Monday, September 22, 2014

18th-century people did not use so-called gender-neutral language

Pet peeve time.

If you quote an historical figure you admire, but you change the wording in order not to offend modern ears, then what you have is not a quotation but a paraphrase, and it should be labeled as such and should not be put in quotation marks.

I see this frequently where "man" is changed to "person". The most recent example is a shortened version of a quotation from Thomas Paine that's making the rounds on Facebook.

The Facebook version:

“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

Here's what Paine actually said:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

If you really admire the person, then show him or her appropriate respect and leave the original words intact.

Tuesday, September 09, 2014

Telephone Phobia

I’ve hesitated to write about this. It’s such a foolish thing — so silly, surely so easy to overcome. A recent unpleasantness connected with this phobia changed my mind. I know I’m not alone in suffering from telephone phobia, a.k.a. phone phobia, and maybe putting some thoughts about telephone phobia online will be useful.

So. Telephone phobia. What is it, and is it contagious?

As to the second question, surely not. At least, I hope not.

As to the first question, it’s a morbid, irrational fear of the telephone. If you have telephone phobia, you might be afraid of answering the phone. Perhaps you’re afraid of making phone calls. Perhaps it’s merely the sound of a ringing phone that makes your heart beat faster and fills you with dread. These are all different flavors of telephone phobia.

It’s hard to find objective information about telephone phobia. It’s considered a type of social anxiety disorder. The more general problem seems to draw more attention from the medical community, and when you search online for telephone phobia or phone phobia, you’ll instead find information about social phobia, rather than the specific problem having to do with the phone.

How common is it? If you have it, are you a rare loon? Maybe not. The only number I ran across was this one: “In 1993 it was reported that about 2.5 million people in Great Britain have telephone phobia.” (From Wikipedia.) In 1993, the population of the UK was just over 58 million, so the ones suffering from telephone phobia were about 4.3% of the population. Assuming that that percentage applies to the US today, we US telephone phobics are members of an army of over 14 million people. We are legion! We are everywhere! Beware our numbers! But please don’t call us.

Telephone phobia is crippling in a society that uses the telephone extensively. Most people would rather talk to you, whether in person or by phone, than write to you. They don’t understand the dread that fills the telephone phobic at the mere idea of making a phone call. They don’t understand his insistence on sending an e–mail instead or his tendency to ignore the need for contact in hopes that the problem will somehow resolve itself.  (It never does, of course.)

Making a phone call is such a simple and common thing for most people that they probably find the idea of this phobia incomprehensible. What’s the problem? Just pick up the phone and call. Anyone can do it!

But not everyone can do it. Telling the phobic to just do it is not that different from telling a color–blind man to simply try harder or to go ahead and distinguish between colors. Yes, color–blindness is caused by a physiological problem, whereas phobias are psychological, but to those suffering from a phobia, the difference is immaterial and the cause might as well be physical.

I think that most — or many — phobics see their phobias as silly and irrational, and they’d love to be rid of them. I know that I feel that way about my telephone phobia. But that doesn’t make it go away. You can’t wish away your phobia any more than the color-blind man can wish away his color blindness. And you can’t simply shrug and go ahead and do the thing that fills you with dread, precisely because it fills you with dread. That foolish, silly, irrational dread is as impassable a barrier as a concrete wall.

What causes telephone phobia? As I said, there’s little information about it online, whereas there’s a fair amount of information about the broader category of social phobia. Regarding the cause of the latter, I found this laughable bit on a medical site: “The exact cause of social phobia is unknown. However, doctors believe it’s a combination of environmental factors and genetics.” Well, yeah. My uneducated layman’s guess was just about exactly the same.

The cause doesn’t really matter. The color–blind man may find the medical explanation of his condition intellectually interesting, but knowing what caused it doesn’t make him any less color blind.

I can’t help speculating about my own case, though.

When I was a child, we had one phone in the house, and it was reserved for the (fairly rare) use of the adults. To me, it was a mysterious and somewhat unsettling object. In addition, I started losing my hearing before puberty. It became increasingly difficult to understand what people were saying to me — or even to realize that they were speaking to me. Later, I found it difficult to understand people on the telephone. (It’s easier to understand people in person because I unconsciously rely on lip reading, an ability that most people with poor hearing develop without realizing it.) My hearing loss has worsened over the decades since then. I now have hearing aids, and they help a lot in face–to–face conversations, they haven’t improved my ability to comprehend a voice on the phone. In fact, frequently, telephone voices are simply incomprehensible. Maybe this combination of the phone being a strange thing and my hearing problem caused my telephone phobia. Maybe it worsened it. Maybe it had nothing to do with it. There’s no way to know, but I suspect there is a connection of some sort.

The degree of dread or fear of the phone varies oddly. In the past, when I was unemployed and waiting/hoping for a call from one of the potential employers I’d applied to, I wanted the phone to ring. I was eager to answer it. We’ve had plumbing emergencies, and I’ve left a message on the plumber’s voice mail and then waited impatiently for the phone to ring. Still, even in those cases, it’s easier for me to answer a desired call than it is to actually make a necessary call.

When a telephone call is very cut and dried, such as calling the dentist’s office to make an appointment, I can do it, I can make the call — although I’d probably drive there and do it in person instead, if the dentist’s office were closer.

What about calling family members and friends? Shouldn’t that be much easier than calling the dentist? No, it’s much harder. Harder? It’s impossible, or very close to it.

The more personal the call, the harder it is to make. The more detached and impersonal, the more I can be an automaton during the call. It’s not so much that the impersonal call is easier to make than the personal one, because it’s never easy, but it is less hard.

People with phobias and people with handicaps develop coping strategies. Often, they do it unconsciously. The lip reading I mentioned above, which is very common among people with poor hearing, is an example of unconscious coping.

One of the ways I cope with telephone phobia is to put off urgent phone calls until the absolute last possible second. At that point, I have to make the call, to avoid dire repercussions. The urgency forces me to do the deed, and so I do it, albeit with racing pulse and heightened blood pressure.

I also use e–mail instead of calling, when at all possible. I’m a word guy, an essayist, a novelist. Writing is natural for me. I’ve had long, warm, revelatory e–mail relationships with people I’ve never met in person. People, needless to say, whom I would never telephone. I love the ability to edit and refine my words, to make sure that I’m saying what I really want to say. There’s no awkwardness. I’m myself. I’m open and easy and communicative. It’s real communication. It’s what telephone calls ought to be but aren’t. Telephone calls are awkward and stupid and tense and frightening and “Oh, God, this is awful, have I done my duty yet, can I hang up now?” E–mail lets me carry on meaty conversations that I could never manage on the phone and would have great trouble with in person.  After all, it’s not the people I’m anxious to avoid; rather, it’s the very act of using the telephone.

I said that people with phobias develop coping strategies to deal with them. Coping strategies are a way to negotiate society despite being handicapped by the phobia. But coping strategies offer more than a way to get by in a society that’s built for people without those phobias. They are also a way to disguise the phobias. No, more than that: the coping strategies are a way to hide the existence of the phobias, to keep other people from realizing that you have them.

Let me revert to the analogy of hearing loss. People like me, who have trouble hearing and understanding what others are saying, learn to smile and nod in a hopefully non–committal way so that the people who are talking to us will think we understood them. It’s a silly tactic, and it results in misunderstanding and miscommunication, but we hard–of–hearing types tend to think that It’s better than constantly asking other people to repeat themselves. In much the same way, people with phobias learn to seem not to have them, to be just like everyone else. We don’t want others to realize that we’re hampered — crippled — by our psychological shackles. We don’t want others to know that those shackles exist. Most of the time, we may cope fairly well. Every now and then, we don’t cope at all.

The recent unpleasantness I mentioned at the beginning was a case of not coping. it made me realize that it’s time to, as you might say, come out of the closet.

I’m lucky. My wife, Leonore, is extraordinarily understanding and supportive. She hadn’t known about this phobia of mine (see how good my coping strategies are?), but she was completely sympathetic once I told her. Others are not that lucky. People with phobias can’t count on support from their nearest and dearest — not to mention strangers.

it’s a different matter if you have a visible physical handicap. If your problem is physical and visible, society is at least somewhat willing to accommodate you. (Although even then, inevitably, callous jerks abound.) Phobias are invisible, however. And they tend to be odd, weird, bizarre, incomprehensible. People without them often think that phobias are an affectation. They think you’re pretending.

I think that’s why it’s so important to talk about them. The world needs to be educated about them. Also, people with phobias need to assert themselves. For their own sake, they need to learn to be unapologetic and forthright.

Now, they don’t need to be proud. For God’s sake, let’s not have a wave of Phobia Pride. Who can be proud of being afraid of the telephone?

What we can do, what we should do, is to tell the world, and especially those closest to us, that this is who we are. Our weird flaws and handicaps are part of us. Accept us and love us as we are, or fuck off.

Wasn’t that empowering?

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Slit

My newest book is a horror novella called Slit. It's filled with gore and kinky sex and a nice seasoning of humor.

But it's not all like that. There are whole paragraphs that are entirely normal. I should have used that for the blurb: "Contains some paragraphs that are quite normal."

http://www.dvorkin.com/slit/

Monday, May 19, 2014

David’s Liberation Day #5

On May 19, 2009, along with a lot of other people, I was laid off from Quark. That was my best-paid job to date, and it would turn out to be my last full-time job.

I was 65, working in a field (IT) that has always been notorious for age discrimination, and it was during the Great Recession, a.k.a. Yet Another Grim Republican Recession, a.k.a. Please Save Us Again, Democratic Party.

Now, I’ve been laid off many times over the decades. (See my essay The Day Job.) This included times when I was in my forties, fifties, and even very early sixties. For various reasons, including a lot of luck, I was able to find a new job each time. I knew — or at least strongly suspected — that it would be different this time. 65 is old in any industry; in IT it’s, like, Egyptian mummy, dude. Even if the economy had been booming, I would have been unlikely to find a new IT job.

I set about looking for a new job, nonetheless, using the methods that had worked for me in the past. (Which you can read all about in my short book The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed.) I also looked for whatever contract work I could find, to provide income in the meantime, and just in case “in the meantime” turned out to be a long time.

I picked up a few tech writing and Web development contracts, but it became increasingly clear that the chances of my getting another full-time job were zilch. At some point, I basically stopped looking for full-time work and focused on contracts.

I also applied for Social Security. This was shortly before my 66th birthday. 66 was the age at which I would be eligible for maximum SS benefits, so applying before that meant that I would be getting a slightly reduced monthly amount for the rest of my life. We didn’t see a choice, though.

In fact, my original plan was to work till age 70, because SS gives you a “bonus” for every year you work past the maximum-benefits age, up to 70. If I had kept working till 70, my monthly SS check would have been more than a third greater than it is. Having just hit 70, I can now see the basic flaw in my original plan: Had I tried to keep working full time for another five years, I would have gone totally bonkers.

For the first few years after that last layoff, Leonore and I felt sad and tense every time the May 19 anniversary came around. Then Leonore suggested that we try to see the date as marking my freedom from full-time work. Except for worrying about money and the future — and that wasn’t really something new — we were really enjoying the ability to spend so much time together and being free from the tyranny of the alarm clock. She suggested observing May 19 as David’s Liberation Day.

And so we did, and so we do, and it has become a happy day, indeed.

Giving the day that name has been important. It did change my attitude, just as Leonore hoped. It marked some kind of mental transition from “fearful out-of-work guy looking desperately for a job” to “happy, free, relaxed guy who does the occasional contract because the extra money is welcome, but he’s entirely his own boss”.

As it happened, during the last five years, I also liberated myself from the traditional publishing industry and switched entirely to self-publishing. It’s true that the traditional publishing industry had liberated itself from me. I had become as appealing to editors and agents as I was to software companies. However, just as with IT work, I had stopped pursuing them. I was no longer sending out query letters, just as I was no longer sending out resumes. When I finish with this blog post, I’ll return to my current novel in progress knowing that once it’s in final form, it will be published. By me. Just thinking about that makes me happy. I feel as light as air.

David’s Liberation Day, indeed!

Saturday, April 12, 2014

Dogs and ham

One of Leonore's language students brings her incredibly cute little dog with her. The dog makes a beeline for me because I always greet her with a treat — a rolled up smoked mozzarella and proscuitto delight from Costco. What dog wouldn't like that?

Well, maybe a Moslem or Jewish dog. But dogs are considered unclean by Moslems, so maybe there are no Moslem dogs. There are certainly Jewish ones (leaving aside the whole circumcision thing).

An old insult for Jews in Medieval England — or at least, in historical novels — was "dog of a Jew". I guess a Jewish dog would be a Jew of a dog.

Today's rambling thoughts brought to you by Working on Taxes, 2014 edition.

Friday, April 04, 2014

MPAD Memoirs

Which would be a nifty title, but I don't know what the title will be.

MPAD = Mission Planning and Analysis Division, simply the utterly most important and core part of what was then NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed Johnson Space Center) in (south of) Houston. (Others who worked there, but not in MPAD, might disagree.) (They'd be wrong.)

Recently, a former MPAD coworker of mine from the days of the Apollo Project contacted me to say he was interviewing people who worked at MPAD at the time of the moon landings. He's my age and also retired, and he drives around the country quite a bit. He arranges his trips so that he can drive through the cities his old colleagues (and we are all old!) now live in and interview them. Once all the interviews are done, he'll figure out how to weave them together with the story of Apollo. The result will be a fairly substantial book.

He was in Denver yesterday, and we had a very nice and quite long meeting. Mostly, he was interviewing me about my life before, during, and after Apollo, but we also spent some of the time talking about the other people who were in MPAD back then. He'll probably want me produce the e-book and print versions of the book and design the cover.

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

It’s not the Christian Bible, damn it

It's silly of me to be annoyed by this, given that I'm an atheist. Nonetheless it annoys me considerably.

Thanks to the Noah movie and to today's date*, there has been a spurt of references to the Bible in the online places I frequent. I keep seeing the Flood and Psalms, both in the Old Testament, referred to as being in the Christian Bible.

No, sirree. They're in the Old Testament, a.k.a. the Hebrew Bible.** The fact that Christians have incorporated the OT into their religion is irrelevant. Moslems have incorporated much of the OT and the NT into their religion, too, but that doesn't make those two books part of the Koran.***

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* I'm referring, of course, to the obnoxious "joke" that today is atheism's holiday because "The fool has said in his heart, there is no God."

** Yeah, yeah, I know, Pentateuch. As far as I'm concerned, the whole shebang counts.

*** Maybe it does to Moslems, who I gather consider the OT prophets and Jesus to be Moslems, but that's just weird, and I haven't encountered any Moslems in the online places I was referring to.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Continuum’s Height Problem

I like the TV show Continuum and its twisty time-travel switcheroos. I'm always a sucker for those, in any show. I wonder how the various mysteries will be resolved, assuming they are all resolved when the show finishes its run. But the one mystery that I find annoying rather than intriguing is Alec Sadler's height.

In the present, he's about 20 years old. He's shorter than almost everyone else, including Kiera. In scenes set in the future, he's in his mid-eighties. Unless future medicine has solved the problem of people getting shorter in old age, he would have lost some height since his max height. But he still towers over almost everyone, including Kiera. Maybe growth spurts happen after 20, but they must be rare.

There are other time travelers, besides Kiera, and none of them seems unusually tall or short compared to people of today or the future. So unless travel itself does something weird to people's heights, Alec's height is a msytery.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Thor Didn’t Thunder, and Oblivion Should Not Have Been Consigned to Oblivion

I keep a lookout for the cable appearances of big-budget sf/f/h movies that I skipped in the theaters. Then I record them to watch while exercising.

After watching such a recording, I sometimes regret that I didn't see it on the big screen, but more often I'm glad that I saved the money and time. I can’t say what effect watching a movie while grappling with a heavy weight has on my judgment, but presumably if it does induce a bias, the bias is the same for all of the movies I watch while exercising.

Recently, I watched Thor and Oblivion this way. Because of how the two performed in theaters, I assumed I’d like Thor and would not like Oblivion. It was the other way around.

Thor’s big budget shows. The sets are lavish (but at the same time absurd and laughable in the Asgard scenes) and the CGI is impressive. But the action scenes are murky, and it’s hard to see what’s supposed to be happening. The scenes begin as set pieces, then there’s some stylized movement and much blurred stuff, followed by a set-piece resolution. The acting is adequate, but the dialog ranges from dull to silly to — in the Asgard scenes — embarrassing. There’s little to the movie. It’s better looking and acted than the awful imitation that appeared on the SyFy Channel but just as empty and aimed at the same pubescent audience. Thor’s box-office success is depressing and disappointing.

Oblivion is a very different matter. It also had a big budget, but that budget was put to better use. The CGI is excellent (albeit with one brief exception) and the sets are completely believable. The acting is quite good, and that includes Tom Cruise, who for decades now has been in the unfortunate and puzzling position of having to keep proving his acting ability. One big problem with the movie is the idea that clones, despite being complete human beings with the normal human range of emotions and needs, are interchangeable when it comes to love. The other problem is that the story line is a combination of a number of stale, old science fiction plots instead of something original. But they have been sewn together competently, and the result is entertaining and believable. I imagine that for audience members who haven’t read much sf, it all seems brilliantly original. The movie deserved much better treatment at the box office, and it certainly should have been a far greater success than Thor.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Blogging about Atheism & Reading about Atheism: The Atheist Blogroll

I started this blog in September 2006.

At the time, I planned to use it write about my writing. In part, I thought it would act as a spur to make me write more because I’d be reporting on my writing progress and I’d be embarrassed to have to report how little I had written. Hence the title and the quote from Trollope at the top. That doesn’t seem to have worked too well. If it had, I’d have written quite a few more books in the last seven and a fraction years than I have.

On the other hand, I came to see the blog as a convenient place to express my opinions about all sorts of things — books, politics, movies, petty annoyances, major annoyances, etc. Of those, the posts that seem to get the most attention are the negative reviews of popular movies. Here I am, trying to set the world right with my insights and wisdom, and the strongest responses I get are hostile ones from people who call me names for trashing a movie they loved. It has been a source of great joy to me. I must make an effort to see more bad popular movies.

But that’s all beside the point.

One topic I don’t blog about (not often, maybe not ever) is atheism or the related topics of religious belief and church-state separation. That’s odd, because atheism has been an extremely important part of my life, and I have strong opinions on separation, strong enough to be offensive to some of my fellow atheists. For example, an essay of mine titled Should Atheists Celebrate Christmas? has earned me more hostile responses from atheists than from theists. (Probably because it’s not so much an attack on the silliness of Christmas as it is upon the silliness of atheists who celebrate it.)

That’s not to say I don’t read atheist blogs. When such blogs started appearing, years ago, I began following them eagerly. The number of such blogs has exploded in recent years, and I haven’t been able to keep up. I still follow the ones I became aware of early on, but I can only sample the others from time to time. Other than following links from blogs, how is one to find the pool to dip into?

A brave blogger named Mojoey has taken up the task. He maintains a blog called The Atheist Blogroll. He vets the blogs he includes, and he removes inactive ones. (This blog, A Blister to My Eye, is now included in his blogroll.) I expect to use his blogroll to discover good blogs to follow. Just not too many, I hope.

I do plan to blog more about atheism, religion, separation, and related topics in the future.

Partly, this is because they are more on my mind than ever as Leonore and I spend more time working on our book about our atheism, which we hope to have done and published before the end of 2014.

Partly it’s because those topics are never far from my mind, no matter what book I’m writing, and I have strong opinions on those topics, and this is my blog, and it’s where I express those strong opinions in strong terms.

I just remembered reading that there will be a flood of big-budget religious movies coming out this year, including one about the Flood. I wasn’t planning to see any of them, but now I think I will — not because I’ll like them, but because I’ll hate them, and it will be a fine opportunity to combine blog posts slamming religion and bad popular movies at one and the same time.

The comments should be fun.