I'm Getting Old

How do I know I'm getting old?

My brother, who I think is only doing it because he has no idea what he's getting himself into, is taking my kids to Disneyland tomorrow.

So of course, although they're supposed to be in bed, they're doing that insane-giddy-I'm-going-to-Disneyland-and-won't-go-to-sleep thing we all did when we were going to go to Disneyland.

I've discovered that being the slightly peeved parent who is the killjoy who tells them to go to bed and stop being so excited is just as much a rite of passage as being the excited kid who won't go to sleep.

This must be a significant parent moment, equivalent to unearthing a monolith in an Arthur C Clarke story. I wonder what it signals?

Quotes Taken From a Discourse by Jeffrey R Holland

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. [The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, vol. 4 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1889), pp. 51-52]

Such public and personal virtue was understood by the Founding Fathers to be the precondition for republican government, the base upon which the structure of all government would be built. Such personal ideals as John Adams' "virtuous citizen" and Thomas Jefferson's "moral sense" and "aristocracy of talent and virtue" were fundamental. Even the pessimistic James Madison said:

I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. [20 June 1788, in The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, arr. Jonathan Elliot, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1901), pp. 536­37]

Commercials and Music

One of my friends mentioned a commercial he'd seen recently, and it made me realize how absolutely unacquainted I am with a couple of things.

The first, of course, is commercials. I have no idea what commercials are airing on TV right now. I have no idea what commercials are airing on the radio right now. Between DVR and podcasts, I don't have any exposure to commercials beyond the quick flashes that appear as I speed on to the next segment of my shows.

This actually means I watch less TV, not just because I don't sit down and flip through channels any more, but because I don't see the commercials for other shows I might like.

So as far as my own subconscious is concerned, the same commercials that were airing a couple of years ago are frozen in time, perpetually airing as I blip through them without paying attention.

Of course, because of the podcasts, this also means I have no idea what's popular in music right now. Since I don't touch the radio any more, I have no idea what bands are popular. My entire exposure to music comes from Radio Disney when my kids are in the car. It's as if I've been sucked into an alternate reality where rock, pop, and alternative have been sucked into space and been replaced by Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and the cast of High School Musical.

I'm sure there have been a couple of musicians come out who are the new Beatles, and that my life would be dramatically altered if I just heard the uplifting message of their latest hit single, which would speak directly to my soul with both it's musical structure and it's lyrics.

But I don't consider to be that big a loss, really, except it means there will be even less chance I'll know any of the songs being parodied on Weird Al's next album.

We Won't Give Up On You, Dune!

Timothy Sandefur has given up on Dune. As in, the Frank Herbert Sci-fi book that is like in everybody's top ten list of Sci-fi novels.

I had to comment.

Actually, I had to answer a question that I believe he posed rhetorically: "What could have possessed the world to grant superstar status to this dreary eternity of a novel?"

The answer is that he's spot-on in his own analysis. The book is a product of it's own time that, were it published today, wouldn't have made it past the editors at TOR. (This despite the fact that I have it on pretty good authority that the editor at TOR thinks all great sci-fi novels should be the tale of a boy rising up to take his father's place, which essentially means he wants revistiations of Dune.)

Dune genuinely has lost some of it's value as entertainment as the years have gone on, but to recognize the greatness of Dune is to recognize that it sprang forth out of nothing.

It's somewhat akin to looking at old I Love Lucy reruns. It's easy to be jaded towards the show and feel cynical about how it features nothing but the same old tired gags we've seen a million times. The appreciation comes when you realize you're looking at the origin of all the imitators, the place where every sitcom staple became embedded into the consciousness of every hack who ever put words into a sitcom actor's mouth since.

As a certain sci-fi writer of the time put it (I won't mention his name, because it's L. Ron Hubbard, and people automatically look at you out of the corner of their eye if you mention you're willing to read anything he wrote now), at the time this book was written, every sci-fi book and story was, for the most part, taking place in pretty much the same universe. He said that it was sort of like the sci-fi writers were all going to the same places and sending each other postcards from all the places they'd all already been.

What Herbert introduced in Sci-fi was something akin to what Tolkien introduced to Fantasy: A sprawling epic, in a world that was unlike any of the worlds we'd been getting postcards from before.

He created an entirely new place, with entirely new issues. An analog writer at the time probably could have done a whole story around any one of the ideas that Herbert brought together en mass to form this complex and truly alien world. It wasn't just a bunch of people who talked like present-day Americans and with the attitudes of present-day Americans in space with zap-guns.

However, because he was sort of inventing the genre of the sci-fi epic, he suffers from some of the same difficulties as those who invented the historical novel. In Hugo's Les Miserables, Hugo spends chapters detailing accounts of wars, just so you'll understand what's happened when a guy starts going through the pockets of the dead when the battle is over. He'll spend a whole chapter outlining the history of the Parisian sewer system just so you'll understand how gross the muck is the hero is escaping through.

Herbert has some issues with that here. The world he's created was so unlike what anyone had done before, he had to spend a lot of verbiage making sure it was clear. Now, it's entered into the consciousness so much as it's influenced other sci-fi authors, that the same dialogue that seemed innovative and ground-breaking when it was written seems unnecessarily cumbered by repetitive prose.

More modern writers have learned to more seamlessly integrate the details of their vast worlds into their prose, but I daresay the line that got us from "Doc" Smith to John Varley went straight through Frank Herbert.

Back to Blogging

Well, I'm coming back.

I'm sure you all have noticed the new layout and the smoother features and some of the other stuff that's found it's way into the blog page.

Yeah, I'm learning.

All the learning actually has to do with some other blogs that I'm working on that I'm not quite ready to unleash on the public yet, although they are out there and running, if the more savvy among you are curious enough to try to find them.

But hopefully soon I'll be able to be proud of them and show them off to you fine folks and let you know they're mine.

In the meantime, this will continue to be my review site, my venting site, my on-my-mind kind of stuff site. In other words, the kind of site that only people who know me probably even remotely care about.

Speaking of which, the new Orson Scott Card book is out, and it's supposed to be fantastic. I still haven't read it, but it's an Ender book about Christmas in battle school. There was a lot of talk in the fan circles about this book before it came out. It was branded as being the literary equivalent of the Star Wars Holiday Special. But I haven't heard a word like that since the thing was published--apparently, it's great.

Also, some of you may have noticed that in setting up the link to that, I am actually able to have the text line up next to the ad instead of having it floating that the top of my post like a bizarre pointy hat sticking out of the top of a block of text.

Wow. First he chose readable colors for his blog, and now he's got HTML figured out. Next thing you know, the guy might end up writing something on the Internet somebody wants to read.

Hope everybody's Thanksgiving was happy, and look forward to both of my readers enjoying more posts in the near future.

A Better Bonds Summary

Earlier I posted a review of Bonds That Make Us Free.

I'm still not happy with the ineptness of my review, and I intend to give it another go at some point, but I think a good one line summary would be this:

This book is about the changes that can happen in our life when we start accepting who people really are and why they do what they do instead of insisting they be who we want them to be and assigning them motives that suit our own purposes.

New Skirt Is More Than Meets The Eye

Hey! Where did she go?!?

Book Review: Bonds That Make Us Free

I read an absolutely amazing book this week.

I read it once before--in fact, I think I reviewed it once before, but I didn't finish reading it that time. I don't think I was really ready for the full implications of what the book was telling me.

What the book proposes is that a lot of the unease, frustration, and anger we feel is rooted in attempts to justify the times when we do the wrong things.

As an example:

A new father is lying in bed at night, and the baby starts crying. His wife doesn't wake up right away.

The father feels the right thing to do is get up and help with the baby.

But he doesn't want to. So he starts coming up with reasons why he shouldn't. The meeting he has in the morning. That he got up last night. That she got a really good nap in after he got home from work.

And he doesn't just stop there--he goes ahead and lets himself get angry with his wife for not getting up. Starts thinking about how little she must be thinking about his wants and feelings to not be jumping up to take care of the kid.

Well, this could lead to one of two actions--he either wakes his wife up and gets her to take care of the kid, or, he gets up and takes care of the kid himself.

In the first case, he doesn't appreciate what his wife did fully, because he feels like he had to goad her into it, and in the second case, he still resents his wife even though he did the nice thing for her. And now he feels like she "owes" him.

So here's the scary thing:

We always think that if we "do" the right thing, then we'll have peace, and that our relationships will work out. "What should I do?" is usually the question we most ask.

But in this case, we can see that, no matter what way the guy chose, he was still hurting the relationship. In other words, what he did wasn't nearly so important as who he was when he was doing them.

The book then takes this a step further, and says that we tend to get into cycles of this with people. Cycles where we see other people as acting irrationally, and we have to act a certain way to try to "control" them, or keep them from acting how we think they're acting. (EG, "I know my wife wants me to fix the sink. But if I just drop everything and go do it, then she'll always expect that. I need her to understand how valuable my time is.")

And then the other person does the same thing with us (EG, "I know I'm nagging him, but if I don't stay on top of him, then it won't ever get done!")

This builds into cycles of blame and frustration, as we become so busy justifying who we are ("Can't he see that I do ____, _____, and _____?") and negating who they are ("He's the one who always _____, _____, and _____!") that we don't ever let our defenses down, and let ourselves see the truth.

And that's what this book is really about, is Truth.

Most of this anger and frustration is caused because of fantasies. Fantasies about what we think we're supposed to be, and fantasies about what we're afraid we might be.

We think we're supposed to be perfect, that we're always supposed to do the right thing, that we're never supposed to hurt anybody and that we're never supposed to mess up. But what we're afraid of is that we're monsters, monsters who do hurt people, monsters who monsters who don't do the right thing, monsters who consistently mess things up.

But the truth is simpler--the truth is we're all just people. People who are struggling, people who are afraid, people who have hope. People who do amazing things, and people who make mistakes.

And when we get away from those caricatures of everybody, of seeing people as being monsters we have to hate, or annoyances who drive us crazy, or even as anybody who can make us be anything other than who we are, that's when we can truly start to have peace.

That's not to say there aren't terrible people out there. One negative review on Amazon says this book is more for "Jerks," and that people who are accustomed to letting people walk all over them should stay away from it, because it will just fuel their fire.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Like I said at the start--this book is not about what you do. A woman with an abusive husband could stay with him or leave him, and still have anger and bitterness and malice in her heart. Leaving him won't take the hurt away by itself.

But a woman who has let go of her false perceptions, a woman who is straightforwardly dealing with truth, a woman who has let go of the caricature of her husband that she's held in her mind--that woman will see, more clearly than ever before, who her husband truly is. Once she's able to let go of the stories she's telling herself about him, once she doesn't need those any more in order to define who she is, then she will truly know whether she has a reason to stay with him, or whether she needs to go.

Because that's the thing the book won't tell you--what to do.

Because for you to have peace, it isn't about being true to who C. Terry Warner thinks who should be. It's about being true to who you know you ought to be, the person who, deep down is really your best self.

That's why the full title of this book is what it is: Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves. Because the book isn't nearly so much about trying to change who we are into someone who is acceptable. It's about letting go of all the self-justification, self-recrimination, and self-analyzing that distorts us and weighs us down, and instead, just being the decent people we really are inside, and being okay with that.

I hope this doesn't all sound like psychobabble. It's a fantastic book that I hope will change my life. I'm definitely having a hard time coming to terms with some of the implications of it. But I'm never going to be able to forget it.

On Amazon.com

Interview with Joss Whedon about the new collector's edition of Serenity.

Firefly cheap!

If you don't have it yet, go here and get the whole series of that Firefly show you've been hearing about for $20.

It's Amazon's gold box deal, just for today. Snatch it up while you can.