as I live a few more questions

Beating Resistance

A serendipitous find on a subject I had just blogged about less than 24 hours earlier: resistance and fear of success. Merlin Mann, the blogger behind the personal productivity blog 43 Folders, writes:

Resistance can be thought of as anything that pulls us away from doing the work we know is most important to us. It takes many forms (including procrastination, fear, distraction, and negative self-talk), but the effect is often similar: we find or permit all kinds of barriers to keep us from becoming the person we want to be, or from completing the thing we really want to make. Whether that’s being a published author, a composer, a playwright, or a painter, our impulse to create constantly battles an impulse to do something else, or to do nothing — to not upset our weirdly comfy stasis.

This book [The War of Art by Steven Pressfield] came up twice in my recent interview with Jonathan Coulton; both in part one and today’s recently released part two. Jonathan strikes me as someone who has, so far, succeeded at talking down the resistance he’d faced, and now he’s doing what he’s great at, and, in his words, he’s working hard to become the kind of “true person” that he wants to be for his daughter.

I think it’s really important to underscore that beating resistance does not have to mean quitting your job or doing something equally dramatic; it just means that you identify and then choose to beat the crap out of whatever perceived obstacle keeps you from doing your work. You “go Pro” … making it all about the work, and not allowing yourself to trail off when it gets hard or when you have to fight in order to get your stuff done. Pretty inspiring stuff, as far as I’m concerned.

In this video clip of the interview, Merlin interviews singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton, when the conversation drifts towards how resistance can block us from becoming (in Jonathan’s words) a “true person”.

Here’s a transcript of the part of the interview that really hooked me:

JC: …if I’m gonna be a true person, and an example of a true person to this child, then I should be true to myself, and do what it is that I’m interested in doing. And it just felt so much more honest since I’ve decided to that. So, yeah that seems suicidal…

MM: No, not really. I men, that’s the funny part about stuff like that…to refer to a book I referred to earlier, The War of Art, it’s not it’s my favourite book or something, it’s just a book I recently read…

JC: (smiling) Sure, sure…

MM: One thing that he said is really interesting ... he said that one reason we do things like procrastinate and we kind of, we find these barriers for ourselves, is that the closer we get to the thing that we kind of secretly realize in our head that we should be doing, the more reasons we find to not do it. Because it creates this kind of stasis that lets us sort of stay locked in.  And yeah, I mean, maybe it’s the craziest thing you ever did, or maybe it’s like you finally unlock the door to thing that’s gonna make you happy.

JC: Yeah, and I do feel like…when my daughter was born, that was the moment that sort of clarified my whole life.

Merlin Mann's websites: 43 Folders and The Merlin Show

Jonathan Coultons website: Jonathan Coulton

Here We Go Again...

A second Denver-area evangelical megachurch pastor steps down after admitting he cheated on his wife with other men:

A month ago, the Rev. Paul Barnes of Grace Chapel in Douglas County preached to his 2,100-member congregation about integrity and grace in the aftermath of the Ted Haggard drugs-and-gay-sex scandal.

Now, the 54-year-old Barnes joins Haggard as a fallen evangelical minister who preached that homosexuality was a sin but grappled with a hidden life.

"I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy," Barnes said in the 32- minute video, which church leaders permitted The Denver Post to view. "... I can't tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away."

...

Sitting cross-legged in jeans and an open-collar shirt, Barnes spoke in his video about evolving feelings growing up in a firm moral family: from confused little boy to adolescent racked with self-loathing and guilt.

In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a "fag" approached him.

Barnes thought, "'Is that how you'd feel about me?' It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed."

Heartbreaking.  And unfortunately, his story is not unusual among gays and lesbians.  The pressure to conform and the fear of rejection can twist a life beyond recognition.  I feel sorry for Rev. Barnes, not scorn. 

The Crunch is Coming: Welcome to the Post-Abundance Era

We're closer than we think to an age when gasoline becomes a luxury and restaurant meals become unattainable.  The sense of abundance that characterized the late 20th century is likely to evaporate for the great majority of us.

read more | digg story

The Flip Side of the Chinese Economic Miracle

I can't believe it, but for once I am in agreement with Stephen Harper's government: I'm happy that they are raising the issue of human rights with the Chinese.  The video below comes from another one of the "new YouTubes", called metacafé, and it shows how disenfranchised the poor in China really are:

Underground Video Of Tyranny In China - video powered by Metacafe
 

Now think about this: If I were posting this video in China, I could probably expect a visit from the police and a quick escort into the Chinese prison system. Kind of puts our problems with our various levels of governments into perspective.

Student tasered at UCLA library for not having his ID card!

This YouTube video is very unsettling.  According to eyewitness reports, the student in question already had his backpack on and was heading for the exits when he was accosted by UCLA Police, tasered, and then, unable to get back on his feet, was tasered multiple times, in front of a crowd of incredulous students.  Someone had the presence of mind to pull out his video cellphone and record the incident.

Here's a link to the campus newspaper account of the story.

Here's what the Los Angeles Times had to say:

The latest in a recent spate of cellphone videos documenting questionable arrest tactics surfaced Wednesday, this one showing a UCLA police officer using a Taser to stun a student who allegedly refused to leave the campus library.

Grainy video of the Tuesday night incident at UCLA's Powell Library was broadcast Wednesday on TV news and the Internet, prompting a review of the officers' actions and outrage among students at the Westwood campus.

The footage showed the student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, falling to the ground and crying out in pain as officers stunned him.

According to a campus police report, the incident began when community service officers, who serve as guards at the library, began their nightly routine of checking to make sure everyone using the library after 11 p.m. is a student or otherwise authorized to be there.

Campus officials said the long-standing policy was adopted to ensure students' safety.

When Tabatabainejad, 23, refused to provide his ID to the community service officer, the officer told him he would have to show it or leave the library, the report said.

After repeated requests, the officer left and returned with campus police, who asked Tabatabainejad to leave "multiple times," according to a statement by the UCLA Police Department.

"He continued to refuse," the statement said. "As the officers attempted to escort him out, he went limp and continued to refuse to cooperate with officers or leave the building."

Witnesses disputed that account, saying that when campus police arrived, Tabatabainejad had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack. When an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, the witnesses said, Tabatabainejad told the officer to let go, yelling "Get off me" several times.

"Tabatabainejad encouraged library patrons to join his resistance," police said. "The officers deemed it necessary to use the Taser."

Officers stunned Tabatabainejad, causing him to fall to the floor.

The video shows Tabatabainejad yelling, "Here's your Patriot Act, here's your ... abuse of power," the Daily Bruin reported, adding he used a profanity.

"It was beyond grotesque," said UCLA graduate David Remesnitsky of Los Angeles, who witnessed the incident. "By the end they took him over the stairs, lifted him up and Tasered him on his rear end. It seemed like it was inappropriately placed. The Tasering was so unnecessary and they just kept doing it."

Campus police confirmed that Tabatabainejad was stunned "multiple" times.

By then, Remesnitsky said, a crowd of 50 or 60 had gathered and were shouting at the officers to stop and demanding their names and badge numbers.

Remesnitsky said officers told him to leave or he would be Tasered.

(Amanda Covarrubias and Stuart Silverstein, 'A Third Incident, A New Video', Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2006)

UPDATE 12:45 P.M.: And here's the inevitable Metafilter discussion thread.

read more | digg story

"It's not my fault! the priest made me do it/I was drunk/I'm gay!"

I am so angry, and I have so much to say about the Mark Foley scandal down in the U.S., that I hardly know where to begin.

Lawyers acting for Mark Foley, the Republican congressman who resigned after it was revealed he had sent sexually charged emails to teenage boys, said yesterday that the politician had been abused by a member of the clergy as a teenager.

No details of the alleged abuse were given, other than that Mr Foley, who is a Roman Catholic, was between 13 and 15 years old at the time of the abuse. One lawyer, David Roth, acknowledged for the first time that the congressman, 52, is gay. "Mark Foley wants you to know he is a gay man," Mr Roth told a news conference in Florida, adding that the admission was part of a "recovery" programme. He also insisted that Mr Foley was "absolutely, positively not a paedophile". Mr Foley said in a statement on Monday that he was an alcoholic and that he was entering a recovery programme to treat his condition. (Glaister, Dan. "Republican who sent indecent emails was abused ", The Guardian, October   4, 2006)

Oh, so now he finally decides to come out of the closet, several years after he was already outed by The Advocate newsmagazine for hypocritcally voting in favour of the "Defence of Marriage" act. 

And of course, now he checks himself into rehab, whimpering: "I did because I was drunk.";  "I did it because of that priest." 

Entering a "recovery" program?  Recovery from what?  Being gay?  Being drunk?  Getting caught??

I find it beyond pathetic that Foley finally plays the gay card, only when he thinks it will help him.  How can it help him, you ask?  By not-so-subtly using the "I'm gay so I molest children" charge which the Religious Right likes to keep throwing at us God-damned sodomites.  That way, perhaps he can cast his sexual orientation as more of a "sin" that needs "recovery".   This man is a disgrace to honest queer people everywhere, and I comfort myself with the thought that he's gonna be one helluva popular bitch at whatever prison he lands up in.

Oh, and he says he's not a paedophile?!?  Well, I guess that depends on the law, but really.  As more word leaks out about the content of those IM messages between him and one or more teenagers, one has to ask just how Mark Foel defines the term. 

Apparently he is now saying (via his lawyer) that since no physical (i.e. face-to-face) acts took place, he is not a paedophile.  This defence falls intro the category of "I never has sex with that woman!"   Clinton learned a blow job is sex.  Foley is going to soon learn that cybersex is sex.

And to make matters even worse, until his resignation he was a co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, and a backer of new legislation, the 2006 Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which he may well now be charged under.  HE WAS IN A POSITION OF TRUST.  (I wonder what Joe Walsh, Adam's father and host of America's Most Wanted, is thinking now.)

I got news for Mr. Foley: Being gay does NOT excuse what you did.  Being a drunk does NOT excuse what you did.  Being a victim of child sex abuse does NOT excuse what you did.  Being ANY COMBINATION OF a diddled-with, drunken faggot does NOT excuse what you did, in any way, shape or form.  That you even TRY to use these as excuses or defenses makes you even viler, if that is possible.

I hope Foley gets the book thrown at him.  His grasping, gawping response by checking into rehab and blaming booze/sexual abuse/being gay is absolutely, utterly, completely vile and reprehensible. Thankfully, most people can already see through that "rehab" act pretty easily; it's getting old. 

And ANYBODY in the U.S. federal or state govenments who is found to have kept his secrets hidden deserves to be tossed out on his ass and go down in flames along with Foley. 
  

UPDATE: Now Newt Gingrich has said that one reason why the Republicans in power didn't act on Mark Foley sooner was that they were afraid of being accused of "gaybashing".  What the...?!  As John Stewart said in response on The Today Show, assuming that all homosexuals are child sex offenders IS gaybashing.

Never Gonna Forgive

My father had a violent temper and when he got angry, he was loud.  When I say loud, I mean VERY LOUD.   To a small child, say, four years old, it was truly terrifying.  That child was me.

Today I had lunch with a long-time good friend, someone whom I've known half my life and whom I had not seen in several years.  During our conversation, there were times when she became loud (and she can by nature be LOUD).  And the space we were sitting in, concrete walls and a low ceiling, simply echoed and amplified the sound, so that, at least to me, it was VERY LOUD.

I was shocked to find myself shaking. 

I wrapped my arms around myself and fidgeted a bit and I'm sure she didn't notice.  I was doing more shaking on the inside than on the outside.  But I actually had a physical remembrance of the fear I had had of my father, something I hadn't felt since I had recovered the original deeply-repressed childhood memories, thanks to a number of sessions of healing touch by performed by Sister Bernadette and Sister Thérèse.

The mind may forget, especially in trauma, but the body never forgets.  And I was once again that child, crouched down with my back against the wall, my arms over my head to protect myself, and screaming.  Screaming.  Screaming at the top of my lungs. 

It may have only happened once, but once was enough.

As I was walking down a university corridor after lunch with my friend, I was thinking about how much that fear of my father had sculpted, and to some extent still sculpts, my life.  And I thought to myself, I'm never gonna forgive me for what you did, you bastard.

I came to dead halt.  I had switched, automatically and almost unconsciously, from I'm never gonna forgive you to I'm never gonna forgive me.   

 

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

 

 

 

 

Some Notes on Moving Forward

Damn it damn it DAMN IT...

I'm still thinking about the Brokeback Mountain short story and that movie everybody's talking about. What is the matter with me... a movie I'd never even heard of three months ago, a movie I'VE NEVER EVEN SEEN, based a short story I'd only just read yesterday. Hitting me like this. It's crazy.

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.

(Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx; LiveJournal icons by eye_knead_icons.)

This quote is what Ennis tells himself at the end of Proulx's short story. But it's not true.

Ennis could have done something about it; he could have fixed it. He chose to let his fear of what other people would think and say rule his bahaviour. And what happened is tragic. But what others think and say is only an excuse. Fear is only an excuse.

The reason all this Brokeback Mountain blogosphere talk has snagged me is this: In addition to the associations it creates with my own past (previous post), it also touches on something that I have been thinking a lot lately: my own role in the problems and difficulties I have experienced. I myself have made choices, perhaps not conscious ones when I was still a child, but choices nonetheless. Quite often, these choices have been very bad ones in reaction to an unpleasant event or situation in my life.

But I need to take my own responsibility for the life I've made, no matter how many external things have happened. I can't keep blaming and regretting all my life; I have to ditch the sackcloth and ashes, get up off my ass, and move forward with what I have. I also need to leave behind what is keeping me anchored in my mourning. Yes, mourning, because that's what it is.

Ennis abdicated his choice, and his happiness, because of his fear. And so have I. Even now, when I know I have nothing to fear, I am stuck in that habit of abdicating my choice, throwing away my happiness.

And there is where the change must be made.

Chinese News Site and Japanese Virologist Assert 310 Dead in China from Bird Flu

There are detailed but unconfirmed reports that have come out of China, that the number of people ill and dead from the H5N1 avian influenza virus is far, far more than just the official count of 2 ill, 1 dead. If these reports are true, it means that the avian influenza pandemic may already have begun within China's borders.

Statistics on Avian Flu, which is spreading in many parts of China, including the actual number of the infected and the dead, were published on Nov. 14 at Boxun.com, a China-related news site.

According to their expose, the number of fatalities in this year up to Nov 12, totals 310 from 13 different provinces, and the number of the quarantined people is 5,554 in total, contrary to the official announcement from Chinese authorities.

Moreover, the numbers in the statistics are lower than the actual ones. These numbers were 'approved' by the Cabinet. The data were provided by an high-level official of Chinese Health Ministry, and it was not revealed the manner in which they came to receive this statistic.

According to the source, since 2004, deadly epidemics are breaking out in many parts of China, including Avian Flu. Since 2005, military was put in charge of epidemic control, leading to tightened information blackout. This kept the accurate report on epidemic situation from coming out to the international community.

The source also said that, the announcement by Chinese Health Ministry is also masking the real situation by resorting to 'technical treatment' or 'unique academic modification and interpretation.' Even when they allow foreign experts or international organizations into China for inspection, they can do it only under Chinese authorities' supervision, which made it almost impossible to uncover the real truth.

Right now, the spread of Avian Flu has become the serious situation in many places of China, and each provincial government is given clear instruction on handling the crisis and keeping out the information.

Currently, Chinese Cabinet and Supreme Military Command issued an instruction, "Anyone suspected to be infected by Avian Flu, or really infected ones should be all confined to designated medical facilities and its report be made to higher government immediately. It is strictly prohibited to reveal information on (Avian Flu) infection without approval of the Cabinet. Any violators will be disciplined and fired or held accountable by further means."

The source also mentioned another authorities' instruction, which says, "If a patient dies (of Avian Flu), you cannot record Avian Flu or H5N1 as a cause of death. A patient suffering infectious respiratory disease, but who did not get treatment at designated medical facilities will not receive assistance such as health insurance. The medical facility which treated this patient will also receive stiff sanction.

(Source of quote) (link to original Chinese Boxun report with chart of people quarantined, ill and dead broken down by province)

Then, Dr. Masato Tashiro, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on Influenza at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Tokyo, and head of the Department of Virology of Japan's National Institute of Infectious Disease, reported almost 100% identical information at a virologists' meeting, which he said had been given to him by a reliable source while he was travelling to China a few days ago: "What you see here is an inofficial, unpublished report from China about the H5N1 infections in China." (link to full German text)

The German news media are all over this story, which was first published the respected newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

I'm currently reading Twenty-First Century Plague: THe Story of SARS by Thomas Abraham, and it outlines just how China's secrecy about the SARS virus led to so many unnecessary deaths. The shocking part is not that China kept the news from the rest of the world; it is that the Guandong provincial government in China kept the news from officials in Beijing! The whole sad story is outlined in Chapter 2.

I hope with all my heart that China is not repeating the same mistakes, but given the recent unconfirmed reports, that hope is fading.

dontthinkaboutit

Spent most of the day in one of three ways:

1. Trying (and failing) to get my new notebook to connect to the campus LAN;
2. Trying (and failing) to get my new notebook to connect to the wireless LAN in my local café;
3. Searching the Internet (particularly the Dell knowledge base) for answers to #1 and #2.

Argh. At least it works when I plug it into my cable network connection at home, and I've already proven it works with the wireless network at the Law Library. I must hust have a setting wrong somewhere for #1 and #2. So I keep worrying away at it, like a dog with a bone (all right, so call the Hackneyed Cliché Police then).

Besides, it keeps me mentally occupied, busywork, don't-think-about-Monday's-funeral busywork, don't-think-about-the-massacre-in-Beslan busywork. dontthinkaboutidontthinkaboutitdontthinkaboutitdontthinkaboutitdontthinkaboutit