And, O parents new and old, here is how to interpret the sometimes confusing behavior of observers around you who tell you (or make it obvious) that you are too strict or too lenient:

• when you do something which unavoidably and disturbingly provokes a memory of what their parents did, then you are being too strict

• if your kid does something they didn't get to do, then you are being too lenient!
  

Note that being a parent in no way makes you immune to this. As soon as you are with other people and their kids, yup, like clockwork every five minutes: too strict! too lenient! too strict! too lenient!

• Part six of True Names, read by Cory


• Part seven of True Names, read by me


• Part eight, the conclusion of True Names, read by Cory


• "The Ant King: a california fairy tale" at PodCastle

(Previous True Names episodes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Not being a beer guy, I don't know what this means.

Anyway, Meghan writes in part

So: how do you all develop habits? I need some advice. Is it something you even focus on? Or do you think it's another tool of our time maximizing, hyperproductivity capitalist society? Sometimes I think this -- "productivity" blogs scare the crap out of me, for one. But you need a shitload of discipline, it seems, to live outside the confines of dayjobs, frozen dinners, and the like.

To which I say:

Oh I am totally all about this, as you have probably heard me rant on about. Left to my own devices I am an utterly unstructured sprawl of procrastination and distractable randomness. Only by an enormous bricolage of tricks do I manage to get anything done, and it's still pretty sad the amount of time I waste.

Everyone's suggestions are excellent -- self-forgiveness, doing things in company, applying the leverage of peer pressure to yourself, rewards, metrics, etc.

I don't even try to write, or at least not to first draft, if there are any distractions around -- i.e. if I have internet access or am near undone housework. This is pretty extreme, as it means that I pretty much ONLY write in coffee shops with my non-wireless-enabled Dana or paper (I am the anti-Scalzi).

But I find that if I try to mix things together, that I always have the secret ambition to write, so that anything else I do (housework, playing with the kids, talking to Esther after the kids are in bed, reading) turns into non-writing as opposed to nourishing my soul, and I don't make explicit time for writing that will really happen, and so I am in a perpetual state of should-be-writing-now-but-something-has-come-up and I become crazy frustrated & depressed. Whereas if I have to get to the coffee shop, it means that I am not kidding myself the rest of the time, I can relax and enjoy life, and that I am forced to make the effort of actually building no-kids no-chores no-surfing no-interruptions writing time into my week.

I also know that I won't exercise on my own -- or not more than an every few months occasional "lookit me I actually went to the gym!" This is why playing a team sport is such a huge win. Even though I am small, slow, and started rugby late, and so I look like a thirty-eight-year-old loser creaking and groaning around the field on the second string team with a bunch of eighteen-year-olds so limber they don't need to warm up or stretch, it is totally worth it because I am not constantly fighting my own resistance, but can just go with the herd. Not wanting to let the side down on game day is a much more powerful motivation for me than wanting to stave off heart disease or reduce stress or whatever; however irrational that may be, it's a fact I've come to accept.

I think an inordinate amount about where I park my bike, where I put my wallet, what I keep on what shelf; I am reluctant ever to do things out of order willy-nilly; evalaute changes in routine carefully, and when I come up with some new optimization (like folding up large plastic bags in a pocket of my man-purse so I will actually have them along and avoid buying the 30-cent ones they sell at the supermarket here, or making four pizza doughs at once and storing them in the freezer) I am inordinately happy.

This sounds like my life is one of smooth routine due to natural obsessive-compulsiveness, but in fact it is the opposite, this is all totally unnatural for me, learned with great difficulty, and in fact my life is one of pockets of well-functioning routine sparsely interspersed in a chaos of staying up too late to finish things, forgetting appointments, losing crap, and being caught up in hour-long distractions (often conversations, whether with my kids or in blogland) and forgetting what I was supposed to be doing. You may not be nearly as ADHD-presenting as I, of course. :-)

About your move to NYC, Meghan: I find that on the one hand, every move or even vacation tends to throw my systems into disarray and that it's a big mistake to underestimate the cost -- it takes months, after a move, to get back to a functioning routine -- but that there's also an upside to this, which is that since you have to build everything from scratch, the net cost to implement drastic changes is zero. So moves are a great time to reinvent your life, putting in place new systems you would never have gotten around to in the old life because it would have been way too much work for only a modest change. But many such small changes, implemented when you have to set up again anyway, can together mean a big improvement. So every time we move between continents, my life is chaos for a few months, but in many ways it ends up vastly improved.

Basically my mantra is to set things up so that what is predictable, and the path of least resistance, is the thing I want to have happen. As opposed to counting on any internal willpower or consistency or perspective to be present in me, because generally it won't be.

The question of whether all this is a tool of our time maximizing, hyperproductivity capitalist society is an excellent one. I think to some extent it can feed into or trigger that mentality. But on the other hand, many tools, pace Audre Lorde, can be used agnostic of their origins.

So that a lot of what I focus on, such as minimizing day-job hours so I have more time to have pillow fights and do pretend kung-fu parkour moves across the neighborhood's flower garden, envision "productivity" in a radically different way than standard-issue capitalist culture might enjoin. The idea, after all, is not to produce: the idea is to be; any results you may obtain are secondary to who you get to be. Repurposing productivity tools as being tools often requires lifting them from the contexts they are presented in.

One thing related to that: there are many sub-agencies in my consciousness. Some want to lie on the couch. Some want to write fiction for the fun of it, others in order to be praised. Some want to go hang out with friends. Others want to be left the fsck alone. My task, I have found, is not to impose the will of the more "good, productive, noble" ones on the slacker ones, but rather to broker a compromise so that they are not constantly sabotaging each other. I find this actually increases even traditionally-measured productivity. If I try to only ever write, I find myself cheating on writing time in order to read and play. If I make it my goal to have time to write, to read, and to play, the agencies tend to respect each other much more.

The Song

Me: Noah, do you like the song?

Noah: Yeah!

Me: Which is your favorite part?

Noah: The one where it says "Christmas". [Later:] I love the wild part.

America's Most and Least Wanted Paintings

Me: Noah, do you like this one or this one better?

Noah: the first one.

Me: Why?

Noah: Because it looks more like it has goats and trees and stuff.

France's Most and Least Wanted Paintings

Me: Noah, do you like this one or this one better?

Noah: the second one.

Me: Why?

Noah: (Pointing to the abstract Christ figure and waving hand) because of this "djlbjlbjjgbllblg"...

Me: Can you elaborate on that?

Noah: Yeah!

Me: Go ahead.

Noah: I don't know what elaborate means.

Me: Well, what does it make you think of?

Noah: A dinosaur.

Holland's Most and Least Wanted Paintings:

Me: Noah, do you like this one or this one better?

Noah: the second one.

Me: Why?

Noah: Because it looks like a pig standing on the table.

Italy's Most and Least Wanted Paintings:

Me: Noah, do you like this one or this one better?

Noah: the second one.

Me: Why?

Noah: Because it's so scary and I like things that are scary.

(Since I'm working -- desultorily, at present -- on a sequel to Droplet, I've been thinking about the story a lot, and have come to the conclusion that the way gender is handled in it is all wrong, for the world of the novel, at least. But anyway...)

In the same context I came across the Dykes To Watch Out For Test, which is both broader and more basic in focus, and more stringent.

So I decided to do an analysis of all the stories I've written according to these criteria. The results of the Frank Miller investigation were not too shocking; other than in Droplet, I don't think I've written about any sex workers at all (one almost wonders if there should be another test designed to address the invisibility of, rather than the obsession with, sex work?)

But the Dykes To Watch Out For test results were, intitially, quite shocking. The pull to have men do the talking, the relating, the acting ... or, if a woman is present, to have her be an exceptional exemplar seen primarily in relation to men... is not only strong but invisibly strong, because in casually wondering about my oeuvre, I figured most of my stories would pass -- but that was because, in the context of that particular train of thought, I was thinking naturally of stories that concerned gender -- the other stories that were "just about stuff", and therefore were almost exclusively full of male characters, just as "naturally" were off my radar.

On the other hand, I realized I have a lot of stories that have very few characters or little dialogue -- some, like the Other Cities, The Orange, On the cliff by the river, and The White City, have effectively no dialogue -- so that the Dykes To Watch Out For Test isn't really all that applicable. It's designed for movies, after all -- very few movies have zero dialogue, or only two characters. To deal with this disparity in a statistically honest fashion, I added two other tests: the "inverse-DTWOF" test (two men talk about something other than a woman) and the "a man and a woman talk to each other (about anything)" test.

This allows me to break the bibilography into four categories: Low Dialogue and Heteromemetic stories, in which either no one talks, or it's just a man and a woman talking to each other; Androcentric stories in which boys talk, and girls are largely peripheral; Gynocentric stories which are the reverse; and Ambicentric stories in which there are communications within and between genders.

While the initial breakdown of eight androcentric stories compared to seven gyno- and ambicentric stories doesn't look so bad, it's actually somewhat worse than that. There aren't any stories where only female characters appear -- the closest is The Valley of Giants, in which the various male characters are unnamed and get no dialogue -- while there are plenty with essentially no women onstage (Embracing-the-New, The King of the Djinn), or with just one woman present, who is invariably in a romantic relationship with one of the (speaking) male characters (The Duck, The Book of Jahsar, The Death Trap of Dr. Nefario, The Blow, Falling); or else where there are several female characters who, however, are really foils, objects of desire, or antagonists for the men -- but don't talk to each other (Biographical Notes..., Red Leather Tassels, The Ant King unless Corpse is female). "True Names" I have generously classed as ambicentric just because the gender system is so weird, but, in fact, if you ignore the pronouns and consider filters (the more disadvantaged of the two genders to which most of the characters belong) as the "females", you're forced to note that two filters never really have a conversation which does not involve a strategy.

The number of actual conversations between adult human women in my oeuvre is shockingly limited... Shar and Narra, the radical grandmothers in Valley of the Giants, the Dashwoods... and Abby and Suze in Start the Clock, if you're willing to consider them adults.

Of course, longer stories are naturally going to have more chances for interaction among all their characters than shorter ones, a progression which is obvious in the chart.

(Anyone else want to subject your stories to the same analysis? We could make a meme of it... :-) )

(In case you missed parts one, two, and three, there they are.)

Update: Annoyingly, you have to have a LiveJournal account to fill out the poll. Anyone know how to fix that?

"No," Noah said, "we are Sephardi because we say Shabbat instead of Shabbos."

"Wow," I said, "I can't believe you remembered that from when we talked about it! But actually we are Ashkenazi because our ancestors were Ashkenazi, even though we speak Hebrew with a Sephardi or Mizrachi accent because most Jews switched to that after Israel turned into a country again..."

Noah frowned. I drew a map.

Just in case you wonder what Noah and I are doing all day.

(Also, we cleaned the house! I am ahead of Esther on the chore list, and only 170 or so behind Aviva.)

Let me know what you think.

Ben: Really? ...what was it like in heaven?

Noah: I forgot.

This story came out of a conversation at the Hugo Loser's party at Worldcon 2002 -- the part about "the second law of thermodynamics as the ultimate party-spoiler in a transhuman utopia of self-spawning consciousness"; it acquired shades of Jane Austen, Voltaire, megamillion year ideological warfare, gender theory, coming-of-age story, and musical theater along the way.

We've pretty much been working on it for the past six years. It's been a delight to work on, and it's surprisingly exciting to have it done and ready for readers -- or first, in this case, listeners.

See, Cory, inexhaustible font of energy that he is (for those who don't know Cory and who think of me as energetic, talkative, and full of enthusiasm for various projects -- Cory is me cubed; he makes me look like a laconic hermit), has declared that we are podcasting it.

And so we are! I just have to hunt down a decent microphone so I can record the next installment....

(It's also under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license -- so feel free to reproduce, remix, and create your own Alonzo My Love! tchotchkes).

	the old atheism	"The New Atheism"
Atheism seen as	Daring and original hypothesis	Obvious; mere sanity
Religion regarded as	Conventional, uninspired, faulty thinking	Pernicious insanity
Religious tolerance considered	Vital	Foolhardy and toxic
Basic emotional orientation	Enthusiasm, rigor and curiosity	Certainty and contempt
Apparent epistemological motivation	Earnest attempt to understand the universe	Fear of the other, agenda of political change

I'm just sayin'.

(On a personal note: if the shoe does not fit, do not attempt to squeeze it onto your foot. I would put my favorite atheists and evangelicals in the left hand column; it's the Dawkinsite smugness that gets to me, not any particular metaphysical contention.)

(Update: My case is probably weakest for putting G. B. Shaw in the left hand column... but his comments suggest at least a bit of, I don't know, decorum...) ]]> 2008-03-04T00:12:09Z 2008-03-04T01:12:09+01:00 tag:www.benjaminrosenbaum.com,2008:/blog//1.607 2008-03-04T00:12:09Z

Aviva: Daddy, would you stop motivating? Now I want eggplant, and I don't even LIKE eggplant!

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* = okay, I'm a lay psychologist...