New Story! "The Sturdy Bookshelves of Pawel Oliszewski," At Intergalactic Medicine Show!

My tale of strange woodworking magic, “The Sturdy Bookshelves of Pawel Oliszewski,” is now available for your reading pleasure (and auditory pleasure, as they added in an audio production of it).  This is one of my favorite stories I wrote this year, as it’s where I started to find what I’m thinking of as my new author-voice – the one that melds a little more of my snarky blogger you all know with the fiction bones it needs to have in order to survive. Your teaser text is here:

When people asked me about Pawel Oliszewski’s bookcases – which they inevitably did, especially for the brief period I was paid to answer their questions – I told them my story in strict chronological order. I explained how I moved next door to Pawel, a quiet Polish accountant, when my mother died. I told them how, over the course of seventeen years, my neighbor gifted me with seven fine specimens in his legendary line of improbable bookshelves.
No, I wasn’t willing to sell them. Yes, he offered me more bookcases – roughly four a year, actually. Yes, I turned him down – the man would have filled my house with bookcases, if only I’d let him. Yes, I still have them all – the specimens I currently possess are specimen #89 (Vickers hardness test: 970 MPa), specimen #113 (Vickers: 1325 MPa), specimen #234 (Vickers: 2250 MPa), and the much sought-after late-era specimens #269, #287, #292, and #304 (effectively untestable).
Yes, it is an irony that each of the bookcases are worth more than my house now. Oh, no, I’ve never heard that one before.
But above all, I tried to tell the origin of the bookcases honestly – the tedious hobby of an asocial immigrant who specialized in awkward pauses. This was an error. People wanted Pawel’s garage workshop to be a magical wonderland – wanted Pawel himself to be a sage, armored in wise silence.
The official biography – which I did not write, despite being both a professional obituary writer and a good friend to the Oliszewski family – jostled the facts around, made it seem as though Agnes knew there was something special about Pawel’s craftsmanship all along.
But no. His bookcases were boring, as was Pawel, as was I. Ask yourself: If anyone had seen anything of interest in that quiet accountant, wouldn’t the world have discovered his bookcases years ago? Wouldn’t they have discovered Myra Turnbull’s purses and Jeb Guhr’s model planes?
No, the truth lay there all along, resting beneath cobwebs; it was just tedious. Easily overlooked. Like me.
Still. I’m going to tell you the way I’ve always told it. Strict chronological order. Just to channel a bit of the old man’s magic.
Are you interested now?

If you’d care to read the rest, it is over here.  I hope you do.

"Samson Was Betrayed By A Woman"

I was reading a roleplaying supplement describing a fictional history when I read this:

“Like Samson, [this character] was betrayed by a woman…”

Now, the “betrayed” part isn’t what I have an issue.  Lots of people betray others.
The problem is that it’s “a woman” who betrayed this guy.  Because if we flipped that script, it wouldn’t be “betrayed by a man,” as though all men were cut from the same cloth; no, it’d be “betrayed by his trusted Lieutenant,” or “betrayed by his best friend,” or “betrayed by someone who was described in terms of something other than his gender.”
This is another example of Smurfette Syndrome, where the “woman” is effectively a character class: you have the fighter! The thief! The wizard! And the woman! And that unconscious smearing (“betrayed by a woman”) implies that all women are alike, they all do this, and we need no further demarcation aside from “woman” to describe someone.
Which is a problem in both directions.  In this case, all women are subtly implied to be betrayers.  Because the only thing we know about this character is that she is a woman, not “a Lieutenant” or “his wife” or “his physician.”  If the betrayal is from “his lieutenant,” we can imagine all sorts of lieutenant-specific reasons to betray: power, “frag the lieutenant”-style incompetency on the part of the hero, shifting alliances.  If the betrayal is from “his wife,” then we wonder what issue was so great that it sundered a marriage.  But nope; it’s a woman, and what are women in that case but generic betrayers?
On the other hand, if it’s a positive syndrome – “was helped by a woman” – then we imply that all women are nice just by dint of being women, and so Madonna/Whore syndrome is raised.
Like I said, it’s a subtle thing – so subtle that a lot of people would miss it.  But men get to have positions and motivations.  Women are women.  And it’s rare to see men not given a profession or a relationship, because we know men have tons of different reasons to do things.
Women?  They’re just women, man.

How I Thank God.

The MRI is in; Rebecca’s brain tumor has not, as yet, grown back.  Which means she will not die yet.  Had that MRI gone poorly, the best we could have done was put Rebecca in hospice and wait for the end.
I have never been so happy to hear about a girl getting chemotherapy in my entire life.
And so I thanked God that Rebecca was okay.  Which was a little awkward, because depending on who you talk to, God was the person who gave Rebecca the tumor in the first place.
The thing about the Rebecca’s saga is that there is a significant amount of providence in her story.  If they had not been at the ER when Rebecca had had her first seizure, Rebecca might not have survived the seizure.  (They had to break open the crash cart to save her.)  If the  Meyers hadn’t been on vacation in Jersey, they wouldn’t have been so close to CHOP, the best children’s hospital in America, where extremely talented surgeons resected the entirety of the tumor.  And as far as parents go, the Meyers are a superteam for a child with cancer – Kat is a doctor, and Eric’s dealt (sadly) with familial cancer before, so they both know what to expect and how to deal with it in a way that provides the best care possible for Rebecca.
Yet I recognize the intense survivor’s bias in all that.  There are children in similar circumstances who weren’t near an ER.  There are kids who got worse surgeons.  There are kids who got parents with less experience.  Am I then implying that God wanted these kids to die?
(Which is foolish, as it’s not as though Rebecca has lived yet.  She has merely passed the first of what are hopefully many milestones.  Her life is still very much in danger, and as usual XKCD described the experience best.)
Yet I thank God nonetheless.
The thing about God is that if He exists, He’s working off of a logic that we’d find hard to understand.  We get bent out of shape about death, which is understandable, since to us death is the end of everything. But if we truly accept all the ideology of God, death is actually a temporary thing, and then we transition to another area.  Death is traumatic to us, sure, but if you believe all the way then you have to understand that to God, death isn’t cruel but a way of transitioning someone from one state to the other.  We see dying as the end of all things, but to God it would merely be a beginning.
And I can’t claim to understand all the ramifications of that logic, though I’ve tried.  There’s a ton of pain and suffering on Earth, but if the stories are to be believed, all of that goes away.  It affects us now, gouges our spirits, but after a million years of living in paradise we’d probably struggle to remember what all the fuss is about.
Infinity is a long, long time, my friends.
None of this is presented in an attempt to convince you.  I’m just saying that faith is a lot more complex than asking why people suffer now.  There are certain fundamental tenets of life where, if we’re wrong about them, then everything we know changes.  For me, in a very real way, my faith is a way of engaging with the universe and saying that I don’t know how things work… and that faith taps into much the same humble mystery I get from learning about scientific breakthroughs.
The world is a complex and wonderful and terrifying place, and I can never know it all.  To me, science and faith meld, clasping hands and spinning in circles, reminding me to question everything.  And so I thank God.
But I also question Him.  Jay Lake, an atheist who is dying of cancer, posted a treatise on faith, where he said, “I have an immense respect for faith and its power. I have a profound disrespect for confusion between the truths of faith and the truths of testable, empirical reality.” And in that, the atheist and the Christian agree completely.  I think that science is our best way to understand the universe and to combat our silly monkey brain biases… but I also recognize that science is an imperfect tool, not the best thing but rather the best thing we have available.
And so I keep my scientific brain open at all times even during my faith, reminding me that I do not know whether God exists, and if S/He exists I certainly do not pretend to understand all the concerns of a compassionate, omnipresent being. My dog thinks I am terribly cruel for putting her on a leash, but my dog does not understand how close she’s come to being hit by a car many times.  To delirious people in hospitals the nurses are cruel demons, tying them to a bed and poking them with needles.  It’s very easy to appear cruel if someone does not understand the methodology of your kindness, and if there is a God it may well be that some portion of our torment may be a kindness we do not understand.  Or that God is not as omnipotent as we’d like.
Or that God does not exist.  I can keep that option open, too.  It is a poor faith that has to deny other possibilities in order to exist.

Ask Me Anything

Today’s a bit of a nailbiter; we’re going to get the results of Rebecca’s MRI this afternoon.  If it’s bad, then things will be very bad.
So I can’t really focus today.  This is usually the time I ask for distractions, so today’s a good day for an “Ask Me Anything” entry.  The rules are the same as always.
Ask me a real question. On any topic. I’ll do my best to answer honestly. 
(Fake questions like “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?” are neither clever nor useful.  You can do it; it marks you as the kind of person who doesn’t realize the joke is so obvious it’s been done a hundred times before, and I’ll think less of you for being tedious.  Hey, I told you I’d answer honestly.)
All other questions will be answered politely, and to the best of my ability.  Go, if you please.

How Facebook Is Like The Mirror Of Erised

My sister-in-law Susan said this on Facebook:
“So you know that delicious-looking recipe all over FB with the crescent rolls and chocolate chips?”
No.
No, I didn’t.
I have never seen a recipe on Facebook in my life.
I’ve seen penis cakes, and turduckopiggens, and elaborate food-sculptures weaved of cooked bacon, but I cannot recall seeing an actual recipe on Facebook ever.  Let alone this universal crescent roll with chocolate chips that seems delicious, but according to Sue even the dog wouldn’t eat it.
Yet that’s Sue’s experience: recipes.  She doesn’t even bat an eye at indicating that a recipe is all over Facebook, which if I noted it, I’d say, “Odd that I’m getting recipes in Facebook now.”  Which indicates that to Sue, recipes are all over her Facebook – maybe not as common as selfies, but a thing that crops up regularly.
Which is the terrifying thing about social media, really.  In the distant past, we had a handful of newspapers and three channels to watch the news on.  And the news was narrow, so narrow that whatever stories didn’t make it into those informational gateways might as well not have existed, but you knew what when you watched CBS, you were seeing the same Walter Cronkite story that the rest of America was watching.
Now, in social media – most prevalent on Facebook, with its algorithms that choose what’s of interest for you, but you can self-select to your liking on Twitter and Tumblr and Google+ – you can see an entirely different world, and never notice it.
To someone, Facebook is a place filled with recipes and cleaning tips and advice columns.  To someone else, Facebook is a welter of lamentations that their sportsball team lost, car photos, bawdy jokes and pin-up girls.  And to me, Facebook is a place of XKCD cartoons and cat macros and scientific breakthroughs.
And they’re all the same site.
I don’t know how many people realize that Facebook is such a customizable experience that each person sees a radically different thing.  I know a lot of people are confused when they posted something vitally important on Facebook – a death in the family, a graduation, a book sale – and I didn’t see it.  They’d assumed that if we were friends, and they posted something, I saw it.  So if my technologically-adept friends often don’t understand that Facebook doesn’t show their posts to everyone, how many of the general population understands?
And I think this effect is weirdly insidious.  It’s been shaping politics for years, an echo chamber kicked off by Fox News, and slowly everyone is being fitted for their customized bubble.  Everyone I know has heard of this latest sexist outrage in science-fiction… but quite literally, I may be in touch with all the people who know and care about it.  Yet to me, it seems huge, and there’s no easy way of objectively correlating it.  I don’t have easy access to web traffic (“This blog post you see as universally-seen has received 3,000 hits”), or statistics showing me how much of an outlier I am, or any of that.
Yet every morning, logging into the Internet, I am presented with a world.  A world that is, and continues to be, radically different from other people’s experience.  And that world shapes my reactions in ugly ways.  If everyone I know and see is calmly discussing Obamacare as though it’s a universal good, then I begin to think “Well, everyone believes this,” and a) my urgency in fighting for these causes lessens because I think it’s handled, and b) I get outraged and threatened more when I see someone attacking Obamacare (“Why is this person so unreasonable when everyone else understands its goodness?”), and c) my facts are skewed.  I am acting according to a customized illusion of the world presented to me not as the world exists, but according to what algorithms inside some server think would comfort and entertain me.
That’s a terrifying thought.  And yes, you can fight that bubble fairly easily, by broadening your news sources or having some friends in the opposition or just doing more Google searches.  Yet my point is that the bubble is enclosed around you transparently, without any warning of “DANGER: Opinions in this zone have been tailored to reflect your biases,” and if you’re not observant then you can wind up looking into a hall of mirrors.
Somewhere, there’s a person for whom Facebook has no politics; it is just recipes and kid pictures, a serene place because its owner wants nothing to do with conflict or debate.  In that same web page, there’s a person for whom Facebook is a continual stream of conservative cheerleading, a steady stream of triumphs of individual gumption.  In that same web page, there’s a person for whom the Trayvon Martin case was such a slam-dunk that it was clear to her that Zimmerman would be prosecuted, because she’d read fifty articles showing exactly how clear-cut this case was.  And to that person, Trayvon Martin’s case had to be the result of jury tampering or corruption.
None of them know they’re seeing different worlds.  All of them may be acting as though this was a universal world.  To them, Facebook is Walter Cronkite the news announcer, bringing them the day’s events, but Walter is whispering a different thing to each of you.
And slowly, surely, we all begin to drift out of touch.

Things Dogs Don't Understand

She still walks around like she’s hobbled, looking up at us with a deep and aggrieved confusion.