This is perhaps the happiest day of my life!
It works best with the little baggie inserts, since the bottle they fit inside seems to have a nipple that captures like an ounce of milk at a time, and makes a defacto backflow prevention valve. Perfect for clumsy babies, slosh gets in and it won’t come out.
In exchange for skipping out on 9 days in Tent City, I had to endure 36 hours of alcohol counseling. This is certainly faster and easier, but I’m hard-pressed to declare it is better. Tent City was boring, mildly surreal, and humiliating in a very impersonal way. Counseling fills me with rage, its phantasmagorical like some of Ken Kesey’s trippiest passages from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and intimately offensive.
Counseling is not there to actually help you, or understand you, or talk through the whole experience of DUI. If it was, the counselors would have MDs or be licensed psychiatrists. They would allow you to talk about all aspects of the experience to help you find any valid concept to grow from your wrongdoing and avoid making the mistake again in the future. They would not cover everyone with a blanket set of determinations, and attempt to diagnose you all with the same information. In reality, the counselors are all ex-alcoholics or Mormons, who are there only to proselytize a religion that is entrenched in their oligarchy: you drank, therefore, you have a problem.
The untenable position of objectively defining a problem that can only be seen by its negative results, and attempting to project negative results when only the one DUI is there to form a pattern, thwarts them from the start. Yes, I made a very bad mistake. And yes, it was not the first time. That makes me a lawbreaker, a person lacking respect for alcohol and a car and the authority of law, it does not make me an addict. They love to say how if you’ve done it once you’ve gotten away with it many times, and if you have done it there are hidden perils beneath your surface. But without results to back up these theories, it begs the question of exactly what is the problem? The problem is defined by counselors, who’s very job is an inherent conflict of interest, since they both assign and clear you from your program, and have a financial interest in the hours you are assigned to attend. They of course follow “guidelines” in assigning you sessions, but the guidelines are written by these same experts.
Each session I hear the exact same phrases and symptoms that they spew, and go through their checklist not finding any positives other than the one instance.
Apparently I am in denial.
The D word has come up with each of the 6 dipshits I have had the pleasure of talking to. It usually takes less than 15 minutes before they bust it out, dropping it like f-bombs in a Three Six Mafia lyric. Angry about the draconian AZ laws? You are in denial about your problem. Bored with the class? You are in denial about your problem. Feel your punishment was excessive for its impact? Denial denial denial. Its a deus ex machina the counselors parade out whenever logic fails them. The beauty of controlling the definitions is that it makes their definers beyond reproach. One of my responses to this whole ordeal has been to study the law and work to change aspects of it I consider unfair, thereby communicating and sharing with others, engaging the political process, and turning my anger into constructive energy. One particular Nurse Ratched all-knowingly asserted that this is all denial, because I should really be focusing my energy on improving myself and my problem. The circularity of that logic is really quite elegant.
The fact is the counselors are not interested in your opinions, or connecting with you, or debating; they are coming for your mind. Session after session, week after week, they are trying to drill into you that you are a bad person. Shame Training. The classes take 1 full weekend, and 5 weeks with 2 sessions a week. If you just sit there and nod and fade into the background, they are easy to get through and generally let out early. And I have tried, making the practice of shutting my mouth and displaying a convert’s facade my little self-improvement project for the time I am wasting in these sessions – the skill surely will come in handy in the future. But docility is not my mindset and never has been, and since my mind is what they are attacking, the classes have been a bitter struggle for me.
The ironies and contradictions in counseling stink like cat piss in a carpet. They talk about projection and thinking errors, how throughout our lives everything we are told and embrace is the subjective opinions of others that may lead us to devalue ourselves and become addicts, yet they do not see the lunacy in their projecting a truth about us having problems with substance abuse. One obese counselor talked about her food addiction replacing her drug habit while trying to humiliate us for our arrests. Another talked about her difficulty maintaining control of her car texting while driving, yet flew into a rage when people were speaking out against AZ’s DUI law that can send you to jail for being 50 feet from your car if you’ve been drinking. We saw a video about a lifetime whino and his 500 arrests, and the counselors spoke of how the system failed him, how he needed help. I guess first time offenders get punished and shamed, and only when you’ve fucked your life up so irretrievably do you get their sympathy instead of scorn. They mention how only 10% of the people who go through 12 step programs are successful, how opiates and meth recidivism rates are upwards of 95%, they say 60% of the people who get DUIs in AZ will get another and the median time is only 3.5 years! Yet still they sit on their folding-chairs thrones, and lord over the counseling sessions as they polish their halos.
What I’ve come to realize is that these people live for rehashing your misery, they are utterly and totally invested in wallowing in your problem, and it speaks more about their addictions than yours. They are in denial about their own codependencies, but they get very very defensive when you turn the scalpel of analysis back on them. They don’t often encounter someone with my IQ, my degree in philosophy, my lively mind, and my ability to push buttons just like them. One of them stopped calling on me for awhile, another threatened to kick me out and send me to Tent City. The most saccharine scene was when we went around the room and spoke about a trait of an addict we felt we displayed, and the counselor practically creamed herself with elation after each person’s breakthrough. The irony and the melodrama were only enhanced in that she let each person leave early as a reward for their soul-bearing confession. After the first guy was cut loose, 20 people couldn’t raise their hands fast enough. Outside the class, a guy who had just revealed his empowered feeling in having not smoked for several weeks offered to sell me weed.
The sessions are not all bad. There is some useful information to be learned about the laws, how to avoid getting caught and mistakes not to make, coping strategies so you don’t do it again, and the realization that you are not a pariah and you are not the worst person out there. They insist you don’t drink or smoke during the ~6 weeks the sessions have taken me, and in cutting out pot and cutting down beer to avoid the 80hr detection window I have reinforced some good habits about not mixing drinking and driving. There are people in there who do feel they have problems and are looking for help. I feel sorry for them that they are forced to be in classes with me, and I feel sorry for me that I am forced to be in classes with them. Another flaw in the design of the system.
Unfortunately, the positives in the class are in reality just the bait-and-switch for the counselors’ reproach and ignominy that fill you with self-doubt. Most of us are affected enough by the awful experience of a DUI arrest that we are genuinely trying to find a lesson and some meaning in it all, and into that breach the counselors plunge. Like sect leaders or military recruiters, they prey on your vulnerabilities and your moments of weakness while you are their captive audience. In the workplace this is called harassment, at home its called molestation, in public its called cult brainwashing. In Arizona its called treatment. It fucks with your head, it makes you begin to see yourself as their addiction statistic when you are trapped and can not raise your own voice for your own affirmation. But on their side they have the inarguable fact that if you don’t drink, you don’t get a DUI. If they packaged the message in a way that was supportive and positive, rather than confrontational and humiliating, it would be such a better use of the 36 wasted hours. If I could have the time back to pick up trash at the park, to talk to other adults about the consequences of my mistake, to communicate with the other class members without the disingenuous counselors in the room, it would be time better spent.
When I was a freshman in high school we had these month-long 1-act plays in the drama club during the spring, after the “big Spring production”. The idea was you got to try something different in theater. I got to be the tech director, but that is not significant. I worked on a play called “The Insanity of Mary Girard” which was kinda cheesy and probably easy for a high school to pull off. It was abstract, attempting to anthropomorphize the “forces of society” in declaring a woman insane when she was not. I liked it, and not just cause I got to hang out with the seniors and go to their parties. The notion has always seemed so obvious to me, and even at a young age it resonated deeply with me – how those in power create the definitions, how the disempowered are disenfranchised, the inequalities between the haves and the have-nots, history is written by the victors etc etc etc. Its a clarity I’ve had my entire life, developed as a teenager, maybe even earlier – when I was about 4 my parents brought me to several sessions with a psychiatrist because I had a natural aversion to authority. Every day after Shame Training I have come home and plinked away at this post as a means of catharsis and cleansing my mind, and now with just 3 sessions and 8 days from finishing, my anger is gone and replaced mostly by amused boredom. The education is not about me anymore, its about the blunt tools those in power use to try to define you, and how fighting them is not about logic but about misdirection. When the last class ends, as the counselor is printing my certificate, I am going to place a takeout order for the Blue Nile Cafe, eat it while I have my first party hat in 6 weeks, wake from this horrible dream like Chief Bromden, and get stoked for the Crazy 88 that weekend.
Karl Rove probably never imagined Sarah Palin to be his legacy. And yet you can draw an arrow from Bush to her. Bush was the perfect folksy coachable candidate, with just enough of a nod toward the center to attract both the evangelical rednecks and the fiscal conservatives, at least in his first term. Palin is almost all that, in a more media-sleek package, and just dumber and commoner enough to seem approachable. She gets the passive-aggressive Baptist women who resent their husbands for forcing them to stay home, or who resent the world for never being able to amount to much more than an empty breeder in the first place. She gets the dumb hicks who like her tits. She gets the god-lovers and the gun-lovers. The only thing she doesn’t get are the intelligent, thoughtful Republicans, and they aren’t going to vote for Obama anyway.
You’d think the Republicans would learn from the polarization of the last 3 elections, and how McCain lost 2008 because he followed their playbook instead of the one that had made him so popular for so many years. But they continue to let their party’s blowhards set their course. Palin having a soapbox is fracturing whatever is left of the Republican Party, and I say good riddance. The best thing would be if the noble part of the Republican Party shed the “base” that demeans them. It would leave them as a minority party, and I cringe when I think of Obama’s health care plan and Nancy Pelosi lording over the House.
Congratulations, Karl! Your sins have come home to roost.
Alana is evolving. Soon we will have to stop calling her Pod. She gets bored, and we have to work to keep her entertained with toys and Baby Einstein vids and tummy time and her bouncer. I am thrilled, her body will help grow her mind, her mind is helping to grow her body.
driving is a big responsibility for a young Pod
I’d be scared with G driving too
Once a year the Phoenix Zoo trucks in a couple tons of snow and ice to give the animals some new stimulation, as well as attract business during their slowest months. We got there at 7:30am, and it was still about 100 degrees and crowded. G liked the special waterslides and music, but otherwise was quite ho-hum about the snow. I almost wished I’d left her at home so I could have enjoyed the sights.
We found a loop of the zoo we had previously never explored, which got us away from most of the crowds. The wallaby and petting zoo were big hits.
G ran around the goat pen making sure she brushed every one, twice.
I had just about the scariest moment I’ve ever had on the roadie on Sunday. This is saying something, since earlier in the ride I was plunging down from the top of Tortilla Flat at 48mph. The week before coming back from the same ride, a catering van — oblivious to me in my hot pink shirt and cruising along in the bike lane at almost the same speed as him — started pulling in front of me while making a right turn. And practically every time I commute to work I have to avoid some jackass on their cell phone not paying attention to the bike lane or making a left turn without seeing me.
The thing about most near-miss roadie incidents is that they are not really near-misses at all. Yeah if you just rode along and obeyed the laws and expected everyone else to do the same, you’d be dead 20 times over. But I make a point of riding paranoid, expecting to be invisible, eyeballing every car that comes near me, with much more peripheral vision and stopping ability than a car. Relying on myself only, most of the time I feel pretty safe.
On a mountain bike, most of what can go wrong is pretty much in your control, and due to bad riding or risky decisions on hard terrain. Its also true on the road bike with regard to the terrain itself, and a few bumps in the road or slick spots aside, generally much safer than the mtb. I fall all the time on the Heckler, but its cause I’m riding gnar. DUH! I’ve only had one really scary near-wreck on my road bike when things were just between me and the road. I was sailing down Power Road towards the river in the high 30′s and picked up a nail. At the first indication of tire wobble, I thought maybe my fear of speed was playing tricks on me. When I realized it was getting worse and I had a genuine problem, panic didn’t have time to creep in. I reacted by staying as centered on the bike as I could while squeezing the front brake only and praying the tire would hold long enough to slow down. Only when I came to a stop did I feel nauseous.
The really close calls I’ve had on the road are almost always about someone else. During the Laveen Country Challenge in ’06 – the day before G was born – someone put their front wheel on my rear in a turn , and when I fought to hold my bike upright that dude crashed behind me and caused a pile-up. I almost got hit a lot when I commuted to Georgetown, and once in Tempe I flipped over someone’s trunk on my MTB when they were stuck in a backup and pulled into a driveway right in front of me in the bike lane. Those times I didn’t properly respect that slow drivers in heavy traffic are the most dangerous to a bike; they think since they are not moving there is no risk and don’t bother to look around. You could call my insufficient vigilance around gridlocked cars, or choosing to ride in a race, a decision to put myself in a riskier situation. And from the point of view of wanting to live, taking that responsibility on myself at all times is the right mindset.
I ride my roadie maybe 50 hrs a year, maybe another 100 commuting and around-towning. I know odds are if you ride long enough you will have a bad crash, and based on my own experiences of how I hit or nearly-hit the pavement, I can control most of the situations I put myself in. But there are bound to be some that I don’t anticipate or are completely out of my control. Like most people who ride, like most people in cars, you just don’t really think it will happen to you.
I was in the flats coming south out of the mountains and into Apache Junction, with very little road traffic, several miles beyond the “dangerous” section of Tortilla Flat full of blind s-curves and impatient boat traffic. I heard a siren behind me, and moved over as far as I could. The road had about 1.5 feet of shoulder. Normally, even with no shoulder on this road, you are so visible that the cars are forced to pass safely. I heard a high pitched whine that I knew to be a motorcycle, but I’ve never seen a moto cop on this road. It blew past me with a rider and passenger, going probably 60. The siren kept coming, and before I knew it the wall of wind pushed me further sideways as a sheriff in a big SUV screamed past in pursuit of the motorcycle. About 20 seconds later, the shoulder completely fell away leaving only the narrow 2 lanes of blacktop.
The Sheriff had passed me a few minutes earlier going the other way. Was he close to me? Did he see me? Would he have avoided me if he had? Surely he regularly patrolled that road and was used to cyclists. Was I just being paranoid? At least it would not have been a hit and run, and Beckie could have sued some deep pockets, which is better than what happens to most cyclists when they get creamed.
first attempt at actual food. still working on the dismount. Her looks of dismay are pretty funny.
I caved.
I joined Facebook.
I initially tried to view FB as a blog, since that has been my main online passion the last few years. Facebook can serve that role, if you’re a person not particularly interested in having a blog. It allows you blog-like features such as posting and connecting to other posters, streaming updates, and links, but only within the Facebook application. Comments all stay in FB and not to your blog, RSS feeds from someone’s “Notes” in FB all stay in FB, even if the Notes stream originated from an external blog. Size, presentation, and type of content are limited, customization seems restricted. Anything I can do in a web page I can do in my blog – flash, javascript, php, but FB stripped down everything to one format and one font. It does not lend itself to creating an environment by color, background, or layout. You have, as best I can tell no access to themes or CSS. It also doesn’t seem to be well-suited for writing a lot, as the editor is very simple. Perhaps these features can be customized by some of the many Facebook applications, but if you are going to that level of detail, you might as well have a blog and access to the source. These are part of what I like most about my blog, that I can create my own space that is visually and behaviorally exactly what I want. FB is simply not suited to play the role of Blog engine well. It does handle photo albums easily, and would take traffic and size off my blog, likely requiring the use of a plugin for WordPress. Whether or not that is better than a neutral 3rd-party site like Picasa will be something I will evaluate further. I quickly removed my stream from chollaball.net into my FB Wall. It might have been viewed more easily by people who don’t frequent my blog, but it was not the view I wanted them to experience.
Once I got beyond judging FB like WordPress or Blogger, I was able to evaluate it for what it does particularly well, and that of course is social networking. It took about a week to get my head wrapped around this concept, since its like email or a message board in ways that initially makes it seem redundant. Adding friends one-by-one is annoying. Not easily seeing a long history is annoying. But the way it takes these same building blocks and supercharges them is amazing. Its like having conversations with all your friends, but better. Its dynamic in the way email is not, self-selecting in the way a message board is not, and of more substance in the way twitter is not. Put them all together and it blows these single experiences away. I’ve found that in a short period of time I’ve become better friends with my existing friends who use FB, have funner and more satisfying conversations, and much more lively chatter. I’ve reconnected with several old friends, and because each of us can package our image and does not face the awkwardness of meeting up live in a finite and immediate setting, it allows you to be much more at ease. 25% of friendship is common interests, 75% is convenience and habit. Facebook allows you to focus on the 25% and make of the 75% exactly what you choose.
Aside from good conversations and chatter with people I see and talk to regularly, I’ve noticed a couple interesting uses for FB. Blog lite – for folks who want to share, but not write too much or go too crazy with a more complex program, FB is a wonderful lightweight blog. For some of my friends, its FB or silence, and I like to hear what they are saying. High School reunions – totally remove the Gross Pointe Blank weirdness, and get to view your peers as adults from a reasonable perspective. Political movements – the matching and recommendations could spread like wildfire. I heard one site bashing Dick Cheney had over 50,000 friends in a single day. Viral marketing – Lance Armstrong has combined FB with his livestrong.com site and twitter updates to tap into the incredible depth of passion and emotion that thousands of individuals have for him. Lance’s appeal defies a niche, its personal, and he uses it masterfully for his anti-cancer campaign.
On a techy level, FB is very cool in its aggressive matching system that latches onto anything about you that it can, and then constantly updates based on the patterns you match. I wish I knew more about it, and working there would be the bleeding edge in “If You Like This, You’ll Love That” algorithms. Within about 2 days, most of the people I talk to regularly by email and groups and blogs were my friends or suggested to be my friends. And so were their friends, and their friends’ friends, and here is where it gets kinda creepy. You can’t slip quietly into Facebook, as everyone who has ever been connected to you knows about it. So people you might want to just casually associate with must become your friends, or be cast into purgatory knowing full well how they got there. Gradations of friends is hardly better – its not that your info should be private, its that your access should be. I don’t really want to talk to people that I don’t normally talk to.
In some cases the lack of privacy is just plain bad. I can see all of Beckie’s friends, comments and activity. She can see mine. Relationships need privacy to be healthy.
The privacy questions get bigger and heavier when you realize that all your info…every post, every picture, every connection…is stored on Facebook’s servers. An outstanding article in the recent Wired talked about FB’s future, how they strive to be the next Google, and the privacy concerns surrounding it all. I’m not worried, exactly, but at the end of the day you always always have to remember that you are on the internet and anything you write is not longer your own. Its harder to do the more comfortable you are. Facebook lets you package yourself, best to do it smartly.
I never post about anything really, which is fine, cause i am busy and rarely seem to have the time for self-reflection that posting requires, but this topic keeps kicking around in my head so here goes.
Alana is a remarkably good baby. Not just cute, and sweet, and smiley, but good: Quiet. Sleepy. Only cries if she has a reason. Basically, low maintenance. Even the daycare staff have commented on it; everyone loves her. She has all the baby-pros and none or fewer–she still poops and barfs–of the cons. For awhile we thought, maybe she’s stupid or something, but I don’t think so…she seems to be hitting the same milestones as G, maybe even more. Jason doesn’t agree, but I think she could be smarter than G.
Example: I finally understand what all the baby toys are for. When G was a baby, if you put her in the baby gym, she laid there and cried. If you gave her a rattle, she dropped it. We put all sorts of toys on her car seat; she ignored them. The only thing that got her attention was Baby Einstein, which she watched obsessively. It was like she was too busy being pissed off to enjoy anything. Not so with Alana. She will play for long stretches with a rattle, or those millions of links that seem to just appear when you have a baby, or in her gym, grabbing at the toys and pulling and rolling around. Amazing. She entertains HERSELF. Unbelievable.
Oh yeah, and she sleeps through the night. Like ALL the way through: 8 pm-6 am. By herself. Exceptional. Genevieve STILL doesn’t do that.
I guess it’s good we had G first when we didn’t know any better. I thought all babies were like her. Explains the exasperated, exhausted look I saw on my mom’s face when I came home after leaving her to take care of a 3-month old G while I was at work one day. Some babies, apparently, sleep. Who knew.
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