Boskone 49

Edgar Allen Puffin minds the Broad Universe table in the Dealer's Room at Boskone 49

They are held in the same hotel, the Westin Waterfront in Boston, about a month apart from each other, but Boskone is smaller than Arisia, and greyer. It is the serious, bookish sibling; more suits, less glitter. I did see a pair of elvish warriors, a Victorian matron or two. David Larochelle sported his modest but classy Steampunk gear. And there was a puffin. Edgar Allen Puffin, who attended a few panels and readings, and helped out at the Broad Universe table in the dealer’s room. But he was not in costume. He was there as himself.

I shared a room with Elaine Isaak, known for the scholarly accuracy of detail in her medieval fantasy novels, as well as for the heinous treatment of her heroes, whom you do not want to be. She has just launched a Jumpstart project for her Author’s Grimoire, a fantasy writer’s manual. Here are the details.

My reading was very well attended (thanks to all of you who were there!) although that may in part have been because I followed Jennifer Pelland, who always packs them in. Perhaps they hung around out of curiosity, to see what sort of reading a puffin would attend. I performed a piece from the first book of Elder Light, which was very well received. And I do mean performed. I had done a marvelous panel with Bob Kuhn, Bruce Coville and Barbara Chiaptis, all about reading your work aloud, and one point we made was that reading, and writing, are a great deal like acting. One has to get into one’s characters the way an actor does in order to understand them and believably bring them to life. Bob gave the panel particular sparkle with his voice-acting expertise, but Barbara clinched it with her audience participation exercises. A good time was had by all.

Another notable panel which I attended was on Optimism vs. Darkness in SF, a subject near and dear to my heart. The discussion was animated (translation: I couldn’t keep my mouth shut; hell, I wanted to be on that panel) and to my disgust, darkness won. But what I took away from the panel, aside from a foul mood, were the opening remarks of Leonid Korogodski, who talked about a kind of fourth law of thermodynamics. I cannot hope to do justice to the way he explained it, partly because it was done in the most exquisite Russian accent, but in essence, an open, self-organizing system tends to become more complex; the more energy introduced, the greater the complexity. In the case of our society, for example, there is greater capacity for negative results as complexity increases, but the capacity for the positive is greater still. More good comes out than bad. The positive always has an edge.

Made my day.

Phoebe Wray makes a point with a copy of her book, Jemma 7729, on the panel Optimism v. Darkness in SF; Jennifer Pelland is on the left, Peter V. Brett and Leonid Korogodski on the right.

Which I needed, because the majority of the readings I attended were decidedly dark. An exception being Shira Lipkin, whose work has a decidedly grim aspect to it, but is beautifully written, and at least the excerpt she shared contained lovely images. Another exception was, oddly enough, Elaine Isaak, whose story may have been set amidst the horrors of the Plague, but at least ended with a birth.

Later that day I had a conversation with Lisa Janice Cohen who had been at the Optimism vs. Darkness panel, and she confessed that she had stopped reading SF, even though she grew up loving it. We found ourselves on the same page; I’ve all but stopped reading fiction entirely because I’ve been burned so many times. So many ugly, grey, joyless books that seem determined to disturb. If there is humor it is snarky, not warm. If there is warmth, it’s there only so it can be raped and pillaged later in the book. Books used to be my friends, my refuge and solace. Now I’m afraid to pick up a book for fear it will bite.

Not that I want my intelligence insulted with a Disney ending. Nor do I think darkness has no place—it is essential. But my idea of a great book is one which takes me into the dark places but then brings me out again, leaving me with a sense of hope and satisfaction. Life is dark and hopeless enough; I need art which helps me to transcend life’s miseries, not wallow in them.

Perhaps I just become too viscerally involved in stories. A nasty image, well-written, can haunt me unpleasantly for days. The accumulation of wrenching emotions, violence, malice and suffering I had absorbed from the authors at Boskone caught up with me to the point where I had to leave one reading, physically ill from it.

Fortunately, the final day was upbeat. I had the pleasure of paneling with Jeff Hecht, Bruce Schneier, and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden on the subject of SOPA/PIPA and its heirs in the Internet content wars. It was perhaps not surprising to find such agreement in the room in support of a free Internet, even if it meant tolerating a certain amount of piracy and IP theft. A great point made was how Megaupload.com was taken down by the Feds without the need for SOPA, vividly illustrating that additional laws aren’t needed. It was also agreed that the best way to combat piracy was to make desirable content easier to get, in other words, make it simple and affordable for the consumer to keep it legal. When content is expensive or restricted, that’s when piracy thrives.

It’s lesson that should have been learned from the War on Drugs: Making something hard to get doesn’t cut down consumption as much as spur a black market for it.

Edgar Allen Puffin with con badge

Boskone is only three days, which is a good length for a con.  Many are four, which is one day too much, at least for me.  Boskone is also relatively low key as far as parties are concerned.  Don’t expect wild nightlife unless you like filk.  There is no Green Room, and although the con suite does a reasonable job, you won’t eat well unless you plan to eat out.  I came away from Boskone 49 with a host of new ideas and contacts, which is really what it’s about for a working writer.

Packing

Several times a year, I have to pack for one of two sorts of major excursions: Conventions and White Mountain hikes.  The two could not be much different.  In fact they are the polar opposites that keep me balanced.

I have partly pre-packed bags for each that have the items I always take.  In my back pack is a first aid kit, a hat and gloves, rain gear, maps, kerchiefs (single most handy item), and my bear-sticker.  That latter is a hefty knife with a compass on the handle and a compartment with matches, safety pins, fish hook and line.

In my convention bag I have PJs, slipper socks, bathing suit, extra lanyards, business cards, copies of published works, and a cosmetics bag which has make-up, fingernail polish, assorted jewelry, and sundry overnight items.

The back pack and the con bag have two items in common: a toothbrush and a hairbrush.  And if it’s a day hike, I don’t even take those.

When I’m hiking, particularly overnight, I’m lugging everything on my back.  Weight is an issue, so I take only the absolute essentials.  I’ll be dealing with the unpredictable moods of nature, so among those essentials are layers of clothing from hot summer day to blizzard, because in the White Mountains the weather can go from one to the other astonishingly quickly.  If I should slip and injure myself, I need to play medic.  Some idiots think all they need is a cell phone so they can call for help.  This is an excellent invitation to disaster.  You’ll wind up lost in a wet, freezing fog with a twisted ankle and no service.

Going to a con, I’m coddled in the climate-controlled comfort of a hotel the whole time.  My worst problem might be needing a sweater because some of those rooms get chilly.  Instead of worrying about taking too much, I worry about not taking enough.  I need outfits for serious panels, outfits for fun panels, outfits for parties, for Bar Fleet, for hanging around in the room and for wandering the halls at three in the morning.  Weight doesn’t matter; just drive up to the hotel and then get a trolley for all your truck, the boxes of books, the cooler full of snack food, the party supplies.

At the con, I have access to a bathroom with a shower and loads of fluffy towels, mirror and hair dryer and an iron.  I’ll change my clothes on a whim if it suits me and the situation.

On a hike I wear the same clothes for three days because there’s no point in changing except to put layers on or take them off.  There’s no place to bathe, other than to shove your sweaty face in a cold stream for the lovely shock of it.

On a hike I’ll stuff the cell phone into a pocket somewhere just in case, but probably won’t touch it again until I take it out at the end of the hike.  I am completely unplugged.

At the con, I’ve got my iPod and my laptop, and I’m screaming if I can’t get the wifi to work within minutes of settling into my room.

As schizophrenic as this seems, I couldn’t do without either extreme.  I need the social opportunity that conventions give me to meet with fellow writers, fellow geeks, fans and icons.  I learn from others and I learn about myself, stretching my limits, making connections in a way that I just couldn’t do in the rural backwater I call home.  I am immersed in the strange and wonderful worlds of the imagination, the life of the creative mind.

On the other hand, I need just as much the opportunity for silent introspection and physical challenge that hiking affords me, to reconnect with what is meaningful, what is essential.  Being on my own out in the wilderness serves to remind me of the hard realities of living, the need for shelter, food, water, and how screwed we are when we take any of these for granted.  Camping out, or spending a week in a cabin with no electricity, makes me appreciate luxuries like a flush toilet.

Two vastly different perspectives, intersecting at me.  Neither is superior; one informs the other.  And that is what you get when you unpack any shouting match between opposing viewpoints.  Polar opposites provide balance, and they intersect at us.

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.]