News Flash! Real Men Are Cowboys! Who Drive Cars! And Use Cell Phones! Laugh, Dammit!
I have a love/hate relationship with the comic strip For Better or for Worse. In some ways, it's great because it's pretty open-minded and liberal. They've dealt with a gay character (though I have to say I don't know what happened to him) who was going through some coming-out stuff in high school, if I remember, in a relatively positive way. You see much more of the mom dealing with her business than you do of the father, who is a dentist.

At any rate, I think it sometimes delves beneath the surface of family/friends stuff. But then sometimes it just gets smarmy as heck. And last week's strips made me cringe. It was like seeing a whole slew of comedians whose whole acts were "Isn't it funny how men do X and women do Y?" But I even have mixed feelings about them, because there's a sense in which the girls are making fun of the men--but they're not making fun of them to question the masculinity involved with, in this case, liking cars a lot, but rather with a sort of 'well, boys will be boys' attitude; a wink and a nudge.

It all starts with "men are cowboys and cars are their horses":

Next, men are cowboys and phones are thier guns:
See, don't those men look funny! With their phones all ringing! Because, y'know, women don't have cell phones.

Next up, making fun of the men for how they use their guns...er, cell phones:
See, it's funny because men use their cell phones in that irritating way!
Eventually, the dad in the comic (who has a new sportscar!) gets a ticket for speeding in his new, "manly" car, (which, frankly, looks like a gremlin or something to me), and lays the old 'do as I say not as I do" schpeil on his daughter:
Because, you know, men can do that sort of thing, if only to set poor examples for the women around them.

And isn't it funny?!

Ech.
Filed under:
Comics as Life, Feminism and Masculinities

Hey Kids! Comics!
I love finding a new comic strip that I like. If it's daily, that's great. When I was in high school, part of my morning routine was two bowls of cereal and the comics page of the newspaper. So I suppose daily strips are sort of comfort food for my brain.

Stumbled upon a comic from the people who do Branching Shuttlecocks when I was looking up the geek hierarchy. It is very good. So good, that you get a sample, which you should click on to go read more:



Filed under:Comics as Life

Bad Reporter Does NSA Phone Monitoring
I really don't think the domestic spying on Americans thing is a laughing matter, in general, but somehow Don Assmusen manages to get a laugh out of me:
Click on the picture to get the rest of the headlines.


Filed under: Comics as Life and Politics

Lovin' the Curmudgeon
Have I mentioned The Comics Curmudgeon to y'all yet? Josh mocks various daily strips, and is funnier than most of 'em.

Filed under:Comics as Life

You Think You're Having a Bad Day...
..well, I'm not, really. At least not yet. But There are a couple of bad days happening in comics-land. First off, we have the continuation of Charlie Brown's low self-esteem, as provided by those around him:
The freaky part for me is that cb is smiling in the last frame, isn't he? So, as I'v elong suspected, cb is really a masochist. Which somehow makes me like him all the more.

And then, there's the really bad day I'm glad I'm not having, though I can remember days like this in the very recent past:



Filed under:Comics as Life

Potential Lovers, Run for the Hills!
Been doing some thinking lately about my self-described 'loner' status. I don't think I was never under any illusions that I was a loner in some 'cool' way. Just always saw it as one of various options. Somewhere along the line in my life I developed a conception of myself as a loner. And I had a nice little set of reasons for the fact that I was a loner, mostly loosely based on being an only child for a good part of my life. From there, of course, I learned to like adults better than other kids, blah, blah, blah. As I might explain this to a new friend or lover, they would nod knowingly. Explanations accepted, loner status, check. It was all very cut and dried, tied up with a nice little ribbon.

And, of course, it's not that simple.

One of the interesting things I'm learning about myself lately is how powerfully shy-in-groups I can be. Hanging out in new groups where I know few peole is pretty hard for me. It's not hard in the way that I spontaneously combust when I think about it; it's hard in that wallflower-inspiring sort of way. I have to make myself talk to other people--my natural disposition is quiet/stareatthewall/runaway at such things. Unless, of course, a school-like atmostphere is encouraged, and then I can raise my hand and speak; for some reason that's feels safer. (Thus my recent visit to the East Bay Atheists group wasn't quite so intimidating, though it had some of the same flavor as other outings I've had lately.)

And when I do make myself talk to people, it doesn't always work out very well for either of us. A recent conversation I had at a little party I went to recently:

Me: (after hearing she needed a beer badly after a rough day) So, why was your day so rough?
Her: (laughing, taking a swig)Not rough, just very, very looooooong.
Me: Ahah. (pause) (more pause) (can't think of the next thing to say)
Her: (wandering away...)

Of course, she could have said something back or whatever--but the point is, there's an easy opening there: "What did you do all day?" or some such. And this is an opening that I just couldn't see that night.

It can be even more painful than that. While I was waiting in line for the restroom the other day in a cafe, the woman behind me started talking to me. Now, this isn't the most comfortable place to have a conversation--and we were both sort of shifting from one leg to the other--but still:

Her: So, are you a student?
Me: Nope. Yes. Well, sort of. Finishing my master's, but not very quickly. (and then...) Why do you ask?
Her: (taken aback by my question)Erm, well, I don't know, it's just a good guess in a cafe.
Me: Yes, I guess it is. So how about you?

So I pulled that one out barely in the end, actually asking a pertinent question, but first I had to sort of freak her out by wondering why she asked if I was a student. It might have been an ok question, but it came out like: "Why are you talking to me?" I go meta with people before I go regular, it seems. Ack.

But shyness does not equal loner-ness. I imagine that many shy people don't want to be loners at all--though they may latch onto lonerness because that's easier (?) than trying to not-be-shy. So there's more to my percievd lonerness--I really do enjoy being alone a good deal of the time. Too much socializing and I go pretty crazy. This is true for most people, of course (I think!); it's just that the level at which I achieve 'too much socializing' is disturbingly low. Hanging out with a group of people for more than a couple of hours is exhausting, for instance. (Sometimes in a good way, but still...)

No where is this little quirk of mine more apparent than in my romantic relationships (looking into the past and future, now, because there certainly isn't anything to look at in the present). To a person, I think I have been quite a bit less social (in various ways) than anybody I've ever been romantic with. And a cursory look through the seive I like to call my memory (I think Lex got all of my memory brain cells), I think I've been mostly less social than any of my friends, too. Maybe a couple of exceptions. And when I say 'less social', I know it's complex, but I mostly just mean 'would more often just be alone than with anybody else' as well as 'doens't feel comfy in groups'.

And the thing is, that's sort of changing. I'm either recognizing something I didn't recognize before, or I'm just changing, or both. Probably both. I still tend to prefer to be alone a good deal of the time, but now I also tend to need some social time in a way that I don't think I ever have before. And it's a scary place to be, what with lots of friendships up in the air (cause or effect?). But here I am.

Still, Lucy's advice to the world might be appropriate in my case, nonetheless, since I'm likely still less social than most of the women I might be romantically interested in:

Filed under: Comics as Life and Therapy

That is So Gay
If only I were as funny as this:


Check out the rest of the comic today here.



Filed under:Comics as Life and Politics

Maybe I Blog Too Much
It's been suggested, sure. It's even been suggested by me. And I've thought a lot about quantity vs. quality in this writing, why I feel the desire/need to write here anyway. There are myriad reasons, of course, and some of them are 'better' than others, but I think one central reason comes down to this:

I just feel more sane when I write.

I love it when people comment, I like knowing people are reading and maybe even getting something from what I write (even if what they take away is an example of how not to be or something!). But, even if I never knew that somebody else read what I wrote--the possibility that they might is what, in part, makes writing here different from writing in my private journals (which, silly of me, I think nobody will ever read). That doesn't mean it makes me proofread or think harder or whatever, really--but it does mean that I'm writing not only for myself; an imaginary audience is still an audience.

Still: I just feel more sane when I write.

Maybe others feel this way about dance, or singing, or sex (ok, I suppose I feel this way about two out of three of those things, too); I happen to feel it strongly when I write. The catharsis is a great pleasure, and as long as I'm getting some pleasure and not hurting anybody (trying not to--though I don't always succeed) in the process, I doubt I'll ever stop, really. I don't like essentialist definitions, even simple ones about parts of myself, but sometimes I do feel like I was just born this way:


Filed under:Blogging and Comics as Life, and Therapy

Personal Responsibility or, The Ex-Libertarian
Had an interesting conversation with my neighbor the other day. I haven't talked to the guy very much, but it had been pointed out to me in the past that he's a die-hard libertarian. Now, knowing that isn't enough to size the guy up, really, because there are lots of different flavors of libertarian. Still, I knew it would be an interesting conversation to a point, if things got down to politics at all. Which, of course, they always do.

He's an interesting guy, actually--a study in blind spots and apparent contradictions--though I may have been projecting. He is a really devout libertarian, to the point that he is angry that his taxes help pay for the public education of other peoples' children and such. He believes in getting rid of all gun laws. That sort of thing. And yet, he was for a very long time a member of the machinists' union, a strong union. Presumably he gained quite a bit from being part of that union (in a good way, to me...but to him? hard to tell).

We argued for a while about particulars, but then I tried to delve into his underlying conception of reality. For him, he repeated again and again, it all comes down to individual, personal responsibility. When I tried to get him to elaborate on that, of course, it was difficult for him to say why he believed that, and what it meant, exactly. But he did think it means that, no matter what situation you are born into, it's your responsibility to create your life, and nobody else's.

It's tough to argue agains positions that are this (in my mind) incoherent. Or at least it's tough to know where to start. I talked a lot about it being a black-or-white fallacy to think that responsibility (whatever we decide it means, exactly) for an act is either all mine or all "the world's". I wasn't able to get it across to him--when I talked about the way we are connected, he said that I was suffering from guilt about what I owed people. He might be right, as far as that goes, but that isn't the whole picture, by far.

Later on, I realized that I should have brought out my old staple I use against uber-libertarians when they go into the hyper-individuality shpeil: What about family? Parents, brothers, sisters and kids make poor libertarians, in part because of the often explicity connectedness that they find in their lives. But I also thought about this:

The idea of a person being completely, utterly responsible for everything that happens to her doesn't even make sense, logically. This is what I wished I had asked him:
--Are you responsible for everything you do?
A: Yep.
--Then you are responsible for what you do to other people?
A: Yep.
--So if you smack somebody else upside the head, who is responsible?

Now, he might respond that he was responsible for doing it and the other guy was responsible for getting hit--but I think that's dodgy, of course. The more clear answer (I think) is that both are responsible, to varying degrees, and those degrees might change depending on how we frame the situation (i.e. if I am goading him on to hit me, maybe I'm more responsible). The point being that it just doesn't make sense, in a world full of other agents, that I am the only one responsible, all the time, for whatever happens to me--because then the same can't be said for any agents that interact with other agents.

I'm really sure that would have convinced him. He would have said, "Oh, yeah, that makes more sense than the fact-avoiding bs that I'm spouting!"

Or not.

Still, Linus gets it:

Filed under:Comics as Life, Philosophy and
Politics