On Dealing with Impossible People: Guns and the Assessment of Need

• I made a statement about guns on Facebook while linking to an article about an outlandish statement made by the founder of "Gun Appreciation Day". My mom quoted part of what I said in a Facebook status. This is what happened:
• Original statement my mom quoted: "If you "need" a gun in your everyday life to feel safe and aren't in law enforcement, actively in the military or out hunting, you might want to reconsider how you live your life."
• Steven: If you go to a mini Mart for a soda and someone tries to rob you, are you saying it's my fault because I innocently went to grab a soda? Just food for thought.
• Me: And you can't see yourself protecting yourself from a robber with any means other than a gun? We as a society can't work to remove the need to rob by working to create jobs and social institutions that teach people they have other options than crime, thereby making everything safer?
• Steven: Nope, if I have the need to protect myself, it's by any means necessary. Ask a cop to stop armed robbery by not having a gun. Educating people does not make them apply what they learned. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Lazy people are going to be lazy, especially if they can get the same thing for less work.
• Me: Since the original quote specifically exempted law enforcement, I'm not going to argue that.
• In this country almost nobody "needs" a gun. Whether or not you want one or will use one given the appropriate provocation is up to you. If you "need" a gun to feel safe in your everyday life, you have much bigger problems to deal with in your life and and where/how you live that affect how you define feeling safe. In which case I pray for you.
• Steven’s comment that REALLY set me off: "I pray for you for being naive to the world. May it not get you in a situation that you unknowingly walked into in the best part of town and where you will have to eat your words or worse, pay with your life or someone in your family because the did not have their proper defense. BTW, 2nd amendment is the right to bare arms for the possibility of needing to over run your government if a tyrant is in office or if your government oversteps their bounds against the people of our country. History in school should have taught you this. Based on your statement, I wonder if the teachers of Sandy Hook would have liked to have a gun when the shooting happened. Even at that, I wonder if they should have considered their life choices before teaching there. Think before you speak!!!"
• Me: "While I hesitate to make any argument for or against authorial intent on behalf of someone who has been dead for over 250 years, it is well known that Jefferson had tyranny in mind when crafting the second amendment. And I think that such use against tyranny would count under "given appropriate provocation." But even then, this is not a NEED. You have the right to arms, but that does not mean you need arms. Let me repeat that, "right" does not equal "need."
• I also think the best defense is preventative (which biases my arguments). In the case of government, it means paying attention to current politics and seeing warning signs of potentially dangerous behavior. In the case of my personal home safety, it means finding somewhere to live where the likelihood of having my home invaded is low. It means knowing where I am. It means taking self defense classes so I can at the very least I know how to remain calm and hold my own if I am put into a painful situation.
• And how dare you bring up Sandy Hook like that and tell me to think before I speak. What happened in Sandy Hook was not part of their day to day life (a part of the original statement which keeps getting conveniently ignored). It was a special circumstance that arose because of a slew of causes including but not limited to a broader culture of violence, a healthcare system that is poorly equipped to deal with the mentally ill in effective ways, and an ineffective system of gun control that fails to properly address the kind of risk factors I just listed.
• None of them could have anticipated this and if they did see it as normal, they probably wouldn't have been teaching in a peaceful, affluent, suburban school where the chances of getting shot are fairly low compared to areas known for experiencing violence.
• Bringing that into this discussion was unnecessary and disrespectful to the people who died. Think before you speak."
• More response Pam: “Being necessary to the SECURITY OF A FREE STATE". Our states and the armed people of those states have a right to protect themselves from the federal government when it decides to ignore the Constitution and violate the rights of the citizens. History shows us that the first thing an evil dictator will do, is to DISARM the people. After that, there is nothing that can be done to stop them without using arms. Give me liberty, or give me death. Freedom is worth fighting for. Ask anyone in our Armed Services. Think before you throw out the freedom many have died for....
• Steven: No Danny, how dare you!!! You are the one that said, "where/how you live that affect how you define feeling safe". Just because they felt safe didn't mean they were safe. Therefore, my argument is true... Carrying a gun is for instances that, although you feel safe, you may not be safe. The only thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, PERIOD!!! [False, false, falsity false. Remember those preventative measures I mentioned? Or how about working on fixing all the causes I mentioned as well. Oh, no? Guns are still the only way?] Think before you speak!!!
• Me: You could have made that point without bringing Sandy Hook into this. Don't blame me for bringing something up that had no place in the discussion.
• And Pam, yes, yes, but what does that have to do with anything I've said? I already said that the ability to protect yourself from a harmful government is a right everyone is deserving of. Please don't insult my intelligence by continuing to reiterate a point I agreed to (in addition to tired nationalistic quotes that are completely unrelated to the discussion at hand). The fact still stands that no matter how much of a right it may be this does not automatically make it necessary.
• Steven: Now you are insulting your own "intelligence". I made a point that you couldn't disagree with so you say it didn't belong. That's what people say when they get shown up. You are correct, you have the right to own a firearm and protect yourself and your home, but doesn't mean you need to. Let the criminal rob you at gunpoint and kill you and your family because you don't feel the need. Your choice, but I won't put my family in that same, potentially, dangerous circumstance. I am done with this conversation as it is impossible to rationalize with someone who is thinking irrationally. Have a good night...
• Me on Tumblr: Now, he’s right, I shouldn’t have ignored his point about guns and would have been much better served pointing out how it is still irrelevant (and disrespectful) it is to question whether or not the teachers at Sandy Hook wanted guns because they didn’t have them. The only reason to bring that up in a discussion in this specific way is to try to shame me. But by this point in the night I was tired and had been drinking and wished to end the conversation rather than go through the effort of pointing out how guaranteedly dangerous it is to carry a gun compared to how irrational it is to imagine a constant threat to safety great enough to warrant lethal retaliation when statistically (and given the increase in mass killings in supposedly safe areas this may be changing, which returns back to my other ignored point about structural changes for preventative measures) you will NEVER need it. 
• The logic here is faulty in that there is a direct causal link between not being “protected” and the likelihood of such an event occurring all on the slim chance of violence occurring. That sounds a lot like a form of paranoia which, as it has been displayed here, does not sound like a healthy reason to have a gun. You will never need a gun. Period. You will never NEED a gun in your day to day life if you aren’t in a profession that requires it and do not face imminent and constant threat to you or yours’s personal safety. You can have a gun. You can want a gun. You will NEVER NEED A GUN.
• If you do face such a constant threat to your safety (a situation that is likely precluded by racial, environmental and/or economic factors beyond your control, a topic I flat out refused to get into here, but which must also be addressed in creating the kind of preventative change I talked about above), you’re probably already rethinking your life and looking for some way to change/cope with your situation. My original statement still stands. And I'm glad we can agree that it is indeed impossible to rationalize with someone who is irrational.

In which Danny goes and sees Les Miz

Did I do that right? Les Miz? Les Mis? (an internet search) tells me that both work.

I finally went and saw this because my friend Erin works at the new Regal cinema in Bellingham. As my roommates and even cinephilic boyfriend can tell you, I very rarely go to the movies without it being someone else's idea (I'm more likely to watch Netflix or borrow one of the hundreds of DVDs Grace, Trisia, Sara and I collectively keep on our bookshelf). Also, Bellingham has trained me well and I find myself averse to the sanitized, corporatized, movie-going experience.

Give me something a little dirty and grungy and local. Or just local since all the ones I linked to are pretty clean that I've seen.

Spoilers contained after this point, you have been warned.

Ah, right, Les Misérables (it's French originally so it's not pronounced less miserable, in fact, judging from what I saw on a GIANT SCREEN with an amazing sound system, I would say that they're quite miserable. Google tells me it translates into English to mean "The Wretched"). That's what I was going to talk about.

I liked it. It was pretty. It was everything I've been told by the raving hordes of internet/theatre fans. Visually and cinematically, the level of detail they went into was mind-blowing. Anne Hathaway made me tear up... twice. First when she entered prostitution to earn money for her daughter, an unfortunately all too real struggle many women find themselves going through even now, and second when she died.

My natural sass and refusal to deal melodrama made it hard to take a lot of the rest of the characters seriously (see for reference English majors reacting to people who call Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet a love story without understanding the full implications of the actions within the play).

Yes, Marius, Cosette is a pretty blonde, but you haven't even met her yet. What in hell are you doing telling me you're completely in love with her?

Inspector Javert, what are you? Quit walking around on the edges of high places. Do you have a suicide wi-oh.

Eponine, the stupid boy doesn't like you, quit mooning ab-- oh well, nice hat, since you can't have him you're going to join in the revolution effort? As long as you believe in the same ideals of freedom and democracy, who am I to tell you not to join in.

And I know, some of you are reading this, probably thinking I missed the point. For one quick example: Javert is a conflicted man because all he's doing is his job (as Valjean points out to him repeatedly) for a system that the People are rebelling against. He offends our democratic backgrounds because he represents the staunch refusal to accept change, and enforces the law as it stands mercilessly and in ways cruelly. To borrow alignment language from DnD, I would call him Lawful Good/Neutral working for a system that is portrayed as having become Evil inasmuch as it no longer works towards the good of the people rather than maintaining the status quo.

I don't dislike the characters at all and I love (LOVE) the socio-political discourse at work. This is a revolution after all, dealing with a corrupt and unfair prison system. Highly appropriate given the current state of the world!

After the little blonde kid (never caught his name, wikipedia tells it's Gavroche) gets martyred, part of me was hoping it would lead to full insurrection, but alas, history proved otherwise and all the pretty boys died. Have I mentioned the eye-candy yet? Because it's sweet.

I'm told that the stage version with full musical numbers helps lesson the...angst (though that's not quite the word I'm looking for) as highlighted in the cinematic version. If I could watch it in mute, I would have been so much happier. I mean, when Cosette and Marius actually talk and there's butterflies flying around implying they're soulmates or Fantine dies and the flag behind her says "mort" which is French for "dead," I'm enraptured. And I'm sure Victor Hugo's original novel probably had none of the musical appeal of this adaptation.

Maybe this is a sign I'm not one to suggest musicals to (just a guess).

Use your powers for good

In my time, I've worked with some pretty awesome people through work, school and various volunteer opportunities, I've come across some of the most amazing people in the world doing all kinds of work to make this a better place.

And amazing as these people are, they're still people. They still have moments where they can act like assholes or say the wrong thing.

And most impressive (and oftentimes extreme) in this mix are the youth that I get to work with. Because that thing about how teenagers are a LOT more capable than many adults give them credit for, it's true.

As someone who barely feels like an adult, but nonetheless finds himself in positions of being an adult figure, I think it's hugely important when working with youth to treat them as whole and capable beings, which ultimately means holding them accountable.

Case in point:

One of the youth I've met, a brilliant young man to be sure, has this unfortunately snarky habit of pushing people's buttons. For those of us who know and love him, we recognize that what comes across as assholishness is just him playing devil's advocate and mostly saying things to garner a response. For people who don't know him very well, or don't meet him in a mediated situation, it can lead to quickly escalating conflicts that he's usually fairly skilled at handling on his own.

Sometimes though he needs that gentle reminder.

I don't know if I gave the best response I possible when I privately confronted him about an argument he had on a mutual friend's Facebook post, which admittedly he did instigate and then proceed to use language that implicitly painted himself as a victim.

I called him out on that and then offered this bit:

You're more than smart enough to know how to manipulate a situation right to the line and then mediate it back down when you see it's headed in a direction you'd rather it didn't. Probably far more effectively than most people would be able to. That's actually really impressive. Use your powers for good.

I ended with this because I wanted to underline the importance that while I don't think he handled the situation ideally, I know he's smart enough to know that the points I called him out on (being the instigator by implying someone he didn't know is a douche and then painting himself as the victim when they rightfully, albeit not productively, reacted) are true. I wanted to say that yes, he's very good at this, but as someone who cares I expect him to use that skill in a constructive way.

These were just some thoughts.

NaNoWriMo 2012

Well, I did it. With half an hour to spare, I finished my NaNoWriMo before Dec. 1. If you'd like to read it yourself, there's a link at the end of this post.

I just printed a copy of the first draft manuscript of the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo.  See:

It's been a long and crazy road. What started on a whim turned into a race against myself.

For those of you who don't know, I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year because my boyfriend said he would we should send each other pictures of ourselves as incentive to write. I lost track of how many pictures I sent him. I can count the number of pictures he sent me by counting the number of cheeks I can see on my face without looking at a mirror.

But that's okay, a non-enforced part of the agreement was that we would send the pics if we were on track with our writing. Except for three days in the middle of the month and the very end, I was playing catch up.

I started fairly slowly, completely missing the first day of writing because I had class and work all day, then as soon as the event was over I joined some friends for happy hour at the local Applebees. And then it took me a week and a half of writing before I actually caught up to the recommended word count by day.

Through this entire process, I had very little in the way of plot. I had decided three days before the start of the month that I would tell the story in the form of letters, but that's about it.

As I started writing, I used what I knew. I have a large collection of letters from pen pals that I have collected over the last seven years and I used these to give me small pieces to prompt writing: certain phrases, locations or scenarios. I found myself pulling from my bookshelf, quoting poets and nature guides.

Eventually I started a timeline of sticky notes and character maps on the wall above my desk.

I haven't taken them down yet.

After about the third day of writing, I decided I would give my story a four part structure with about each week of the month determining how long I would write each part. Given my epistolary form, I could change narrators with each new part. I continued writing.

This is the French press that was almost constantly filled with yerba mate or guayusa teas.

About halfway through the second week, I was feeling stuck. I wasn't sure where I was headed. In short, I didn't have anywhere to go. That worked for the first half, because I was still setting up the story in many ways and introducing the characters and their personalities, but I realized I had only given myself three protagonists to voice. What would I do with the fourth part?

Eventually it occurred to me that I could change the format of the fourth part a little bit. I could have letter and response, where in parts 1-3 you would only ever see the letter side. Parts 1-3 would each be told through a different protagonist's letters. Part 4 would be told through letters between the characters.

Great! That gave me a a direction to head toward, but I was still missing something to drive the story. I was still missing a climax, an ending, a goal. Unless I wanted to ramble myself into a postmodern stupor, I would need a reason.

And then it hit me. It was the form of the story that gave me the idea. What if Part 4 was only letters between two of my protagonists, potentially about the third? And if I'm showing them interacting, what could happen that would be big enough to make them talk about the third protagonist?

I had a cold feeling in my stomach.

I needed to kill one of my protagonists.

Obviously I didn't need to. I could very well have gone in a completely different direction and created some other kind of resolution, but this way just felt right. Whether I had intended to or not, I had already planted the seeds for my character's death. I had given him strong reasons to live and in taking those reasons away, I could push him to his death.

I didn't like it. In fact, as I was writing, I hated myself for it. I felt bad for this character I had created, knowing that everything he loved and cared about would be systematically removed until he felt like his only option was suicide. That's the worst part. I was making him take his own life.

But much as I hated it, it felt right. It felt like it needed to happen and I could still turn the story around in Part 4. His death wouldn't be completely in vain.

I felt consumed by this story, forcing myself to write as much as I could every night on top of all my day to day responsibilities.

And I'm sure there are plot holes, continuity issues and generally huge sections of just plain bad writing, because a lot of this process wasn't always about crafting perfect sentences. It was about laying the groundwork so I could edit and add enough that perfection that I could be happy with it. It was about winning the competition of me vs. the word count.

My boyfriend was the incentive I needed to start. The incentive I needed to finish was starting in the first place because I'm too damn stubborn to let myself give up.

Some of my favorite lines from Week 4 of writing:

At least once a week I get someone in here that calls it an “I-talian.” I’m like, no dumbass, do you call it “I-taly?” No, you don’t because you would look like an idiot, but the customer is always right so I just have to bite my tongue and ask if they’d like mayonnaise on it, all the time secretly hoping they tip me well and if they don’t tip at all, wish that the mayo gives them a heart attack.

Hafiz and Rumi? What is it with your aunt and naming pets after dead poets? Has she ever had a parrot named Poe? A hamster named Shakespeare? It’s cute and I guess at the very least it proves her to be well read.   

Jake is a crazy-ass motherfucker. He doesn’t know a thing, but thinks he’s right about everything. He’s stubborn as all hell. I think I’m in love.

Thank you to everyone who has supported me. To the people I know only through the internet sending me encouragement every time I posted about my word count. To the people working on their own NaNoWriMo projects at the same time. To all the friends curious about what NaNoWriMo even is. To my roommates for being understanding about me locking myself in my room every night for a month being up until 2am. To Ethan for giving me the push I needed to start. I might have been able to do this without you, but it would have sucked a whole hell of a lot more.

To any of my friends out there who might have wanted to read my NaNo Project, here's a link. This is the version I will be doing my primary editing on, so if you feel so inclined, use the comment feature to leave me feedback! Consider adding it to your winter break reading list.

Handwritten: A Novel in Letters

How Social Media Affects our Education

So after reading this Chronicle post via tumblr, I started thinking about social networks and the classroom experience.

“There’s all this emphasis on having your own blog, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, but what about the skill it takes to read and listen to those things?” he said. “For all the technophilic love given to networked communication and peer-to-peer learning, it’s not the best educational mode—there’s something about linearity and dialogue that works better than the chaos you saw today.”

I think part of the inherent breakdown within the discussion this article talks about is partly the medium, and partly the education of consciousness and interaction with networked modes of communication.

Regarding the medium: Twitter is not the best venue for these kinds of discussions. There is an internal lack of stability that does not allow for a consistent and organizable flow of conversation. True, it has gotten better over the years, but a nested timeline like the Plurk interface where each update is its own dropdown conversation, and tangential threads can easily be removed to their own thread

or even a shared document like in a Google Doc would better allow for a discussion because different subjects could be fleshed out and, more importantly, contained. The form of the website itself dictates, in part, the way we interact with it just like a film is different from a book even if they have the same story.

As packets of information, tweets are not an effective tool. Using them for discussion is similar to reading a play by Shakespeare but only reading one couplet at a time with significant pauses in between.

It also seems a mistake to have everyone in the same room tweeting at the screens in front of them. It helps keep the conversation on track, yes, but it also creates an environment of enforced silence where the only expression of ideas is through the screen, through twitter. Why not let everyone go home and sit in their pajamas to tweet? They may be distracted by other things, but the comfort factor can easily help relieve the stress of using the Twitter platform for discussion.

Regarding consciousness: Just like with any other skill, it takes practice to master communication through a social media platform. Some of us are better equipped than others to the demands of digitized communication. I for example can run two small blogs, a tumblr, personal Facebook page with two shared pages through work, multiple emails, a plurk account, a twitter account all with some degree of success in part because I know how to focus and refocus my attention and can conceptualize the ways in which my multiple online presences interact with each other, with my audiences, and with how much attention I give them.

This is a learned skill.

One that with developments in technology we are learning at earlier and earlier ages.

If I may use another analogy, some people can only text one person at a time (and even then are pisspoor at following through)

Google Gooeys on texting

 While other people can juggle several conversations at once without feeling overwhelmed.

Using social media at the level necessary to promote meaningful discussion requires a base understanding of not only the dynamics of the social media, but also people. If I flood someone's feed (be it twitter, or otherwise), there is no chance for response. Conversely if I do not update enough, my input is not contributing.

Digital and social media will never surpass the linear flow of a classroom discussion for direct transfer of information, but they have other benefits.

There is a record of the conversation being had that can be referenced repeatedly. You don't have to be there to take part. Linking and further networking provide opportunity and access to further information (outside articles, et. cetera). Digital communication and social media are vaguely atemporal in that they do not require a strict linear progression of information. You can revist, add to, or critique any point of a conversation at any point. The text (as most concrete signifiers of communication) is malleable and moveable in ways that verbal conversations aren't.

For example, for a group project in a class I took my freshmen year of college, we created a Facebook group that surprisingly still exists. Utilizing the social media as a tool, we were able to have meaningful discussion, in part because we chose a format that was most meaningful and helpful to our needs.

Twitter can never be that because it is too disorganized and too short. Tumblr because it removes length constraints has some options that make it more useful than Twitter, but the interface is still missing the traceable cohesion required for meaningful communication. I think that plurk has a better interface, but suffers some of the same limitations as twitter for size of posts. Things like Google Docs (or the now defunct Google Wave) offer probably the best option, but are also more unwieldy and disorienting as a shared experience.

In short, I think the classroom experiment as described in the article fails not on a why, but on a how.