Category: blog

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

What have you waited a long time for?

Summer. Realistically, it always feels like it’s an age away. Sadly, at the moment, I find myself living in England. This is a country where winter doesn’t just last forever but is a near-endless time of darkness, since the sun comes up late and never appears to become bright, going down in the middle of the afternoon. It is unsurprising that in this kind of climate everyone seems to be angry and miserable all the time. What confuses me is how people inhabited these islands in the first place. I know as soon as I can get an offer from an American college, I’ll be on the first plane out again. We are currently in the middle of hurricane-force winds and falling ice mixed with rain. There’s one upside, though — for the first time in months, the wind is actually so strong it’s blowing away most of the miserable cloud cover and it’s as bright as it’s likely going to get around here until the spring makes longer days possible. It does, however, feel like the wind is blowing straight through the walls, especially at the windows and doors, meaning that I have been relegated to living most of my days wrapped in blankets. Yes, I’ve put tape and soft things there to try to mitigate the problem but when the construction is as bad as it usually is around here, you can stand a meter away from the window and feel the brutal chill from outside and there’s no tape in the world that’s going to solve that one. I have a far better solution but it involves an airport and finally saying goodbye to this place. Anybody’s department hiring tenure-track in creative writing? Definitely hit me up.

That being said, though, I’ve always found summer to be the thing I most long for for most of the year during the majority of my life. The first reason for that is something I’ve talked about a few times recently — that as a student, school was nothing more than a nightmare of desperation and summer was the only way to escape it, not to mention that it meant far more time with my family, both my parents and my extended family, which was definitely a bonus. The second part, though, is what I’m going to talk about today.

As is often typical of people on the spectrum, I suffer from Sensory Processing Disorder, a truly awkwardly-named condition, often abbreviated SPD, rather uninspired, I agree, and sounding far too much like it can be protected against with the use of thin prophylactics while engaging in extracurricular rituals that I find both disgusting and disinteresting. What this comes down to is that my sensory perception is rather different than most people’s. It’s different in a predictable way, though, and that’s what I figure might be useful to talk about, as most people see anything autism-related as being a bit of a black box and confusing to the neurotypical mind. I assure you very little of it is but we’ll just talk about this one for the moment.

First, how do we sense things? Regardless of the mind function (even in animals, for that matter), sense organs are trigged by something. I’m going to use skin and touch but they all work in loosely the same manner. When there is contact made, an electrical impulse fires (some of the impulses are electrochemical but that’s not a necessary distinction to make so we’re just going to ignore that) in a sensory nerve ending and is relayed to the neural processing component relevant to that organ in the brain. When it arrives, if it was a benign trigger, the brain receives the message as touch. If it was a sudden and unpleasant trigger, the brain receives it as pain and there is typically an aversion response — you yank your hand way from a flame, for example.

I’m going to assume you’re with me on this still. It’s useful to remember that the same goes for things like smell or sound. Most of it is simply relayed in detail to the brain for further processing and if it’s particularly painful, it triggers an automated aversion reaction like covering your ears or holding your breath. They’re not completely instantaneous but they’ve been practiced for years and you can do them without any active thinking, generally speaking. The important part about this is that the difference between what we feel as painful and what we just process as sensory data to be processed now or later is not a question of what caused it but how the brain treats the information. A touch example makes it fairly clear. If you were standing under a window and someone standing there dropped a ball from above on your unsuspecting head, it’s quite likely you would respond to it as pain, likely being somewhat displeased that a ball had been dropped on your head. I’m not a fan of having things dropped on me and most people aren’t. For obvious reasons.

Now imagine that you’re playing soccer. If you haven’t ever engaged in this, I’m sure you’ve seen it done, at least in a video. I’m not really a fan of playing (and especially not of watching) team sports but I did play a little as a child and I even coached a couple of soccer teams when I was starting out as a teacher — admittedly, coaching and helping out with young adults playing sports is far more fun from my perspective than playing the game but perhaps that’s just because I’m a teacher at heart and encouraging young people is part of my personality that doesn’t go away just because it’s after school and outside. One of the typical ways of receiving the ball in soccer is to make contact with it against your head, sending it off in another direction. For the sports-unfriendly, this is called heading the ball. If you’ve tried it, you probably discovered that it’s nowhere near as painful as it looks. You step into it, make contact, the ball goes off where you expect it to (or not, if you’re me) and keep playing. The ball hits with at least the same amount of pressure as the one dropped on your head from the window but it’s not painful. Why?

Because the brain interprets the signal as ok, as expected, as a generic signal rather than a painful one. That is, I admit, a hugely simplistic way of looking at what is a highly complex and only partially-understood process but I’m just pointing out the basic notion of how pain works in the realm of physical sensation. The simplest way to think of this is that touch and pain are only different in how the brain interprets them — when an anesthetic numbs the area, for example, you don’t stop having the potential to get hurt if you were to hit your body hard but you no longer feel the pain because the signals going to the brain don’t get there. Pain isn’t something that happens at the point of contact. It’s an interpretation.

Why have I gone to so much trouble to describe this? Because my brain doesn’t work properly to deal with these things. People have this tendency of thinking of us on the spectrum as “neurologically different” or “neurologically diverse” and that’s fine but there are some things that aren’t different or diverse in the “multiple ways of doing things is good” sort of way but are just problems. This is one of them. Being hypersensory is a disaster unless you are able to completely escape the modern world.

What it means is that most sensations are sensed at a far higher level of intensity than for those who are neurotypical. I’ll give you an example. If you shake hands with someone (a rather odd tradition in the west that has always confused me — I know the history but it was silly even in the days of swords), you likely feel light pressure against the skin of your hands. I and others who are hypersensory feel this skin-on-skin contact as full-on pain, much in the way that it feels to have boiling water poured on your skin. Actually, in my case, that’s exactly what skin-to-skin contact usually feels like. The sound of music from the house next door has the pounding intensity of gunshots a few centimeters from my ears. The smell of diesel from the delivery truck going down the road makes it impossible to breathe without choking and feeling dazed.

While not everyone who is hypersensory feels the same degree of pain or feels it in the same way, it’s usually expected that all sensations from at least one sense organ (usually touch) and often all of them are increased to such a point that what most people experience as normal or even pleasant or positive sensations are well into the realm of painful and aversion-causing.

It’s a little less predictable than it being absolute. I love music but how I experience it changes not just day to day but minute to minute. I can hold someone I love in my arms and comfort them as they cry but that same contact may feel like holding onto a flaming piece of wood another time. There are many things we (and by we I mean the entirety of medical science) don’t know about the mitigating factors and causes of sensory disorders, especially those that increase sensitivity to stimuli. But the important part to keep in mind is that those things that are desired are usually better tolerated by our minds than those things that are not. If you think that’s something specific to spectrum inhabitants, that’s why I mentioned the soccer ball on the head — this applies to everyone. The only difference is where the crossover point is between sensation and pain.

Anyway, I hope that’s somewhat useful for those of you who interact with us on a continuous basis and hear things like “I can feel the wind against my skin indoors and can’t stand up” throughout the winter. I long for summer. Actually, I long for a place where winter is a word other people use and simply never applies. But here I go, back into the storm…

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

What was outside your bedroom window?

Snow was outside the window. We talk about the extremes of weather that have happened in the world lately and it’s definitely true — the storms we have now are more violent, more brutal, faster and stronger than they’ve ever been. But there used to be more snow. I have lived in many places in my life but for awhile as a child, I lived in a town called Paradise, just outside Canada’s eastern-most capital city, St John’s. It’s out on a narrow strip of land in the North Atlantic and it’s still surprising to me that anyone thought it was a sensible place to inhabit given that it’s a land of ice, snow and ten-month winters. Of course, that’s before I spent time in the UK where the wind is more painful, the climate more inhospitable and the people generally enough of a motivation to inhabit any rock in the middle of the ocean just to escape.

I hated school. Not like you hated it. Not because it was hard or because there was work. Not because I had to sit still. Because it was hell. Being around the other children was an exercise in contemplated torture. I didn’t understand them at all — not what they wanted, not how they thought, not what they were talking about at all. I understood adults to some degree, although their complex emotions eluded me just as much then as they do now. I am a simple person. That’s not because I’m stupid. It’s because I don’t see any reason to make life complex. They don’t have a reason for it. They just give in to momentary desires and urges and don’t seem to be able to stop themselves.

On top of that, the teachers didn’t understand at all. Not only did they simply not really have a grasp of the topics they were supposed to teach (how a grown adult completely misunderstands the point of the multiplication tables I will never know but it’s absolutely true) but they ridiculed me and felt threatened by the fact that I didn’t need them. I already knew what they were trying to teach and I wanted one of two things — either they would give me something to do or read that would be academically stimulating, which they seemed to think meant a couple of grade levels higher when what I meant was graduate-level work, or they would, and this is incredibly easy and what I thought they’d go for if I kept telling them it was an option, just leave me alone. They didn’t.

But there was a way out. It was snow. I abhor broadcast media, especially the radio. If I wanted to hear people whining about day to day problems, I could just call pretty much anyone. It’s what humans do. But I don’t want that. Not ever. So the radio is just that plus a collection of music. Often not-quite-music, in all honesty. News that isn’t news for the most part, just stuff about sports and celebrities that implies that those things are important, intermingled with democratic things like politics, which I was against even from a young age, knowing that elected government is just mob rule by proxy, anyway. I love music. I am perfectly happy to listen to music all day. But I don’t need the talking and I want to choose the music I hear. If you aren’t that picky, fine. But I am. I’d be ok with them choosing the music, though, if they’d just shut up and play it. Unless it’s country. Or rap. Then I’m out.

But amid all the twangy strings and voices that sound like they were recorded while unspeakable parts of the singers’ bodies were being mangled then blended with a chorus of migrating geese, there was salvation. Some mornings, there would be an announcement saying there had been sufficient snow to close the schools. It isn’t safe to get there. It isn’t safe to open them. Of course, I knew school wasn’t safe any day at all. I was definitely going to get hurt, whether emotionally tortured by the teachers or physically tortured by students who saw me as other simply because I had no interest in them and was perfectly happy to ignore them. Their parents were definitely training them to be the next generation of angry, self-interested morons, for the most part. They really did think they deserved to be noticed and paid attention to. I just wanted to be left alone. They were systemically incapable of leaving someone alone. I don’t blame them. I do blame their parents. But more than that I blame the teachers, who were also incapable of doing it and they were supposed to be role models for peace in the school. Instead, they encouraged the violence and dismissiveness as if it were my fault for being quiet and staying apart.

Sometimes, though, the schools made a sensible decision about the weather and told us to stay home. Everyone rejoiced. The teachers got a holiday and the students got to go out and play in a white wonderland. Me? I got to read. I got to finally be safe. And I got to spend time with my parents — they were both teachers so if the schools were closed, I got a bonus. Not only did I get to finally escape the hell that was other people and the hell that was other people at school, I got to spend the day with my parents. Much of the day, of course, would be relegated to clearing the snow from the driveway, although I’m not really sure why anyone cared that much about making sure the snow was gone. I’d have been perfectly happy to hibernate until the sun came out and melted it. But there was usually plenty of time during the day for me to sit in bed and consume book after book. After dinner, though, came the best part — board games and cribbage with my parents and, if I was really lucky, my grandparents would be visiting and they’d be included in such a thing.

Snow is a terrifying thing to drive in and I highly recommend avoiding it. When you don’t have to leave the house, though, and you can spend time lost in the pages of something that lends itself well to escape, it’s a dream come true. When I was eleven, I got my hands on a newly-translated book called Sophie’s World, which was later to become my favorite work of literature, on one such day when school was missing from the necessary component of my life. I read the whole thing that afternoon. I actually went back and read the thing again a couple of weeks later, I enjoyed it so much, along with everything he had written that had yet been translated into English — in 1994, that wasn’t all that much, sadly, but I can certainly tell you it’s all worth your time. The point wasn’t which book I was reading, though. It was that I could be left alone to do it. Sure, there were video games (on the revolutionary NES, no less) and using the computer (my first was the Commodore 64, which was a fantastically easy thing to learn to program on, first in BASIC, then in machine language). But there was nothing better than being warm and cozy under blankets turning pages.

Looking out my bedroom window on those days, I could usually see plenty of the neighborhood kids making snowmen, throwing balls at each other, hitting each other with hockey sticks (sometimes actually playing hockey, too) and generally doing the things that kids do in snow. I’m not sure I ever understood why they enjoyed doing them. I tried, not just understanding but getting out there and doing them, too. I ended up cold beyond belief, in pain and just as confused. My parents stopped telling me I had to go out and play, eventually, when they realized just how mindlessly stupid I found the whole notion and didn’t get anything out of it except pain.

I was truly happy to see what was going on out there, though, as long as I didn’t have to participate. I could finally look through a protective window at what was happening in the world, observe their interactions and try to figure them out. But (and here’s the best part) if I got it wrong, I was still safe. Nobody would know I hadn’t figured out how to communicate. Nobody would hurt me.

And not a single teacher could make me look weird in front of the class for knowing the answer.

Once someone told me nobody likes the smartest kid in the class. I always thought they meant the stupid students didn’t. But they were being far more insightful. I think they meant the average and even the other intelligent people in the room don’t because they felt less smart by comparison. But they hit the nail explicitly on the head. The teacher doesn’t generally like the smartest kid in the class. It’s not always true, of course. I love the smartest kid in the classes I teach and I think all good, intelligent teachers do, too. But those teachers are few and far between — almost as proportionally lacking as good parents, one might accurately suggest. I eventually did find a few teachers who didn’t resent me and some of those I have met later in life and been truly thankful for. It took some time, though, and none of those appeared in my primary experience.

Snow was my savior. Snow, that epitome of mother nature’s cold and angry voice settling on the ground around us, something that I can’t stand to have to deal with. For me who has no desire for seasonal change and would be perfectly happy in equatorial climates of constant warmth and absent precipitation, not to mention a general hatred of all things culturally white, snow is a curious thing to long for. And I certainly no longer do. But it was the only thing that would save me from the fires of eternal classrooms. Thanks be to cloud. Amen.

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

In keeping with my recent trend toward rewatching some of my favorite movies lately, last night’s relaxation was accompanied by Tora! Tora! Tora!, the 1970 production telling the story that led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the impetus, if not the reason, why the United States entered the Second World War. Leaving aside for the moment that there are some serious inaccuracies in the movie and that one of the biggest mistakes the Americans have ever made in their history (which is saying something, given how many horrendous military blunders there have been) was participating not only in WWII but doing so against Japan, it’s a stunning work of cinema that, if you haven’t seen it, you should.

I should probably mention one thing at the beginning. The movie is subtitled. It’s all subtitled. Unless you have good comprehension in both Japanese and English (my spoken Japanese is far from good enough to catch most of it, especially at the speed it flies by), you’ll probably need the subtitles — if subtitles bother you, the movie is fairly evenly divided between the two languages so you’re not going to enjoy yourself. The other thing that’s useful to note is that it is a war movie. The entire thing is about the military actions. The side effects of that are that it’s got a pretty rigid feel to the dialog, which is obviously intentional and quite representative of the reality of the time, and that there are no significant female roles, given that the military of the 40s was pretty misogynist. Sure, there are some token wife-and-girlfriend parts but if you’re looking for something that passes the Bechtel test, look elsewhere. This ain’t it.

In case you don’t know the story of Pearl Harbor, I’ll summarize it quickly for you — the movie does, in fact, get most of the general stuff right. The Japanese government had become highly militarist by the time WWII began and it was already fighting in most of Asia — and doing relatively well. It had conquered Manchuria (a story I am happy to tell you in detail but this is not really the place for a history lesson) and overrun a good portion of the continent. Much of that was done without the consent of the government itself at the time. The military was incredibly powerful but the government was so aggressive they were mostly happy to accept victory regardless of the path that led to it. Anyway, it was seen as unlikely within Japan that America would approve of the conquests in Asia — quite possibly a mistaken assumption but we’ll never know now. And it was accurately assumed that the industrial capacity of the United States would be so incredible compared to anything else the world had ever seen that in a war of attrition, which was doubtless where the conflict was headed, a country the size of America would simply erase Japan from the map unless it could be made to back down and not start fighting in the first place.

While the Emperor, titular head of the Japanese government, in this case the Showa Emperor, was strongly against war, especially preemptive, first-strike war, the military was really calling the shots. The rise of State Shinto and a craze of population-wide devotion to racial and cultural triumphalism meant that war was coming — and it would be war on a scale never before seen, war with America. It was quite clear to everyone that the only way to win a war against America was not to have to fight one, to simply avoid a real war by making it unpopular enough that the American government wouldn’t engage. The destruction of the Navy, for example, would be so overwhelming that by the time it was restored to the point of being able to attack Japan, the general public would never support the kind of protracted war necessary to do the job, especially since the rest of the war would likely be over by that point. That was the theory and Admiral Yamamoto sees it as his only hope. He might indeed have been correct but, as his luck would have it, the real power of the navy at that point had shifted to naval aircraft launched from carriers, which weren’t in harbor at the time of the attack.

So the movie follows the path of the American intelligence and military services trying to figure out what was going on both in Tokyo and in Washington while the Japanese navy prepared for a decisive attack. The attack, by the way, was incredibly well planned and executed — the problem was that war hadn’t yet been declared, due to what can be seen as the most disastrous clerical error in recorded history. The United States decided to punish Japan for this in the only way the brutal militarists of the west knew how, pounding the island nation back to the stone age with its military might. It took four years and the development of atomic technology to do it, plus the stated intention of the Soviet Union to enter the war and fight the Japanese, too, but a nation the size of a continent did indeed blast one a fraction of its size into starvation and the resulting occupation.

I do appear to be talking quite a bit about WWII-era Japan in recent posts and, if that is not interesting to you, I apologize. It is a topic that I have found interesting most of my life but it’s not one I often write about so you’ll be happy to know this is more coincidence of what movies I’ve decided to talk about than an ongoing discussion for me.

The story out of the way, this movie has some interesting things beyond its plot. One is that it’s probably the first truly successful movie filmed in multiple languages for a western audience. There have certainly been plenty of movies not in English — some of the earliest ones, in fact, spanned the language spectrum. And there have been great movies on both sides of the Pacific since movie film was perfected. But that’s not what I mean. This movie doesn’t just have a few lines in a foreign language — it’s got about half in English and half in Japanese, meaning that it is alienating to everyone who watches it. Even if you’re a Japanese-American, the American side will feel alienating because you’re not for the American military’s perspective on the Japanese and the Japanese side will feel alienating since the country had devolved so far into the pockets of the military commanders, it had pretty much lost its cultural identity for a decade or so. That shock to the mind is something I have seen in other movies since but never anything before that point.

There was another movie made a few years later that tells much the same story, mostly from the American side (Midway), which is an excellent movie, too, and I’d highly recommend watching both, probably back to back, since it gives a totally different perspective. But it doesn’t come from the perspective of understanding, more from the perspective of seeing just how stupid people can be when they get fired up and want to fight.

What’s more interesting about this movie, though, is the story that it tells. It was courageous. At a time when most people alive well remembered the war, even if they were just children, Pearl Harbor was a sore spot in the American collective consciousness. To tell the story not just from the perspective of the Japanese commanders responsible but to tell it accurately was brave in a way being militarist never could be. You see, the highest level of the naval command in Japan went on record against the whole operation. The imperial position was that war should be avoided at all costs. The people who wanted this to happen were the army, who wasn’t going to fight the battle at all, and the less senior commanders, mostly those who hadn’t actually had to fight a real enemy and were happy to send Japanese domination all over the world. Those somewhat parodied positions were all too common in American media at the time, both the time of the war and the time of the movie’s release, portraying Japan as a country of barbarians and war-mongers who couldn’t be trusted.

This flew in the face of those assumptions and did so in a rather dramatic way — especially the last scene, which I would propose as being one of the most moving reflective moments in all cinematic history.

For most of its history, Japan was relatively pacifist with a few short-lived exceptions. World War II happens to be one of them but it has become the most obvious example of east-west relations in the minds of many Americans even to this day (as can be seen in the popularity of the recent remake of Midway in 2019). From internment camps to occupation forces, American treatment of the Japanese was unforgivable but it is a part of the past that has often been overlooked in a way that fighting against Germany or even the Civil War couldn’t ever be. That’s because fighting in Europe can be spun (inaccurately) to be about fighting for principle and the Civil War can be seen as fighting for freedom, which might even be somewhat legitimate as a lens. Fighting against Japan, especially fighting against Japanese civilians, both those living in America and those still in Japan, was nothing but shameful and it’s something that has been diminished in collective media memory ever since. It’s striking that this movie, one of the very few to do so, talked about it so openly and drew attention to something a whole hemisphere wanted to keep quiet.

[estimated reading time 9 minutes]

Yesterday, I rewatched one of my absolute favorite movies. The English title works out to be From Up on Poppy Hill, one of the less popular releases from Japanese animation powerhouse, Studio Ghibli. (In Japanese, it’s コクリコ坂から, so it’s not a reference to drugs, just the color, by the way.) Since it’s something I indulge myself and watch from time to time, you may have heard me talk about before but I’ve never gone so far as to write about either why it’s great to watch or why it’s particularly meaningful to me. Now, though, is my chance — the place I’m currently staying is mid-hurricane as ice and rain fall and the wind attempts to tear the windows out of this room so I’m not going anywhere and neither is anyone else, so I’m just realistically trying to distract myself from the fact that my neighbors, as per usual, have been playing music that is both loud and awful since late morning.

First, the simple story. I should probably mention that this is actually the story so if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like to know the plot before watching something, go watch it now and come back. If you’re like me and prefer to know what’s going to happen, you’re all good to keep going.

The whole thing takes place just before the ‘64 Olympics (which happened to be held in Tokyo) but the point of the timing is to set the story in the postwar period when Japan was just starting to seriously come out of the disaster that was imposed on the country by the war, the defeat and the postwar shortages. Life was still pretty simple at that point and what we think of as modern urban Japanese culture hadn’t really started to happen but there was finally enough to eat and it was time to show of cultural pride for the first time in a couple of decades. Most of the action takes place (action being a bit of a relative term since it’s mostly a love story and it is, thankfully, without any of the graphic “action” often associated with what I tend to loosely refer to as fuckdramas) in Yokohama (south of Tokyo if you’re a geographic neophyte).

Umi and Shun, two high school students (he’s older than she is by a year so they’re not in the same class) are approaching life in very different ways. She’s quiet and reserved, putting nearly all her effort into running her house (complete with boarders) while her mother is in America to study while he’s in charge of the school newspaper. After being demonstrated the morning routine of synchronized breakfast that I know I would have no shot at imitating even being double her age, we get to follow Umi to school where she discovers not only that she has a secret admirer but he’s declared his appreciation for her in the newspaper — in a poem (see why I like this movie yet?). It’s subtle and obvious at the same time.

Since Umi’s sailor father disappeared, presumed dead, during a supply run during the Korean War, she has taken her young childhood learnings of signal flag reading and raised the flags every day to guide his spirit home — and perhaps his living body, although that’s becoming increasingly unlikely, given that the Korean War was about ten years earlier. From his father’s tugboat, Shun has watched her raise the flags every morning in a demonstration of love for her father and has fallen in love with her from a distance. His poem is an ode to the flag-faithful girl.

The school, swept up in the modernization craze that is sweeping the country at that point with a brutal hyperactivity, is planning to tear down the old (obviously nineteenth-century) clubhouse and build a new facility for the students. While most of them don’t seem to care, there’s a significant membership in the clubs that inhabit the building and they have significant history with the place. It is, admittedly, a shithole, probably needing to be torn down. In a stunt to draw attention to the campaign to save the clubhouse (in an obvious reference to fraternities in university being “Greek”, the place happens to be called the “Latin Quarter”), Shun jumps off the roof into a miniature pond, surfacing right in front of Umi who, after their eyes meet for a moment of shared introspection, summarily drops him back into the water. Their relationship has begun, I might say, with a splash.

There are a few subplots that I’m not going to get into but there’s a party at Umi’s house and she and Shun disappear into the house to wander, ending up in her mother’s study looking at photographs, where Shun discovers to his astonishment that Umi’s father happens also to be his — his biological father, given that he was adopted. When he reveals this to Umi, the shock is deep but they agree they can be nothing more than best friends, given the awkwardness, not to mention the genetic lack of wisdom, of pursuing penetrative partnership with one’s siblings.

They take a bit of a side trip from their relationship to fight for the clubhouse in Tokyo but the real surprise comes from the happy couple’s meeting with the only surviving member of the trio of sailors of which their fathers happen to be the other two, who relates to them the real story of Shun’s adoption — not altogether unusual for postwar Japan but decidedly complex by modern standards where few families have been completely wiped out by nuclear attack and almost nobody is being killed in wars, at least proportionally speaking.

As with most Japanese movies, almost every scene is a mixture of emotional happiness and overwhelming sadness. Longing meets with calm logic and love is backed against loss. Daily life is lived against the context of multiple wars and even breakfast comes with the necessity of combined families and international students. If you have caught the western disease of thinking that animated films are made for children, I invite you to return to your world of Disney and lock yourself in the castle. (As much as I love Disney movies, by the way, I do believe the fact that they are aimed at the lucrative children’s market has rather biased western audiences raised on those kid-friendly masterpieces of anti-theater against the much more dramatic and grown-up animation from Japan — I’d say of the east but really we’re just talking about Japanese animation mostly and what’s now starting to come out of China and South Korea is generally following the Japanese mold.)

So that’s the plot. And it’s not exactly simplistic but it doesn’t sound necessarily like the most interesting story ever. Of course, I haven’t mentioned that the dialog is better written than most modern film would lead you to expect and the soundtrack is absolutely fantastic. These are two things that you’d expect from something directed by Miyazaki (yes, that dude, the only Japanese filmmaker you’ve got a good shot of having heard of unless you were born yesterday and the first thing you watched produced on the other side of the Pacific was Your Name). I was, unlike most other people, underwhelmed by The Wind Rises and some other Ghibli productions. This one made up for it for me. The entire score is original but has the feel of contemporary emotion mixed with a traditional vibe. There’s no Imperial March in here but neither is there reason for such a thing and I could listen to the soundtrack straight through pretty much any time and come out with a smile on my face — believe me, it’s not a bad way to spend an hour if you’re heading somewhere and just want to keep your eyes closed and chill all the way there.

But there’s depth in them-there hills, I promise. More than you might see at first glance. First, the whole movie is a commentary on the resilience of a society. It’s less than twenty years after an overwhelming and brutal defeat that America would never have inflicted on a western nation — Japan was recovering from invasion, sweeping and unrelieved shortages to the extent that nearly every inhabitant was suffering from severe, late-stage malnutrition, widespread radiation and a long-term occupation force that wasn’t exactly friendly until it became clear that the country held a strategically-important location in the nascent Cold War. But unlike Europe, still reeling from the war, much of it pretending to be victorious in a war that they should never have fought in the first place, Japan was ready to host the Olympic games (which they did in rather spectacular fashion — search 1964 Olympics on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean) and was rebuilding with a construction boom that was quickly leaving the United States and Europe in its wake. The rise of the Asian economic miracle that was postwar Japan had already showed its first signs of coming into being. I’m not going to talk about the effects of the Keiretsu-dominated economy and such or the positive impact of a centralized MITI strategy but suffice it to say, things were looking up for the first time in awhile and the islands were rising like the sun that gave rise to both name and flag.

More specifically, though, it addresses two particular themes — adoption and childhood freedom, things that you can probably guess are highly important to me. Being adopted, any time the subject is treated in popular media is an interesting experience. It’s usually discussed as abandonment or lack of love. So generally there’s an annoyance factor that the public starts to see adoption more and more along those lines, which is certainly not what it is for most people. It’s not that for me, as you’ve probably noticed from the other times I’ve discussed my particular situation. In the case of Shun, he was adopted twice in short order, both into loving families that wanted nothing more than to give him the life they’d give their own children — of which he was suddenly one, no more or less, simply their own. Shun’s father even goes so far as to shut down any discussion of “real fathers” and simply states that he’s Shun’s dad and that’s all there is to it, a father like any other. I could imagine those words coming out of my dad’s mouth, too, and he’d be just as correct. (Yo, Dad, shout out with much love, by the way.)

So this is a clear demonstration of what adoption can really be. It’s not just a second chance for an abandoned child. It’s a family that doesn’t see the adopted child as different from the biologically-linked propagation method of family expansion against which it is usually judged. Families are about how you are raised and love is based on familiarity and safety, comfort and teaching, support and expressions of interconnectedness. Blood isn’t thicker than anything. Love is. Your parents are the ones who hold you when you cry and pick you up when you fall down. I’ve never seen that story told so well on the big or small screen.

The other piece of the puzzle that strikes me as important — and what turns this into something other than a set piece investigation into an adopted love story — is childhood freedom. We can achieve almost anything at any age. We don’t have to be twenty-five before we can do something with our lives worth doing. In this story, high school students turn a building that should have long since been condemned into a beautiful historically-restored masterpiece of construction, change the minds of corporate boards and pretty much self-organize as a micro-culture of their own. That’s not the most significant part of the story, though.

In an age where children are shut off from the rest of society for their own protection, this is a demonstration of how things should be. These are people in secondary school who not only run their households as needed but travel to Tokyo, jump off buildings, light fires, publish newspapers. This is not a nod to health-and-safety regulations. It’s a blatant outcry against them. Not to say that we don’t need government protections, just that we don’t need special ones for young adults. The characters in this story aren’t cotton-wool-wrapped innocents. They’re adults in everything but times around the sun. It’s a story of expectations — if you demand performance, you’ll get it. We in the west have grown to suspect that young people are incompetent and have built a society and education system that rewards mediocrity and ineptitude, reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator in the name of equal opportunity, simply meaning that nobody has any opportunity to do anything other than live a life of quiet desperation unless they’re a moron. This is another pathway, one of expecting adult behavior, intelligent and logical thought, not pandering to behavioral problems or silliness but expecting from secondary students what we expect from doctoral students in the west — and even then, with vastly less whining and trips to the bar.

I always have difficulty answering the question what’s your favorite movie? I usually offer to give a list of my top ten and I’m not sure what the order would be. But in any list of those — or a list of things I think you and anyone else should watch — this would be on there without doubt. While watching the same movie day after day would quickly get boring, I’ve probably seen this one as many times as any other I’ve watched and I can honestly say I can’t see myself ever growing tired of it.

By the way, while you’re at it, if your Japanese isn’t up to it, there’s a complete audio track in English if your streaming provider supports it and if you’re working on your language skills (oh how I wish my Japanese was fluent!), there are some well-executed subtitles.

You may be a big action fan or into comedy or something, the first of which I can relate to (that new Star Wars? wow — just wow) and the second I have no comprehension of at all. But if you expect animation to be either child-focused (darling, it’s better down where it’s wetter — take it from me) or a subway-friendly replacement for soft porn (I’m looking at you, Fairy Tail, with an emphasis on the tail), this will, unless your preferred footwear is tabi, knock your socks far enough off you’ll likely be socially prepared for sandals.

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

In “Day 14”, I talked about the question of memorization — knowing something by heart — in response to the question of the day. But there’s another way to look at this. I know it’s not really the prompt but, having thought quite a bit about that one, I’m going to answer a slightly different question. What do you know in your heart?

I know I am loved.

About ten years before I was born, my parents became aware they couldn’t have children. Unlike the fictional story in Genesis where Sarah ends up putting her trust in supernatural ideas, my parents, children of not just the hippy movement but scientific progress and society, decided that wouldn’t be the end of their love of children (there’s a thing about teachers and children that I’m sure you’ve probably noticed, my parents both being teachers, this makes some sense in many ways) and applied to adopt a child. It took about a decade to jump through the hoops.

In the fall of 1982, they got a phone call telling them they could drive a fairly long distance and collect their first child. Me. I’d been born and, while I have neither the interest nor the means to find out the situation of that birth, I can tell you that the biological provenance from which I was extracted was exceptionally young, unmarried and in no way capable of giving a child either the love or the teaching that are required for success as a small human. My parents, however, were overflowing with love and what they lacked in freely-flowing currency, they made up for in sheer hard work. We were certainly not poor by any stretch of the imagination but neither were we what anyone could imagine in the western world as being rich — I have always been a little curious when the debate about fitness to have children focuses so much on economics that only the rich are seen to be fit parents by one side and the extremely poor are seen to be fit parents by the other, when the reality is that you need enough money to raise a child successfully but you don’t need a huge surplus to do it well. I had a life in which I was extremely well provided for, due to the hard work for often incredibly long hours by my parents, who worked multiple jobs and did everything they could to give me and my sister the childhood they wanted for us.

There is a lot of argument about adoption. People say that it is based on a concept of irresponsibility, that if it is known that there is the possibility of putting a baby up for adoption, the incentive to only have children when there is a clear plan to take care of them is taken away and people will have more children. Not only has that not been borne out by the facts, it’s a silly argument. Let’s just say that there is unlimited adoption, that any person anywhere in the world could put a child up for adoption and there will be a guaranteed recipient. It’s not true but for the sake of understanding, let’s assume it. Now, you find that you want to have sex with someone and you could get pregnant. You have the option of birth control or, if all goes wrong, abortion. But, since you have the option of adoption, you will choose to undergo absolute hell for nine months, followed by what most people foresee as the most painful experience of frequent medical occurrence, childbirth. What would you choose? Exactly. While many people will select to suffer through that experience to have a child to take care of at the other end, although this is not something that I can personally understand, it is not surprising in the least that very few people will willingly go through pregnancy and childbirth only to have no actual child in their lives at the end of the thing.

They also tell me that it’s about abandonment. In some cases, perhaps. But I would suggest that, given the painful silliness that tends to come over humans in the immediate aftermath of childbearing, this is highly unlikely. There is a genetic predisposition among human females (it would be there in males, too, but the plumbing is wrong) to feel an overwhelming attraction to their offspring. It’s genetic. Can’t be avoided. There are some exceptions but most of them come down to damaged and troubled brains. It’s actually the same circuitry that to a lesser degree provides for all kin-altruistic tendencies among humans and other animals. But it’s especially strong as a bond between a mother (especially a first-time mother, by the way) and a young child having just been inside their body for the better part of a year. I suspect this has a lot to do with overcoming the recent pain that giving birth has just caused, to prevent prehistoric mothers from killing their newborn children or abandoning them, as would have probably been the immediate response after such an experience. If you would like to discover just how mindless the argument as to abandonment is, go to a maternity ward and ask the mothers who are in the worst possible situations for raising children — severe illness, overwhelming poverty, threats of family violence, refugee status — whether they would like to give up their children, you’ll get a very clear picture. If you don’t want to go to the trouble, there have been dozens of studies doing just that and their results are unmistakably clear.

So why do mothers give up their children for adoption? That answer is, not necessarily universally but definitely in the vast majority of cases, clear, too. Love. The whole adoption process is marked by something that humans in the modern age are rather painfully lacking in — genuine altruistic love. We are a species that is predisposed to find small things cute — cats on the internet, for example, but I bet if you post pictures of chicks, lambs, puppies and fawns on your social media feed of choice, you will be inundated by positive feedback. It’s not just an internet phenomenon — where do you think the idea of propagating the sale of chocolate at Easter by using bunnies and baby birds and using Christmas mice and personified reindeer (young Rudolph, anyone?) to sell everything from board games to new cars complete with seasonal red bows on top comes from? Babies are no exception. While personally I find the whole notion of a human that has not yet gained the capacity for thought and language intensely disgusting, others of this species clearly demonstrate that I am in a tiny minority. Of course, I find the extremely young to be just as troubling to me and that is a particularly common trait among those of us on the spectrum so it’s not surprising. Given that autism is a genetic trait and that genetic traits are generally propagated through a population proportional to its reproductive bias, the fact that those on the spectrum are generally disgusted by the whole notion of procreation, children and only tend to have sex under the social pressure and duress that comes with modern life, it’s pretty obvious that the fact that we are in the minuscule minority that we are is a result of this, among other pressures — this more than anything, though, I would propose. There’s never been a study on it but there wouldn’t be, as it’s not something for which there are adequate historical records and could only be done going forward through evolutionary time — thousands or tens of thousands of generations. It’s a silly study and, while that’s not a reason for studies not to be funded, I’d like to think it’s a good reason for this one not to be seriously proposed.

Western governments make adoption a nightmarishly difficult thing. I am confused by this. I am a supporter of the right to choose not to have a child. I’m not in the slightest a supporter of the right to choose to have one. But the right to choose not to get pregnant, as far as I’m concerned, is a fundamental human right that should not be denied to anyone. Those who don’t agree with me, one would think, would at least see making adoption easy to access for potential mothers as a way to reduce the demand for abortion but it is the same group of people, generally the reactionary Christian right, who oppose easier access to adoption. My parents, for example, highly-educated people in a stable family situation with enough money to raise a child, a home and no criminal background, respected by their society to the extent any young people can be, had to fight for a decade before being awarded an adopted child. The fact that it is more difficult and vastly more complex, time-consuming and expensive to adopt than to give birth is scandalous and horrendously against any proposed notion of reducing the amount of children born into situations that are unfortunate and unsustainable, not to mention that the population of this planet is many thousands of times too high and adoption is one easy way in which to effect dramatic population reduction without serious social engineering — which is absolutely necessary but is a thought for another day.

While many, if not most, pregnancies are accidental, I can see my existence from young infant to today, as a demonstration of my parents’ unquestioning and heartfelt desire to take care of a young life. My sister and I were the benefits of a huge amount of love that simply would not have had the mechanism to exist for us without our parents’ commitment.

So the next time you think about asking someone about their “real parents” or any such nonsense, keep in mind that, while your biological parents had very little choice about you coming into the world, especially if your parents don’t support the notion of abortion, mine spent a decade fighting for their new children (not to mention the years after I was born that they worked hard to acquire another child, which took four years and ended in my sister’s joining the family). I don’t have “unreal parents”. I have parents. They have loved me and cared for me and they still do and I feel just as strongly about them as anyone whose connection included an umbilical cord. Blood is irrelevant. You love your parents because you grew up with them taking care of you. If you hate them, it’s likely because they didn’t do much of the loving or taking care of. While I’m many months early to celebrate the anniversary of my joining my parents to form a family of three (it’s in November, by the way and we call it our “family day”, celebrated the way most people celebrate their birthdays), it is a subject often on my mind.

[estimated reading time 5 minutes]

What do you know by heart?

I have always had a nightmare of a time with remembering things. It’s not that my memory doesn’t work. It works just fine in most ways. It’s about judgment. I can’t remember quotations because I automatically reword them in my head. I can think of a half dozen better ways to say something than the person who wrote it. I usually say whenever someone asks me to remember a line that I’ll learn to remember when the author learns to write better. I will start respecting literature in its original form when it improves to write better than I can.

Here’s the thing about poetry — and literature in general. It’s not that writers from the past were bad. Far from it. They were pushing the boundaries of what was possible, expected or accepted in the art of their time. But think about it from a medical perspective. There was a time when bleeding someone intentionally was the norm. It was a huge advance on the practices that preceded it. Then it was surpassed by rudimentary physical procedures in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, medical imaging, nanosurgical procedures, lasers and other bloodless surgical techniques and the skill of doctors that have been trained according to the best techniques developed over centuries, these have all surpassed those ancient techniques for curing people. We don’t think that reciting prayers over their sickbeds will cure people — thankfully, we’re not that stupid anymore. Sure, praying with someone is often a good practice to improve their mental state and I would suggest that anyone who is unwell, especially someone unwell enough to be hospitalized, contact their spiritual leader of choice. I know I do. But it’s not going to fix their broken heart or kidney to have an exorcism done there amid the beeping and buzzing of the medical gear. We’ve moved on.

Literature, though, at least the way we teach it in our schools, it hasn’t moved on at all. And that’s sad. Because not only are we teaching students this way but that is how our culture is learning to see books. Like Shakespeare and Milton and Dostoyevsky and Dickens are the best our languages collectively have to offer humanity. And it’s bullshit, plain and simple. If you think Shakespeare has the most advanced command of the English language, Dostoyevsky of Russian, Balzac of French or Goethe of German, you have been sadly misinformed. Their writing is stilted and arcane, their plots hopelessly simple and their staging lacking in subtlety or modernity. It’s not that these people didn’t know their craft and they were incredibly advanced for their society at the time — they were groundbreaking in many ways but not in others and we must remember they were humans writing as an art form, not technicians perfecting an objective research method.

But it’s not about judging them. It’s about building on their shoulders. If you are mistaken enough to believe that we haven’t improved on techniques in any are of our cultural existence in the past three, four, five hundred years, what exactly do you think our artists have been doing all this time? If writing techniques hadn’t become more advanced to the point that the most talented writers today weren’t leaps and bounds ahead of Shakespeare, what would be their reason to keep writing and why would anyone bother to read their work if they could just go back and read something that was already better? We look at historical literature because it’s where we came from and it’s important to understand how we got here. Humans love stories. We love knowing the past. Nobody cares that there’s a dog on the side of the road until they put it into context, that the dog ran away from home, wandered around and ended up on the side of the road. Putting humans on the moon is something most people don’t feel particularly emotional about until they trace the pathway of just how difficult it was to get them there. The story is everything.

The story of progress in writing is one that has been sadly neglected. Building on the shoulders of great giants of literature is something that is one of the highest ideals and successes of human society in the past five thousand years and, unlike medicine, industry and technology, this is a story that is generally ignored both by educational institutions and society at large.

The other piece of this that confuses me, though, is the question of knowing something by heart. Two times two is four. It’s always four. It’s objectively true. It’s not a human perception issue. If an alien civilization came to visit us from another galaxy (yes, I know how difficult that would be given physical limitations but work with me on this thought experiment), they would agree that two times two is four. They wouldn’t necessarily have any appreciation for our art or music or even understand how our thought processes worked enough to communicate with us. But their mathematics would be, if not identical, close enough for all practical purposes. Actually, I’m fairly certain that the basis of a fairly recent science fiction movie was using mathematics as a way to construct a working language to communicate with an alien life form. I can’t remember what the movie was called or anything else about it — but given that it was a Hollywood production and they never really make the basis of a movie about systemic failure, I suspect they succeeded in communicating through the beauty of numbers.

But “to be or not to be” isn’t either a coherent way of communicating that thought or the best way of phrasing it. Shakespeare wrote the way he did for a reason. It’s not because it’s beautiful. It’s not because it’s the best way of writing. It’s because he had a team of actors who needed to learn their lines. Pattern-based verse is exceptionally easy to learn and to memorize for stage performance. There’s another section to that logic, too. It’s far easier to teach something by rote if it has a predictable rhythmic form, often if it has a predictable rhyme scheme to know where it’s going. That’s a mental cue that can’t be overlooked and given that in the western world at that time literacy was about as low as the desire for intelligence and thought is now, teaching these parts to illiterate players for performance in a very short timeframe meant that if Shakespeare and his compatriots wrote prose or anything particularly advanced from a language perspective, it would have been impossible to put on in a reasonable amount of time. You also have to keep in mind that Shakespeare’s audience, to continue to use him as the obvious example, wasn’t nobility or the educated elite. They’d show up, certainly, but the overwhelming majority of the audience at the Globe would have been the great unwashed (and I mean this just as literally about that time period as I do about today’s mass of population). The “cheap seats” were the ones that would have been prepared to riot had they not enjoyed the play and that means he had to write in language that would have been easily comprehensible to the least educated and tell stories that would have been appreciated by a group of rowdy, drunken idiots. This is not the stuff of excellence. This is the stuff of mediocrity and it is stunning that he was able to create such amazing work given the circumstances. But by today’s standards it has only interest from the perspective of historical development. You can like it, sure, but it’s liking it in the way that we like old buildings or traditional art — it’s not because it’s the best technology or technique that we can imagine. It’s just impressive within the context of its time. Writing a play of Shakespeare’s quality is something that can be accomplished by any undergraduate student with a desire to do so just as building a bridge that surpasses Roman standards is within the abilities of a mediocre undergrad engineering student or designing something in the style and technical limitations of the Parthenon or St Peter’s Basilica is in reach of any architect worth continuing their program long before graduation.

A whole other question, though, is what do I know in my heart. But that’s a question for another day.

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

Write about an assumption.

I am many things. I am asexual and genderless. I am a believer in absolute equality and the shamefulness of ownership and possession. I am against democracy and believe that self-government is the source of much of the world’s problems and should be eliminated. I believe we need to be saved from ourselves and that indulging desires should be prohibited both by culture and by law. I believe that government should be by consensus of the educated elite, non-representative and shouldn’t care in the slightest what is popular except to note that what people want is almost always the wrong choice. I believe in absolute pacifism, the abolition of all military and a general reduction in policing and increase in obvious and comprehensive individual surveillance regardless of guilt or innocence.

So I assume the vast majority of people hate me and everything I stand for. Am I wrong? Possibly but I doubt it.

I am branded many things, although the most frequent two are liberal and communist. Let’s talk about those for a minute.

A liberal is someone who doesn’t believe that things shouldn’t be done the way they’re done now just because it’s how they were done in the past. Given that the past is plagued by millennia of war, suppression, oppression and entrenched misogyny, racism and other versions of hatred, I find myself wondering how anyone who isn’t liberal by this definition hasn’t already been executed for crimes against humanity. I strongly believe that hate thoughts are war crimes whether they’ve been acted on at all and that racism should be punished by exile — and since humans occupy this planet, I mean exile not from a nation, which is a silly concept that belongs to the nineteenth century now that we don’t need borders or individual government, but from earth. If people want to live lives of hatred and violence, let them do so in a new penal colony — on Mars. They can turn their shameful violence into cultivation of a new human settlement and do some good for the species rather than the untold harm they are already doing. The desired punishment aside, though, I am absolutely serious. Who gets up in the morning and says “the world is great the way it is” and “let’s not try to make this a better world”. Seriously. There is an old Jewish proverb — pride lives in the dung heap. Being happy with the status quo, in other words, is a shitty way to live.

While we’re at it, there’s another one — there’s a basic rule of caution — don’t be overcautious. Simply put, if you think the world could be better and are worried that in trying to improve it you’ll make it worse, there’s no point in living. You have to take a chance to move forward. Buddhists are called on to spend their lives, their thoughts and their actions for the betterment of all life — this is often talked about as “all sentient beings” which translates to modern English as “anyone who thinks”, since that’s what sentience is. Thinking is the result of language and communication (both internally and externally) so what’s meant by this is, improving the world for all humans. That’s what the Buddha taught. I think we may have to interpret it a little more literally than that. We are living in a world and an age in which thinking has been prized by one group within society and derided by another. Nobody is ambivalent about thinking. Either you truly want to be intelligent or you don’t. Either you want to understand or you don’t. Either you are curious or you’re not. You want to know the truth or you don’t care as long as you pretend to already know it. There are two political parties aligned with these differing positions. One supports the idea of learning, education and thought. The other fights against it with violent tribalism, hatred and raising up the average and mediocre.

There’s nothing wrong with being an “average American”. There never has been. What there’s something wrong with is setting that as the bar for achievement. If you live your life as average, that’s not at all a bad thing to achieve. But if you ever stop trying to make yourself better, stop reaching for a way to learn more, know more, help more people, care about more than you’re already doing, no matter how you end up getting to the end of your life, you gave up your humanity and died on the inside long ago. My criticism isn’t that there’s something hatefully wrong with the result — it’s that there’s a disaster in the goal. If you are satisfied with yourself, if you ever look in the mirror and say “I’m good enough and I don’t need to be better”, it’s over. And when many people do it, our species is done and we can get out of the way and make room for a return to a purely animal-dominated earth in our wake. There are many self-help books that tell us to look in the mirror and say such things. Not only are they wrong, interpreting their instruction in this way is silly. I know what they’re getting at. They’re teaching a millennia-old teaching about self-acceptance. That’s very different from how people are reading it today. The teaching isn’t that we are ok the way we are and we should be satisfied. It’s that we are ok the way we are, shouldn’t shit on ourselves all the time and should go forward from here looking to get better. Everyone can improve. Everyone can learn. Everyone can help people. Everyone can love. And everyone can change.

That’s not an assumption. It’s simply fact.

But what of assumptions in my case? I make many of them, as do we all. We’re all biased. We all look at the world through a lens. It’s not that we need to stop having assumptions or ways of seeing the world. It’s that we need to identify them and stop pretending we’re being objective. We’re not. Objectivity isn’t a human trait. We can’t do it.

I assume that most people out there hate me. And I have assumed that most of my life. It may have something to do with my autism that makes me see other people as threatening. But it may have something to do with the fact that they are actually threatening and have in far too many instances made good on those threats.

There is a general assumption in the modern western world that if someone hurts you, you have a right to hurt them back. If someone hits you, it’s ok to hit them back. And that if you perceive yourself as being disrespected, you have a right to harm the other person. This is a horrendous way of living. Payback and tit-for-tat? From a culture that pretends to be based on the Christian teachings of “turn the other cheek” and “do to others as you’d have them do to you”? I know this culture has strayed far from its roots but when I hear people say they want to get back at their exes by cheating, that they want to pay someone back for keeping them up all night with loud music or that they would go and strangle someone for hitting on their partner, I cringe inside and outside.

Not only is this a fundamentally disastrous way of functioning for a society, there is a far larger problem. Objectivity. We can’t do it. Humans simply aren’t biologically or neurologically capable of objectivity, especially in questions of emotion and perception. I’m not objective and neither are you. Unless you’re a computer. And if you’re a digital intelligence of some sort, you’re only objective until a human writes your code. Which I assume probably happened at some point, as all software has inherent biases. Where do these two things meet? If you believe that it’s appropriate and acceptable (at this point it even seems culturally required — “come on, are you going to let him disrespect you like that and get away with it?”) to hurt someone for their actions against you rather than simply accepting and walking away or, even better, accepting and actively forgiving and caring, what happens when you perceive someone as acting against you? What happens when you take someone’s facial expression as disrespectful? What about when the words someone says that are directed at a general topic hit close to home and you feel they’re attacking you? In such a situation, you may indeed feel that it is acceptable to hurt that person in return. Given that people typically respond to my daily existence with anger and hatred, living in a society where people are given the impetus to act violently and harmfully on those thoughts, I am bound to get hurt and so is anyone else who thinks deeply and holds opinions that are different from the accepted norms.

And it has happened to me. Not by the people you’d expect. I have lived in some of the most violent places in the western world and visited many others. I have never felt particularly frightened to walk through places after dark that others constantly caution others agains — I could give a list but I’ll just point out east London as the most recent of these places where I spent a fair amount of time late at night, as that’s where I was living at the time, without having any particular apprehension about walking the streets. But I’m terrified to go outside because of people. I was attacked by a middle aged middle class guy and beaten almost to death in the middle of a sunny afternoon in a shopping district. I was attacked by not one but several police officers in varying situations, in none of which I was doing anything either violent or dangerous — two of which may be summarized as “I was sitting in a parked car waiting with the doors and windows closed” and “I was driving on a highway at the speed and within the lane of the majority of other traffic” and in neither case, nor any of the others, was I actually accused of committing a crime. These are just a few of the examples of culturally-permitted attacks on me and I am not an exception in the slightest to what I have witnessed among others who share beliefs and traits with me.

So my assumption is, to be clear, that those who are different are hated, persecuted and attacked. It is not safe anymore in this world to be in the minority — not only in skin color or immigration status but in holding any opinion that isn’t seen by the average-focused, self-satisfied tribalists (followers of Trump, one might say, although that’s nowhere near a broad enough brush to include people who think this way) as normal.

Being different has been the source of all human progress. If we’d been satisfied with living in the trees, eating without fire, traveling at a walking pace, sleeping under the stars or even communicating at the speed of travel or going without knowing what’s beyond this planet, how would we ever have achieved the amazing technological advancements that our species has made? Without different, divergent and highly-minority thought and actions, we wouldn’t have the ability to travel, to communicate or to heal.

I have other assumptions, too, as do we all. I believe that western culture in general is based on the notion of greed and controlling, possessing and hating, competing with and fighting and that it will be a good day for all humanity when western culture has been relegated to the scrap heap by the decline of military and economic power concentrated in this part of the globe. I believe that silence and peace is preferable to noise and conflict without exception. But more than anything else, I believe I am living in a world that is unsafe and committed to hurting me. Perhaps if it would stop proving me right, I could change my assumption. Your move.

[estimated reading time 3 minutes]

What do you know that you didn’t want to know?

The implication behind this one is that it’s about relationships. For me, it’s not romantic relationships that are the issue. It’s friendship. What didn’t I want to know? That most of my friends would abandon me at the slightest chance of a problem.

Seven years ago, an ex-partner started spreading nasty rumors about me. I’m sure many of us have had that experience and those who haven’t are likely to encounter at least one vengeful and vindictive partner. In my case, the rumors were particularly damaging because, as a teacher, I am expected to be a role model. The fact that there was no basis in fact for any of them didn’t make a difference. As is obvious from the popularity of reality television and general tabloid stupidity both in print and online, people are happy to swallow any story as long as it is salacious enough. If it had been about sex, it would probably have been even more willingly accepted by the general public but I don’t think anyone would have given any credibility to a claim of sexual misconduct on my part, given that I am asexual and generally disgusted by the notion of sex — those sexual partners that I have had have had to work long and hard to make it very clear that they desired it and that for continued partnership, I would have to choose between friendship, at which point they would find another partner, or physicality.

It has taken me many years and many mistakes to realize that it is better to have no committed partners if the cost is sexuality. But I didn’t know that then. It’s not particularly relevant to this issue, anyway, given that the rumors weren’t sexual in nature. It wasn’t really all that shocking to me that a person who would suddenly and without notice abandon a long-term relationship would say things that were untrue.

What I was completely unprepared for was that it wasn’t just the general public or my vague acquaintances that were prepared to accept them. I believed, before this happened, that my closest friends would stand by me even if I had done something wrong and that they wouldn’t be prepared to believe nasty things about me, especially without talking to me about them first.

I was wrong. I had a group of people I truly valued and who were a huge portion of my life. They gave me a good portion of my reason to get up and go to work in the morning — I love the teaching but clinical depression and several serious physical health problems make things very difficult even if you love what you do.

Without so much as a conversation, the people I considered my closest friends disappeared from my life. One of them was good enough to write me a letter telling me why but was unprepared to engage in conversation in spite of the fact that I did write back explaining that not only was it false but that I could very easily prove that it was, if my word wasn’t good enough. The others didn’t even do me the courtesy of saying goodbye.

I was distinctly hurt by this, as would be expected, all of these being people I had not only long-term but since-childhood friendships with, often seeing or speaking to them every day. So my illusion of a support network that would stand by and hold me up when things went wrong was crushed in short order. I know now that I simply can’t trust people to know the truth, to be prepared to listen to the truth or to stand by me through the nightmares that everyone’s lives have the potential to present.

I wish I had never found out.

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

What happened when you had control?

I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced anything that could loosely be called control of a situation but the time that everyone seems to think of that way is the relationship between teacher and student. Since I’m a teacher and have taught in various environments, I can certainly say that control is definitely the wrong word for what goes on in a classroom — I’m not sure if you’ve ever been in a classroom where there was a serious control situation rather than a relationship in which the students agreed to be peaceful and let the teacher teach but I haven’t, not as a student and not as a teacher.

But it’s an interesting concept. I believe it’s important for the teacher and students to have a mutual respect. If you try to do this with rules and instructions, as soon as you turn your back or leave the room for a few minutes, the entire situation will fall apart. You’ve certainly been in a classroom when the teacher has left and within thirty seconds, it sounds like a bar ten minutes before closing time. There’s yelling and movement and nothing is getting done. That’s the other piece. If there’s no respect floating around, the students aren’t going to trust you that what you’ve set as work is useful — if it’s actually just busy work, at least you can be honest and say that’s what it is and that the school or curriculum has made it necessary and that you’ll move on to something a bit more relevant as soon as possible. Honesty is absolutely necessary or you’ll very quickly lose any respect you’ve worked hard to build up. It’s easy to say that because you’re older or more experienced that you shouldn’t have to earn students’ respect but that’s nothing but ego and hubris talking — everyone needs to earn the respect of the people around them, especially people who are supposed to be in a situation where they trust you with their knowledge and minds, realistically much of their future. You hold a huge amount of what they’re going to become in your hands and if they’re going to take on trust that you know what you’re doing and have their best interests in mind, you’ve got to give them something in return and not just expect it.

Here’s the other thing that comes to mind when I think about control — learning is far more distributed than it’s ever been. You’re not the only source of knowledge in that room. There was a time not long ago — I was a student during that period that definitely extended into the 90s — when the teacher was in the room to share knowledge. That’s not the case anymore. If the teacher left and the students had to figure something out, there wouldn’t have to be someone incredibly smart in the class who had all the answers. Each student could take out their phone and look it up. Knowledge really isn’t the purpose of a teacher anymore. It was true not very long ago that sharing knowledge was a large part of a teacher’s job — the largest part was still always sharing an understanding and developing students’ minds as to how to learn in the future but that’s now become pretty much the only purpose of being in a classroom.

Sometimes (almost all the time, honestly) teachers at this point in time forget that the information floating around on Wikipedia and various other internet sources is probably at least as good and often far better than what they can share from their own notes and experience. It’s not that the teacher is stupid (at least, it’s not always the case) but that the people writing most of these articles are doing so collaboratively and don’t have to fit their information into an hour of on-the-fly provision of information. I can write a fantastic article in a weekend on many topics but I’m never going to reach that level of precision and accuracy if I have to speak about it off the top of my head in front of an audience. I’ll get reasonably close to what I could do if I prepare it well but I can’t expect to outdo a team of authors with an unlimited amount of time to prepare and many revisions for accuracy and precision. Nobody can. Even true world-class experts in the field won’t reach that level and many of those experts are the ones responsible for much of the online content in the first place. If you think the point of teaching is to share information, it’s time to sit down and let the students just read — it’s better information and they’ll learn it more quickly. You’re there for explanations and understanding, not for raw data.

So what does this have to do with control? Well, one of the biggest and silliest things that schools (and many colleges) have done over the past decade is to introduce regulations about electronic information in classes. No phones, no tablets, no laptops… I’m not sure exactly where this became seen as necessary. Do people really think that students have no understanding of how not to be distracted? They are perfectly capable of sitting and watching a movie without being distracted by their phones. They can chill with their friends, do very little and not get distracted by them in any meaningful way. If your students are getting distracted, it’s your fault. You haven’t given them a reason to trust you or a reason to pay attention. Not to mention, you’re supposed to be teaching them how to function in the real world — out there, there’s not going to be a school policy saying you can’t have your phone. If they haven’t learned how to exist in a world that is full of potential distractions and not actually get sidetracked, you’re teaching them to fail and that is something you should probably feel pretty ashamed about.

The other thing — and this has been an issue since I was a young student, too, but is far worse now — that causes a huge problem in terms of disconnection from the real world due to control is evaluation without aids. If you’re working on something, you will have reference materials. You’ll have your own personal stuff and the ability to check just about anything you want on the internet. It’s not like thirty or forty years ago when reference books were a long drive away and a search in a card catalog. Information is right at our fingers and to deny students access to that information is just creating an artificial environment.

I know why this has been done and how it became popular, long before the internet became the dominant method of information provision. It makes it easier to evaluate because you don’t have to be creative. You can just test people’s rote learning skill and that’s easy enough to measure. You can give problems pretty much right out of a textbook and if everyone solves it the same way, that’s not an issue because people can’t talk to each other or it’s called cheating. It’s the wrong system. It doesn’t reflect any sort of work environment in the world. If you can’t remember how to do something in today’s world, you can look it up. If you need help, you can get it.

So what we need to be teaching is the ability to find how to do something, apply it, accept help, work collectively and do so in a manner that is efficient. We need to work on a deadline and produce the required result. There is almost no evaluation in our schools and colleges that does this. At the graduate level, there is quite a bit more — we call it research and writing a dissertation. There’s no rule about not using resources to help you create a better research project or write a better dissertation chapter. Neither should there be in college or in school. This would take a massive shift. It would take a huge giving up of control.

What happened when I had control? Letting aside the fact that control is an illusion, I gave it up. In every classroom that I’ve ever been in charge of, the paradigm of learning has been collective trust and understanding. I don’t make students learn things by memory — I try to create an understanding of the overarching ideas so they don’t have to memorize and can simply figure things out as needed. I build evaluations that are designed to test their creative skills to solve real problems in the discipline. I ask questions that they can’t simply copy answers for out of a book or from the internet and, since those things become supporting information rather than sources of duplication, there is no need to regulate their use even during an examination. Further, I allow resubmission of all work an unlimited number of times — this seems unworkable but when it comes down to it, I can read a student’s changes a hundred times faster than they can make them so I’m always going to come out on top and few students will ever submit a paper more than three or four times and few in a class will make anything other than small additions and changes to improve the overall work. I’ve never felt even slightly bogged down by this policy and I can’t imagine changing it. I would encourage all instructors at all levels to do it. It also means that my grades reflect the students’ actual capacity to put the topics of the class into use at the end of the term, as the final versions of all the work are the ones that are completed by the end of the term — not understanding at first is not held against you but understanding well by the end is clearly demonstrated by the grade rather than it being a holdover from the easier work at the beginning being done well and then dropped off.

Control is an illusion, at least in a classroom. I’m not sure how well I understood that as a student but I’m sure I had a pretty good idea of how close we were in most of my classes to the mob taking over and driving the teacher both crazy and into retirement. I hope my relationship with my students will always be one where I hold the reigns of control lightly and am allowed to do so by a calm and quiet policy of mutual respect rather than having the need for discipline — I always get worried about teacher who talk about “classroom discipline” because they’re working on a whip-the-deviant-students model, even if they don’t have the whip in hand.

[estimated reading time 11 minutes]

May break my memories, I suspect. But doctors, there’s no may about that, they’ll hurt me endlessly.

I began the day with the first of four short writing prompts (this is day 10, if it’s not clear from the order of these posts). There are still three left, after more than two thousand words on graduation, drunkenness, societal waste and, more relevantly to the prompt than anything else, the difference between breakfast and lunch, especially to someone who wasn’t going to eat either of them.

Write about a memory of a popsicle.

Popsicles are truly an interesting thing. I have to say, I have consumed more than my fair share of them. I have quite a history of throat infections and the like. I was, indeed, a singer and that took its toll. And as a teacher, someone who speaks nearly constantly all day, that doesn’t help issues either. I was singing from the youngest I can remember and, while I wasn’t a particularly unwell child — such problems that come with Lupus didn’t appear until a little later — I did have frequent sore throats. Not to mention, I have an undying love for fruits, even if I don’t have a particular interest in licking things. I was also a child of the eighties and there was nothing if not a cultural obsession with sucking on frozen things at the time — if you’re not familiar with the prevalence of frozen fruit-flavored things kept in the freezers at the time, you may wish to search out a part of your cultural heritage that will certainly be a pleasant surprise to you and might give you a break from all the high-fat snacks you likely find yourself craving. If you pour hot cocoa with a little honey into small glasses and insert popsicle sticks (or toothpicks), freezing them overnight, I promise you you’ll be in love the next day when you first indulge yourself. If you want something more involved, coat a banana in melted pure chocolate, drizzle honey over the top, sprinkle crushed peanuts over the whole thing and freeze a bunch of them with popsicle sticks sticking out of them. When you eat them, you won’t remember that there’s no added sugar, no real fat content, nothing artificial and that they took you less than ten minutes to make the whole batch. Midnight runs to the fridge for another piece of cake? I think not. Suck on this. The banana, I mean. Suck on the banana.

That being said, though, my experience with popsicles is actually a little less midnight-phallic-consumption-oriented. When I was in my teens, my mother’s twin brother came to live with our family for awhile — I can’t remember exactly how long but maybe six or eight months. He’s a great guy, kind and generous. We spent many hours playing cards or just chilling in the back garden talking about life. Or just sitting around not doing more than being quiet and reading. He was, indeed, someone who had learned how to be still and relax, something most people in the western world (and increasingly many in the eastern world) have exorbitant and myriad difficulties either doing or finding reason to try to do. I didn’t necessarily put it into practice at the time but quite a lot of the peace that I later learned in practice from the mouths of HH, the Dalai Lama, and Thich Nhat Hanh were first planted as seeds by my uncle.

Anyway, I had had a bit of a disastrous experience in school. I had been attacked by another student. And most of the people around me had decided to take the other side of the conflict. Not that they didn’t think I had been a victim of an attack, just that my being so obviously different and not particularly being interested in fitting in, made them judge me very harshly and turn against me in a rather extreme way — something I once was told, a meanness and hatefulness only children can demonstrate, which I later found to be completely untrue, as the general public is now doing much the same thing, what I have often termed the Trump effect, populism and mob violence merging into a social dynamic that is defining the western world in the twenty-first century. I just wanted people to accept me. They didn’t have to like me but they had to see me as a valid human.

I wasn’t particularly interested in going to the store nearby to buy a treat. I don’t understand the concept of treat but that was harder to explain back then. Not to mention there were no sidewalks in the district I grew up in, many cars, badly-maintained roads and the store was a considerable distance to walk — I grew up in a very car-dominated culture, something I don’t see as a problem even now, just that those cars are still not powered by sustainable electricity. We headed off to the store, though, and it felt like no time at all. He wanted a popsicle and a paper, he said. And some coffee. None of which was the real purpose of the exercise, I’m sure, especially since he could have done the ten minute drive in a car had he wanted to, even if I was too young to legally put foot to gas pedal. We spent the entire way there with me whining about my situation. He should have told me to stop but he didn’t, for some reason, letting me continue. When we came out of the store, he looked at me and said “you know, they all take a shit the same way you do”. We walked back the whole rest of the way in silence. I got it. I learned my lesson well that day. Popsicles? Not worth the bother. We are all the same, even if people don’t notice.

And there was a far more vital lesson there to learn. If someone is in pain, you hold their feelings in your hand and lift them out of it. It’s your duty as a human. I don’t know if I knew it before then. After, I never forgot it.

Write about a memory of sunscreen.

Driving has been the source if not of masses of pleasure, at least the experience of freedom and escape that is so fundamental to my life. Most of you likely remember the infamous sunscreen song. It was a poorly-written essay by a reasonably-well-known columnist named Mary Schmich, who must have skipped a few courses in college on the use of the English language. But that’s not the important part. It was transformed into a pseudo-rap parody of contemporary culture (which was already pretty good at looking silly on its own, since this was, indeed, the late nineties, a time of abject musical silliness and anti-music being sold on the newly-popularized compact discs that every kid worth their Nikes was hooked on spending their hard-earned cash on acquiring). I can’t remember who turned it into a song but, like most things not worth listening to, it skyrocketed up the popular music charts that year. The British listening public, of course, being even more mob-centered and mindless than those of the domestic market, actually had it hit the number-one spot at one point that year. I’m not sure how high it got in the American top-forties but the fact that anyone mistakenly identified the thing as music is a source of some curiosity to me — it bears as little relationship to must as does the notated silence of John Cage or the pounding of hammers in a woodworking shop. Silence and the sound of woodworking are beautiful things. They are not, however, music. Neither was this.

Anyway, nineteen-ninety-nine was a summer of many things for me. It wasn’t my first kiss, nor was it my first time driving, but it was full of both of those things in many ways. I had a truly wonderful friend I spent a lot of time with — oddly enough for me, as I’m not particularly good at it, nor have I ever been, we spent a huge amount of time playing tennis. But we spent more time together in the evenings, chilling in out of the way places, listening to loud music and generally being the “young deviants” we were often called, among other, less pleasant names. There was a night at a place called Cape Spear, the most easterly point in all of North America, where there is, of course, a lighthouse. We were sitting there, perhaps three or four in the morning, with a boom box (even I can’t think of the thing, not being either black or hispanic, as a “ghetto blaster” — I’m not sure either of those two cultures would like to lay claim to that term but I can’t bring myself to even pretend to want it and while my cultural background is mixed, none of its components really lay claim to the popular version of “ghetto life” to blast anything with) on the ground turned up to (as was popular in those days) eleven. There was nobody else there. Nobody else for the entire visual distance which, thanks to the area, was vast. So there was absolutely no possibility anyone was going to hear the music, anyway. Which was good, since we’d have been dragged in for noise violations if there’d been anyone else around, without a doubt! It was a clear night and we sang along for a good couple of hours to whatever was playing. I didn’t much care. We both knew the words to most of the songs and if we didn’t we made them up. We ran out of our own music and had the radio on and this sunscreen travesty showed up. We both looked at each other and laughed and, while I didn’t know the words, she certainly had every single one of them committed to memory. I’ve never been a radio listener — while popular music is something I often like to spend time listening to, especially the popular music of my childhood rather than that of today, I can’t stand broadcast media. She was, though. About thirty seconds into the thing, the batteries on the radio gave out and the song stopped but she kept going right to the end, dancing around the pavement in front of the lighthouse as if she was on stage in front of a stadium audience. At the end she bowed, I applauded, and we sang ourselves back to the car. I’d like to say that was the end of a beautiful night but we actually just went back to get more batteries and saw the sunrise later that morning before falling asleep in the car. We got woken up a few hours later by the park police banging on the windows but, since we were both fully clothed and not doing anything illegal, it wasn’t a problem and we headed home for a lengthier nap. So, sunscreen, right? La.

Write about a memory of a doctor’s appointment.

Oddly enough, as someone who has had many thousands of doctor’s appointments, the first thing that comes to mind is actually something a bit less ordinary. I have had many friends study to become doctors but one of them is far more frequently on my mind than any others, mostly because of how much time we spent together during her first year at medical school. I have made a point of not sharing the names of other people in my public writing and I’m not going to make an exception now but I have no doubt that she knows who she is and I hope she knows how much that time meant to me.

She has been through some truly traumatic experiences in their life and I certainly have no intention of sharing them, even anonymously, in public or in private, with anyone. They are her memories to share or not share as she wishes. But it’s important to know that there were such memories. She disappeared out of my life for awhile and I worried a lot about where she had gone — not because I hadn’t heard from her in a week or two but because she disappeared for what I think was probably a couple of years in complete silence. Suddenly, there she was, talking to me again, pretty much every day. I don’t remember what the reason for the renewal of our friendship was but whatever it was, it was completely insignificant and likely just an excuse to break the dam and reach out. At least, that’s how I remember it. I was there to listen and that’s all I could do at the time. I thoroughly enjoyed those days, although they mostly just blur into one. There was a lot of talking, a huge amount of writing — on her part mostly, although I can’t remember what the topic was and it likely wasn’t something in my area of expertise but writing is, for the most part, writing and it’s something I’ve spent huge portions of my life doing, usually with others.

Eventually, though, that time gradually drew to a close and she went off to start a new chapter in her life. A chapter that would lead to her becoming a doctor, something that I strongly encouraged her to do, since it was always her dream — she may have been too intelligent to fit the mold of medical practice in this country, where most doctors are only slightly more intelligent than the chairs in their offices, but there are certainly some truly brilliant medical minds floating around and she was undoubtedly going to be one of them, if she could deal with the incommensurate levels of bullshit and meaningless data memorization that are the medical school qualification process, something strikingly unrelated to actual medical practice, even as a family doctor. So she was on her way into what I think is probably the most prestigious medical qualification program in the UK. And I was happy to offer to help however I could.

Anyway, we talked about starting a huge (perhaps overly-ambitious, although I think it’s possible to accomplish it) project together. I don’t mean as equal partners. The vast majority of the work would be hers, as would be the credit, but I was happy to be behind the scenes. I was already far too ill to do a full workload in any case but the happiness I get from being useful and helping one of my closest friends — probably the person I spent the most time with at that time or most others, in fact — accomplish something she truly wanted to do was incredibly rewarding and something I strongly wanted to do. I remember seeing her smile so genuinely when she completed another milestone or learned how to do something that she had once thought beyond her grasp, often after only a few hours of trial — writing computer code, for example, and learning to use Adobe Illustrator, which she didn’t just get the hang of but absolutely mastered in a few short months. Those smiles carried me through those times.

I was very broken, too, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to help. Actually, helping was the only thing that gave me the structure and meaning in my life that stopped me from giving up. See, I had already spent many years on prescription medication for my mental illness, which had in the beginning given me the ability to continue to function, even if I was barely aware of the fact that I was doing so. I continued to teach and write but gradually my ability to even stand up was diminished to the point of impossibility. There came a point, though, at which I realized that my body couldn’t stop taking the medication. I had never been warned of the chemical dependence that the medication would cause when I started taking it — I’m not even sure how well-known its addictive properties were at the time, all those decades ago. But it has subsequently been discovered to be one of the most addictive drugs out there and is generally never prescribed in anything other than the most extreme circumstances now, mostly emergency-room kinds of situations where someone is in danger of going into shock or stimulating a heart attack or aneurism from the panic they feel. I had been on it for so many years, the effect was decidedly minimal — I was still having panic attacks on a nearly-constant basis. But I couldn’t stop taking the pills, at least not all at once. I had tried several times to reduce the amount that I was taking but it was no easy task, as anyone who has ever been prescribed benzodiazepines long-term will know all too well. So I came up with a far more gradual reduction plan (actually, with the help of that particular friend) and, after about a year, had gone from an incredibly high dose that I will not publicly disclose to absolutely none. The withdrawal effects were some of the worst experiences I have ever had and resembled living through a waking nightmare of having things crawling on me, hallucinating, fevers and the like. Anyone who has gone through serious systemic chemical dependency and come out the other end has likely had similar experiences. If you haven’t, be very glad this is not one of your memories. Those were, in spite of the tranquilizing effect of the drug still left in my body, the worst days of my life.

But day after day, we got together and worked hard. There were days we accomplished little and simply talked about shared (not that it was experienced together but that we shared it with each other) pains, many more that we did more than I ever thought possible in my diminished state. We had, realistically, a standing daily doctor’s appointment, with each other. And it is those appointments that kept me living through those nightmarish nights of terror. I’ve thanked her many times for being there for me. She’s well aware of what she meant to me and still does. But sometimes it’s still nice to remember that not everything in those times was darkness and suffering.