YESSS!

Earth-shattering kabooms! Woot!

People tend not to believe me when I tell them this, but it's true--we don't get a lot of big thunderstorms in Seattle. Overcast, yes. Drizzle, certainly. But the huge storms where you're soaked to the skin within 10 seconds of exposure and the lightning crackles beautifully overhead, and the thunder is so powerful it can be felt down in the marrow of your bones? Not s'much. So on occasions when it does happen, as it has tonight, there is cause for celebration.

The death of secrets

As I've wandered through the constellation of actual blogs (as opposed to spam factories and thinly-disguised storefronts), I've noticed what seems to me to be a singularly disturbing trend--the tendency of bloggers, especially younger ones, to reveal intimate personal details to absolute strangers. There are people who give out their addresses and phone numbers online, people who post publicly-accessible photos of themselves wearing little or nothing, people who update Facebook and Twitter from inside public lavatories, people who give out blow-by-blow re-enactments of the last night's sexual encounter. The blogosphere is awash in TMI.

No, I'm not turning a blind eye to my own tendencies in this direction. This blog is called "CONFESSIONS of a Laundry Faerie," after all. Although I usually try to keep it light, over time it's come to be chock-full of personal information. Even so, there are some things I simply won't reveal here--things that I truly believe are nobody's business but my own.

The confessional nature of our era encourages people to throw clods of information at each other. Witness the proliferation of meme lists (as Gretel points out, they should probably be called "me-me lists") like "100 books I've read" and "25 things I've eaten" and "20 BEST SONGS EVAR" and "68.3 fascinating facts about me." Yes, I've done these too; some of them are even posted here. They're seductive; it's fun to share such information, and these lists make you think you've learned something of interest about the person who's filled them out. But what have you really learned, apart from a collection of bullet-point trivia? It's like the difference between getting lost in the nuances of a wonderful book and skimming through the Cliff Notes. Part of the pleasure of making friends is the slow, gradual process of getting to know a person thoroughly--and likewise, the process of cautiously unfurling one's external being and allowing the other person to catch glimpses of one's inner self. Part of the joy of making a true friend is recognizing when you can tell someone else a deeply-hidden secret, and know that it will be as safe in that person's hands as it was in yours. But how can that particular joy ever be obtained if you grow up in a culture that doesn't even understand what a secret is, let alone why someone would want to keep it?

I've known my mother my entire life. Like most people in my family, she's good at telling stories about all sorts of life experiences. Until fairly recently I was sure I knew about every major event in her life, including some highly personal information. And then Mom's sister came to visit, and while they were happily reminiscing on the couch together my auntie just asked a question in passing--something like "Whatever happened to that one boy you were going to marry?" I was pretty sure I knew who she meant; after all, Mom had told us that she'd considered marriage a few times before she met Dad. But to my shock, in response to the question, my mother suddenly began to cry. I sat quietly and listened, and heard for the first time about her first true love in college, about their engagement, and about how her parents flew out from California and forced her to break it off because they didn't approve of him. It was a revelation.

My mother comes from a different generation--one which recognizes, for the most part, that some things are simply too personal and private to share with the world. She understands the concept of the secret. I wonder how many people of my generation and younger could even recognize this concept, much more know how to apply it.

And speaking of not being able to keep secrets: today is my 40th birthday.

The killdeer

A killdeer is a type of plover, a bird that lays its eggs in a shallow nest made in an open field, rather than in the safer refuge of a tree. The eggs are mottled, a protective coloration that makes them look like the rocks that often surround them. The mother killdeer usually covers these eggs to warm and protect them. But if a predatory animal comes near, the killdeer starts acting very oddly. She flops off her nest and begins limping away, carefully favoring one of her wings, and occasionally flaps around awkwardly, making a loud distress call. Recognizing all the signs of a bird with a broken wing, the predator usually stalks the killdeer for some distance--or at least until the killdeer has determined her eggs are no longer in danger. Then, if all goes well, she suddenly recovers and flies away, leaving the predator with nothing. Such distraction displays are common among birds (and some fish) as a means of protecting their young.

But distraction displays aren't limited to animals. Human beings--especially children--resort to them as well, in situations where there is a predator in their midst and they cannot hope to best that predator by physical force. In the movie Good Will Hunting (an otherwise excellent story marred by excessive profanity), Will's counselor and mentor Sean has a discussion with him
about abuse. One of the things Sean says, almost in passing, is that his alcoholic father would "come home hammered, looking to wale on somebody, so I'd provoke him so he wouldn't go after my mother and little brother." Sean was a killdeer. He couldn't turn in his own father--or maybe he tried, and nobody believed a little kid, or they didn't want to get involved in a domestic violence situation. He didn't want to be hurt, but he wanted even more to keep the people he loved from being hurt. So he stood up and took the abuse, drawing the predator's fire in order to keep other people safe. In similar fashion, in the case of child molestation, a killdeer child may try to draw the predator away from other children by putting on a seductive display, even though it may turn her stomach to do so. As the Wikipedia article on distraction displays states clinically, "Distraction displays have their cost and displaying adult birds are sometimes captured by the predator being distracted or by other opportunist predators." (my emphasis)

Like their animal equivalents, human predators often lack empathy for their victims; unlike animals, however, when human predators are caught, society usually demands that they account for their monstrous actions. It is illustrative of their mental states to see how many cornered human predators immediately, almost instinctively, blame their victims. And of course, most such victims also blame themselves, assuming that there must have been something they did to precipitate such behavior on the part of someone who should have protected them and who instead did them harm. It may take a very long time--well into adulthood--before an abused child finally internalizes the idea that he was not somehow to blame for what happened. The scene from Good Will Hunting ends with Sean gently, firmly, repeatedly telling Will, "It's not your fault," until the words finally sink in. A number of people seem to find the repetition in this scene funny. I'm guessing that's because they've never known what it is to be a killdeer.

Late-night wonders

In the past I've mentioned some of the odd things one sees when one is out late at night. Many an Epic Late Night Grocery Run has been punctuated by an odd sighting or two... such as the time I was leaving the Safeway parking lot and the car's headlights picked out a low, gray object about the size of a kitten, scuttling along the edge of a building (entirely too close to the entrance of a local restaurant, by the way). It was the biggest Norway rat I'd ever seen.

Then there was that incident the other night--well, early morning, actually--as I was tooling peacefully home along the city's main thoroughfare, which just happens to be a one-way street. Suddenly someone flew past me in the left lane. I'm guessing he was going so fast because he couldn't read the posted speed limit signs, driving as he was in the wrong direction. Gah!

So...

What wondrous oddities have you spied
when the garish lights of day have died?
Come, readers all, and here display
Your night-time tales of the weird or fey
To bring delight or cause dismay!

The return of the Nerd Brigade

After many weeks of hiatus, CM and the Nerd Brigade are up to their usual hijinks again. The house is alive with the sound of teen boys debating how to enter a room chock full of bugbears, the crunch of homemade popcorn and the scent of boiling hot dogs.

Back in the early '80s, when it seems a lot of parents didn't have anything more pressing to worry about, there was a sizable hue and cry about D&D and other tabletop role-playing games being a sort of gateway drug to Satanism. Such worries seem almost quaint these days--witness the Nerd Brigade, a group of teenage boys from our church, none of whose parents seem to have batted an eye over their participation in this group--but nearly 30 years ago parents really worried about the state of their D&D-playing kids' souls. It was enough of a concern that numerous articles were written in the attempt to pacify parents--"no, your kids aren't going to become trenchcoat-wearing violent cultists just by playing D&D." (Some things never change; now it seems concerned parents get their panties in a twist about the occult effects of runaway bestsellers their kids want to read, such as the Harry Potter series. Uh, right. The minute I can holler "Wingardium leviosa!" and actually make something fly, you folks will have a leg to stand on, m'kay?)

RPG enthusiast Kismet has written a good article on some of the benefits of RPGs (they increase the exercise of imagination, improve reading and math skills, and encourage teamwork and camaraderie), and has also written an article on the pitfalls of such games (condensed into one phrase: they're time-wasters). In my opinion, though, D&D is like a lot of other hobbies: what you bring with you has a lot more influence on you than anything in the nature of the hobby. If Jhaymes has an unhealthy interest in gore and he bakes cakes for fun, you shouldn't be all that surprised if he comes up with a gray brain cake that bleeds realistically when you cut into it. It has little or nothing to do with the shady or occult nature of cake-baking, and everything to do with the inclination of the individual.

Back to basics

Tonight I'm doing something I haven't done in a long time. I'm turning away from the computer, pulling out one of a myriad little notebooks I have stashed around the place, and I'm writing a few ideas out in longhand.

When I first started writing, I declared I would never, ever compose by typing on a word processor. It felt soulless, and back when I was lucky to reach a top speed of 20 WPM, longhand writing was usually faster. Since that time I've been able to reach an official typing speed of ZOOM ZOOM, and I've discovered the benefits of being able to type ideas almost as fast as I can think them. Still, I've determined there's some part of my brain that works differently when I'm writing ideas down. It's especially useful for hammering out creative concepts, as opposed to setting down logical thought (or at least what passes for logical thought in my loopy laundry-faerie mind). And I need to finish a particular creative project.

So. Off to the notebook. I'll see you back here later.

"They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is..."

I've seen this well over a dozen times. It still cracks me up every. single. time.

Why can't we have shows like QI on this side of the pond?