Christmas Wishes

To everyone and the whole world, I wish you a very happy Christmas. Despite the religious associations of the holiday, I'd like to think that it has become rather secularized. Some might think this as a shame, but I like to think it means everyone can enjoy it equally, as it means something special for all of us. Joy, gratitude, peace on Earth, and good will towards everyone are universal, and so I hope we will all have just that. My favorite thing about Christmas is that it gives you an excuse to be happy for no good reason, and that is reason enough to celebrate.

So no matter what your condition or situation, I wish you great happiness this Christmas. And hey, happiness every other day, too. I don't think there's anything wrong with just being happy and glad without any reservation. So go ahead, be happy. You have my blessing. :)

Airing of Grievances

Two of my friends have posted on Facebook that, according to Seinfeld, Christmas is the time of an airing of grievances. I think this sounds good, but I don't have any grievances that are light enough to post merely on Facebook. I thought I'd post here instead, to write how I really feel.

After all, though I may have petty grievances against all sorts of annoyances in my life, my biggest grievance is against myself. No one has harmed me or disappointed me more than I have this past year. It's a sobering thought, but there it is.

I'm not angry or miserable about any of it. In life, we fall but we get back up, and so shall I. There could be no joy without sorrow, no success without failure, and so I look forward to doing even better with all I have learned from my shortcomings. And that, maybe, is something to be grateful for this Christmas.

So, this Christmas, my biggest grievance is against myself, but that's not so bad. Merry Christmas.

Spam email is POETIC!

"Aloha, my gentleman

Two souls and one thought, two hearts and one pulse.Honey, I came here almost hopeless to find you. I am waiting for you for such a long time that I already feel your soul, but I still can not meet you. I know that we are both imperfect, but somehow we will perfectly match together. I do not know what the life has in store for us, but I hope that we will share it together. (link) I will bring you tenderness and happiness, a feeling of deep and everlasting love. I will take you to a place of colourful world and crystal dreams. You are my life and my love, I can feel that you are also somewhere here also looking for me.

Hugs
Li"




I know you're not a real person, Li, but with such a touching and heartwarming offer, how can I refuse? Well, I do refuse, since I'm not a chump, but by my word a "colourful world and crystal dreams" is just about as irresistable as it gets.

The "SyFy" channel's "Alice"

From American McGee's Alice to Tim Burton's Alice to the treatment of Alice in Lullaby, it seems like everyone has had a shot at "re-imagining" Lewis Carrol's classic of children's literature, Alice in Wonderland. When the "SyFy" channel (quotes required since it's such a silly name) decided to remake it into a two-night show, they dropped the better part of the title and made it just Alice. Why? The reason soon becomes obvious: because there's no wonder in this version of Wonderland.

The premise is fairly thin. The Queen of Hearts has taken over Wonderland and is using a casino (get it? she's a playing card?) to leech emotions out of humans from our world. She then sells these like drugs to the populace of Wonderland, keeping them within her power. Enter Alice, a girl who is, despite what you may be thinking, actually completely unrelated to the Alice of legend. There's plenty of speculation that she might be "the" Alice, but there really doesn't seem to be any connection. Apparently her only qualifications are that she wears a blue dress and her name is Alice.

Alice in Wonderland is full of vibrant and colorful locations, Alice, on the other hand, seems to take place mostly in dilapidated old hotels. The characters in Alice in Wonderland are quirky yet full of a strange kind of wisdom. The characters in Alice are virtually all human in appearance, and are only connected to the novel's characters by their names. The Mad Hatter, who isn't mad and doesn't make hats, is one of the best characters in the program, as charming and British as any Artful Dodger. Another standout is the White Knight, played by the guy who plays Taggart in Eureka. Another Sci Fi regular making an appearance is Colm Meaney, further proving my theory that the Sci Fi channel doesn't hire actors for certain shows, but just owns certain people. In my imagination, if I spilled my lemonade in the Sci Fi waiting room, Amanda Tapping, Ben Browder, or Michael Shanks would come out in overalls with a bucket and a mop to clean it up. Meaney does a capable job, but his character, the Queen of Hearts's weak-willed husband, doesn't have much to do. Alice herself is well played, but her writing is so dull that she doesn't have much to work with. The Queen is played by Kathy Bates, who is neither very menacing nor amusing, but whose acting rather gives the impression that everyone is just humoring her character.

Apart from traipsing around run-down old buildings and nondescript forests (neither of which have much Wonder in them), the other real set is the casino, which is brightly lit and consists of three fairly small rooms: the casino room, the Queen's throne room, and the third room.

The plot, such as there is, involves the Queen's son falling in love with Alice and giving her the ring which controls the portal into our world (the looking glass of the second novel's title). The Queen needs this to keep up enslaving humans and leeching their emotions, so she's determined to get it back. The rest of the film revolves around the characters evading capture, getting captured, escaping, evading capture, getting captured again, and escaping again to victory. The writing is remarkably lackluster (Alice's big speech to make the humans in the casino remember who they are is basically "REMEMBER! REMEMBER! REMEMBER YOUR FAMILIES!"). Although she's introduced as a karate expert, Alice needs rescuing several times. The March Hare, called Mad March, is described as the queen's top assassin, but gets taken out with one punch by the Hatter, whose combat skills really are second to none in this show, and make me wonder why he didn't just save Wonderland singlehandedly ages ago. The casino is left unguarded at a crucial moment when the White Knight dresses up a lot of skeletons in armor and stands them up outside. Why nobody notices him setting them up, and why they subsequently fall for attacking an army that only stands there, is anybody's guess; I suppose it's because everyone's mad in Wonderland.

The bottom line is this: this is a show about a wondrous place that could have used a giant heaping more wonder. A couple of charming characters can't do much to save a show with a weak script and no eye-popping set pieces. For a story that revolves around imagination, this program is sorely lacking, and that lets down what could have been a fun adventure.

THAT BEING SAID...

I have a suggestion for a new "SyFy" channel special:

"They fed him honey. They broke his house. They stole his tail. This Spring, Eeyore's really pissed... and he's not going to take it any more."

Kleenex, Monasteries, and Vituperation

I was horrified to find the following message on the bottom of my box of Kleenex:
"Say goodbye to the stiff upper lip... [their ellipsis] Tell calm, cool and collected to take a hike. Whoop it up! Laugh, scream, cry and holler! And when tons os stuff stuffs up your nose, blow it loud and blow it proud! Show your heart and show some tears... of joy and sorrow, in awe and pride. Just let it out!"

I don't want to believe that my Kleenex is telling me to behave like a simpleton and a lunatic, abandoning decency and decorum for the sake of becoming an emotional mess and a public nuisance, but I can't help but think that's exactly what my Kleenex is saying. To me, this speaks to a broader issue, one that continues to replace the educated gentleman of previous generations with the rude, ignorant, and utterly reprehensible self-absorbed man-child of the twenty-first century, the kind of willfully stupid Philistine who refers to a well-spoken man such as our president as a "snob," who dismisses the arts and history as "artsy", and who finds a purpose in television and sports.

Well, my friends, the raving populace has always been weak to bread and circus, but when I start to despair about the state of humanity in the modern day, I reflect that the world has always been filled with a cacophonous rabble who, among their more heinous offenses, belittle their betters for their knowledge and refinement. Not that I am particularly either, mind, but I do aspire to be. Not only has there always been this noisome crowd, there have always been refuges where proper sensibilities and learning are protected.

Even in the Middle Ages, when the majority of the world ran around burning witches, the wisdom of the ages was preserved in manuscripts copied in monasteries. While there will always be the threat of Dark Ages, whether through the collapse of civilization or, as we see today, through a purposeful preference towards ignorance and idiocy, there will always be a minority of people who stand up against this kind of barbarism and hold out.

Thank you, ancient monks. And thank you to you, too, if you are also someone who loves reading and writing, and all things worth preserving.

Sometimes I take myself much too seriously.

Here's Looking At You, Google.

Just for fun, I decided to run a line from the poem "Over the Misty Mountains Cold" by Tolkien in Google to see what it came up with. I didn't use any Boolean functions (no 'ands' or quotes). The line was "The heart is bold that looks on gold." Google arbitrarily decided that the word "looks" is not relevant to my search and told me so at the bottom of my page. Instead, it filled up my page with ads for things like heart-shaped gold trinkets. Despite the fact that I included the line word for word, Tolkien only appeared on page 4 of the search results. Smartest search engine? Sure. My conspiracy theory is severely disappointed.
I was originally going to make this my Facebook status, but then I realized that would make me the biggest nerd ever.

Borderlands

As readers of this blog will know, I'm a big fan of the post-apocalyptic genre, particularly of the Mad Max movies, which I think are still the epitome of that world. It's not a stretch, therefore, that I should be interested in the new game Borderlands, which a friend of mine rented for me for the PS3. Before I continue, I should include that my friend and my brother both like the game a lot, so it seems I'm the minority opinion here.

The graphics are cell-shaded and stylized, which makes the game feel like a weird dream. The characters you meet are all varying degrees of ridiculous charicatures, which is a major strike against giving the world the right feeling. A lot of the apocalyptic (the game is actually set on a border planet, but let's call a potato a potato) elements are played for laughs. There are also no conversations: the characters, of whom there are precious few, are only there to give you quests, and shops are just dispenser machines.

The game is marketed as a mixed FPS and RPG, but it doesn't hold up as either. I've been playing FPS since the Doom days, so I've developed a bit of talent, but the game requires none. It's a slog of shooting each other a lot, and hiding when you need your shield to recharge. Since the game is heavily hit point dependent, it translates to just a lot of lead in the air while you whittle down the opponents' health bars. The controls are fine, except for the vehicles, which always move in the direction you're facing rather than turning the direction you're turning the control stick, which just doesn't feel right.

The game doesn't work as an FPS, because you really don't use any skill in fighting, but it doesn't work as an RPG, either, because you can't make any choices in the story or even interact with the other characters. Character customization is pretty flat (you get a tree of buffs like in World of Warcraft, but they're really not that great), and you get a grand total of one special ability. This might change later in the game, but I played to around level 20 of 50, so I'd like to think I at least scratched the surface.

You've seen these characters before. The big brute, the magical slender woman, the standard soldier, the skinny sniper. Hell, apart from the woman, you've got them all in Team Fortress 2, and in that they're actually more fun.

The guns have varying effects, including shocking your enemy, eating through their armor, or setting them on fire. This does provide a level of picking the right weapon for the job, which is nice, but the plethora of guns the game advertises just isn't attractive to me. The guns have a bunch of different modifiers, like the yellow weapons in Diablo, that make them more or less unique, but they're about as consistent and useful as those weapons: just because you can pile a bunch of random modifiers on something doesn't mean it feels 'right', which many of these guns don't. A gun that shoots really fast AND has low recoil AND does fire damage is just... fair, since it really just boils down to raw damage output. If the guns were closer in damage potential, like they are in most FPS games, you could pick the flavor that suits your style best. When it comes down to it, I'm really not that excited about shooting weird guns, particularly when it's shooting them at the same enemies over and over.

Which brings me to one of the biggest downfalls of the game: the enemies level along with you. I don't understand why games these days all seem to have a level-up system. It makes sense in games like Dungeons and Dragons, where it means (or should) that you can fight bigger and more interesting enemies, but what's the use if you never get other enemies to fight, but just tougher versions of the same ones? In a world where most of your enemies are human anyway, it doesn't make sense. Why should one particular noggin take ten (or a hundred) times as much destructive power to go 'splode as another? For that matter, is any one gun really a hundred times more deadly than another?

Now, I know that these complaints can really apply to many games, even games I love, such as Fallout 3, but those games have elements that rise above the rest, elements such as writing and interesting characters and mood. Borderlands lacks all of these. It's a long grind. There were a few standout moments of "hey, that was kind of cool", but really it was hours and hours of slogging through the same enemies with little to make it worthwhile.

It's NaNoWriMo again!

National Novel Writing Month is almost here again! In less than a week, thousands, perhaps even millions, of people across the world will be tapping furiously at their keyboards for a solid month, struggling to reach that golden mark of 50,000 words. For everyone who has been putting off writing that great novel because there just isn't enough time in the day, NaNoWriMo takes away the excuses. If so many other people are doing it, so can you! I've participated twice in the past. I actually finished a 52,000 word novel in 2007, and I participated but only made it to 30,000 words in 2008, mostly because I'm lazy. I was also writing my Master's thesis at the time, but that's just an excuse! Just like with all things in life, if you really want to do something, you do it. You don't complain about how much else you have to do.

This year, I fully intend to participate, and to win! I think the real joy and success of the project comes from the communality of it. Novel writing is a generally lonely business, full of self-doubt and misery, asking myself why I'm pretending to be a writer when everyone else is out having fun or being productive. NaNo is the time everyone else is engaged in the same struggle, and with that comes strength and a sense of real purpose. The website lets you keep track of what your friends are writing and how they're doing. There are also forums to let you talk to both local and other writers about your trials and your triumphs. Really, the overall feeling is that we're all in it together, and that, for one month, whether you're writing about sweeping tragedy or ninjas, all that matters if that you keep going. Everything is positive, encouraging, and optimistic. We can do this! We can write a novel in a month!

Now I just have to buckle down and do it.

If you're like to do it, please do! ^_^ And we can be friends on the site and share encouragement and all that stuff!

Future Love

Warning. I'm not very politically correct. I apologize to everyone who is offended. If you're not offended, I'm not apologizing. I won't be giving you any links to what I mean because, really, I don't want to do that to you. If you're really curious, a simple keyword search will bring you all the horror your fragile sanity can stand.

The Internet, namely YouTube (which is about a third of the Internet anyway, the other two thirds being Facebook and porn, and maybe a little 4chan), keeps trying to make me watch videos of fat peoples' stomachs. And fat people poking their stomachs. And stroking their stomachs. I must admit I first clicked one of these links because I was baffled about what could be in such a video (not to mention baffled by why the Internet thought that I would be interested by it). The videos themselves are pretty tame, as far as I can tell: fat people sitting around playing with their bellies. It's the kind of thing children do when they're bored. And let's be honest, we all enjoy a bit of belly button lint picking every now and then.

But it's the comments that disturb me. Just for you, dear Internet, I'm going to delve into one of these videos to give you a sample:

"I wanna rub her belly and stick my finger in her belly button."
"So beautiful, darling you should try to make it to the point of almost exploding. But be careful~"
"Please pull your pants down just a little bit so we can see you underwear. Thanks"

And each of those comments had people clicking the thumbs up button to recommend it. I would think the other button was the one that meant "Creeeeeeepy!"

Now, I'm all for a realistic body image, but doesn't encourage people to eat excessively fly in the face of everything we know about good health and diet? I'll be the first to give a bony model the sammich she so desperately needs, but this is people encouraging obese people to be even more obese.

There are plenty of bizarre fetishes out there that don't involve hurting anyone. I really only know about these because I watch Attack of the Show's "Around The Net." Things like balloons and giving people piggyback rides. I don't understand how this is in any way sexy, but at least nobody is getting hurt. But encouraging people to become obese? That's just about as sick as those people who want to be amputees.

What this all comes down to, though, is that I have a theory. I believe this is an evolutionary coping mechanism. As obesity becomes increasingly common, our brains start to change the way we see beauty to compensate. What would happen to fat Western society if we still held on to our old notions of athletic being beautiful? Imagine that poor minority of women who still fit that image who would increasingly bear the burden of continuing the species. Meanwhile, the rest of women have nothing to do but sit around, eat pizza, and watch Oprah. It only makes sense that, in order to preserve the species, somebody has to "hit that." And, in order to steel those brave souls to the unenviable but necessary task ahead, Mother Nature puts new thoughts into their heads. Thoughts like "your belly looks hot with it all bloated keep it up never stop of course take breaks but its sexy"

Yes, Internet, I went out of my way to find the creepiest comment on there. I hope your appreciation will make up for the mental scars.

I used to think that future babes would look like Raquel Welch. Or maybe Molly Millions. Oh, my poor, poor illusions.

PS I tracked down the source of YouTube's tragic mistake. In Rammstein's "Keine Lust" video, they dress up like fat people. I guess for YouTube it was either an unnatural attraction to fat people or else just burly middle-aged East Germans....

And, of course, by watching the videos necessary to gather the comments for this post, I have only confirmed YouTube's opinion of my deviance, so I can look forward to many more of these videos in the weeks to come.

Rasputin

Sometimes I take a little thrill out of knowing that a man like Rasputin lived in what might still be considered living memory. It's a wide, weird world out there. Perhaps the strangest thing in it ist he human mind and the worlds that mind creates. There are men who, despite the vast systems of power in the world, can control the world with purely the power of their intellect and personality. In that, perhaps, is the greatest magic of humanity. WE MAKE THE WORLD.

An in a world with all that (alleged) poisoning, shooting, freezing, and drowning, there's this:

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2009/10/all_hail_klenginem.php

Klingon Eminem. Thanks, Lord Admiral. Thanks for BLOWING MY MIND! The dude really has to speak up, though. KLINGONS DON'T HAVE MULTIPLE VOLUMES! It sounds like he's whispering because his mom has her bridge club over and she doesn't want to hear Klingon coming through the vents again.

Strange Thought

It just occurred to me that I can't remember the last time someone tried to convince me to change my mind about something. It seems that people are just too eager to live and let live. Have we gotten to the point that we just don't care how other people see the world? Are we so diluted and soft that we don't care enough to separate right from wrong, to see that some choices are better than others?

Now, I'll admit that I don't know what to associate this trend with. Rather than just picking one out of a hat, as I would normally do, and rant against it, I thought I'd let you write your own rant! So, dear reader, what has caused us to stop trying to better our friends and fellow humans?

1) Hippies. The influence of dirty, unwashed liberalism in modern America has made all conservative values moot.
2) Anthropology. Cultural relativism has infected society in general.
3) Television. We see too much of everything, so it all seems familiar.
4) Urban life. The breakdown in traditional small-town connections and values leaves us without a basis for culture.
5) Space aliens. Divide and conquer!
6. Commies. Because they can't stand our red-blooded American ways!
7) The internet. Everything now has a forum and a support group, so it all seems normal.
8) Secularity. People no longer turn to religion for a grounding basis.
9) 4chan.
10) Loki. He's behind everything, isn't he?

Open Letter to Facebook

Dear Facebook,

We used to have so much fun together. You were a place to post funny or interesting links. I could share my pictures or look at other peoples' pictures. It was good times. Do you remember those times, Facebook?

Because then everyone started using games. Really crappy games. And you kept telling me about it. You kept telling me ALL about it. Then eventually you let me tell you to shut up about it, and it was good.

But then the status thing started getting worse. People started enjoying talking about themselves, and the 'like' button just fed their ego. The results? Chaos. Madness. Now I have friends who tell me half a dozen times a day that they're washing their car. Or going to the mall. Or watching TV.

Facebook, I feel dirty. I feel like I know way too much about the lives of people I don't know. I feel like I need help. I need a restraining order. I need the world to give itself a little more privacy.

Because if I really wanted to know, I could always, you know, ask.

Your friend,
bluefish

Truth in Writing

The students in English 1010 are working on their personal essays, which means personal essays are also constantly on my mind. I just had a conversation today in which I confessed that I believe that, in general, people are cruel, selfish, and petty. I wish it wasn't the case, but I have an unfortunate (and undoubtedly prideful) view that the average person is mediocre, and mediocrity breeds pettiness. People do not aspire to be great, to transcend this mortal coil, to create beauty and wisdom and fantastic thought, they....

But then something catches me off guard. It's a thought I hadn't expected, although I've heard it before. The thought is this: of all the essays I read, I can't help but feel for every single writer. I feel a connection, some slight touch, like the spark of electricity jumping between two wires. Even for the briefest moment, we touch, like strangers in a crowd who brush together and then feel our eyes meet. And for everyone, even for the kids who only want to write about how cool that game was, or for the ones who have to be there and can't be bothered to treat me like a person, I can't help but feel a little sympathy. A little compassion.

Writing is beautiful in that. More than any other medium, it transmits pure thought. It places me into the mind, the experience of the writer. Rather than capturing the objective truth, it captures one person's truth, one particular person's imperfect memory rather than a completely factual recollection of the past. And in that imperfect memory are housed all the fears, all the hopes of a real person. If a person misrepresents a situation, leaves out the things they fear or mourn, their own actions they wish they could forget, that is beautiful, because I can feel even in the absence that shame, that guilt, that grief. If the writer admits it, embraces it, presents it to me like a gift upon a cushion, it is beautiful, because, no matter what it is, it is so wrapped up in heartbreak and truth that I can't help but pity them. Even the ones who don't see how thoughtless, absurd, or even cruel they were implicitly admit their childishness, their lack of understanding, and I can't blame that, because they don't know what they did.

If we could all write and all read, all come to understand our own thoughts and the thoughts of all others, to live not in their shoes but in their minds and memories for the space of even a few brief pages, how could we ever have war? How could we allow poverty, misery, suffering?

(And then there are those who walk in and say, "I hate writing. It's so pointless." Bastards.)

American Writer

We need a reality TV show about writing, to make writing edgy and cool. It should be a reality-based contest to try to find the best writer among a gang of colorful characters. There could be the rebel who never wants to accept criticism (I'll use to be verbs if I want to, that's just my style!), the lovable one who can never get it quite right (oh, I thought haiku was 7-5-7!), and the misfit who struggles to fit in with everyone else (no one appreciates my sonnets about death!). Just imagine the hilarity when people from the street cue up to come write for the celebrity judges, who tear apart their cliche-riddled personal essays! The tears when we're getting close to the finish but one of the characters is still trying to wrap up the climax of a short story! The thrill of listening to the final product each week and calling in for our favorite piece!

I'd be happy to help produce the show, TV people. Just drop me a line.

The Kings Cross Bogan rolls 20s

I played in the worldwide D&D Day game today. Near the end of the game, I decided to stop trying to play a character and just go a bit crazy. The first thing I did was, when I used an ability called Sword Dance or something, I said that my character shined her (yes, I got stuck playing the girl) sunrod into a globe of glass while she danced with her sword, all Saturday Night Fever. Later, I quoted the Kings Cross Bogan by saying, "I will call on my fully sick boys!" and I rolled a 17 to hit with my daily attack. Next, I used an ability called Booming Blade, and went "chk-chk BOOM" as I used it, and rolled a 20. Critical hit on the chk-chk BOOM? Very appropriate.

Sometims, I blog about nothing at all.

Relevant to My Interests: The King of Elfland's Daughter

"No spell indeed!" she hissed. "No spell indeed! By broom and stars and night-riding! Would you rob Earth of her heirloom that has come from the olden time? Would you take her treasure and leave her bare to the scorn of her comrade planets? Poor indeed were we without magic, whereof we are well stored to the envy of darkness and space. ... I would sooner... give you a spell against water, that all the world should thirst, than give you a spell against the song of streams that evening hears faintly over the ridge of a hill, too dim for wakeful ears, a song threading through dreams, wehreby we learn of old wars and lost loves of the Spirits of rivers. I would sooner give you a spell against bread, that allthe world should starve, than give you a spell against the magic of wheat that haunts the golden hollows in moonlight in July, through which in the warm short nights wander how many of whom man knows nothing. I would make you spells against comfort and clothing, food, shelter and warmth, aye and will do it, sooner than tear from these poor fields of Earth that magic that is to them an ample cloak against the chill of Space, and a gay raiment against the sneers of nothingness."


So speaks the witch in Lord Dunsany's novel The King of Elfland's Daughter. I am a dreamer at heart. My favorite book, as I have attested time and again, is Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. Dunsany's novel touches on many of the same themes: the slow waning of wonder and magic from the world of humans, pushed back by rational thought and the gradual wearing down of time and worldly concerns. The description is wonderfully unbalanced: Dunsany spends paragraphs describing the way sunrise creeps over a forest, or goes into deep detail about the wonderous splendors of Elfland, of which no speech can tell, but gives us very little to characterize the major characters in the story. Often the vital actions of characters are glossed over in a few lines, while the folly of minor characters gets entire paragraphs. The reason for this is obvious: the theme, not the characters, is paramount. The story itself, the wonder and beauty of it, is much more than the sum of what the characters do. In fact, the characters are frequently at the whims of the setting; Elfland itself is as much a character as any of the elves, humans, or trolls.

In the modern world, it is almost not worth mentioning that we deride fables and fantasies and hold up dull, mundane things as what we should direct our lives to. This novel is fantastic perhaps primarily for what it manages to do with the richness of its language and story: mock the common world, with its short-sighted people and its daily toil, and extol the beauty of fantasy.

What more is there for me to say? Don't expect a fantasy adventure in the modern sense. There are no towering heroes or mighty deeds here. The only phsyical fight is over by page 24. The conflict in this novel isn't person to person, or even hero to monster, but the clash between two ideals: reality and the imagination.

As Padraic Colum explains perfectly in a quote on the back of my edition: "Lord Dunsany is that rare creature in literature, the fabulist. One can hardly detect a social idea in his work. There is one there, however. It is one of unrelenting hostility to everything that impoverishes man's imagination."

To Be A Hero

Maybe there's something to be said about all of us based on what heroes we most look up to. Some people see their mom or their soccer coach as their hero, for bravely driving a minivan and cooking pancakes or selflessly encouraging good self esteem and sportsmanship.

And some of us aim for something a bit more epic.

Shitty One-Ply

I used to have a friend at Ithaca College who would go on about the sad unfairness of one-ply toilet paper. While all the student dorms and the bathrooms the students used were stocked with one-ply, dry and scratchy and irritating and easily ripped, all the bathrooms in faculty areas had soft two-ply toilet paper. He used to point out how very unfair and classist this is.

I'd like to go beyond this Marxist rhetoric and speak instead to an even wider problem: the very existence of one-ply toilet paper. Why in the world do we need this product? Is there anyone out there who prefers what is universally known as a genuinely inferior product? Of course not. The only conceivable reason anyone would buy one-ply is because it's cheap (and, in the case of universities, the people who buy it won't be forced to sandpaper their asses on it). Imagine if factories only produced acceptable classes of toilet paper. I would be willing to bet that the greater efficiency involved in having fewer choices would ensure that the decent two-ply would cost as much as one-ply does now. This leaves me with the conclusion that one-ply exists only to justify the existence--and higher cost--of a separate, BETTER variety in two-(and multi-) ply toilet paper. We don't have shitty one-ply so we'll actually buy and use it. We have it so two-ply costs more when we actually do buy it.

This theory extends to other products. Take, for instance, optional packages on automobiles. For instance, optional passenger airbags. How many people are going to say, "No, thank you. I feel pretty confident that I'm not going to get into an accident, and if I do, I don't like my passengers all that well anyway."? This also applies to just about everything we can buy, from video games to operating systems to razors. So many of them are genuinely inferior products that it doesn't make sense to me not to offer just one product that's the very best it can be. Instead of having a $1000 and $2000 version of a computer, for example, can't we just only offer the very best at, say, $1400? The efficiency of only having to make one model would make it all the more worthwhile. What's wrong with letting everyone enjoy the very best of things? And nobody would have to put up with shitty one-ply toilet paper anyway.

Yesterday

Yesterday, I went into one of the local used bookstores, Books of Yesterday, and delved into their dungeonlike basement, where half the books are just lying around in towerlike stacks or unsorted on big shelves behind the desk I never see anyone at. In the back corner, they keep their fantasy books. I saw a copy of R.E. Howard's King Kull stories, but the book had mold in several places, and I'm not about to pay five bucks for a moldy book. I also found an Ace paperback edition of Fritz Leiber's Swords and Deviltry. Wikipedia says Fafhrd amd Gray Mouser is one of the seminal swords and sorcery series. The only other time I remember reading about Gray Mouser is when he dueled Zorro way way back as a joke in InQuest magazine. The store had two copies of the book. One had a laminated cover, and they wanted more than ten bucks for it. The book cost 1.25 in 1973. The other, the one I bought, was five bucks. It has a page loose and several pages torn, so I was going to try to talk them down, but my nemesis at the register beat me to the punch.

When they say Neanderthals would fit in with modern men, I wouldn't be too sure. This guy had a brow ridge that would do a silverback proud. He barely spoke three words to me, didn't say hello when I did, and literally threw my credit card onto the counter when he was done swiping it. Since I was worrying about whether I was going to get brained by a stone-headed club, I didn't have the audacity to question him about the quality of his product. And so I walked out, five bucks plus tax poorer, but with a book that, according to the back cover, promises "the greatest heroes in the annals of fantasy." Can't go wrong there, now can ya?

The Truth Will Out

Every now and then, if I'm very bored and I think no one is watching, I make the little plastic men talk to each other.

Developments

You might notice that I've removed the bit about where I live and it not being very cyberpunk. The reason for this, as I alluded to briefly in my last post, is that I'm really not very cyberpunk these days. The reason for the original theme of this blog was that I was writing a cyberpunk novel, and it was to be things that I came across tangentially or just material related to that genre, in which my mind was revolving at the time. Things have changed, however, and by no choice of mine that novel is on hiatus. For the time being, my writing is more along the lines of burly men swinging swords at snickering sorcerers, not to mention whatever else I come up with on ficly. I am also ghostwriting a fantasy novel, which comes with its own thick share of challenges, so I do my own writing in my 'free time.'

So be warned that, aside from a general writing theme, this blog will be about just whatever's on my mind. Well, I suppose it will continue to be. Excelsior!

Wild West FPS

I think I abandoned any coherence of theme or topic in my blog a long time ago, so now I'm going to write something that might even interest one person in the world: why I believe no one will ever make a Wild West first-person shooter game that feels right. I have tried Call of Juarez, Red Dead Revolver, and Gun, and none of them made me feel like I was either in a Western movie or in a real-life Wild West situation. The reason is that video game developers are too tied to traditions of first person shooters, traditions that are opposed to the way a Western game should feel. These include:

1. You Run Everywhere. Since the days of Doom and Quake, first-person shooters have featured a guy running endlessly. Although some modern games attempt to make this a bit more realistic by giving you limited amounts of running, these still, more often than not, give you superhuman abilities to dash from place to place like a giddy pony, prancing merrily while laying down a hail of bullets.

Why it doesn't work: How many Westerns have you seen in which the heroes, instead of moseying down Main Street while tumbleweeds blow by in the background, instead charge down the dusty lane like a maddened bull? Or, in the middle of a firefight in the tavern over the only good-looking showgirl, dodging back and forth like a paranoid with a bladder problem? It just doesn't work. If there's a run function at all, it should be used extremely sparingly: very brief bursts of speed paced far apart.

2. You Piss Bullets: In the original FPS games, the only limit to your ability to shove out a living wall of ammo was your total ammo capacity. Even in more modern games, your guns carry dozens of rounds and take only a second or two to switch magazines. This lets you spew out such a ridiculous number of bullets that it makes that scene from Hot Shots Part Deux seem like a tea party with stuffed animals by comparison.

Why it doesn't work: In the Wild West, your gun didn't have an ammo belt leading down into a mystical lead reservoir in the Marianas Trench. In fact, the famous Colt Peacemaker held six bullets, five if you didn't want to shoot yourself in the leg if your gun got jarred. To reload, you first pull the hammer back to half-cocked, then use the reloading rod to push out every used cartridge, one at a time, rotating the cylinder as you do so. Next, you insert each new cartridge, one at a time. Even assuming you walk around with a handful of cartridges and have completely steady hands while bad men try their very best to improve your body with convenient blood ventilation (as all games seem to do), this is highly time consuming. Of course, some guns allowed for entire cylinders to be swapped out for pre-loaded ones, but I doubt even a skilled gunfighter would carry more than a few of these at a time. And that only applies to pistols; rifles were frequently single-shot, and even lever-action rifles had to be reloaded one bullet at a time.

3. You Mow Down Hordes of Bad Guys: This one is self-explanatory. In most games, you practically win entire battles single-handedly. Considering how many busloads of remarkably similar-looking enemies you kill, I'm surprised your character doesn't get carried off to Valhalla by valkyries during the inevitable death sequence. (The Call of Duty games are particularly bad at this: on the one hand, they expect you to chew through more bad guys than Rambo. On the other hand, despite your jaw-dropping killing power, you get walked through the missions by your squad commanders like a directionally-challenged twelve year old, as though having a single set path to travel from beginning to end of the map wasn't enough. Apparently, your supervisers think you are the embodiment of god's wrath on Earth sent to mete out justice on the unworthy, with the problem solving skills of a kidney bean.)

Why it doesn't work: While there are Westerns with high body counts (The Wild Bunch comes to mind), these inevitably involve Gatling guns. Since I don't want to go on another tangent about what annoys me in FPS games in general, let me just say these parts are basically pointless mini-games; entertaning only so long as the thrill of massacring the entire population of a small town with a powerful weapon lasts. In most situations, fights are between fairly small numbers of people. In The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Tuco and the man with no name sneak up and blow up a bridge and everybody leaves. In an FPS, they would have to shoot everyone anywhere near the bridge, blow it up, and then fight and kill the army that shows up to avenge it. Actually, it wouldn't be both of them. It would be the man with no name doing it all, while Tuco shoots one or two enemies, tells the same jokes ten times, and complains about how poorly you're doing as your soft squishy organs are slowly and forecefully replaced by lead.

4. Everyone is a Superhero: You shoot a bad guy in the stomach at point-blank range. He convulses for two seconds. Then, he shoots you in the face. Everyone takes as much killing as a buffalo, not to mention your own character survives so much he might as well make a living dynamiting train tunnels by holding the explosive in the right place and waiting patiently for it to blow, only to repeat again once he waits a few seconds or consumes a few health packs for his health to recover.

Why it doesn't work: Nothing is worse than shooting someone with your last bullet, only to have him shoot you right back as you struggle to reload. Also, just how well would Unforgiven have worked if Gene Hackman would have gotten up, brushed himself off, and squared off with Clint Eastwood all over again after Clint shoots him the first time? What about if during the climax to The Quick and the Dead, if Sharon Stone had to shoot Gene Hackman seventeen times instead of twice(actually, let's not talk about The Quick and the Dead. It's a silly movie.)? It's just not right, man.

HOW IT SHOULD WORK: Fewer bad guys. Fewer bullets. Each bad guy has a good chance to kill you; one or two hits and you're gone. No health packs or bandages or any such bullshit, except maybe bandages to partially repair limbs crippled by one bullet. When you're done, you light a cigar, toss your poncho over your shoulder, and ride your horse off into the sunset.

Bonus: Oh, and no freaking half-hour cut scenes. I don't want to have explained to me why my character wants to kill these people. I can fill that in for myself. Heck, I can do so in three words (four if you count the contraction): he's being paid. And that's plenty good enough for me.

Here's the final scene to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, my favorite Western. Now imagine if, instead of standing there firing one shot, they all charged in from opposite ends of the cemetary, banging away the whole time. Then, once they closed to within the ring, they were all three dashing around in circles, shooting off bullets all over the place, each getting hit a dozen or two times, reloading all the while, before finally collapsing... and respawning to start shooting all over again. It's just a good thing Sergio Leone doesn't play FPS.

My Wicked, Wicked Ways, p 424

"In those days I would pick up a script, or a script would be sent to my home and a description of the male lead would say: Spike Rudling; lithe, lean, handsome, piercing-eyed, a man not to cross. That would be me.

"Today it is so refreshing. I don't have to look any further than the description, of say, Pete Anderson--a once-handsome man, now decadent, a shadow of his former self and who has taken to the bottle and . . .

"Then I know that must be me." - Errol Flynn

I haven't felt the way I feel today in so long

I remember chasing butterflies in fields of wildflowers
with my brothers and my mother watching over me
like the rotted black hunters' towers sleeping

I must have been tiny
I must have been very young

Where has that gone now
Where is that boy
Where are the butterflies

Where is the bamboo butterfly net catching, catching

In my memories there is no one else

I feel like so much less now
So much of me is gone

Butterflies flying through torn netting

Today's Moment of Horror

You know those moments where you question everything you thought was good and true as the world comes crashing down like a buzzbomb on your coastal British city? I just had that moment. And that moment is this: http://ficly.com/stories/4809

It's nonspecific--the solitary detail is the line near the end about holding her pillow and screaming 'why!', something I doubt anyone outside a Disney teen movie has ever done. It's full of cliches--"heart and soul" being among the worst. It's written in intrusive second person, constantly reminding me that it's not really talking about me. It starts off with quite possibly one of the worst rhymed couplets short of 'life' and 'strife.' It uses 'your' for 'you're.' It uses the word 'heart' four times in twelve lines.

It's from that website I've been touting, and the betrayal of something I championed only makes the pain that much worse.

Because it's covered in praise. Dripping in bleating, sparkling, slack-jawed fawning. While it violates everything I hold sacred about the theory of good writing, it gets a featured slot on the main website. It's like seeing someone beat my best friend to death with a rusty meat tenderizer and then get handed the key to the city by the mayor.

While rocking back and forth clutching my knees in the darkest corner I could find (which in this case was among the spider family living behind my boiler), I've tried to convince myself that it's a satire and everyone is in on the joke. But I just can't believe it. I can't bring myself to.

And if your response is, "Oh, but it's so heartfelt," so is putting your head in a toilet.

The problem here is that this situation raises an inescapable point: when a small percentage of the population thinks clear, detailed, poetic writing is excellent, and a much larger percentage thinks wordy, nonspecific, melodramatic nonsense is excellent, who is right?

Have I just spent the last seven years of my life learning to write the wrong way?

I need to go cry myself to sleep.

(To those who think this is all tongue-in-cheek poking fun at this poem, it's not. Despite the jokes, I'm genuinely distressed about this. My stomach hurts.)

Random Thought

I learned the other day that American English has one remnant from Cockney rhyming slang. "To blow a raspberry", from the rhyming phrase "raspberry tart," meaning "fart."

Don't you feel better about American English now?

Twilight of Legends (Major Sasuke spoilers!)

I had long looked forward to seeing the 22nd Sasuke competition broadcast on G4TV, and the day finally came today. Sasuke is a Japanese contest called Ninja Warrior in America, in which "one hundred determined athletes have accepted the challenge to become ... Ninja Warrior!" It's an obstacle course that tests the body and the spirit, a true measure of skill and willpower.

As the show progressed, my eagerness changed slowly to disappointment, and then to despair. One by one, my heroes all failed on the first stage, and relative nobodies advanced to the second stage... and then on to the third, and one actually made it to the fourth stage.

My giddiness mounted as an introductory program introduced a new G4 Ninja Challenge winner, David Campbell, a likeable bald guy with a very photogenic way of channeling mystical energies. Then the show announced, to my thrill, that freerunner and promising Ninja Warrior Levi Meeuwenburg would be returning; not only that, he made a one-week tour of Japan before the contest, visiting contest favorites Yamamoto Shingo, Takeda Toshihiro, and the legendary Nagano Makoto. Each of them were glad to welcome him and give him tips, but they were also all humble and encouraging rather than proud. We got to see Takeda's fire station, Yamamoto's gas station, and Nagano's fishing boat as they chatted with Levi and encouraged him. I think it's the humility and team spirit that I welcome so much about the Ninja Warrior All Stars: they all genuinely want everyone to succeed in the challenge. As Levi himself said, to him it's not a contest, it's a team sport.

They also brought back Luci something, who competed in the last Sasuke as well, but, frankly, I don't know why. It's good to have a girl, but she couldn't even compete the mini-Sasuke challenge G4 built in America. If she couldn't beat the practice run, what chance did she have in the real thing?

When the tournament itself started, I was giddy. Then, things started to happen. In a pair of bad signs, Yamamoto Shingo, who competed in every single Sasuke challenge, rising from gas jockey to the manager of three local gas stations in the eleven years of Sasuke, fell when he stumbled unexpectedly dismounted from the mat following the Halfpipe Attack. Then, the heroic Akiyama Kazuhiko, who completed the Fourth Sasuke (one of two men to have completed the challenge), slipped while attempting to climb up the side of the Halfpipe Attack and slid off. Akiyama, a former crab fisherman, was once a top competitor, but a degenerative disease has left him nearly blind. Still, he made it farther than most.

One of the men I was most looking forward to seeing was Yamada Katsumi. A former favorite to win it all, his wife and family left him for his all-out dedication to the contest, which also cost him his job. I used to think he could make it, too, but for years, he has failed to even get past the first stage. This time around, he fell from the Jumping Spider. If there is one person who I wish would make it all the way, I'd choose Yamada, because he's such a tragic figure, a real life Ahab.

Returning American decathlete Paul Terek also failed the Slider Jump, who was the first American to do exceptionally well in Sasuke, having gone to the third stage a few years ago (he's apparently also big in Japan, having won several other athletic game shows). I'm thrilled he tried again, though, and I hope he keeps going.

Then, disaster was compounded by further disaster. Several other favorites fell out with barely a mention. Then, Levi Meeuwenberg himself failed a new obstacle, the Slider Jump. Although five competitors had made it through, they were all relative unknowns, particularly two who were fresh from the Sasuke trials in Japan.

It was time to change pace. It was time for a dragon to spread his wings. It was time for hardened, smiling, tanned fisherman Nagano Makoto. Like a wise sensei, his positive attitude and wisdom, his encouragement and acceptance of all, are inspirational. And he started well, powering through the early parts of the course with no problem.

A calamity shook the heavens and the earth. All sound ceased, and a dragon fell flaming to the ground in an inferno of scorched hopes. Nagano failed to dismount the Slider Jump and splashed into the muddy water below. The great legend himself was humbled, stunned at his own failure. Every one of my favorites was out. I was heartbroken. I lost my composure, yelling, "No!" in disbelief. I wasn't being dramatic; I was genuinely moved.

The rest of the show was fascinating, but for reasons other than what I had hoped. Five newcomers entered the second stage, and, amazingly, four passed. Of the four, one made it through the grueling third stage, beating even Nagano's performance in the previous tournament. Then, he came within seconds of total victory. It seemed for the first thirty seconds of his climb like the humble shoe salesman who failed to qualify for the last two Sasukes would do it, but then he ran out of strength. Although I was hoping he would do it because that's what Nagano would have wanted, I am ashamed to say I'm glad he didn't make it. It shouldn't be so easy.

The show asked an interesting question: does this Sasuke mark the end of the All Star era? We've watched Yamada, Yamamoto, Takeda, Akiyama, and Nagano compete since almost the first. No tournament seems complete without Yamamoto's gas station cap, Takeda's orange fireman trousers, or Nagano's frosted hair and affable smile. But it's been ten years since the tournament started, and it might just be time for the new generation to take over.

Then again, the 19th competition was also a total wash for our favorites, with two no-names slipping through the first stage to wipe out early in the second. In the 21st tournament, Takeda and Nagano put in a fantastic performance, getting the two best results.

Will our heroes learn from their mistakes and come back stronger for one last hurrah? Will the All Stars who haven't succeeded yet have a chance to taste the sweet cup of success that has eluded them for so long? Will Nagano add a second victory to his dragon's hoard? Or, like all things, has the time of these legends ended, and is it time for a new group to rise to glory? I can't imagine now that anyone could take the place of the All Stars in my heart, even if they do take their place on top of the final climb to immortality on Mount Midoriyama. The All Stars are too loveable, too diverse, each with their own legendary stories behind them.

But one day, perhaps a new dragon will take flight.

((PS: It's sad to say, but I was almost as moved by this event as I was by the funeral of a dear friend that I went to over the weekend. There's something epic in Sasuke that I can't explain even in a blog of this length.))

My Newest Fascination

So my good friend has gotten me involved with ficly.com, which is all about writing short stories--VERY short stories. Because they're limited to only 1024 characters (that's like letters, but includes any keystroke), it takes the old excuse of "I don't have time to write a story" and slaps it in the face with a dumptruck. Anyone has time to write 1024 characters. If you have ten minutes, you have time to write a story on ficly.com. It also teaches economy of language, because the writer has to create a character, setting, and plot all in a very limited space. Another interesting dimension of ficly is that anyone can write a 'prequel' or a 'sequel' to any story, so stories become chained together.

I recommend any of you who have an interest in creative writing to check it out. And don't tell me you don't have the time.

James Cameron to Remake Dances With Wolves

((I don't usually complain about things I have next to no idea about, but this really got under my skin. I sat there fuming for half a minute, blinking back tears of hate and dreaming of convoluted vengeance schemes against the whole universe, probably involving the Anti-Life Equation. But then I decided to write a blog instead.))

Not literally remake it, but he is making a video-game-and-movie both called Avatar, which is about a world on which the ignorant, invasive humans clash with the peaceful, nature-loving Na'vi, and a human goes from being part of the oppressive human force to joining up with the locals. If this doesn't sound like a certain Kevin Costner flick, you haven't been paying attention. (It's also the same as The Last Samurai, but Dances With Wolves is the better movie, and I'm standing by that statement.)

To make matters worse, a BBC News story on the movie-and-game quotes a producer: "'Our industry has not created a new universe in 32 years,' said Mr Landau. 'We have now.'"

You can't be serious. I've already played this game. It's called Starcraft, in which the wise and benevolant Protoss come into conflict with the expansionistic, greedy Terrans, and the hero Jim Raynor switches sides when he realizes what a bunch of toads his leaders really are. In fact, when I first saw a vaunted screenshot from Avatar, I had a reaction very similar to that.

"Oh, look. It's a Terran Marine standing next to a Goliath. I guess they're shooting at Zerg."

Now, I'm no scholar, but this is a common storyline--and recognized trope--in science fiction. It appears in Ender's Game and that whole nonsense. It's pretty much the whole film Princess Mononoke. It's even in the first Final Fantasy movie, and you don't want to be associated with that, do you?

And, of course, this goes back at least as far as Gulliver's Travels, in which Gulliver figures out how greedy, corrupt, and cruel humans are and ends up siding with a bunch of super-intelligent horses. And when you'd rather hang out with horses than humans, that's pretty bad.

Dr. Jonathan Swift wants his cut of the profits, Mr. Cameron.

Simple Gifts

I remember learning that song in perhaps third grade and thinking it was remarkably dull. "To turn, turn will be our delight?" Sounds like a bunch of hippies. And hippies are just a step above Wiccans.

Setting aside my burning torch for a while, let's talk shop. People say it's the little things in life that matter. That's not true. It's just that the 'little' things many people overlook are the things that are really the big things. Ever since I was a wee lad, I've had a fanatical devotion to creative writing. Some novels are dearer to me than most people are.

I value reading things written by my friends. Like a child who is given a blank piece of paper by a psychiatrist and some crayons, the blank page shows the soul of the creative writer with clarity not found in anything else. In a piece of creative writing, be it nonfiction, poetry, or fiction, we reveal our inner selves, our longings and our doubts and our terrors. When we create from the heart, our veils are penetrated, and readers nestle into a private nook of our soul. Even more so than in a painting or a sculpture, which is only a snapshot, a piece of creative writing is a world in itself, with its own rules and values. It reveals if the writer is calloused or romantic, cruel or kind, petty or generous.

Flannery O'Connor believed in a just world, one where truly good people are rewarded and the sinful are punished. She then went on to demonstrate how all of her characters were flawed.

Charles Dickens wanted to believe in a happy world that is safe and good, but they always came out flawed.

Courage and loyalty were paramount to Rudyard Kipling.

Of course, you can argue any of those sweeping generalizations, but my point remains: creative writers don't write about the absolute real world, but rather the world as filtered through their hearts. It's the world as they see it, as they hope it is, as they fear it is, as they wish it was, as they are terrified of it becoming.

This is why I value the writing of my friends above almost anything else. In it, I feel like I really get to know the person. It's not just when you hold a person over a volcano (what, you haven't seen Firefly?) that you meet him, but when you read his poetry.

Perhaps a year ago, a good friend of mine gave me a chapbook of his poetry to read and critique. I never did get to critique it, but I read it every now and then, and I am amazed by both the depth of the writing and I feel like I truly meet again a person I only glimpse in 'real life.' Frankly, I feel a little guilty to hold onto this poetry and read it, but that's a part of someone's soul. It's not the kind of thing I can throw away.

Moments like those, like a sunrise over a treasured landscape I'll never see again, are as unforgettable as they are sacred.

(PS Probably fortunately for my digestive system, the bacon did stay green after it sat on the frying pan for a minute, which dissuaded me from chancing it.)

Not an Ideal Circumstance

Just a few minutes ago, I set about making myself something to eat. Not having finished off the bacon I bought maybe a week and a half ago, I took it out of my fridge to find that it had gone green. It didn't smell awful (it didn't really smell at all), so I asked myself just what could have happened to it. Is a week and some in a fridge too much for some slices of dead pig to handle? Even more perplexing, was it still edible despite the color change? I decided to throw some strips on the frying pan to see if they returned to their natural color with a little heat.

You're probably thinking that I'm crazy, and green food is bad for you, but I learned early on that green food isn't so bad. A very sage man named Seuss (he's a Doctor, people!) informed me that eating green eggs and ham isn't injurious to my health; if it was, the little boy could just have said "I will not eat it, Sam-I-Am. I will not eat green eggs and ham, because it could probably kill me, and I don't want to risk it." Instead, the boy provides the much weaker argument that he simply does not like green eggs and ham, suggesting that, apart from taste preferences, green eggs are perfectly safe to eat.

Of course, I came to my senses soon enough and threw out my green bacon, but it did give me pause.

Completely unrelated:

Whenever I write a blog post, I'm filled with blog fever all day and am full of ideas for more blogs. I pass them up, however, not wanting to post more than one a day and make my loyal readers feel overwhelmed. However, after that day has gone by, my ideas and my desire to write about them both seem to go away.

It's like my old rule for writing: if I want to finish writing something, I make sure to write a sentence a day, no matter what. It's a way of tricking myself into writing. If I aim to write a long time, I feel overwhelmed, or I think I don't have the time for it. But if I only set out to write a sentence, I can accomplish that easily and with very little time, but then I'm already writing, so I keep going.

Let that be my advice to you today, writers out there: write a sentence a day.

Perspective

I've been watching a lot of pirated television recently, mostly because I have a lot of time that's not regimented by outside sources that I should be using to write rather than enjoy television that I don't technically have a legal right to be watching--or is it legal to watch but illegal to upload? In any case, it's on YouTube, and if the world's most up-and-coming software giant lets it go (or, in any case, hasn't found it yet), I see it as my Google-given right to enjoy it.

If you're curious about what I'm watching, it's mostly the British car show Top Gear, because I know nothing about cars and can't even drive, but find something hilarious about watching middle-aged English men complaining about cars and each other. Also, the book series I was reading at the time of my last blog entry is The Dresden Files. It's not the greatest writing, but it's a solid Summer page-turner, the chief draw of which, for me, is that the narrator is so sarcastic.

At any rate, as I was watching unhealthy amounts of Top Gear, I came across an episode in which the gang race against a team from a German car show I've never heard of. I watched the episode in English, naturally, but then I decided to watch the German version for a lark. The difference in the focus was obvious: the shows focus on their respective teams. What struck me was that I bought the perspective offered by each show. In the British version, the Top Gear team seemed the way they usually do on their show: fun, enthusiastic, and a little acerbic in their sense of humor. They laugh, they smile, they make fun. The German team seemed like a bunch of Germans complaining, which is something they do with German efficiency. On the German show, however, the German team seemed much more likeable (although they still spent most of their time complaining), and the British team looked arrogant and obnoxious. The point is that I actually found myself rooting for the British team on the Top Gear version and for the German team on their version.

Side-note: on the British show, they made lots of jokes about World War II and its aftermath, even playing up the team showing up to the challenge in Spitfire fighter planes. On the German show, although they showed the Spitfire entrance, neither the team nor the narrator said a thing about it. On the other hand, even the polite Germans couldn't help making cracks about Dunkirk and Arnhem when they were given miniature tanks to play with.

This naturally got me thinking about my own life and opinions. I must admit that most of my opinions were formed not by my independent thinking but by the persuasive charisma of people I have run across, the people I respected and treated as teacher. Now I can't help but wonder if I would believe things completely differently if I had other teachers, not to mention other parents. Would I be riding around in a pickup truck with my hound dog's ears flapping as he puts his head out the window, listening to Country and Western and flying an American flag above the porch of my house? Would I go to church if I had genuinely connected with one of my priests? Would I have majored in something actually useful instead of English, and therefore be working at a solid career instead of sitting in my apartment on a Monday afternoon writing a blog?

Perhaps. But the revelation I've had, or think I've had, is that it's vital for me to examine myself, to weigh for myself what I believe and what I hold most dear, and to determine for myself, not by the influence of others, who I am. Ever since I was in high school, I have defined myself by the reading and (attempted) writing of fiction. Perhaps it's time I had a good long look at that as well. It's not too late to become a theoretical physicist.

Viable Alternatives

Today, I woke up at around ten thirty. I played Fallout 3 on my PS3 until 5:30 in the afternoon, barely pausing for bathroom breaks, and not eating or drinking anything. I also didn't change out of my pajamas. When I was done, I felt very hungry and rather disoriented. Then I read a book for a while.

And I enjoyed reading much, much more than I enjoyed playing the video game.

Is there something wrong with me? Or am I just more literary and less digital than I think I am?

To lie back from the world, listening only to the sound of my own thoughts and the dry rustle of pages turning, to immerse myself so deeply in a book to the point that I no longer see the page but the scene that the words are weaving, this is a pleasure unique and wondrous.

If you read this blog...

You are invited to join a forum that we are putting together just to have a place to chat and share thoughts. So if you're at all interested in swords, ninjas, guns, video games, movies, books, dragons, or air, you're welcome to join the forum.

Seriously. If you're the kind of person who would read this blog even for .73 seconds, you should join the forum.

Yes, you.

http://forum-of-doom.proboards.com/

Freaking Thesis

I think I may have complained to every human being on the planet about this already, but I'm tired of all the hoops I have to jump through for getting my thesis approved. Who would have thought that by far the easiest and most enjoyable part of my thesis would be actually researching, revising, and writing it, while all the formatting, approval, and running from place to place is far more aggravating than it should be.

This university has a massive, unwieldy bureaucracy filled with underlings who could and should be doing this piddling stuff. I suggest we use it.

To other graduate students: I'm not suggesting you shouldn't do a thesis. It was wonderfully rewarding, interesting, and even exciting to work on the actual thesis part of my thesis. All the hoopla, on the other hand, interests me about as much as a turd on a shoe. It might be funny if someone else was dealing with it, but if it's me, it's just aggravating and kind of disgusting.

The Reason I Crunch Numbers

Although my crunching of the numbers for Star Wars might be excessive, I enjoy it, and I find it to be a useful activity, both as a fan and a writer. It's important to try to understand the way a world works, its nuances and behaviors. To be able to understand and write about a world, it's important to understand how it works. And that's where something like crunching the numbers comes in. A few years ago, I wrote an entry in another blog somewhere about why Sauron could never bring the amount of forces shown to bear on Gondor--there is no way that, with medieval technology and supply routes, he would have been able to provide food, shelter, equipment, stables, etc. for such a vast force. I brought in some modern arguments about things like the supposed million-strong army of the Persians: it's just not possible to have a force that vast all in one place. It's very rare to see an army over 200,000 strong in the ancient world for that reason, and even that army needs massive numbers of followers and support personnel. Historically, I've heard it said that an army would have followers on a 1/1 ratio. Even assuming orcs don't bring their families along... but now I'm getting carried away again.

These are the considerations every fan needs to take into account when thinking about a world. It's the little things that turn a book or movie from just a story into a living, breathing world in which the audience's imagination can run wild. Whenever I'm watching or reading something that moves me, I imagine myself into that world, creating new stories and characters on a whim. That is the deepest level of immersion in a world, and it's necessary to understand the mechanics of that world in order to do that. It's also the reason I read slowly: I can go through text very quickly if I'm just reading for comprehension, but I prefer to read slowly, to stop to picture scenes, to think about what if and to fill in the gaps in the story with my imagination.

That's my reasoning behind spending all that time on crunching the numbers for my favorite stories. It's fun, and it's useful. Maybe you should try it, too. Keep your favorite writers honest: what's possible and what isn't?

By the way, I notice now that I didn't take the modern navy numbers by a third, as I was doing for the others to simulate the lack of extreme poverty in Star Wars. In that case, there would have been 800 Star Destroyers rather than 2,400. Fewer, but that's still a lot. Then again, I doubt the extreme poor contribute all that much to military economies, so perhaps my initial figure was reasonable.

Crunching the Numbers On... Star Wars

It's complicated to imagine what a galactic war would be like, but I can't imagine it would be much like what's shown in Star Wars. The numbers just don't add up: the war would be much, much bigger than the one we're shown. Don't get me wrong: I love Star Wars passionately, but the numbers just don't make sense.

Let's start with a little math (and then move on to much more math). How many worlds are there in the Old Republic (by world, I mean populated mass, whether it's a planet, moon, or something else)? To answer that question, we look to the Galactic Senate. Remember those shots of the huge Senate room with the floating platforms? Each of those represents not just one world, but one system, which may have several worlds in it. How many worlds is that? Thousands. And that's just the Republic members. Even assuming most populated worlds are members of the Republic, that's a lot of populated worlds.

According to Wookiepedia, George Lucas once said there are 24,372 worlds in the Republic. Even taking that with the typical grain of salt that all of Lucas's statements that aren't directly in a movie come with, let's use that as a baseline. 24,372 worlds with at least enough population and development to qualify for membership in the Republic.

Now, let's come to Earth. We have a population of roughly six billion. Of those, perhaps two billion live in what we could call reasonable comfort (less than luxury but better than poverty). According to Wikipedia, the world has 17 million active duty troops. Even assuming a third of that (taking just the part of the world that lives okay, because Star Wars worlds generally seem to do all right for themselves) that's at least five million troops.

In other words, we have five million troops from a planet like ours. Admittedly, Earth is pretty well populated... until you consider that the planet is mostly ocean and our agricultural practices are pretty slim. Naturally, we'll have a higher population than Tatooine or Mustafar, but I assume Coruscant must balance worlds like that out.

Then again, according to Wookiepedia, Naboo (which seems outrageously fertile), only has a population of 600 million, making it one-tenth the Earth's population, and one-third the number I stated as a benchmark. But you repeatedly hear Naboo referred to as a small world, so I have to assume it's an exception. Ryloth is listed as having a population of 1.5 billion, and that's a pretty backwards agricultural planet. Corellia weighs in at 7 billion, so I seem to be pretty close.

So, let's assume that my previous numbers are sound. Two billion people per world, five million troops per world, and more than twenty-four thousand worlds. That comes to 120 billion troops.

Okay, so say that the vast majority of worlds in Star Wars aren't warlike or don't feel like having a standing army (and can't raise one in an emergency such as the Clone Wars, either, which is a stretch). So let's take that number by one-tenth, because I'm being generous. Twelve billion soldiers, being, as we've seen, a very conservative estimate for the amount of soldiers that we can call on.

Devaronian's advocate: Many worlds, if not most, are ill-suited to serve as regular soldiers. Several races in Star Wars (Ewoks, Toydarians, Tusken Raiders, etc.) could never be in a galactic army. Counter: Let's be honest: the majority of worlds in Star Wars are human or close enough to human; the rest are rare exceptions.

Devaronian's advocate: Many worlds, such as moons and colonies, are vastly underpopulated, therefore my average of two billion is too high. Counter: Come on. Coruscant has one trillion people living on it. That's 500 worlds right there. Besides, in order to have representation in the Galactic Senate, there's got to be at least some people living there. According to Wikipedia, Alderaan has about 2 billion people living on it (pre Death Star), and there's nothing to suggest it's exceptional in its population.

Next, let's add some more numbers to try to understand how many soldiers there would have been in the major battles of the Clone Wars. Total number of clones from Kamino? Wookiepedia lists three million clones as the general standing number. There's some disparity about numbers, but even assuming the very highest number they guess at, which is 700 million, that's still very slim.

How slim? Let's take those 24 thousand worlds again. That's about 30,000 clones per world. The podunk city I live in has a population of 42,000. Assuming we're particularly scrappy, we could take those clones by ourselves.

Let's look at it from another perspective. Remember that our planet has 17 million active duty troops? It also has about 45 million reserve troops. Assuming those would be called up if the planet was threatened, we'd be looking at about 1/11 of the Grand Army of the Republic right here on Earth.

How many major campaigns theaters are there in a war encompassing Earth? Half a dozen at least. And yet in each major planetary campaign, we see only one big battle. They're even referred to as battles: the Battle of Kashyyk, the Battle of Mygeeto. If you're really trying to conquer a planet, you would have to fight long campaigns over vast theaters, not conquer one big city and call it a day. And for that, you need many more troops.

Devaronian's advocate: Although the clones form the core of the Republic army, the Grand Army of the Republic is actually composed of local forces who fight within their own sector. Counter: In virtually every representation of the Clone Wars, we see clones, not local soldiers, fighting. The reason given for forming the Grand Army was so there wouldn't have to be an army drawn from the worlds; there was an attempt to create a separate army in the comics, but it failed, which suggests the clones form at least the majority of the Republic's army.

Remember the battle for Hoth? The Rebel Alliance was more or less quartered within a base the size of a standard military base. How many troops could possibly have been involved in that fight? Not even a million. Considering some of the numbers we've been bandying around (24 thousand worlds. Twelve billion troops.) that's a drop in an ocean the size of every ocean in the galaxy combined. How could a force this size possibly hope to face off against the Imperial navy? For that matter, why would the Imperials only send a few Star Destroyers to destroy the Rebel base if they knew it was their chance to crush the Rebel Alliance once and for all?

Now let's look at the navy. An Imperial-class Star Destroyer has a mass of 25 million tons (I got this from a disreputable source, but bear with me). An aircraft carrier might weigh around 70,000 tons. That comes to about 1/350th of a Star Destroyer. The world today has 22 aircraft carriers (again, thank you Wikipedia), which means about 1/20 of a Star Destroyer (I'm using rough numbers here). I've done some quick math and I assume we can double that easily with the rest of the world's navies; this brings us to 1/10 Star Destroyer. Going back to 24,000 worlds, this gives us an estimate of 2,400 Star Destroyers in the Empire. Wow.

Where are they all? We see none when the Death Star comes for the Rebel base on Yavin 4, and only perhaps a hundred at most at the Battle of Endor. Wouldn't the Emperor focus all of his Star Destroyers at the place he can destroy the entire Rebel Alliance--not to mention needing them for his own protection? Wouldn't he bring in at least half his fleet?

Then there's the question of the number of starfighters we see in space battles. According to Wookiepedia, the average complement of a Star Destroyer is 100 ships, of which 48 are fighters. Compare this with a modern aircraft carrier, which can carry more than 90 fighter aircraft. Consider again that an aircraft carrier is 1/350th the size of a Star Destroyer. Of course, a Star Destroyer also carries soldiers, assault vehicles, etc, but if even a tenth of it was dedicated to fighters, it should hold 35 times the number of fighters as an aircraft carrier (not to mention a TIE fighter is only about 6 meters and a TIE Interceptor 10, while an F-16 is about 15 meters, more than double the length of a standard TIE fighter). That means each Star Destroyer should be carrying more than three thousand fighters. Considering Earth is currently listed as having 28,000 fighter aircraft (a third of which is about 9,000, going by our earlier-used ratios), we see that there would be more than enough to equip those Star Destroyers. Phew! Take that, Rebel scum! So if there were even one hundred Star Destroyers present at the Battle of Endor (not unreasonable, considering the vital importance of the battle), there would be three hundred thousand Imperial fighters to contend with. Those TIE fighters might be crappy, but that's a lot of green laser beams!

By the way, can a 16 meter X-Wing ever really hope to destroy a 1,600 meter Star Destroyer? I'm not C-3PO, but I'm going to say the odds should be 100 to 1. And that's not including the Star Destroyer's fighters.

It could be argued that the majority of the Imperial army and navy are occupied with controlling the Empire elsewhere, and only a fraction is free to fight in any given battle. Some evidence for this would be the presence of stormtroopers on Tatooine. I would argue that those stormtroopers are only there to search for the droids and the stolen plans; local pacification is probably done by locally recruited troops, if it's needed at all, as in Vichy France. Surely the majority of Imperial worlds don't need a standing garrison. They should be able to focus on the major threat to their dominance. Even if there is rebellion on other worlds, an overwhelming defeat of the Rebels at Endor would destroy hope and go a long way to re-establishing order.

Not to mention there are no Star Destroyers or even more than a couple dozen fighters on the whole first Death Star? What in the world was the Empire thinking?

Let's be honest with ourselves: Star Wars is a story, not a simulation of real galactic warfare. The numbers just don't add up. As a story, it draws its influence from our modern experience: each planet becomes a city in scope of battle, so that the galaxy becomes the planet. Explained this way, we see why the battles are really on a planetary, not galactic, scale. The writers can only create a world as far away as their own imaginations can go... and those didn't go far from this planet we call home.

It came from real life!

Just two little snippets of information, just to pretend that I still have a blog (and to encourage other people to start writing in their own blogs, grr argh!)

I trimmed my hair again the other day. My mother has always said that my hair is quite thick and tough, but I never really believed it was extraordinary. The other day's adventures proved otherwise. Midway through cutting my hair, the length extension snapped cleanly in two. It is no ordinary hair of this Earth that can defeat something specifically made to destroy it. I even took a picture of the corpse (with a shorter extension on the clipper).



The other thing I wanted to do was complain about grading papers. I'm sick of grading papers! Argh! Papers everywhere! I hate them! Hate them! My floor is just about tiled with them! In the middle of the night, one of them bit me on the toe! I have a strange rash on my back, and I think they're causing it! I took a picture of the mess across my apartment floor, but I decided not to post it for privacy reasons (student names are showing).

The Modern Man needs your help!

My poetry chapbook is due on Tuesday for class, and I'm still struggling with a few last poems. I'd like your input on this one:

Tomorrow’s Future

They pay a shilling to enter the Great Exhibition’s lower gallery.
Riding his father’s shoulders behind the top hat,
the boy’s eyes grow every time he turns his head.
More patient than Virgil, the man strokes his mustache
and waits for his son’s mind to drink down
the reaping machine from the endless fields of America,
the quickest steam gurney from the smooth raceways of Britain,
the big bore rifles from the towering foundries of Germany.
And most of all, the promises of Prince Albert’s new era
represented in the vastness of the exhibition’s scale:
the arched steel girders, entire ash trees beneath acres of glass,
goods from every corner of the Empire and the globe
brought by steamship to the queen’s home in London.
The boy’s imagination cannot be filled,
grown to a bucket as wide as the borders of empire.
Long after the sun has set and even electricity,
new marvel demonstrated by science magicians,
cannot replace it, they turn for home.
Pausing in the halo of a bulb as the lamplighter makes his rounds,
the man asks what the boy thinks of the World in Hyde Park.
“I wonder,” his son whispers, “what the boys will go to see
when they can speak to each other with the power of lightning.”

A little contentious today, aren't we?

I hate to swear. It's crass and ignorant. But sometimes I can't think of a better way to say it. So you have been warned

















*****


















Fuck the tea party. Our country keeps a torture facility open for years in Cuba, opens secret prisons across the world and makes people disappear without a trial, hands over prisoners to foreign countries because we can't torture them as much as we'd like but other countries can, and we, the people, do nothing. Then the government--rather than just curtailing our civil liberties, occupying foreign countries, and abusing our trust--imperils our MONEY, and we're up in arms.

Fuck that.

If you want to be angry, be angry about something that means more than your wallet.

Another Dream

Last night, I had another one of those dreams. Better than any video game. I was a drow assassin armed with a sword and a laser gun working for a group of rebel soldiers on a space station. It started with me sneaking onto the station, since it was being surrounded by deep space monsters (looking like giant space ticks crossed with dogs). Then I crept through the deserted, rusting under layers which were populated by scavenging punk gangs. Then I arrived in the main control room to be greeted by cheers and praise; apparently, I was quite the hero. I came not a moment too soon, because the walls shattered, and a platoon of battle droids entered. After dispatching them in fierce fighting, we started planning a counter-attack to break free, but then the dream ended. My colleagues were all very interesting characters; I wish I could remember more of them. One of them was Toshiro Mifune in a battle suit. Those battle droids never stood a chance.

Sometimes, I think being asleep is better than being awake.

On a more melancholy note, sometimes I spend a lot of time reflecting on the friends I have lost or drifted away from. This life is far too transitory. I can too easily count the friends I've had for longer than five years, and it seems like that number is steadily decreasing. Leaving friends, like any habit, becomes easier the more I do it. I wish it wouldn't. I wish I had the strength to cling to those friendships more tightly; then again, maybe there is wisdom in letting them go if they're not worth the both of us trying to hold on.

One of those days

I've been down all day, but that's okay. I got up early to join my family for Easter breakfast, then accompanied them to Church. It was a good sermon, and I even got a little teary at one point, but I didn't feel the presence of anyone or any greater thing but the crowd pressing in around. I couldn't help thinking how many of them, like me, wouldn't be there next week. I couldn't help wondering how many were there just in case. I wondered again, as I often have, whether religion is all one great act of collective wishful thinking.

But that's not what I set out to write about. I set out to write about my feelings. I have no immediate reason to feel the way I do, but that's not a sin. It's a beautiful day. Not a good day for melancholy. Maybe that's why I'm writing this, deep down: on a warm, sunny day, I feel as though it's my duty to the day to feel more cheerful.

But I don't feel in any hurry to cheer myself up. I don't mind feeling down. I put a melancholy song on, sit and think. Be glad I don't have anywhere to be this minute, no one to be with. Maybe there would be that rush to try to cheer me up, and I would have to put in that effort, as though making me feel better were another task on that daily list, and I could help them get there if I only smiled a little. And of course I'd try, because I don't want people to feel bad. The worst part about feeling bad is that trying to hide it, and I'm not a bad actor. But when I'm alone, I can kick back, grab a pillow, hum along with Billy Corgan. I'm not hurting anyone and no one is hurting me. Just time to breathe between heartbeats, let it go for a minute. Just be melancholy for a while, no rush to be anything else. At least not yet.

towards humility

How vast the cosmos, the inescapability of depth,
the scope by which galaxies are clouds
of dust. Consider the shapes of nebulae,
the deep breath of the eye that shapes them thus.
How meaningless the quarrels of humanity.
Expansive the star's bright cradle's comfort,
deep the hole of its dying despair.
Can you sing across the galaxies?
What black well shall your suffering make?
Never draw the lines of constellation
for fear of painting with dead stars;
you know no better, nor could you learn.

A "Review" of Street Fighter IV

My friends recently rented Street Fighter IV for the PS3, and since neither of them has a PS3, we've been playing it at my apartment, and they left it here for the weekend.

When I was a kid, I spent hours in front of this game. On the rare occasion I had quarters, I'd play, mashing buttons like a fiend and usually getting my ass not so much handed to me as shoved in my face by older kids who knew what the hell they were doing. More often than not, I watched those kids playing each other. I wanted to think that, one day, I, too, could make those cartoon characters beat the crap out of each other as well as they could.

It's past two o'clock in the morning. I've been trying to beat the final boss with Abel since 1:00. I finally did it. I've been swearing more than I probably have all year. I said things aloud to the screen that I never thought I'd say to anyone. I've railed, I've seethed, I've punched the air. I have Nintendo thumb so much my left thumb is literally purple.

But I finally beat that sonofabitch Seth. I unlocked the last character it's fairly(!) easy to unlock. I feel like I accomplished something epic. I feel like long poems will be written in heroic couplets about this day. The day Seth met Able, and, after a grueling war that lasted long into the night, stood victorious.

And unlocked some sad dumbass Bruce Lee wannabe I will never bother playing as.

Dream

I had a dream. I got up in the morning, walked around, started getting ready for going to the presentation today. Then I noticed that there were things in my apartment I haven't had for a while; to check to see if I was in a dream, I pinched my cheek. I didn't feel a thing; I panicked, expecting to get attacked by some horrible nightmare monstrosity in a moment. Instead, the floor opened into blackness, and I fell through.

I fell down toward the Earth from high above. I almost collided with the street, but wound up hovering over it. I was in China outside some official function. A shouting policewoman was pushing people onto a rickety bus to go to the event, screaming at the top of her voice. When she saw me, she started screaming at me to get on the bus. I told her I wasn't from around there, I was just a dream manifestation, and I didn't have to do anything she said. She just screamed louder that everyone has to get on the bus, dream or not. I didn't get on the bus. She kept screaming. I woke up and went to the presentation.

I'll leave it up to you to interpret, readers.

Not an April 1st Blog

One thing wrong with April 1st is that you can't do anything serious without people wondering if you're just pulling their leg. I'm not. I just wanted to clarify that right off. If necessary, I will repost this tomorrow.

It's a sad thing to realize that I don't know people as well as I sometimes think. Even upon casual meetings, people start to tell me that something is "like me" or "unlike me," they start to tell me what films would "suit me" or make suggestions about ways to accomplish "my goals." I put all these in heavy, heavy quotes because the first thought that always comes to mind in these conversations is that they don't know me as well as they think they do. How would they know what books I'll like? Have they seen me cry? Do they know what moves me? How do they know what secret fire burns in my soul?

Before this turns into a bad song, let me pan back a second and finish my thought. As sad as it is to realize I don't know people as well as I thought, or that others don't know me as well as they think, it's even sadder to think about whether I know myself as well as I think.

What do I really want? What moves me? What is that fire thing? When the remnants of my fleshy brain finally starts shorting out in my robo-body a thousand years from now, will I look back and be glad of this or that? Or will I long for something else, something I never had even in that long life?

Who am I really? What do I stand for? What do I want to do with my life? And no thanks, poetry teacher, for bringing up these unanswerable cosmic questions I've spent long hours in front of glowing screens trying to push down.

Razor Sharp

I teach college English (although not really, since this will be the last semester I teach it, having nothing to do with how well I did and everything to do with the fact that it wasn't ever going to last anyway, and I am supposed to pretend to be an expert when I am unemployed in three months with really no job prospects, but I'm sure I've complained enough about that before and I will again later). In my classes on Tuesday, I had the students compete to see which team could come up with the most cliches. When my students asked why cliches are bad, I explained that it's because they no longer evoke images in our heads. They're so familiar that they've lost their power, and all we hear is the cliche.

But this isn't always true. Whenever I hear the phrase "razor sharp," for intance, it puts a very specific scene in my mind.

I'm standing in the upper bathroom of our house. I am holding a pink disposable razor from my mom's sink cupboard in my hand, the blade resting against my thumb. I am fourteen, attending Catholic school, and my father won't allow me to shave my first mustache. He says it's just peach fuzz anyway and it's not a problem. It is a problem: the dress code forbids facial hair and I've been warned. My father likes to brag that he was born with a mustache, and I have never seen him without one except once, in a photo of him as a small child.

I'm looking at myself in the mirror. Looking at my mustache, the dark hairs individual and straight, brushing my lip. I hate it. I don't want to have a mustache. I don't want to get in trouble.

Then, I hear someone at the door, the door starts to open, and I grip the razor tightly, trying to make it disappear in my hand. My brother tells me to hurry up so we don't miss church, then leaves. When he is gone and I check my hand, the razor has left two deep straight cuts half an inch deep in my thumb, the skin white and puffy around them, the blood just starting to seep up.

It starts to hurt later, when I lie that I cut my hand on a knife. I only hope no one notices there are two parralel cuts, not just one.

And I learn just how sharp razors are.