FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

I notice that Willamette Week mentions this site in their “Murmurs” column. I also notice that I have to correct some of that mention.

Nowhere have I said this site is named for a New Bad Things song. What I did say was that the title of an old post from elsewhere, which I republished here, was from a New Bad Things song.

Specifically, the phrase I used was “the title of the item in question (used here as well)” — that title being “Ennui Go!” which is lifted, in fact, from the name of a New Bad Things album, and not a New Bad Things song. So you can credit me with using “song” instead of “album title” because that’s my fault.

As for the name of this site, that most definitely is not taken from a New Bad Things song, and its origins are shouded in mystery, even for me. Mainly because it’s years old and I’ve forgotten where it came from.

Gold star, however, to anyone who can properly identify, without Googling for it, the origins of the title of the post you’re reading right now.

My problem is that I’m an extremist. There’s a day-to-day social reality that requires the adoption of several distinct and differentiated personas depending on the situation at hand, and it’s an adaptation of social evolution which I’ve never been able to hone properly.

There are twenty-four hours in any given day. Theoretically, we’re supposed to sleep for eight of them (not that I know many people who manage that), so put that third aside. Of the remaining sixteen hours, a standard full-time job occupies fully half that.

As a general proposition (with exceptions, of course), the working half of the day requires one of those alternative personas. If you’re someone who dislikes it when other people don’t care about doing things correctly, then in a workplace which, say, consists of co-workers who are idiots and/or management who are idiots, social standards dictate that you ignore all of that, focus on your own tasks, and go home at the end of the day.

In other words, you have to shutter off and shelter your own personality and character in favor of enacting the Workplace Persona.

Let me put it this way: Masks piss me off.

I don’t have a private persona for when I’m at home alone, a separate social persona for when I’m at the coffeeshop or meeting friends for a drink, and then another separate work persona.

But the normal dynamics of the Real World™ frequently require at least the creation and maintenance of the latter. And I’ve never been particularly good at pulling it off.

It’s a sort of socially-mandated multiple personality disorder which disturbs me. It’s also the sort of juggling act that most people, apparently, are able to pull off (or at least pretend to) far more adeptly than I’ve historically ever been able to manage.

Shutting yourself (your self?) down or off for half of your waking day seems like a remarkably suffocating way in which to live life. One, of course, that until recently I had managed to stave off for nearly three years by lurching my way through work that was completely self-motivated.

Now, here I am trying to figure out whether or not I managed to pack, into any of the blue storage bins I used for my move last April, any of the masks I’ve had to try to wear back when I last had to do the routine and workaday Real World™.

Masks piss me off.

Over in the December issue of Harper’s, there’s an essay by Stanley Fish on the push, by proponents of Intelligent Design, to “teach the controversy” as a way of inserting their beliefs into the biology curriculum.

I’m having some trouble with the essay on at least a couple of counts.

One of Fish’s arguments is that by employing this “teach the controversy” tactic, IDers actually are taking a cue from the multiculturalist left. While that appears to be so (based upon Fish’s quoting of a pusher of ID), what rankles me is Fish’s revisionist history about what it was for which the original multiculturalist left was pushing.

What he seems to claim, in essence, is this: That the multiculturalist left, in an orgy of postmodernism, struck out to do away with any notions that there was any discernable truth to be had.

My own recollections of the multiculturalism fights during the 1980s, however, suggests that the original pitch of the multiculturalists was to legitimately broaden the discussion. But then multiculturalism was hijacked by two forces.

On the one hand, you had what we could call radical multiculturalists with an agenda — for example, outright overturning any sway of “white male” culture, even if it happened to be legitimate culture. On the other hand, you had the radical right which worked to cast all multiculturalists as being of the radical type, out to undo Western Civilization.

Unfortunately, Fish seems to swallow wholesale both mischaracterizations of the original multiculturalism.

My other issue with Fish’s essay is this: While the controversy over ID may be a manufactured one when it comes to biology curriculcum, and as such ID has no place in the biology classroom, like it or not it is an actual social controversy and therefore arguably has a place in the social studies classroom.

Not once does Fish address that question, instead preferring to use his essay to trash not just ID proponents (justly so), but also to trash original multiculturalism by buying into the perversions foisted upon it by both the radical left and the radical right.

Convenient for Fish as this might be, in that it allows him to paint and position himself as somehow being outside the fray, inventing a multiculturalist boogeyman to go along with the monster from the ID seems more than a little irrelevant to the matter at hand.

If his underlying argument is that there are, in fact, some truths to be had, don’t we have to start with a full, rather than a selective, deployment of the facts?

There was a book I mentioned a few posts back, Operation Wandering Soul, which I had said I had picked up to read a second time several months ago.

While that much certainly is true, I still haven’t actually finished that re-read. Nor have I finished my first time through one of Richard Powers’ other books, The Time of Our Singing (which means I can’t yet claim to have read all of his novels.)

Nor have I managed to finish reading It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis, although I’ve started it.

Also still unfinished is Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History (and, no, I wasn’t put off this one by the fact that it apparently was on President Bush’s reading list this past Summer).

For some reason, over the past year or so, I am having a tremendous amount of difficulty finishing books, and almost never is this because I don’t think the books are worth the read. Somehow, I just get stuck and a moment hits where I put the book down and don’t pick it back up again.

Right there that’s at least four books which sit unfinished. If I rummaged around, it’s entirely likely that I could locate a few more.

During the run of my previous site, I accumulated and read a mammoth number of books about Portland history. So it’s not like I haven’t, in recent years, been reading a great deal. But for some as-yet-undetermined reason, I haven’t been able to follow through on this other short stack of books.

It’s not been unusual for my reading habits to follow patterns. Normally, it’d be the pattern of following a single author. Going on a Kurt Vonnegut re-read kick. Reading my first Powers book and then storming through the others. My one-time high-level mania for Milorad Pavic, which began with Dictionary of the Khazars.

Sometimes, the pattern is different. Salt is the perfect example of what I once termed “conceptual histories” — a genre I used as my guide for finding new things to read. It led me to The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, for example. As it turns out, I appear still to have an Amazon Listmania List for these sorts of books. Most of those on that list I still haven’t read.

Call it something of a literary ennui. An odd sort of listless restlessness when it comes to getting any reading done.

I would like to be reading something, but apparently I’ve become incapable of determining just what that something might possibly be.

Okay, so when I made a reference to the debate over bans on smoking in public places in my post about some of the more cultural aspects of smoking, I said I didn’t want to get into the public policy debate. And I certainly don’t want to turn this into some sort of regular topic here.

But since I just tonight followed a Welcome to Blog post over to a Portland’s Future Awesome thread about such bans, I should go ahead and say a couple of other things about the matter.

First off, there are what I consider to be legitimate grievances and illegitimate grievances. Unfortunately, most of the comments from supporters of public smoking bans over in the PFA thread appear to be of the latter type.

Here’s what I consider to be an illegitimate grievance: The argument that anyone has some sort of inherent right to have their preferred or favorite bar be smoke-free.

You don’t have a fundamental right, predicated upon the basis of your dislike for smoke, to force, say, Horse Brass Pub to go smoke-free rather than, say, heading down to Doug Fir Lounge instead.

I’m sorry, but the argument is just plain stupid. And the only reason that sort of pitch ever gains any traction is because the level of hostility against smokers has increased due to there being so many asshole smokers in other more day-to-day situations, which is what I addressed in my previous post on all of this.

There’s only one legitimate grievance here, and that’s the workplace health and safety argument. As I said before, I’m of mixed opinion and divided mind on that count, but there’s no question that it’s a legitimate point of contention.

But can we please stop this bizarre line of thought wherein people think they somehow are entitled to have all bars be smoke-free simply because they dislike smoke and don’t want to have to travel a bit further to find a different bar?