Men!

Twice in the past few days I have come across a link to this piece, Rebecca Solnit, writing in the L.A. Times, about how (some) men love to explain things they know nothing about to women, and how this oppresses the women. Indeed, she goes on to compare her experience with having to give an overconfident ass in a Raulph Lauren Aspen lodge the smackdown with the plight of women in Islamic nations who are not allowed to testify at their rape trials, or Maria Lauterbach being butchered by her rapist.

What? ... What!?

These people, the explainers, the talk-down-upon-ers, are blowhards. They like explaining things they know nothing about to everyone, not just to women. OK, sorry. I shouldn't be declarative like that. I risk being accused of explaining something, and of arrogance, asshattery, blowhardedness, and general male-dominated hegemonic discourse.

Still, please, hasn't everyone, female or not, met someone like this? Hasn't everyone had to sit through their bluster and arrogance and contempt? It's not like only men can act that way, either. Have you never experienced a woman's whithering contempt? Her certainty in the face of all reason?

Not all women, to be sure, and not all the time. Just some women, or rather some people, some of the time. It doesn't look like a male thing from where I'm standing. She doesn't even seem to realize that linking maleness to arrogance the way she does is exactly the kind of contemptuous stereotyping that she protests later, when applied to herself:

Several years ago, I objected to the behavior of a couple of men, only to be told on both occasions that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said they had, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest -- in a nutshell, female.

Or, rather, when she perceives it applied to her. I doubt either of her accusers actually came out and said she was "subjective" or "dishonest" because she was female. (Though I'll admit the stereotype may have crossed their minds, because people are bad like that.) Indeed, I've seen this kind of behavior, too, and again from both sexes. People always, always remember the "facts" to their own advantage. Men do, and so do women, and so, I have no doubt, does Ms. Solnit. But heaven forbid the incidents in question not be perfectly preserved in the objective crystal clarity of her memory. There is no possibility that she might be subjective in the least, even if every other human being on earth is.

Of course, it never works to talk to anyone about that, because nobody will admit they do it themselves. "Everyone else is subjective, but not me! I know what I saw." Except when they show you the video later and point out the man in the gorilla suit.

No doubt the men in question were in the wrong, and Ms. Solnit was in the right, but to become incensed at the oppressiveness of these men questioning her version of events? Incensed to the point of making these people who had the temerity to disagree with her the poster-men of all male oppression? That seems strangely... arrogant. Isn't Ms. Solnit, now, doing the explaining? Perhaps it is people who explain things, to people, and let's just call them blowhards, whatever their sex.

Inconceivable

I am reading through my backlog of Interzone magazines during lunch. Recently I finished a story (which I will not name for reasons that will soon become apparent), and I thought, "wasn't that one of the readers' choice stories?" IZ had the results of a readers' choice poll in issue 209. I pulled the issue, and sure enough, there was the story.

I can't say I was surprised, but, I have to be honest, I thought the story was gut-thumpingly awful. It was built around a gimmick, and it was written entirely to make a point that was bland, simple, almost trite (although true, but being true isn't enough). It assumed that the reader was too dim to have appreciated the point before, while being at the same time so sensitive as to be moved by the author's treatment of it. The author basically clubbed the readers over the head with this point and nothing else and sat back, satisfied this was sufficient to make a story worth writing. It was a ode to the author's own sense of what his writing could do for the world. And I thought it was terrible. It was the kind of thing I would expect from a gifted* high school student in creative writing class, not being published in a magazine that people pay for.

This was one of the readership's favorite stories of the year.

Obviously I don't understand what people like to read. Did they like that the story was oh so clever? Did they honestly think it was insightful? I'm baffled.

* Yes, gifted. It was well enough written for what it was.

And

You know what's really annoying? I can't post any of this stuff, because I don't want to ruin the impact when read in its proper place (assuming I ever finish this damn thing).

Arglgargle!

It is, to put it mildly, slightly annoying to work on a picture for two hours, finally be getting somewhere with it, and then have Photoshop Elements crash.

And I cut myself shaving this morning.

Stupid Excel™ Tricks

Why does Excel make it impossible to know what cell is selected when the window is not active? I can understand feedback so that users don't get confused about where input is going, but I'd like to be able to select a cell in a sheet and then do something in another window, using the selected cell as a convenient place holder. Convenient, that is, if it wasn't invisible.

Yes, we are all individuals!

I'm not.

Some people might say it takes a rare individual to realize that they utterly unimportant and ordinary. I don't think this realization is particularly rare. The reason people laugh at the guy who raises his hand and says "I'm not" in that scene from The Life of Brian is not just the incongruity of a single person standing out from the crowd by being the only one to say they don't stand out. Most people, I think, recognize at some level that we have all been in that crowd, that we are all in crowds of one sort or another at all times, and that Dennis (the "I'm not" guy) is right when he says he's not different. He's only saying what is true for any of us, and which we already know (but saying it with impeccable timing).

Then again, my friends tell me I am an optimist.

"True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
what oft was thought, but never so well expressed."
-- Alexander Pope

In broad strokes the actions of any of us are both incredibly predictable and completely inconsequential. People who know me well might be surprised to hear me say that, as I also believe strongly in the value of each human being (or other sentient entity), and in seeming contradiction to the above, the uniqueness of each person. But the difference is in scope. Each of these ideas (that we are unique individuals of great value and that we are interchangeable particles in history of no individual consequence) can be true as the same time of the same person, because they address different scales. On the scale of history I certainly do not matter. To proclaim otherwise would be hopelessly grandiose. Even limiting ourselves to the here and now I do not matter to such a large segment of humanity that, by any objective measure, I might as well not exist. Even the actions of the rich, powerful and famous will disappear into history. If Newton had died in childhood Leibnitz would have gotten credit for discovering calculus, and life would go on. Even those things which seem overbearingly huge to us right now are hiccups in history, and it will all be gone in the blink of an eye, as the Atlantic grows just a few meters wider.

However, there is another scale, the human scale of one to one interactions, with my friends, colleagues and even random strangers on the internet. In that tiny circle around each of us, we do matter and we are unique, important individuals. And, after all, we each live in a universe of our own, centered, by necessity, on ourselves.

People deal with this in different ways. Most of us, most of the time, just ignore the big picture, because, in the end, it ignores us. Periodically someone will be outraged that nobody around them 'realizes' how utterly banal it all is, they will rant and shout, or mope and groan, or perhaps take up 'mischief' (also known in some circles as 'wankerhood') in order to wake people up. And the raging individuals, too, are part of a crowd, gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists in unison.

There is no escaping your insignificance. A few decades as a single speck out of billions swarming over a mote lost in space. There's no significance in that, no matter what you do, if you insist on taking that kind of perspective.

But nothing requires you to take that kind of perspective. There is nothing more natural about looking at your life through a backwards telescope from the surface of the moon. The distance between your thumb and forefinger is just as natural a measure as any other, and the few hundred people you know are no less significant that the billions you do not. You are the center of the universe. There is no escaping your importance and responsibility.

This, too, is not a unique realization, but one that is useful to remind ourselves of from time to time.

Trolls

It is a strange feeling to watch as a person describes being deliberately provocative, even rude, as a deeply important task taken up by the best and brightest in order to deflate the self-importance of others.

I have seen it, more than once.

The self-described 'troll' pronounces the vast majority of humanity (that is, one supposes, anyone who responds negatively to their prodding) 'sheep', dim-witted followers. The non-trolls are not smart enough, it seems, to see how important it is to be crass and disruptive for the sake of it, how pictures of naked women inserted randomly into a discussion of authentic reproductions of USAF flight jackets reveal the essence of the human condition, and, of course, too blind to have seen the human condition for themselves. In other words, the 'troll' vastly inflates their own importance, creating in themselves a perfect parody of that which they claim to defeat, and seemingly never realising that the reason they are reviled is not that they shine a burning light on uncomfortable hidden truths, but that they are tediously repeating the obvious, when they say anything at all.

This post is, of course, my own failure, justifying those 'trolls' in their sense of rebellion. I am one of those blinkered, close-minded guardians of conformity that they have set themselves against, and by rejecting their declaration of war as delusionary I only confirm, for them, the importance of their task. So I do it here, where at least it will do little harm.