Cruel or Incompetent?
A lot of relationship problems can be solved by determining the motivation of today’s fuckery: Did they mean to do that? Yes, they eviscerated me and fed my liver to the pigeons, but was that an intentional surgery?
Yet there’s a relationship game show that just isn’t worth playing, and that show is:
Cruel Or Incompetent?
Which is to say that in any long-term relationship, there are certain things your partner should know about you. These are your baseline values: I’m not talking about the little niggly stuff like, “I want a call if you’re going to be out late,” but rather the core stuff like, “If you lie to me, I’m leaving.”
If you’re a full-time mother, you shouldn’t have to hold a Powerpoint presentation going, “My kids are going to come first.” If you’re in a monogamous relationship, you shouldn’t have to hold a class that outlines bulletpoints like, “Our monogamous relationship precludes getting hummers from strangers at truck stops.”
These aren’t universal laws. But they are the core aspects that people dating you should, on some level, fundamentally understand. If you value harmonious friendships, then anyone dating you shouldn’t have to be debriefed on the reasons why insulting your buddies at parties is Right Out. If you’re someone who needs up-front communication to be happy, then dating someone who goes “it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission” will lead to disaster.
And when those earth-shattering transgressions come, and they go, “Well, I didn’t know!” then you have one of two situations:
1) They’re lying scumbags who did know what you needed, and willingly chose to hurt you.
2) They’re people so oblivious to your inner workings that they’ll waltz past the most mission-critical aspects of your psyche unless you take the time to program them like a computer.
And the answer in either case is that you should get the fuck out now. If they’re liars, then hit the eject button.
And if they’re genuinely that clueless about the quintessence of who you are, then their innocence is not a mitigating factor. They may not be evil people, but if they can’t pass that exam of Youness 101 without a tutor to guide them, then chances are good that there are other really vital parts of you they’re not going to get.
And how much time do you want to spend training someone who doesn’t get you on an instinctive level? I mean, I’ve heard of people who’ve trained cats to fetch their morning paper. It can be done. But one suspects it takes way more effort and frustration, and there are many cats who just won’t do it. And while there’s nothing wrong with getting a cat, if “fetching papers” is your goal you’d probably be better off getting a dog.
But there is something potentially harmful about finding someone who has no real concept of who you are, and spending the next few years trying to instill them with instincts that they probably should have come preinstalled with.
So either they’re a liar – always a possibility – or they require so much work to get them to comprehend Relationships With You 101 that they’re probably not worth the time.
In that case, either one would be enough of a sin to say goodbye. Yes, in one case someone’s acting maliciously, and the other they’re acting innocently. But a hurricane doesn’t need motivation in order to destroy your life. And you can walk away.
What Yoda Should Have Done In The Prequels
It was kind of cool when, in Attack of the Clones, Yoda whipped out his lightsaber and showed us all what a badass he was by destroying Count Dooku.
It was also totally fucking out of character.
The great thing about the original Star Wars films is that, as Saladin Ahmed noted today, characters drew strength from giving up power. Obi-Wan sacrificing himself to help Luke escape. Luke refusing to fight his father, setting blood lust aside to remember who he was.
Yoda was the emblem of all of that. A little green dude. Harmless. “Wars make not one great.” “Your weapons. You will not need them.” He was not a being of power, but of wisdom, and he scorned all this violence for better solutions. He was Obi-Wan-plus in that he didn’t need to fight; he wasn’t concerned with who could beat up who, but rather with who was doing right.
Then the prequels threw all that aside. “Sure, wars don’t make one great,” they said. “But that’s because Yoda is the greatest fighter of them all! He doesn’t have to care!” Which sends the fucked-up message that wars actually do make one great, you just have to be so good at them that you don’t worry about them at all.
Why couldn’t Yoda simply not be a fighting master?
Why, instead of having to face down Count Dooku and save his students from certain dismemberment, could he not have had his students hold back while Dooku approached him, saber in hand? And simply said to Dooku, with sadness, “Lost your way you have.” Talked to Dooku. Had Dooku rage, as he would. And when Dooku threatened to kill him, Yoda would simply say quietly, “All you will have demonstrated by slaughtering me is that kill an old man, you can. Impressed no one will be. And one day someone stronger will kill you to take your power. This is the path of the Dark Side. But… there are better ways.”
And Dooku would, torn between his ambition and Yoda’s words, threaten him. Lightsaber to the throat. Yoda’s neck sizzling. Yoda, closing his eyes, would take the burn and say: “Any man can kill. Only a few can acknowledge their errors. Only the great can rise past them.”
And Anakin, stupidly sensing a threat that his own master did not care about, leaps in and forces a duel to the death. Robbing them of a potential ally. Losing the information they could have gotten from Dooku. Learning the wrong lesson: that Yoda would have sacrificed himself stupidly for nothing.
That would have been a fight worthy of a Star Wars. Instead, we got a leaping frog, a flash of blades, and the lesson that martial victory is really what counts.
Alas.
No, I Will Not Be In San Francisco This Weekend
I was supposed to do a signing for my upcoming urban fantasy novel Flex, wherein I would have flown to San Francisco and signed my book for you and almost certainly gone out for drinks with anyone hanging around afterwards.
Alas, my publisher moved the release date, so as opposed to my book being out, say, last Tuesday, it will now be out in April of 2015.
The good news is that I’ll still be doing a signing at Borderlands Books (which is, I assure you, a truly kick-ass shop) – and the better news is that I’ll probably be doing a small West Coast book tour, when I can manage it. We just don’t know the exact dates yet.
So.
* Not in San Francisco this weekend, though I’d love to be.
* My urban fantasy novel Flex (about crazy videogamemancers and bureaucromancers and perhaps too many musings on donuts) will be out in April of next year.
* I will visit San Francisco and hug as many of you as possible, sometime next April.
We clear? We clear.
Strange Things Are Afoot At The Circle K
Occasionally my blog is an update on my psychological processes. But this past month has seen a radical change in my behavior, and I’m not quite sure where it’s coming from.
As y’all know, I’m an introvert who does a darned fine extrovert impression. It’s not that introverts don’t like people – it’s that being around people drains our batteries on some level, and we need to go recharge by curling up in a room, alone, with a book or a game or whatever meditative offering we use to become social little monkeys again.
I feel like a broken iPhone, because my introvert batteries aren’t charging any more.
I went to Context, which was a wonderful con where I had a much better time than anticipated, but when I got back I couldn’t move. I was so low-energy that I called in sick to work the next day, because I couldn’t even answer email. I felt physically ill.
And that’s been happening everywhere. Though I love gaming, when my wife had to cancel our usual Thursday date I was thrilled, because I didn’t have to see anyone. I usually go out a couple of times a week, but I curled up and watched reality shows and didn’t talk to anyone, and by the time I went over to the Meyers to celebrate Yom Kippur with some of my most beloved friends, I thought I was ready. Ninety minutes later I was screaming-ready to leave, shivering from oversocialization, and just unready in all ways.
I don’t want to be that guy who sits around the house watching Ink Master and playing endless rounds of Civilization, but… I appear to be that guy. At least this month.
I don’t want to be around people.
There have been numerous theories as to why this is: the usual suspect, the mourning over Rebecca, is of course front and center. Some have suggested my spring Seasonal Affective Disorder has finally flipped to the fall, which will at least stop stupid people from asking me, “Hey, you’re depressed in the spring, are you sure you’re doing it right?” And others have suggested maybe it’s the Internet, I’ve been in a few mild scraps with people and though I’m not afraid of going toe-to-toe with people in online arguments that does burn my batteries when it turns from “debate” to “damage control.”
I don’t know. But I feel strained, all the time. My battery is not quite broken; I can feel that maddening trickle of charge, hours plugged into my usual recharge sources, watching that little meter ever quite leave the red zone. Making me scared to leave the house, because inevitably I’ll get somewhere and my socialization will go dead, a flat black, and I’ll be unable to find my way home.
And, as always, when I experience a psychological flutter like this, I worry that this is the end. I’ve been lucky. I’ve been swamped by seasonal depression, and bad fits, but what if this is the new configuration of my life? What if something snapped inside, something battered by Rebecca and my heart disease and the stresses of writing, and now this is the way I’ll be? How will I adjust?
Maybe I’ll be fine. But I can’t count on that. I really can’t. And so I’m just trying to recover with new videogames, with more cuddles from Gini, with more reruns of Ink Master, but it’s slow going.
This is a month. It’s a long month. And I’m hoping my desire for company will return, but right now I just want to crawl into a hole and pull the dirt down on my head.
The Lumo Lift: A Day One Review
As seems to be a sad new tradition, I got my birthday present today. Yes, my birthday is July 3rd. But I seem to have picked up an affinity for ridiculous Kickstarters, and so in this new digital age my life consists of a constant stream of emails from developers, promising me that delivery is just around the corner. I expect I will forever be ordering things I’m excited about today that arrive forever later.
(If you’re curious about my impending Soylent experiment, well, the shipping is delayed. Still. Always.)
Anyway, this gift was the Lumo Lift, which seemed like an awesome idea – it’s a step-counter that improves your posture. Whenever you slouch – and I usually have a spine shaped like a question mark – the Lumo Lift buzzes, reminding you to remove your Quasimodo-like crouch and stand straight and tall!
And early results seem to indicate that it corrects your posture like the Dance Central game teaches you how to dance – which is to say that you can kinda flail in the general direction of things, but there’s no fine-tuned body-sensing and a sad vacuum of feedback.
I’ve taken one walk around the block with it, and thus maybe things get better. But that one walk was frustrating.
The biggest problem with the Lumo Lift is that it’s supposed to buzz every time you fall out of position. And that would be great, if it did. But either it didn’t buzz, or the buzz was so faint I didn’t feel it, so I had to walk around holding my iPhone in front of my face with the Lumo Lifecoach app blaring red at me.
Worse, when you correct your posture, there’s no haptic feedback that I could sense. So basically, even if it buzzed every time I fell out of position, the Lumo Lift is like having someone tap on your shoulder and say, “Hey, you’re slouching” but that guy never tells you when you’ve got it right. The app supposedly glows green when you get back into position, but the delay on it was really long at times, and walking around stiffly staring at a phone seems to be a great way to walk into trees.
(Though this is where the Apple Watch would come in super-handy – if the background on your screen was red when you slouched, green when you stood straight, that would be a nice integrated way of sensing where you were.)
Worse to the worse, the Lumo Lift didn’t seem to register some changes in position. It told me I was slouching for the last quarter-block of my walk, and I kept leaning back and forward, wriggling around like I was trying to get an old rabbit-ear antenna to pick up CBS, and nothing happened. Eventually I had to reset the Lumo to tell it “I AM STANDING STRAIGHT, DAMMIT,” but that involved pressing twice, or three times, or whenever, because it wasn’t exactly consistent in registering feedback.
On the bright side, it turns out that walking around the block with Shasta is about 1,750 steps. So I feel fit. My target is 10,000, and we’ll see if I can get there.
(On the super-plus side, according to the “10,000” rule, once I achieve 10,000 steps I will be a master at walking. So I’m psyched about that.)
I’m gonna wrangle with it some more, because I like the idea, but the Lumo didn’t actually provide any helpful feedback on this first run. I stood straighter, but that’s because I was trying to stand straighter because I paid like $80 for this frickin’ thing and dammit, I was trying to get it to work. What I need is something that actually buzzes when I’m out of position in a way that alerts me consistently, and I don’t think that does that effectively – or maybe I just haven’t doped out how to use it yet.
Oh well. I got a dog to walk after work. Let’s see how this goes.