Arisia 2012

A grand spectacle of a SciFi/Fantasy convention held at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston, January 13-16. I offer my humble reflections on an event far too complex for a single blog.

Last year I bitched about the Green Room.  It was broke, and they fixed it.  This year the food was excellent (loved the beef stew!), the volunteers were friendly and helpful, and the room was kept tidy and appealing.  So, credit to the organizers for doing it right.  (And the souvenir book is pretty darn awesome, too, thanks to GsOH Phil and Kaja Foglio and Gareth Hinds!)

This year’s finger of shame points at the hotel which, in an act of jaw-dropping bad judgement, booked non-Arisia guests on either side of Barfleet.  You know this would not end well, and it didn’t.

I missed Barfleet altogether – didn’t even have a chance to sample the Horta – because I had panels scheduled opposite the start of the party.  By the time I got out, the guano had already hit the nacelle.  Complaints of noise were registered by the non-Arisia guests and hotel security showed up to shut the party down.  Captain Bhagczech grabbed the Horta and got it to safety before it could be confiscated.  The hotel took all the rest, and left an awful lot of people very, very unhappy.

According to my informant, Will “uses his power for good and not evil” Frank, the Hotel, the Convention, and the UBS Shameless got together and discussed the matter with their respective legal advisors, then negotiated a truce of sorts, details still to be settled, but the Barship got its booze back.  Lessons were learned all around from this incident, including don’t trust the hotel not to do something really stupid.  It takes several hours to set up a Barfleet party, so they couldn’t just move to another suite once the complaint was lodged (and they had plenty of offers).  In the future precautions will be taken before set-up to make sure there are no uptight mundanes flanking the party suite.

Read more about parties, panels, promotions and people at this year’s Arisia.

SOPA

Imagine your worst enemy has the keys to your website, and is legally authorized to use them.

Never mind piracy. What SOPA would open the door to is far, far worse. It’s like bringing in the Marines with deadly force authorized to prevent people from stealing extra napkins and pats of butter from the condiments counter. SOPA is burning the village in order to save it. SOPA is the golem you thought would protect and serve, but it brings only destruction to everything precious.

If you think SOPA is just about stopping piracy, think again.

Monsters

It’s always somewhere between two and three in the morning, isn’t it?  That’s when the monsters come.  They spawn from the head and chest, and stare with large, cold, accusing eyes.  Manifesting every flaw, failure, and guilt.

There’s no use to it.  The monsters accomplish nothing but misery, chasing around and around, replaying mistakes that can’t be undone, problems that can’t be solved.  Yet they persist.  A chill no blanket can warm.

Sleep won’t come, and there isn’t any comforting mantra that can drive the monsters away.  They were always there, under the bed, in the closet, amorphous in childhood, then given form as the adult blundered through life.

Three o’clock becomes four, and then five, and then the alarm rings, not to awaken but to mark the end of monster time.  Busy day fades them out.

They’ll be back.

It’s okay, you can wish me Happy Holidays

Folks keep wishing me a Merry Christmas, and they mean well, I suppose, except for the ones who say it with an almost defiant belligerence.  You know, the sort who think “Happy Holidays” is a direct attack on them, instead of the open-minded effort at inclusiveness that is intended.  Personally, I prefer “Happy Holidays” because I don’t celebrate Christmas.

As an atheist, it doesn’t make much sense for me to celebrate Christ’s Mass.  Despite all the evidence that December 25^th could not possibly have been the historical date of Jesus’s birth, Christians have latched onto the holiday and guard it jealously.  I’m fine with letting them keep Christmas in their own way, and I will leave it alone.  I’ll even wish them a Merry Christmas, as long as they show me the courtesy of allowing for my non-Christmas holiday.

After all, Solstice is very real, very dark, and usually very cold.  It’s pleasant to put up lights and see them twinkling bravely in the gloom.  And knowing that the days will begin to get longer, even if winter has only just begun, is a reason to celebrate.  Because alternative holidays are only nominally acknowledged, we don’t have the Solstice holiday off.  Never mind.  I can be flexible.  The lights are just as lovely a few days later.

I’ve been told that “Christmas” is a secular holiday also, and why can’t I just celebrate it as such?  Mostly because all the secular reasons for the season don’t resonate with me.  Being opposed in principle to the excesses of consumer culture, I find the annual shopping orgy positively stomach-upsetting.  This year, contestants in the competitive Black Friday event pepper-sprayed one another to gain advantage in the brutal struggle to bag that must-have gift for the small tyrant at home.  If I’m going to give anything to anybody, it’s going to be that must-have warm meal for the homeless person shivering on the street corner.

Yes, I hear you assert, that’s what Christmas is all about: Charity and giving.  And I think, Oh really?  For a few weeks out of the year, people suddenly notice the poor, the desperate, the faces of suffering.  For a few weeks they righteously open their wallets and their hearts.  And on December 26^th, the suffering ceases to exist for them again.  They’ve done their duty, donated a toy, a turkey, a fistful of dollars.  Time to go back to blaming the poor for their poverty, and congratulating themselves on their wealth.

Well, I suppose it’s better for them to open their shut-up hearts at least one time of the year rather than never at all.

And then there is coming home for the holidays. That’s a real reason to celebrate for those whose kin are far away.  To see one’s children who have left the nest, to return to parents and feel the warmth of home again; this I can appreciate.  Of course, Thanksgiving serves much the same purpose for many people, with a lot less stress.

As for me, my family is all with me.  We get to laugh and argue, talk and share, break bread and fuss over chores every day of the year.  So Christmas doesn’t bring anything special that we don’t already have.

As for my extended family, well, let’s not go there.  Trust me.

I don’t mind if others celebrate Christmas, if it brings them comfort, peace and joy.  Although to hear them complain sometimes I wonder. But December 25^th just doesn’t have any particular positive significance for me.  I expect to be visiting friends on New Year’s and having a marvelous time.  I’ll be celebrating the Solstice.  There are little holidays fall during this time, like my anniversary and my younger son’s birthday.  So, wishing me Happy Holidays makes perfect sense.

Go ahead.  It’s okay.

Cognitive Buddhist Therapy

Or how I conquered my depression and Christophobia in several hundred thousand not-always-easy steps

It wasn’t a single moment; it was a series of moments, each gently tugging at the trajectory of my life. I had spent most of it as a statistic, one of the millions suffering from the Western epidemic of depression. A study of popular reading on the subject could add a few more labels to my patterns of behavior: Bipolar; Asperger’s; Autism Spectrum. Geek.

Losing sight of the treatment in the forest of labels

Whatever the condition, there is always some drug a physician will prescribe for it. “We’ve had good results with this one in treating cases very similar to yours.” Skeptical geek; I go home and search the Internet, read studies, order books on the subject through Interlibrary Loan. They don’t know what they’re doing with the drugs. Not really. And there are always side effects.

What did seem promising was Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I am more comfortable with books than with people, so I didn’t seek out a therapist. I searched the Internet, read studies, ordered books on the subject through Interlibrary Loan. I taught myself. I became my own therapist.

Picture the person in the operating room who floats above her own body, looking down on it: Destructive behaviors. Isolation feeding depression. Hostility feeding isolation. Self-pity feeding hostility. What a daisy chain of poisonous blooms!

Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy – and a lot of small steps

Take a step. A small step. Reach out. Whimper and run and hide again, but forgive the failure. Forgiving helps; guilt doesn’t. Try again. And slowly, slowly train oneself to smile, not scowl. To be pleasant, not withdrawn. To keep taking steps out into the light.

About this time, a friend decided she was going to defy the aging of her body by climbing all the 4,000 foot peaks in the state. I said, “I’ll go, too.” Made the commitment. Followed through. In the trudge, trudge, trudge of mile after wheezing, panting, sweating mile was the space for reflection. What else can one do but think? Thinking is something geeks do well. The demands of work and home often don’t leave one with much time for it. Hiking was the golden door opened, permission given to spend hours trudging and thinking.

And then there is the summit, the perfect metaphor for great accomplishments achieved by small steps. The grand spectacle of great distances. How small the world below; how far away its problems. These mountains have been here longer than human kind and will likely be here long after. In that there is profound perspective.

Moments like pieces of a puzzle. Like notches of focus, each click bringing an image into sharper clarity.

How to create a Christophobic

I was brought up Christian, but was disillusioned as soon as I was old enough to begin questioning its premises. My only sister held her love for me hostage to my acceptance of Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Ours was a small family to begin with, and as grandparents and parents slipped away, I was left with distant relatives and a grandmother I adored. She, too, was a devout Christian. She didn’t completely reject me for my atheism as my sister did, but there was always that mournful look in her eyes because I wasn’t saved.

“I can’t bear the thought that I will be reunited with all of my dear ones in Heaven, and you won’t be there.” Like I could just choose to believe for her sake. Like I could say, “Yes, I accept your invisible friend as my Redeemer, even though the literal existence of these mythical beings of yours makes as much sense to me as that of Mighty Mouse, Great Cthulhu, and the fairies in the back garden.” I suppose I could have tried to lie about it to please her, but I’m a terrible liar.

Add to that the antics of all the others who wear the Christian label and righteously fan the flames of intolerance and hatred. My best friend was one of the first victims of AIDS. The Gay Plague. Remember the rhetoric? How the fags deserved what they got? Disbelief turned into flaming resentment. I abhorred them as much as they abhorred me.

West meets East

All this backstory feeds into the next moment of enlightenment, the next click, the next epiphany. I’ve always been an admirer of the Dalai Lama because he is a scientist. A holy geek. At the heart of his Buddhist faith is the conviction that science is completely compatible with its teachings. More than that, any tenet of faith that does not hold up to close scrutiny must be called into question. Quite the inverse of Christian blind faith that the Earth is 4,000 years old because the Bible says so, don’t argue with me, la-la-la-la I can’t hear you.

I’m not a Buddhist and never could be because of the reincarnation component. It makes no sense to me, and it’s central to the religion. In an interview with Carl Sagan, another iconic figure, His Holiness admitted that if science could definitively disprove reincarnation, he himself would reluctantly have to relinquish belief in it. “But,” he added with a puckish grin, “you will have a very difficult time disproving reincarnation.” He’s got a point.

So on a long road trip to a writer’s convention, I took along an audio of the Dalai Lama’s latest book, “Towards a True Kinship of Faiths”. I was interested to know how His Holiness was going to pull this one off. Buddhism and Western Theism are polar opposites, utterly incompatible, never the twain shall meet.

I was mistaken.

The Triumph of Radical Compassion

With gentle and patiently persistent logic, His Holiness demonstrated not only how all branches of Theism share a basic critical component with Buddhism, but that both traditions share this same component with secular philosophy: the necessity of compassion. Allah, the merciful and compassionate. Jesus, the forgiving, who instructed us to help the poor. The compassion of the Buddha, who remains in the world to teach the means of escaping suffering. The secular humanist who seeks to cultivate human thriving and alleviate suffering. We may disagree on how to achieve it, but we are all striving for the good of humanity. We all believe in compassion. We all want peace.

Click.

Of course, the problem is that too many of us forget what we have in common because we are so focused on what we sets us apart, and are too busy yelling “My way or the highway!” The sad truth is that many, perhaps even the majority, of true believers do not draw on the best and highest ideals of their faith; they instead tend to project onto it what they want to believe, and the lesser human qualities prevail. But never mind, it’s a start, a path to a common higher ground.

And it was a way for me to get past my own Christophobia. The problem wasn’t the religion. The problem was the practice. There are many good and gentle Christians in the world. I now had a compelling reason to put aside my prejudice and have constructive conversations with them. With my own enlightenment, there was a tiny bit less negativity in the world. That’s progress.

Cognitive Buddhist Therapy

The next nudge brought it full circle. I read about experiments done at the E.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Here was pure geekiness, using state of the art equipment to really get at what was going on in the brain of a trained Tibetan monk. What the fMRI data and the computerized EEG studies showed was that the brain of a person who has undergone long periods of meditation and mind training is substantially, measurably different than that of a “normal” person.

To sum up an entire paper’s worth of research, Buddhist practitioners have been performing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on themselves for centuries, training to rid themselves of mental afflictions and achieve inner peace. Successfully. Their methods actually change the structure of the brain in a quantifiable way, without drugs, without surgery. Without side effects. Western science is finally starting to catch up with Eastern philosophy, and to the Dalai Lama’s delight, confirms what they have known all along. Anger is unhealthy. Hatred is pathological. Jealousy, greed, and craving are afflictions. Compassion is healthy. Lovingkindness heals. Virtue really, and literally, is its own reward. We are not slaves of our evolution; the plasticity of the brain allows us to transcend the destructive emotions we have outgrown as a species.

Click Snap

Although I can’t become as adept at controlling my brain function as a Tibetan monk, I can take steps to retrain myself, even at my age, to respond in more positive ways to both the inner and outer world. And, in fact, it is working. The simplicity of it is stupefying. This is wisdom that has come out over and over again in different cultures, different traditions, different philosophies; human beings discovering and rediscovering this basic truth.

It is climbing a mountain. It is continuing on the path, doggedly, step by step. It is seeing how vast the world is, how small we are, how little the events of the moment matter. It is sitting still, it is seeing the importance of our choices, it is realizing what good we can do. It is understanding we have no control and letting go. It is understanding that it is up to us and taking responsibility. We are smaller than dust compared to the universe. We are the universe compared to an elemental particle.

In ten thousand million years it will not matter if I do an act of kindness now. But in this moment, the moment that I inhabit, it makes all the difference in the world. And that is the moment that changes everything.

Balancing Like Crazy

e pluribus unum

 

I embrace radical cynicism. I embrace radical compassion. I want to disappear into the White Mountains with a backpack. I want to disappear into the bouncing bodies on a dance floor. I want the silence of a winter forest. I want to drive down the highway with Skrillex cranked to wub-wub-wub-wub-vzzz-slam. I want to write for the entire world. I want to write for no one but myself. I want to be famous and busy and in demand. I want to be unknown and hidden and solitary as an oyster.

Here I am steering some lunatic line down the middle, cleaning house and making dinner and picking up the kids from school, smiling from behind a desk at the library and saying, “May I help you?” Is it any wonder I stare at the picture of Nietzsche on the printer with the caption “What the HELL do you think you’re doing?” and I scream, “I don’t know!”

This bipolar sine wave propels me through my day-night-day. It’s like a heartbeat, alternating punch-thud and slack-silence. Hearts don’t hum along like an electric motor; they spasm repeatedly.

Punctuated equilibria drives evolution, periods of stability blown apart by episodes of violent change, earthquakes and monster meteors, steaming jungles plowed over by glaciation. Riding the whip of environmental extremes begat clever ape, homo sapiens, ultra-nationalist neo-baboon. So, maybe I’m on to something.

One common thread weaves its way all through this flapping crazy quilt. For better or worse, for dreams of richer and realities of poorer, in spiritual sickness and in mental health, I write. No matter who I was, I wrote; no matter who I become, I will write. When I die, I will have written.

But don’t ask me to take a personality test. Am I an extrovert? An introvert? Spontaneous? Plan things carefully? Comfortable with change? Fear it?

Yes, all of the above.

The Seven Billionth Baby

Today, in several nations around the world, they are celebrating the birth the baby who kicked the total population on this fragile planet to seven billion. No body really knows which of the 250 babies born every minute on average really was the one to tip the number. No matter how you crunch the statistics, it’s still too damn many.

It beats the alternative, a friend of mine commented.

The alternative? I asked. You mean, birth control?

No, no, it beats seeing the population declining in a post-apocalyptic death spiral. At least the future is still coming along. (Yes, when you hang out with geeks and SF/Fantasy authors, you have conversations like this.)

Certainly, I prefer optimism. That’s why I write anidystopian fiction. But I don’t see this dubious landmark as anything positive, or a reason for optimism. Quite the opposite.

I see the growing population as contributing to that coming apocalypse, when we finally run out of food, resources, and clean water. I see the out of control birth rate as a symptom of oppressed women with no alternative to being barefoot and pregnant, and of families mired in poverty and disease who keep having kids because they anticipate that at least half of them won’t reach adulthood. I see it as Fundamentalists who condemn family planning and abortion, then abandon unwilling mothers to cope with one of the greatest responsibilities a human being can take on. I see it as the glorification of sex without consideration for its natural consequences. In short, I see continuing population growth as a manifestation of human stupidity.

In the interest of hope, I can add that population growth has declined to sustainable or near-sustainable levels in most industrial countries, that is, in places where health care is good, life expectancy is high, education is widespread, women enjoy something approaching equal rights and opportunities, and family planning is readily available. The better the standard of living, the more likely population issues take care of themselves.

Never mind the exhortations of religions of compassion to take care of the poor; here is a logical, secular reason to do it: the horror of riots, wars and widespread suffering that will result if we don’t control population will not be good for anybody. Except, perhaps, rats and microbes.

Anguishing over English

English is a bus leaving the station while we grammar geeks argue on the platform about the Oxford comma. Language constantly evolves with use. “Colour” became “color” when it emigrated, and everyone boldly splits infinitives and puts up with that up with which we never used to put.  Somehow, we all still manage to communicate, although not always well.

I railed at the use of “impact” as a verb (unless you are talking wisdom teeth) but nobody listened.  I fumed over people who punctuated every other sentence with lol.  I muttered at the supermarket over the “less than 14 items” aisle.  And I still maintain that, with a few isolated exceptions (there are always exceptions) use of the “F” word never improved any piece of prose, and in fact merely shows the writer’s lack of imagination in coming up with more original colorful metaphors.  All to no avail.  It’s a lost cause.  Srsly.

However, how one wields this potent weapon we call language does reveal a great deal.  It is in part a class thing. How you speak and write helps to identify where you fall in the social spectrum: Ivy league or publicly educated, painfully geeky or casually colloquial, or don’t make no fuckin dif. But money and education sometimes are wasted on certain individuals (think George “ingrinnable” Bush) and there are worthy individuals who make the transition from Eliza Doolittle to Henry Higgins on their own merits.

Of course, it can be argued that using language to pass judgement on a person is a kind of bigotry.  But let’s face it. People who know their there from they’re will tend to do better than people who don’t. It’s like wearing neat, clean clothes to a job interview. It isn’t essential, but it sure helps.

As far as everyday, ordinary communication goes, as long as your audience easily understands what you mean, it’s all good.  Correcting people’s spelling and grammar on Facebook is really rather rude and, I believe, constitutes trolling.  (But, I confess, I’ve done it.  I couldn’t help myself.  Sometimes it’s just too painful to watch something you love being tortured.)  However, as writers, we all know that it isn’t just what you are saying. It’s how you are saying it. Those of us for whom words are life and livelihood aren’t content merely to communicate. Thus, we care about the fine distinctions and nod with approval when we encounter others who do as well.

And sometimes, there are small victories.  Our local supermarket has changed their fast aisle sign to read “fewer than 14 items”.

[This rant was inspired by a blog on the Clarion Writer’s site.]

Thinking like a chloroplast

It is the height of arrogance to think that it is up to us to save the planet.  The biosphere has recovered from disasters far worse than anything we have the power to inflict.  The Earth will be here long after we are gone.  We can be symbionts, enabling Gaia to know herself, or we can be parasites who know no better than to sicken their host.

Disease organisms must be constantly on the move.  They are attacked by the defenses of their host, and if they are successful in warding off that attack, it is a pyrrhic victory.  A debilitated host is a poor one, and a dead host is worse.

Parasites that do not debilitate their host can get along indefinitely.  But the relationship that works the best is that of symbiont.  Bacteria have been at it for literally billions of years.  At some point prokaryotic cells found a comfortable shelter inside larger cells, and lent their particular expertise to their host’s success.  The chloroplasts within the cells of leaves have their own distinct DNA.  They do the photosynthesizing to provide the abundant supply of energy that the plants enjoy.  Within animal cells, mitochondria do something similar, in that they are small powerhouses providing benefit to the cell.  They, too, show evidence of their colonial past in their distinct DNA.

Termites are able to take advantage of a rich source of energy, the cellulose in wood.  Indigestible to most animals, termites are able to break it down into its component parts, make use of the sugars, and excrete the waste in the form of pellets that they use for building their nests.  Within the gut of the termite is a symbiotic microbe which does this digesting for them.  But the credit doesn’t even stop there; the microbe relies on a bacteria within its own structure to secrete the enzymes needed for the process.

Organisms within organisms, providing mutual benefit, the recipe for long-term evolutionary success.  If we are wise, we will mimic this strategy.  We will seek ways to become a contributor to the overall health of the greater organism.  Chloroplasts and mitochondria didn’t plan out their success; it wasn’t intelligently designed.  Countless millions of other viruses and bacteria were mutating, evolving, swapping genetic code like computer geeks at a freeware convention.  This worked.  It was perpetuated.

We, on the other hand, don’t have to stumble about blindly trying things and failing catastrophically, repeatedly, in order to seek out something that works.  We can reason it out.  We can see the success of others and imitate that success.  We can even choose to leave behind previously successful adaptive behaviors and acquire better ones.

If we choose to be the equivalent of Gaian cancer, or Gaian plague, or the Gaian equivalent of bedbugs, we run the risk of getting exterminated for the pests we are.  We may make our host so sick that she can no longer support us.  But unlike bacteria, we can’t just go infect some other planet.  We die with the host.  In the case of the Earth, life will recover and go on without us.  Tubeworms deep in the oceans will evolve into the next dominant species.

So the reason we need to choose a new, less exploitive strategy for interacting with the planet is not some tree-hugging reverence for Nature for Her own sake.  It’s not some enviro-Disney love for bunnies and Bambi and the pretty birds that sing.  It’s a cool, rational, right-wing Republican sort of cost-efficiency and profit motive.  We want to succeed.  Long term.  Like, millennia.  Okay, so maybe it’s not the best analogy. Corporate thinking isn’t so good with long-term models.  We need to get past the short-term thinking, maximize profits for this quarter and to hell with next year.  Disease organism thinking.

We need to think like chloroplasts.

Acting for Real

A person is born within the synapses.

I was scanning Sue Bolich’s blog on building really believable characters, beyond stereotypes.  Outlines?  Lists of character traits?  Hmmm.  How about creating the character by becoming the character?

In order to write good dialog, I have these strange, schizophrenic conversations with myself, alternately assuming the personae of the characters involved.  I guess I’m letting my subconscious do the work, instead of frontal cortexting outlines, lists of traits, favorite flavor of ice cream and all that.  When I’m inhabiting the character, I know he would detest gardening because it would get his fingernails dirty, or that she would react to the death of her dearest friend with a kind of quiet objectivity that pains her more than would an uprush of genuine grief.

I know how Tristramacus would stand, pace, gesture, and it’s very different from the way Mirramarduk would stand, pace and gesture.  They would insult each other in very different ways.  They would react to those insults distinctly.  I know this from standing, pacing, and bellowing as Tristramacus, and from sneering, gesturing and acidly retorting as Mirramarduk.  I notice how I’m holding my hands, how my body moves, how my face looks, what words come out and how I say them.

The acting method is limited only by one’s ability to play roles.  I have a musician, a quiet fellow, whose brain sings with music, fantastic music, roiling, soaring, sizzling, silvering melodies, harmonies, weaving and wandering between his ears every waking minute of the day.  He’s a rather ugly hound, but gentle and loyal.  Likeable.  Always a best friend, a sidekick, a confidante, never a lover.  Never raises his voice, never gets exasperated (or at least never shows it).

I have another artist; this one works in the visual medium, primarily painting but also working in wood, stone, glass metal.  Over the years his obsession with perfection, with his own genius, with his ability to take the abstract concept of beauty and make it manifest in the world through acts of creation, has wrought in his head an exquisite insanity.  He is arrogant, violently misogynistic, toxically in love with a physically beautiful male whom he ultimately murders so that age cannot destroy his lover’s perfection.  He sees the murder as a heroic act of spiritual redemption.

One must be able to play all these different roles, feel genuine within them, and then see what one’s acting instinct comes up with for characteristics.

Then comes the hard part: Choosing the words that will communicate to the reader what one sees so vividly.  I have spent a lifetime learning how to make language properly convey what it is that I am trying to say.  Writing and rewriting.  Never completely satisfied.  Perhaps I would have been better off on the stage.