Tolerance and Altered States

I have a very low tolerance for drugs and alcohol, so I avoid them. I can't take so much as a decongestant without unpredictable and often drooling results. I have a very scientific theory about this, if you're interested. I think that my natural state is altered enough, thank you very much, and if I add any sort of chemical enhancement to this, things go completely haywire. I am afraid to mess with my equilibrium.

Altered states and tolerance.

Tolerance has become a buzzword. Generally it is trotted out when you think I am wrong and I want you to shut up. You should be more tolerant. If you were tolerant, you would just admit that I'm right. When we practice tolerance, it's usually of things and people with whom we already agree, or of whom we already approve. I am tolerant of children if they are well behaved. I am tolerant of people who disagree with me on matters about which I don't care a whole lot.

Tolerance. It sounds like it should have a "p" in front of it, like Ptolomy. Ptolerance. Maybe if we put a "p" in front of it, it would remind us to p-p-practice it. It would elevate it from a mere retaliatory talking point to an art, a science, a Philosophy.

Inherent in the definition of tolerance is disagreement. I would argue that it implies a sort of structural, atomic disagreement. I would argue that in order to tolerate something, you must reject it. Wait a second, that doesn't make any sense. No, it doesn't. But neither does tolerance when you think about it. It's unnatural. It is an altered state.

An example is in order here. I absolutely hated and despised the book Eat, Pray, Love. I thought it was whiny and self-indulgent; I thought the writing was only mediocre; I thought that the author spent a lot of money and a lot of time to learn nothing at all. Do you want to know how I really felt about it? The book was a bestseller. It was highly recommended to me by people whom I respect and love. Enough people loved it that Julia Roberts agreed to be in the movie version of it. I cannot fathom at all how all of these people could be so wrong. I have tried very, very hard to understand the liking - even loving - of this book and alas, I cannot. I fundamentally disagree with anyone who says it was a good book. Therefore, they are all idiots and I shall never speak to them again. I will degrade them and belittle them for having such abysmal taste in literature at every opportunity I get.  I will create opportunities to tell them how awful it was. This, of course, is ridiculous. What kind of jerk would act that way? Don't answer that.

When it's boiled down to something as relatively silly as an opinion about a book, it's kind of obvious, isn't it? Of course I can accept a difference in perspective. I don't have to believe that my assessment of it is wrong to understand that other people might have reached a different conclusion. Nor do I have to believe that my assessment is the only correct view of the book. Of the friends who recommended the book to me, one was at a particular place in her life where elements of the story "spoke to her", another just liked the descriptions of the food and the places. Fair enough. There needn't be any judgement in that, really. They live in their heads, in their lives and they know what works for them. We practice tolerance of each other's points of view because we love each other and because that's more important to the greater good than whether or not we enjoy the exact same books.

It gets trickier, though. I know this. The root of intolerance, I believe, is fear. We are intolerant of things that we perceive as a threat to our well-being or way of life. We don't want our equilibrium upset. We are afraid of the unpredictable, perhaps drooling, results of the viewpoints of others.

There are some things that shouldn't be tolerated: murder, dishonesty, theft, injustice. Yet, we sometimes find ourselves tolerating them by default. My jBird told me a lie a few weeks ago. I will admit, I completely lost it, folks. "I will not tolerate lying in my house!" boomed the Mama voice. But I do, don't I? What can I do but put up with it when it happens? I can correct, instruct, fume and rage about, but when it comes down to it, I must tolerate it because I have no control whatsoever of the things that my jBird chooses to say. I can only control how I react, the input I give her, and the encouragement I show for doing what's right. The rest is up to her.

That's the root of that intolerant fear, isn't it? The rest is up to her. We are so convinced of our rightness. We are so sure that ours is the way things should go. If only they could just see how it is. If only they would just admit they are wrong. It is frightening to leave it up to them. It upsets our equilibrium. Except when you realize that you are them. To someone else, you are them. You are the they who have it so backwards. I don't care what your stance on anything at all is, you are someone's them. The idea of you making up your mind on your own is keeping someone else awake at night. And you know what? They are every bit as committed to their viewpoint as you are. They believe with all their hearts that their beliefs are valid. They fear for their future just like you do. They worry about the state of things, they get excited when things seem to go their way, they have their doubts, their discouragements, their concerns, just like you.

So, tolerance. Or, if you prefer, ptolerance. Does it mean you lay aside your own opinion, your own beliefs? Absolutely not. Who are we if not a product of our beliefs and preferences? I guess that's the rub, though. We are all that product, which means we are all as different as the ingredients that make us up. We can't control anyone except ourselves. The rest is up to them. And that's tolerance in a nutshell, isn't it? I may think you've misjudged. I may not be able to understand at all where you are coming from in spite of trying. I may believe exactly the opposite about something and you won't be able to persuade me otherwise. I may even offer suggestions to you about how to see it my way. But when all is said and done, tolerance is my understanding that the rest is up to you and that's all right.

I am speaking of personal tolerance, here. In the end, it is the only sort of tolerance there is. As fanciful as it may seem, there is a vast human civilization out there who operate or have operated for millennia under immensely different codes of law, types of government, living conditions. We can legislate all the tolerance we want, but if it is not found in the hearts of the citizens, the law is difficult to uphold. I am not talking about voting here. I am talking about how you decide to live regardless of circumstance. Expressing your tolerance with your vote is a terribly important thing, but even more important is expressing your tolerance with your life. With your everyday interactions. You cannot blame lawmakers for your reactions to those who disagree with you any more than my jBird can blame me for lying to me. That part is up to you. It is always up to you.

Tolerance is seeing the person behind the belief; it is thinking in terms of individuals rather than stereotypes. It is accepting your own doubts and understanding that you could be wrong, but you choose to believe you are right. It is knowing that other people are doing the same thing. It is listening for what people are actually saying rather than hearing what you expect. It is disagreeing right down to your very core and accepting the possible validity anyway.

It is not our gut reaction, it is an altered state.

Hunt Elk! Win a Weatherby!

At two separate times in my young adult life, I worked for a subcontractor of the U.S. Postal Service. My job was to sit at a computer screen and look at pictures of mail and code them for delivery. I learned a few things from this job. The first being that people really, really do not know how to address mail. The second being that you don't know the meaning of fun until you have typed postal codes for nine straight hours in the middle of the night under fluorescent lighting. The third, and probably most frightening thing, is that it is by sheer miracle that any mail gets delivered correctly at all.

Of course now we don't use the "snail mail" very often any more. We can pay our bills online, send notes, upload photos, send e-cards, submit essays for rejection, enter contests, receive newsletters and coupons and just about anything else you want to do. It's simple, right? Enter your email address in the form and save the planet from all those pesky envelopes and stamps. Why teach kids to write at all? Why not just start out in primary school with keyboarding classes so they can type their way into adulthood?

Into adulthood where they cannot seem to remember their own email addresses. I have been in a 15 round grudge match with the NRA over the last several months. It would appear that a man named Stuart thinks he's me. I don't really blame him. Who wouldn't want a piece of all this? Judging from his preferences, I'm guessing actually he wouldn't. We don't have a lot in common, Stuart and I. How on earth do I know this?

Because he has used my email address to sign up for every newsletter the NRA sends out, for several golf publications and discount superstores, for an extremely right-wing alumni group, for a long johns manufacturing and direct sales company (OK, so sometimes I look at these when I get them), and a few other assorted mailing lists. At first, I would just casually unsubscribe. I know sometimes we slip up when we type. It was probably an accident. There was that whole span of time where I signed all of my professional correspondence "Love, Lou" by mistake. My rather startled clients probably just thought they were receiving really good customer service. (That would help explain the hugging, too, now that I think about it.)

But eventually it seems that my dear Stuart would realize that he wasn't getting his NRA credit card offers. Did you even know that you could get a credit card through the NRA? I think you can earn points with it or something. (Bullet points. Ha!) There are typos and then there is using an email address that is clearly not yours to sign up for the most random crap. Not only that, but when I unsubscribe I get a few weeks respite and then dear Stuart signs me up all over again. To everything. How does this happen? I feel dirty reading someone else's mail. It's a felony. (This is what I tell the monkeys when they open my mail. "You don't want to go to jail for reading my mail, do you?" "But it's just a packet of oil change coupons!" "Felony! Jail! Do you? Do you?!" We're a well-adjusted family.) I feel dirty getting NRA newsletters. I'm terrified Charlton Heston is going to show up at my house with a shotgun or something. (Another quick digression: I know how to shoot a shotgun, by the way. My dad borrowed one when we were kids and took us out into the woods and set up things like milk jugs filled with water to approximate a human head. He wanted us to know that guns were real and to see the real damage they could do and also how to use one properly. Like I said, we're a well-adjusted family.)

I realize this email thing is what a friend of mine calls a "white boy problem"; that it is only a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things; that my grandparents had to walk uphill barefoot in the snow to the outhouse to get their email, but there's this nerdy part of me that worries over it. I worry that Stuart is missing out on updates about his favorite pastimes - wearing long johns and going on golf ball hunts with his alumni group - and I worry that the gun and golf loving Stuart is mentally unbalanced because he can't seem to grasp what his own email address is. We can't have folks like that just hitting golf balls willy nilly.

The "not right"ness of it all bothers me on a cellular level. It makes me worry that the fabric of our very society will unravel because of this blatant lack of attention to detail. It bothers me that we just generally accept that we will get this weirdo crap in our inboxes and that there will come a day when we can't tell the difference anymore between honest communication and misdirected messages. That one day it will all be spam. (Brief digression: when we lived in China, people would send us care packages from the States with things we couldn't get like brownie mixes and mac and cheese and stuff. And Spam. "Oh goody! Spam! You know, there's just not enough mystery meat here in China. I think I need some in a can from the good ole U S of A!" I think this is the very origin of calling unwanted emails "spam": my family's care packages. It's literally Spam. A whole inbox full of goodness and just for the heck of it, we'll throw in this nasty can of Soylent Green.)

Canned meat products aside, my dear Stuart, I don't want to hunt elk. I don't want to win a Weatherby. I don't even know what a Weatherby is! (How does that sort of contest even work, anyway? For every set of elk horns you send in, you get an entry into the Weatherby drawing?) I don't want the latest technology in ball washing. I have plenty of silk long johns. I attended a different crazy para-military state university, so I won't be attending your reunion. But I would like you to do all of those things if you want to. At the very least, can you use my email address for your personal correspondence so at least I can have access to the really juicy stuff?

Tangled Date Night: History and Science

Get this, you guys.
The Chief Lou and I were having a romantic evening last night. We really went all out.
We put the kids to bed early and they actually fell asleep when they went to bed.
We slipped into something a little more comfortable (read: flannel pants), turned the lights down, heated up a great big bowl of queso and got the fiesta sized bag of chips, and snuggled up to watch NOVA on PBS.

It was hot.

Very hot.

It was about volcanoes.

Not just any volcano. Mount Saint Helens.

So, if you're roughly my age, images of the explosive eruption of Mount Saint Helens may be burned into your unconscious along with Ronald Reagan and the Cold War. I remember sitting and watching people on the news try to uncover streets, cars, houses, beloved pets that were covered in ash. I remember people being vaporized in the nuclear fallout and singing with Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen. I remember images of rescue workers in yellow suits helping deal with the aftermath. I remember mushroom clouds. I remember Plasticine hair and large white teeth. OK, so maybe I was pretty young and it all kind of ran together in my mind. But I do remember when the communists made Mount Saint Helens erupt and all the trickle down ash. Of course, I was living in Vermont at the time, so we were about as far removed from the whole thing as you could get and still be in the US. Those poor foreigners in the State of Washington - not DC where my grandmother lived, but that distant galaxy of Ewok planets where the trees grew so large and there were things like volcanoes. Listen, if you're older than I am and less demented, your memories of the thing may be a little different. But what is that thing people are always saying? That children often see things more clearly than adults do? This is obviously a case of that, so don't be harshing my buzz. Anyway, it was 1981. Anything was possible.

So, as life goes on and you have man-made disasters to confront and store away in the unconscious, these mere volcanic eruptions get pushed aside in favor of other horrors. Like Milli Vanilli and the 2000 election and stuff like that. Until you are snuggled down with your sweetie and suddenly realize that you recognize the footage that they are showing of the surrounding areas. I've been camping near there! With my babies! I've stopped to pee at that exit on the freeway! This is so about my life! So we watched the geologists (they're a wild and photogenic bunch, aren't they?) as they explained all about the lava dome that has grown in the crater and there were a lot of seismograph action shots [I do love a seismograph!], a few thermal computer images and lots of helicopter shots of blowing ash. It was just riveting and here is what I learned:

- Geologists are insane. It is like an extreme profession. I never would have guessed it what with the rocks and the bazillions of years and all that.

- After an eruption, the volcano continues to burble out lava and it hardens in the cooler air and forms a bit of a cork for the volcano. A massive cork made of rock.

- There are pretty much non-stop tremors after an eruption as the volcano continues to burp and clear its throat.

- That sucker erupted again in 2004 and 2007 and NOBODY TOLD ME ABOUT IT! In 2004 I was safely away in the land of Ohio, but in 2007 I was RIGHT HERE. (I told you. This is all about me.)

- Once the volcano settles down some more, it occasionally belches out "spines" of rock the size of sky scrapers, sometimes at a rate of 16 feet an hour. That's not terribly fast if you're driving to the mall, but if you're watching a whole building breaching like a whale out of a volcano crater, that's entirely too fast to be at all comfortable with. All of this is just happening a short way down the freeway from me!

- The insane and photogenic geologists did some really fun things with core samples and newly exposed rock walls and a fancy microscope and explained very patiently to me that Mount Saint Helens is "like a bottle of soda that has gone flat" just as casual as you please. Apparently the belching is from trapped gases and as of late, she's had a Tums and a good dump and is resting quietly now. The relief was palpable in our TV room, let me tell you. Except...

- They have no idea, nor any idea how to predict, how long it will be until those gases build back up again. Cheerful Crazy Geologist Guy just shrugged and pushed up his glasses and said "It could be three hundred years, it could be three years."

In summation: there is a big honkin' rock cork stuck in the champagne bottle of a mountain near me that is being steadily shaken until who knows when it will pop that cork with a mighty vigor and I will die in my bed, or at the very least have to get my carpets cleaned.

Here's the best part though. This is the part that made me cry. In the crater of the  volcano where everything was dead. Dead as a doornail. (Someone please explain this to me, what is a doornail and why is it deader than other things?) It looked like the surface of the moon. All dust and gray and black and ash and igneous rock. Barren and destroyed. Obliterated. Just dead. Except...

Right smack in the middle of the crater was a burst of color. A wild prairie lupine had sprung up amid the destruction. Not just managed to grow, but was thriving. It is a plant that usually grows at higher elevations but there it was, just standing tall and bravely blooming its delicate purple flowers. How did it accomplish such a thing? Crazy Geologist Guy with Ponytail explained it to me. It nourishes itself. It has bacterium that live on its roots that convert something into nitrogen to feed the plant, which in turn grows and photosynthesizes and feeds the bacterium a simple sugar. So there, in the middle of such desolation and complete annihilation, this plant gave itself some sugar and insisted on growing. Not only that, but because this plant decided that it would just, you know, grow, it has helped to pave the way for life to slowly return to the crater and surrounding areas.

Come to think of it, I may just survive a volcanic eruption after all.

Back That Truck Up!

Here come the claws. Like in a B werewolf movie, I can feel the wiry hairs sprouting on my knuckles. I have hackles and they are raised. This is not a comfortable state for me to be in. My general M.O. is to mind my own business, but sometimes I feel the need to give somebody the business.

Having just blogged about the First Amendment - using "blogged" in the loosest sense of the term, more like cutting and pasting - I will be the first to stand up and defend anyone's right to write or say or do whatever they want to. I also will defend my right to say Back. That. Truck. Up!


1st Truck that Must Back Up: Stop calling every parenting style with which you don't agree "abuse". Regrettably and horrifyingly, real abuse does exist in this world. There are families who are subjected to demeaning, hurtful, damaging, and sometimes even fatal atrocities at the hand of a parent. If that's what you're talking about, call Child Protective Services, don't blog about it. If by "abuse" you mean: setting boundaries, not setting boundaries, watching TV, watching the wrong sort of TV, eating at McDonald's, eating meat, not eating meat, going to public school, homeschooling, buying toys they like, not buying toys they like, making them do chores, not making them do chores, admitting that they get on your nerves, being stressed, disciplining, not disciplining, wearing pants, cutting their hair, or any other random thing you've taken against, cut it out. For every post that I read that some smug know-it-all rails against the "abuse" they witness other parents doing, I read five more written by honest, hardworking mothers who are doing the very best they can day after day through all sorts of circumstances and instead of going to bed at night feeling like they've accomplished something, they feel guilty. Like they don't measure up. You know why that is? Because the honest ones among us realize that sometimes we make mistakes, sometimes our human nature gets the better of us, sometimes we are not as good a parent as we'd like to be or as we know how to be. And then some jerk comes along and proclaims that yes, indeed, you are doing it all wrong and let me tell you how. Back that truck up. If you have parenting all figured out and you never get tired and you never do or say things you regret and you always make the very wisest choice in every situation in your life and your poop smells like roses, keep it to yourself and your little padded cell in Wonderland.

2nd Truck that Must Back Up:  Everyone around me must, right now, quit saying the following: Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse, any combination of the words think and box, the phrase "everything in moderation" about anything at all, the sage wisdom "everything happens for a reason", "now more than ever", "let's roll" and probably some others but I can't think of them right now. The English language is rich and beautiful and has stolen so many words from other languages that it's now the boss of all languages. Let's air out some new phrases, shall we?

3rd Truck that Must Back Up: Stop calling everyone with whom you disagree politically a Nazi. It's rude and displays a shocking lack of historical perspective. If they are marching crowds of human beings to mass execution, then OK. If they are a feminist or a Republican or a great big blow-hard or just someone you don't like, find another word. There are concentration camp survivors still walking around and it's disrespectful to them for you to even compare your petty political complaints to such horrors.

4th Truck that Must Back Up: Stop being offended when someone offers you a kindness. I am so liberal I'm looking at Socialism in my rear view mirror, but part of my libertine ways is to treat all people equally. So if you're old or female or male or trans-gendered or a kid or whatever I will treat you with kindness. That means I will hold the door for you if you are a few feet behind me, I will offer to let you cut in line if I have a giant cart-load of groceries and two kids and you have only a few items, I will pick up something you've dropped and hand it to you, I will offer you my seat on the bus if you look tired and whatever else it may strike me to do to try to make your day a little easier. Looking startled and refusing doesn't make you liberated, it makes you rude.

5th Truck that Must Back Up: Me. I'm in a bit of a snit.

My darling readers, I started this blog as a means of expression for mostly me. I never really imagined that other people would read it, much less like it. I'd hoped, you know, or else I wouldn't have published it. But I get such positive, yummy vibes from all of you every day and now it has transformed a bit with the consciousness that others are reading. Don't take my ranting personally, please. It's just a little tantrum. It's also in response to the GBE2 prompt this week: Pet Peeves. Wow, I needed that.

Dancing With Elephants, Part 1

Elephants have been on my mind for the last few days. That sentence is alarming to me. Not being a zoo keeper or a safari leader, I don't have a whole lot of good reasons to be contemplating elephants. Do I really need a good reason? I have three reasons, anyway.

Reason #1 For the Recent and Alarming Contemplation of Elephants:
The Republican "debates" and stuff. This is something I have studiously avoided hearing about, but hear about nonetheless. When I explain to people that I do not pay attention to such things, I invariably get the same sort of response: something about staying informed, or my civic responsibility, or being in the know. These appeals  used to bother me, but I've discovered there are some things I'd rather not know. I like to think I am a relatively intelligent person. It's not that I'm not capable of following political discourse, it's not even that I'm not interested in politics, it's that I refuse. Just no. Increasingly over the last 12-16 years things have become depressing to me. The presidential race is like a 2-year long reality TV show where we all watch and opine about people's hair and their clothes, make political decisions based on our "guts" rather than on logic or any sort of fundamental knowledge of the Constitution or law. Whoever gets the best one-liner for the day gets to stay on the island. Whoever buzzes in with the right catchphrase gets to go on to the next round. And we let them. We let them by participating, by circulating the videos of the latest moronic thing someone said when they thought the mic was turned off, by watching the "news" and repeating the talking points, by rising to the vitriolic bait that's thrown our way.

 Case in point: gay marriage. This is becoming a central campaign issue, again. Gay marriage is to the new millennium what abortion was to the eighties and nineties. I bet even in reading that last sentence, it conjured a spark of emotional response. What is she going to say about it? Where does she stand? Here's the thing, though: that's why it's an issue. It attacks you right in your amygdala. It doesn't matter which side of the issue you fall on, it will piss off people on the other side. It's like a homing beacon. One candidate emits a signal that attracts us on a cellular level, another emits a signal that repels us. These kinds of issues are fraught with emotion, with personal experience, with fear, with hatred and with very little sense.

From a purely governmental perspective, does it benefit the function of government to deny certain people civil unions? Absolutely not. It would probably be beneficial in the long run and save money in costly legal battles and legislative snare-ups to just give it all the go-ahead. And while we're at it, from a purely governmental perspective, does it matter if any two people getting married love each other or are morally upstanding? Absolutely not. There are far too many hetero marriages that prove that point for me.
So why, then? Why is this even an issue? Why are we talking about it? Why can't we just make civil unions legal and be done with it? The legislators on both sides of the aisle know that it makes good sense, both politically and economically. Regardless of what they say, most citizens who oppose it know in their heart of hearts that after the news cycle dies down, it will affect their life probably not at all. But yet again this election cycle, it's an issue. Why? Because it makes everyone so emotional. Because it's sexy. Because everyone seems to feel strongly about it one way or another. Because it's a surefire way to divide people and draw up camps along party lines. It gets dangled out there every election cycle, well, because it dangles. It makes us think of all manner of evil people get up to in their bedrooms and oh! won't someone think of the children?! And we buy it. Some of us try to have a rational discussion about it. Some of us act on instinct. Some of us are horrified and some of us are intrigued, but we all fall for it.

This is politically a non-issue. There is no reason that in 21st century, post civil rights movement America that anyone should be legislatively excluded. Case closed. The contestants in the electoral game know this, but they also know that the issues that really hit us where we live aren't so easy to make posters of. They're issues that affect everyone, across the board. They're issues, that regardless of party affiliation or political leanings, are crushing the American spirit. A lot of the issues we face today have been decades in coming and there are not easy, 8-year solutions to them. They are so big, so entangled, so unwieldy that we can't even think about them properly. So they play the sleight of hand tricks, pander to emotions and we all get to ignore the elephant in this particular room. Personally, I find this reprehensible. I find the hijacking of the American political process by charlatans and show-biz to be utterly inexcusable. The fact that it is done on the backs of citizens who unquestionably deserve equal rights is disgusting.

So I stop listening. I tune out. I'm not really missing much, but I'm gaining a ton. I meet nice people everywhere I go. I get to think for myself. I get to make decisions based on my own faith, my own beliefs, my own morality, without the interference of so much noise. I live my small life from day to day, choosing what's important to me, rather than being told. It has been a delightfully surprising discovery over the last several years that my whole outlook on life, and on people in general, has changed for the better. I get to make judgments based on tangible interaction with actual human beings, real life situations.

 I have friends from every sector of the political map and guess what? We all get along. I find things to love about all of them. I find things that we hold deeply in common. I find things I can learn from them. I find beautiful people who are working hard and doing the best they can. I've watched people take punches from all directions and survive. Not just survive, but live joyfully. I've watched people come together and help each other out. I've watched people celebrate together, mourn together, eat together, work together and live together. These are far more valuable to me than which bubble to fill in on my ballot. These are the people who are going to make a change. These are the people who keep this country (and countries all over the world) alive. This is where it matters. We can have all the legislation in the world, trying to make everyone live and do just so, but that won't change people's hearts. But you know what will? A loaf of bread for the new neighbors, a jump for a stranger's dead battery in the grocery store parking lot, a get well card, a "you go first" to the person behind you in a long line, helping a child find his mother in a crowded room, looking up and saying hi when you walk past someone on the street. These and all of the millions of little opportunities we have every week to do something to remind us that we are human.

Thank you for tolerating my righteous little rant. Stay tuned for other fun elephant-related news tomorrow.