My Own Stupid Fears

I heard yesterday morning that Juan Williams had been fired, but I had to go into the office before NPR covered the story. It wasn't until I got home and opened up Pandagon that I learned the basics of what had transpired. Juan indicated that he is fearful of people in "Muslim garb" because he thinks that they are all terrorists. There may be more to the story - that he actually implicated that Muslims are to blame for his fear - but I am not usually the type to look things up.

Officially, I'm deciding not to have an opinion on the events, positive or negative, cuz the guy is going to be financially ok. The events have made me think about the times when I have been nervous when seeing a young brown guy with or without typical Muslim clothing in an airport/plane setting. It's a knee jerk fear that I significantly dislike. The vast majority of brown guys I see are either like me - citizens going about their day - or people from other countries who work here and are also going about their day. I work with brown guys all the time. I've even dated brown guys. One told me a story about the reaction that some of his friends in London got on the subway right after the subway bombing. His friends were just going about their business that day, sitting on the train with their backpacks. They noticed that on one else was sitting near them on the crowded train. There was nothing for anyone to fear - the guys had laptops, work papers, and their lunches in their bags - but the people were nervous anyway, and the guys understood it completely.

Every time I have an episode of fear around a brown guy in an airport, I realize a) that if something were to happen to me, it is going to happen, and being nervous isn't going to change anything, and b) that the guy is just going about his business, just like me.

Of course, there was one episode in my life where I assumed that the guy walking down the street was just going about his business too, then he crossed the street and mugged me. There were other factors at play in that situation, and I saw it as mainly a $35 learning experience. I became a little more paranoid, but that has probably been for the better for me, since I was rather naive. However, I know that most people walking around in my neighborhood are just going home or going to a friends' place, even if for "nefarious" reasons. They don't give a crap about me beyond the five seconds when we are passing on the street.

Fears exist for so many reasons. Mine exist because of being brought up in white America in the late 20th century and picking up on so many negative messages. They are also borne of embarrassing and scary experiences of my own. I force myself to see just how rare those experiences have been, and how the vast majority of the time, the people around me couldn't care less about doing harm to me. It might not be how I feel, but it is a fact. Those feelings are not important to anyone but me.

Love at First Sight is Not

One cannot love anyone or anything based on the evidence gained from sight and sexual reaction. The only thing that really does is encourage us to learn more, which can lead to learning good or bad things. Sometimes, the one you might overlook at first becomes more and more interesting and then you see them differently. Many times, you will meet someone, talk for a little while, exchange numbers, then talk later and realize that you don't need to call that person.

If the person ends up being undesirable to you in this way, odds are that the other person can tell. You do the person a disservice (not to mention yourself) to continue to pursue when a fundamental incompatibility surfaces, despite coming from an attractive frame. Love must be based on as many senses as possible, including the things like ability to communicate, agreement on fundamental issues, and physical compatibility, among many others. Anything less should not be considered love.

Oh! You've blinded me!

Can my dear sciency friends read this article and tell me what is not true? I am finding this article wonderfully genderless:

Incidentally, these cues work because they derive from the basic mammalian infant-caregiver attachment behaviors that enable us to fall in love with our parents and kids. Only in rare pair bonders like humans can adult mates use similar subconscious cues to sustain their romances indefinitely.

I kept waiting for some hunter-gatherer, evo-psych bs to pop up, and if it did, I didn't catch it.

Thoughtfullness

A Westboro Baptist Church wannabe out in Florida wants to make a stink. Why not hold a cook-out and use some old books as kindling? Distasteful, indeed, but we are assured that the books are copies of other books, and contain no new information.

But once word gets out to a medieval society torn by war, warped by patriarchal traditions and often deadly misogyny that someone, somewhere, is burning a ream of bound paper that contains a copy of information they have readily available to them... Once that word gets out, the backwards society decides to flip the fuck out.

I don't like the idea of kowtowing to the kind of person that would relegate me to shrouded breeding stock had I been born in their country and not mine. Violent reactions to peaceful demonstrations, even if carried out by brain-dead morons, demonstrate significant insecurity.

Huh

I found this link buried in my drafts, from two years ago.

Queen's bloomers sell for £4,500

That's Why I Don't Read Movie Reviews

I saw Inception last night, and apart from some bright spots, I was mostly bored with the movie during the second half. Its about these spies that go into people's dreams - an implausible thing in reality, but I buy it for the movie - to collect secrets or plant ideas. In the dream state, you can still feel pain, but if you are killed you just wake up - that is until the characters are in the first stage of the main dream state of the movie when we get the "oh, wait, we need more suspense" addition to the movie where people killed in the dream now just enter a limbo state as their real brains melt. At that point, I rolled my eyes and started eying the time.

Like most action/heist movies, this one starred mostly men, which is part of the reason that I don't like such movies (the other part is that the typical heist plot bores me). A couple of the things I did like about this movie were the addition of a female character playing a role in the team on the heist who never becomes romantically attracted to any of her co-workers and the Cobb's realization that he can't create an accurate representation of his dead wife because no one's perception of anyone can match the complexity of an actual human being.

Andrew O'Hehir's review review of Inception mostly mirrors my own take on the movie, except for one detail. He never mentions the second thing I liked about the movie, and that being such a tiny, unimportant scene, I don't care about that. He does, however, refer to Ellen Page's character as "genderless" and refer to the dead wife character as "all the female, erotic energy" that is missing from a universe of professionals. Apparently, Andrew must be reminded that women are different from men and only exist in a sexual space lest he forget to be attracted to them. He never refers to DiCaprio's character as genderless, even though he has all the sexual masculinity of a cardboard box throughout the film - just like most male movie characters. This is just another reminder of how most movie reviewers can't see women as people. When one is presented not as window dressing, but as an average woman, they claim she is androgynous. It's as if Andrew never met a woman in real life.

HAPPY FISCAL NEW YEAR

My Travels So Far

visited 14 states (6.22%)
Create your own visited map of The World

Basically, if I had a layover there, I was there. I've had a couple of 16 hour layovers in Frankfurt, where I got to go out and enjoy the city or nap in a hotel room. The layover in Heathrow was during the day, so I got to hang out in their mall. I was only in Argentina overnight. I leave for Peru today.


visited 16 states (32%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

I tried to include only the states where I have spent a night, but I've spent enough time in Covington, KY to consider it for the map. I also did visit the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, so I include that one.