her genuine love for gaming than with some Machiavellian plot to infiltrate herself into my life, but who knows?

Maybe some of the reason that she enjoyed Pac-Man so much was that her eldest son was sitting beside her so often.  

It's nice to think that this might be true.

Im jealous.

To be young enough to find joy in a paper crown and a plastic banana…

More information about road kill than you could ever want or need

Catherine Price writes an amusing piece in Slate about her adventures trying to cook rabbit road kill that reminded me of two road kill stories from my own life.

Yes. Two.

The first was a heated debate I got into with a deer hunter on Christmas about fifteen years ago.  The hunter in question was bragging about "taking down three deer this season" when his wife reminded him that one of the deer had been road kill that he stumbled upon on the way home from work.

"Road kill?" I asked.  "You count a deer that was hit by a truck as a kill?"

"If you drag it out of the woods, it's a kill."

"And what if you drag it out of the breakdown lane?" I asked.

"Close enough."

Apparently it is not uncommon for a hunter to include road kill in their seasonal kill numbers, especially if the hunter is the one to hit the deer. 

And several states have actually gotten involved in road kill reclamation. 

The state of Illinois, for example, requires hunter to register any deer claimed off the side of the road.  The law states that "road kill deer may only be claimed by those individuals who are residents of Illinois, are not delinquent in child support payments and do not have their wildlife privileges suspended in any state."

Am I the only one who thinks it strange for a state to link child support payments to road kill reclamation?

Colorado, on the other hand, issues permits for the "harvesting meat from road kill."  The law provides for the possession of "edible portions" of road-killed wildlife.  Harvesters (their word, not mine) are therefore permitted to hack off certain parts of the animal but must leave the rest behind.

Antlers and fur, for example, come under a separate jurisdiction. 

So you can take a drumstick and a little white meat but must leave your future deerskin coat behind.

Utterly bizarre.  President Obama. in his State of the Union speech, talked about simplifying government, using the example of salmon, which change jurisdiction depending upon their location in the river. 

Perhaps he should start the simplification process by eliminating governmental regulation as it pertains to road kill. 

I'm pretty sure we were just fine before it.

My second road kill story takes place ten years before the Christmas Day road kill debate.  I was attending a college party at North Adams State College in Massachusetts (now Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts).  In the center of the room was a large, plastic garbage  barrel from which the frat boys were spooning out spiked punch to guests.  Floating inside the punch was a block of ice containing road kill. 

The frat boys had scooped up some indiscernible species of mammal from the side of the road and frozen it in a block of ice with blue food coloring.  Then they froze that blue block of ice into another clear block of ice. 

The goal of the party was to finish drinking the spiked punch before the clear ice melted down to the blue ice, thus exposing the punch (and any would-be drinkers) to the road kill.

One of the most ingenious and disgusting things I have ever seen.

And yes, they managed to finish off the punch in time. 

I even helped out a little. 

Television wasteland

Seventy-one percent of Americans say television is one of their favorite forms of media, even as they consume it more and more on devices other than traditional TV sets, according to Deloitte's fifth annual "State of the Media Democracy."

I'm sort of shocked to hear this. 

Elysha and I do not watch much television. 

In fact, we watch very little television. 

And almost all of the television that we do watch, save sports and NBC's Thursday night lineup, is watched on DVD.

And we even watch the NBC Thursday night comedy 30 Rock on DVD.  

As a result, there are evenings like the last two (both following snow days) when we actually want to watch television and have the time to watch television but have absolutely nothing to watch.

Normally, we'd pop in the DVD of our current show and watch a couple episodes.  Our postal carrier failed to show up today (so much for the rain, sleet and snow claims), and therefore we are still without our Netflix DVD of Glee, a show I am quickly souring on. 

So we were stuck. 

Last night we watched a thirty minute episode of the television version of This American Life (recorded on the DVR) and then waited two hours for the Celtics game to begin on the west coast. 

Tonight we watched an HBO documentary on Vince Lombardi and then turned the television off at 9:00.

Normally I wouldn't care so much, but after two days trapped inside the house thanks to snow, sleet and freezing rain, I would have really enjoyed watching something entertaining for a few hours tonight. 

I found myself a little envious of those people who have their entire night planned out based upon the television shows airing on network TV.

Just for kicks, I took a look at tonight's television lineup to determine if there was something decent that we could have watched had we planned ahead a little better.

My options included:

Back-to-back episodes of a show called Minute to Win It.  I assume this is a game show and therefore not something we are interested in. American Idol, which was entertaining back in 2002 but quickly became unwatchable for us. Criminal Minds, which I assume is a police procedural.  I have watched enough police procedurals in my life and do not need to watch another.  Ditto for medical dramas.  A show called Live to Dance, which I assume is a dance competition of sorts. Yeah, right. Back-to-back episodes of a sitcom called The Middle.  Admittedly, I know nothing about this show and have never heard a single person speak of this show.  But I'm pretty sure the Lombardi documentary was better.  Human Target, a show that I happen to know was based (rather poorly) upon a comic of the same name.  I read a review of this show sometime during the fall and found the concept ridiculous. Not interested. Modern Family, a sitcom that I have been told is very good by many different people (although every time I hear it described, it sounds like an update on All in the Family or Roseanne, two shows I never watched but know so much about that I feel like I watched them). If we were to watch it, we would probably watch it in its entirety on DVD. Cougar Town: Based upon promos that ran during the NFL season, I know that Courtney Cox is in this sitcom.  I also know that it airs at 9:30, which is the slot where most sitcoms go to die.  And everything I've heard about the show makes it sound stupid.

So that's it. One possibility, unless of course I looked beyond the four major television networks, which I admittedly did not. 

So what is good on television these days that I may be missing?

Check that: 

What is good and new on television these days?  No police procedurals.  No reality shows.  No hospital dramas.  No game shows. 

Elysha and I recently finished watching Breaking Bad, which we liked a lot because it was well written, well performed and most important, original.  Other favorites from the past have included The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lost, and the great Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

All shows that were written well and were things that we had never seen before. 

Okay, fine.  I watched Battlestar Galactica as a kid, but this was nothing like the original version of the show.  

I was hoping to feel the same about Glee, but the over-produced musical numbers (when some honest singing would be preferable) and contrived plotlines are starting to get to me.

Mad Men or Dexter will probably be next in the Netflix cue, but is there anything on network television today that fits my criteria? 

Something that I could start watching today and be happy?

A possible Valentines Day treat

I think I've found the perfect Valentine's Day activity for Elysha and me.

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Seriously. 

Sure, we could eat dinner at her favorite restaurant. 

Or I could take her to a movie.  Popcorn and hand-holding and such.   

Or we could act like those disingenuous, high-minded pontificators who reject Valentine's Day as a fabricated, commercialized Hallmark holiday under the guise of waiting a day or two in order to purchase roses at a non-inflated price.

You know those people.  They say things like, "I don't need the calendar to tell me to give my wife flowers" and "Our love doesn't wait for February 14th."

If I could vomit on command (unlikely since I am vomit-free since 1983), I'd vomit on the shoes of these people whenever they spout such nonsense. 

Or Elysha and I could go to White Castle and make a memory that we will never forget.

Seriously.

Valentine's Day at White Castle. 

Could you imagine anything more memorable?  

Especially with White Castle's offer to take our photo so that we can "treasure the memory" forever.

Thoughts?

The headline should read: 99-year old Japanese poet finally gets off her ass

I know there are people who will hear about the 99-year old Japanese woman whose self-published book of poetry has become a bestseller and think that this is a heartwarming and inspiring story.

I guess that anytime you sell 1.5 million copies of any book (and particularly poetry), it would warm any heart.

But I can't help but see this as a tragic waste.  The woman did not begin writing until she was 92 years old, and while "better late than never" certainly seems to apply here, imagine what she might have been capable of had she begun writing earlier. 

I'm not surprised that one of the messages in her poems is "Don't try too hard."

No kidding. 

And please don't try to tell me that she required 96 years of life in order to gain the experience and wisdom needed to write her poetry.  The argument that a writer needs a certain degree of life experience before he or she can write successfully may have some truth to it (though I doubt it), but 92 years seems like a long enough time for anyone to begin writing. 

Incidentally, my boss told me when I was 34 that I could not publish a book before the age of 40, citing that time-worn experience argument.   

SOMETHING MISSING was published when I was 37. 

I often say that the only reason I wrote the book was for spite.