Goals for the Summer

Because sometimes you need a list.

1) Maintain 4.0 GPA for summer semester.

2) Clean carburetor.

3) Learn Irish.

4) Learn to read music and play the tin whistle.

5) Keep dancing.

6) Clean your damn apartment more often.

7) See more friends.

8) Spend time out of town.

9) Organize photo library.

10) There is no number ten.

The song is called "Onion"

I performed at the 13th Annual Swinger's Ball in Willow Springs. This was last Saturday, the 27th of March. You probably weren't there, so here's the video. In the beginning, I am in the front, third couple from the left. Then I'm in the back line. Shortly after, I'm right in the middle. 

If a better video surfaces, I'll link it here.

Video!

Cemetery Blues

I was walking home from class last night when I passed the cemetery. You know the one, it starts at Lawrence and Clark and goes north about a block. I don't usually walk home, but it was a nice night and so I found myself there.

I immediately thought of dead people, as one does. A cemetery is basically a big public housing project for dead people. In the dirty corner next to the McDonalds wrappers are the small unobtrusive headstones, cramped and cold. Looking towards the east the monuments rise high and gaudy, gentrification having pushed out those less prestigious corpses.

Then it all got personal. I am going to die. I am going to be in a box in the ground. I am not going to be able to do anything. Or think anything. Box. Ground. Dead. These are thoughts which often terrify me if I let them. They are the reason I engage in work like Fear, to confront and accept the eventuality of death. But last night, I chose not to let them. I was flying high after having aced a chemistry test, and having seen the sun in the sky for the first time in what seemed like years. In this particular mood I wasn't worried about trivial things like money, or mortality. I was optimistic. I will finish school, and become a nurse. I will help people. I will get the perfect motorcycle, and ride it into the west. I will spend part of my life in another country. I will have a house with a garden and a blue shed. I will make this experience as fulfilling as possible for myself and for those around me.

And then I started thinking about religion, as I often do. I was raised in a religious family, but now I'm finding my own way in a godless universe. I know I have a limited amount of time to make good on the promises listed above. What changes about your perspective if you think you'll live forever? Probably depends on which believer you ask. Regardless, I do think there are some similarities between worldviews that are worth considering.

Take broken-ness, for example. The state of being imperfect. A huge part of Christianity is acknowledging moral imperfection as a result of our sinful nature. Taken too far, this can turn into debilitating guilt of Catholic proportions. But a little guilt is a good thing, for believers and atheists alike. Mistakes are useful. Note them, make sure not to make them twice. Proceed onward. I agree that no one is perfect. There is no such thing as perfect. We are all doing our best in a universe that cares not a whit for us. Falling down is to be expected. The key is to get up, call a friend, and go laugh about something.

Every Schoolboy Knows

So, it's odd being back in school. Odd but also familiar, because all the little school things you'd forgotten about come back in a rush. The desks are too small, there's too much light, and everyone looks vaguely dissatisfied. Which is not to say I don't like it. I enjoy learning new things, especially when those things are quantifiable, observable, and indepedently verifiable. I also enjoy the way you meet new people. The desperate scrambling because omigod-let-me-find-someone-not-dumb-or-we'll-never-get-these-equations-balanced. It's a glorious panic.

And then there are the teachers. The semester so far has renewed my belief that teachers are some of the strangest people on earth. (And I hang out with theater geeks!) My chemistry professor is my best example so far. She's an older woman, mid 40s. Russian. She likes to run her hand through her hair, and it gives the impression that the whites in her salt-and-peppery mix are in fact just coated with chalk, indelible after all these years spent at the blackboard. Her accent is stereotypically Russian, complete with "wegetables", but her Os are decidedly British. This makes listening to her read chemical reactions a real treat, because most of them contain oxygen. She has this cadence when she speaks; it's initially calm and collected, but when she arrives at the point she considers most important she will turn from the chalkboard and finish her thought in a manner that approaches violence. As if knowing where to put the coefficient is a matter of LIFE and DEATH. It's strangely effective.

The biology professor is less... emotionally volatile. Which is good, beacause there's a lot more to cover in that class. And we only meet once a week. I found out last Saturday that the one week of class I have to miss is a test week. I also found out that she drops the lowest of our five test scores. So I have my work cut out for me there. The classroom is nicer - it's very new media, with three projectors and computers at every table. The lighting is softer and warmer. It feels safe. The class is going to be a significant amount of work, but I'm a biology geek, so I can handle it. We started on Saturday by reviewing the scientific method and experimental design. Which stands in stark contrast to my psychology class. That's another post entirely.

Not As Random As You Might Think

Let's call that month of no-blogging a holiday break. You cool with that? Good.

Now it's 2010 and we're done with the ohs, or the oughts, or whatever you want to call them. I'm fine with that. They were okay, the double-ohs, but there are better things on the horizon. I'm going to back school. I'm dancing more. I'm visiting Ireland. It's my birthday, and the sun is actually shining, having briefly broken though from whatever alternate dimension it visits during Chicago winter. So take that, universe. You have NOTHING on me today.

Now, back in September, I promised a follow-up post to the Origin of Species debacle. You'll recall the salient points - the creationist duo Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort were planning to release an anniversary edition of Darwin's famous manuscript, complete with a Comfort-penned introduction which attempts to refute the theory of evolution. I know, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. However, in the invening time, a number of people have done admirable jobs of pointing out the ignorance, intelluctual laziness, and plagiarism in the introduction, so I won't be refuting the whole thing here. Instead, I'll use the rest of this post to clear up a few misconceptions about evolution. It is a counter-intuitive theory, which helps to explain some of the widespread resistance to it in American culture.

Misconception #1: Evolution is a process of mindless chance which produces complexity.

This is an objection I see raised all the time by critics of evolution, and that's unfortunate, because it's one of the most easily understood concepts in the theory. It is beyond my understanding how Ray Comfort can fail to get this. The key to dissolving this misconception lies in a simple statement: Evolution contains both random and non-random elements, and those elements work together to produce complexity. Or as Richard Dawkins puts it, "Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators."

The 'replicators' Dawkins refers to are organisms, or more specifically their genes. Genes are the things that make us what we are. They tell certain cells to become an arm, certain cells to become a liver, etc. Genes can change randomly through mutation. When DNA (the code in which genes are written) replicates, errors can occur. Certain genes (or parts of genes) may be deleted, cloned, or rearranged. These random changes (mutations) provide the raw material of evolution. But now we come to the important part: non-random survival. Our genetic code is not allowed to mutate at random and go its merry little way. Instead, deleterious (bad) mutations are culled from the population because the organisms that harbor them are less successful at reproducing. Nature, having no conscious plan, is selecting for survival those organisms better able to operate and reproduce within their environment. Hence, natural selection.

Misconception #2: "There are no transitional species!" or "We still haven't found the missing link."

Many creationists harp on this phrase to such an extent that it takes on an air of "the creationist doth protest too much", but I think this particular objection raises certain important points about how we think about history and classification. Here are the important points to conceptualize:

First, fossilization is difficult. Only certain parts of animals fossilize, and only under certain conditions. We find many more fossils of sea-dwelling creatures than we do of land-dwelling creatures, for precisely that reason. Also, searching for fossils is expensive and time consuming, and rarely yields the whole-skeleton fossil that is so hoped for.

However, given the difficulty of fossilization, we do have many examples of transitional fossils. Tiktaalik was a lobe-finned fish, but had certain features in common with four-legged animals. Archaeopteryx was a feathered dinosaur extremely important in helping us understand the origin of birds. (Birds, as it happens, are all descended from the dinosaurs.)

When people talk about the 'missing link', they are really talking about wanting to find a transitional fossil that is a direct ancestor of modern humans. Despite the fact that we have found many of these, people have a tendency to see modern humans as somehow special, or different. This is a reflection of our anthropocentric nature and our failure to see our true place among a long line of transitional species.

I think that's enough for now. I'm taking a biology course this semster, so I'm sure I'll have more to share once that gets started. For now, good night and good luck.

Excuse Me, But I Think Your Bias Is Showing

I ran across two things on the internet today that seemed to resonate, and sent my train of thought on a cross-country haul. So I'll re-trace the journey here.

Thing the first: This blog entry by one James Chartrand. The funny thing about James is that he's a woman. "James" is a pen name, an identity the writer assumed when she found she wasn't getting the work she wanted as a freelance writer. In this entry, James outs herself and explains the reasoning behind her decisions.

Thing the second: This NPR broadcast which features a study by Emily Sands, in which "surprising" gender biases are revealed in the theater community. Surprising is in scare quotes there because I'm not sure how surprising it actually is.

If you live on the planet Earth, you have had to think about gender bias. If you are a woman, you have had to think about it frequently. If you are a woman trying to succeed in male-dominated industry, you would probably give your firstborn in exchange for not having to think about it. So in some ways, a story like James' is not surprising. People do have biases, and they are in some ways unavoidable. Does it suck that one has to hide their identity in order to get more money for the same work? Yes, yes it does. But I'm not really sure what to do about it.

The premise of the study by Emily Sands was to send out identical script samples to male and female artistic directors throughout the country, with some scripts having a male playwright listed as the author, and others having a female playwright. (The samples were in fact written by Pulitzer Prize-winning Lynn Nottage.) But here's the interesting part: while all artistic directors rated the script's quality equally well, the females gave it lower marks on the sections that asked about how well the script would be received by the theater community. One is made to wonder whether the female artistic directors have less faith in women playwrights, or whether they are simply being more realistic about the chances that the work has. They, having faced the monster of gender bias, know full well that the script with the female author has less of a chance to be produced. To what extent these artistic directors are creating a self-fulling feedback cycle was not addressed in the study. I'd also be curious to know what sort of theaters were asked to rate these scripts. Does the bias change when the sample set is just major regional theaters? Do small groups like the Neo-Futurists have a similar bias?

After reading both of these articles, I began thinking also about how they relate to ethnic bias. I recall vividly certain blog entries from a playwright friend of mine who has had trouble finding the elusive "stable day job." Having a foreign name, he must constantly wonder if his reusme is being sent straight to the circular file because of ethnic bias. Would he get more responses if his name were Bill, or Sam? Would he feel awful sending out resumes with a false "nickname"? Would interviewers feel tricked when he showed up with a decidedly brown face? Possibly.

I do feel that ethnic bias is perhaps a more complicated beast than gender bias. It taps into the kind of in-group/out-group thinking that was a survival necessity for our recently evolutionary ancestors. When we consider working with someone, we want to be sure we can communicate with them, joke with them, that they have a similar work ethic, cultural values, etc. These are the things that are hard to put on a resume. Perhaps in the future we'll all have video resumes so that employers can put a face to a name and get a sense of personality. But that's a minefield all its own.

In The Pines

I walk off the bus from Detroit directly into the midst of Chicago winter. It's not what I'm expecting, to tell the truth. When I left town it was still coat-and-hat weather. This temperature, on the other hand, requires the full breadth of winter accouterments. But I haven't packed those. So I shoulder up my burdens, trusting the strain of walking to keep me warm, and stride headlong into the wind whipping down Canal Street.

As I move south tiny snowflakes begin to fall and I think of whiskey and fireplaces, and my current demonstrable lack of both those things. Whiskey and fireplaces feel like home. My apartment does not feel like home, it feels familiar. Which is not at all the same. Eventually I make it to the train and there is the picking-up and putting-down of bags that always accompanies travel through public transit systems. And there is the waiting, and the avoidance of grifters and homeless and con-men and guitar players. But parking tickets are too expensive, among the many other reasons.

My key turns in the lock, click. The bags go on the brown thing. The mail goes on the desk. The clock says it is too late to be awake when you have to go to work tomorrow. Here it is, me and the cats, same old life. I sometimes cannot believe I have been here three and a half years. Other times I very much can, and it makes me want to rip things apart. But. Keep calm and carry on.