Tag Archives: rant

Morning

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Everything about morning is wrong.

The light in the sky is wrong–distorted in color, an evil haze from the wrong part of the sky, flooding all creation with a hideous luminescence unwholesome to the eye and corrosive to the senses. Every waking sensation is pain; the purr of a kitten, corrupted by morning, is as the assault of a thousand jackhammers, and even the very music of the spheres is a harsh cacophony of crows. The laughter of a child, impossible as it may seem, is made worse by a thousandfold in the morning.

The Greek philosopher cicero, speaking of mornings, wrote Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, which means “There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.” The fact that there are people who embrace the morning, who leap from their beds every day happy and even eager for the corrupting,, agonizing assault upon their senses, demonstrates beyond any doubt how very, very, very wrong he was.

Morning twists and corrodes all it touches. Morning reduces the intellectually nimble to shambling zombies; it makes a lover’s caress into the touch of the scourge and sackcloth. There is nothing good that can come of it save afternoon; it is the time best reserved for snoring and firing squads. I advise everyone of decency and sense to have no truck with it.

Oh, for the love of God…

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News item of the day: Woman blames security flaw in Mozilla web browser for destroying her relationship.

From the article:

“This privacy flaw has caused my fiancé and I to break-up after having dated for five years… Firefox should be respecting every single area of privacy per user on one system. It’s not doing that,” the woman writes.

Now this here, folks, is an outstanding example of how people absolutely hate to take responsibility for their own feelings, responses, and emotional reactions.

The bug in Mozilla did not cause the breakup. Insecurity caused the breakup, together with poor communication skills on the parts of both people involved.

The woman says she and her ex were together for five years. Well, if they were dating for five years, what in the name of all that is holy were they talking about–the weather? Whose turn it was to wash the car? Clearly, neither of them was talking about the parameters and assumptions of their relationship, else she would have known that he was visiting online dating sites, and he would have known that she was not OK with that.

She learned something she did not know, because they were not talking. What she learned triggered insecurity on her part, which she did not deal with gracefully because she does not take responsibility for her own emotional responses. She did not talk about her feelings and the fact that his behavior violated her boundaries and expectations, because they both lacked decent communication skills. And somehow, all of this is…

…Mozilla’s fault?

Amazing.

The value of shame in protecting a healthy society…

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…or, “strangeness in Franklin’s email yesterday.”

So. My Web site generates rather a lot of email, some of which tells me I’m going to hell, some of which is incoherent and relentlessy bizarre, but most of which is quite positive.

And then there’s this one, that just arrived:

Came across your website (http://www.xeromag.com/fvpoly.html), and had a strong reaction. I hope you might be interested. This is not your ordinary “you will burn in hell” flame mail.

You have revealed a great deal of yourself online–far more than any properly modest person would do (but you do not regard modesty as a virtue)–and my reaction to that is to analyze and critique what you have revealed. I’m embarrassed, even mortified for you. If ever you actually find a little more wisdom, I think you will look back at your online missives with utter horror for the rest of your life. But of course, stubborn fools die all the time.

The fact that you do not understand how mortifying it is to have so much of yourself, and of your friends, on display is very indicative to me. Once upon a time was nearly as self-revealing as you are, and so I’m motivated to offer you some unsolicited advice.

Your openness about yourself shows more clearly than anything else could that you believe that you are morally “in the clear.” That there’s nothing wrong with you or the way you live. For someone as arrogant as you are, I know that moralizing will not impress or help you in the slightest. The only thing that has a chance of helping you, actually, is a combination of intelligent criticism and real, liberal education (not just reading a lot of books).

You’re perfectly aware of your self-confidence. Among your other writings is a revealing section called “Three easy steps to self-confidence.” Self-confidence is in general, of course, a very good thing. But it seems you have confused positive self-confidence with the capacity to turn off your natural feelings of conscience, i.e., the ability to quell healthy and natural self-doubt. In this way, sociopaths are made, cults are born, and civilizations are ruined.

Every page on your webpage also conveys the message that you think you have it all figured out: you’ve thought it all through, and this is how it’s done. Your Polyamory FAQ is a perfect example. You’ve got it all covered. If you answer all the critical questions cleverly, that shows that polyamory as you approach it is morally OK. The trouble, of course, is that your FAQ proves no such thing. Your FAQ is absolutely full of elementary errors of reasoning and fundamental assumptions, which any sufficiently well-educated person could spot instantly. It is a statement of your personal dogma. The only thing it really proves is to me is that you are, underneath the facade you put on for yourself and others, a very confused person.

That’s why I recommend very strongly that you take some time out and get a real liberal education (from other, sane people–at a university) and learn the habit and virtue of self-examination. It’s quite evident both that you really have not learned that habit and that you think you have learned it. You are evidently reflective, and you pride yourself inordinately on that reflective habit. But you must not confuse a habit for reflection and introspection (i.e., self-indulgent navel-gazing, which any teenage girl can do) with a habit for well-informed, critical self-examination. The latter requires wisdom and critical thinking, which requires liberal education. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, and you’re an excellent example of why this is so.

Feel free to share this mail with your friends; amuse yourselves with it.”

Now, this is a very interesting piece of email, for a number of reasons. It’s not completely incoherent, but at the same time, I’m having a very difficult time understanding what this guy is saying, aside from the fact that he doesn’t much cotton to folks like me.

He seems to be saying, if I’m reading him correctly, that a deep and abiding sense of personal shame is the only thing that keeps society healthy, and that this deep sense of shame is the result of a proper education. I get the sense that for him, education, privacy, shame, and morality are all connected, and that for him, anyone who is not private both lacks shame and is “confused.”

I also get the sense that there’s a subtext here which suggests that this sense of shame is the only thing which prevents people from behaving unethically. He seems to feel that it’s lack of shame which characterizes a sociopath. (Most psychologists would say that a sociopath is characterized by a lack of empathy and emotional connection with other human beings; I wonder if this person feels that shame and empathy are the same thing, or that one can not connect with others emotionally if one is not shameful.)

An irony here is that he seems to feel a “liberal education” would fix my problems. This is ironic in no small part because I have sex [EDIT: Six! Six years’ worth! Aargh!] years’ worth of college education behind me, much of it a liberal arts education. It’s also ironic because, generally speaking, there is often an inverse correlation between degree of schooling and tendency to adopt socially and religiously conservative views; those who have a liberal education are, statistically speaking, more likely to talk about, and live, in unconventional ways.

Y’know, sometimes I just don’t get the way people think.

Writing Clearly for Fun and Profit…

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…or, how to make sure your LiveJournal, mail list, and newsgroup posts don’t just get skipped over by your audience.

Forums like Weblogs and mailing lists are written media. In these forums, we see nothing of what people are save for what they write. In any written medium, people who write clearly and distinctly, and who use language precisely and in an easy-to-understand way, will likely be read more often and given more attention than people who do not.

Anything you do that makes your messages harder to read or harder to understand will make it more likely that people will not pay any attention to anything you have to say. The written word is the only thing you have here; if you do not use it well, then your ideas, no matter how good they may be, will be disregarded.

There are many things that people do which make their messages difficult to read–and everything that makes a message difficult to read will cause some people not to read it.

The worst offenders are:

1. using runonsentences that are not properly spaced.especially when there are no spaces after the punctuation,when you do this with commas,it gets really,really,really hard to read.this makes everything run together,in a mess that is almost impossible to extract meaning from.really.

How to avoid it:

– Put a space after every piece of punctuation. Notice that a space follows the period at the end of a sentence, and follows a comma within a sentence.

– Do not use run-on sentences. If you are expressing two different thoughts, use two (or more) sentences.

2. Putting all the mass of text in one big lump. I guarantee, this is one of the worst things you can do.

How to avoid it:

– Break your thoughts up into paragraphs. Put double-spaces between the paragraphs. By breaking up your text, you make it far, far easier to understand.

3. Using AOL cht-spk or 1337-5p34k. Using terms like “u” unstead of “you,” “ppl” instead of “people,” and so on makes your message much more difficult to parse; as a general rule, I almost never read messages that use these styles of abbreviations; especially when they are combined with jargon or other abbreviations that are not immediately obvious. Add emoticons and the like to the mix, and you have an impenetrrable mess. Remember, your goal is to communicate; do not create artifical barriers to this communication.

4. Using the D/s writing convention invented in some of the more obnoxious online BDSM chatrooms and, unfortunately, spreading like typhus or bubonic plague throughout much of the rest of the Internet community. I’m referring, of course, to the use of hybrid upper and lowercase letters when referring to a group of people that may include folks who identify as dominant and submissive: “W/we would like to ask Y/you for a favor. Please attend O/our combined play party and English grammar dissertation; it will be the best time Y/you will ever have outside an insurance seminar.” I’m waiting for the day people begin applying this grammatic monstrosity to individuals who are switches: “I/i am a S/switch, which means I/i can be Dominant or submissive.”

How to avoid it:

– Don’t. Seriously. Just don’t do this. I/i M/mean I/it. I/i automatically disregard A/any message from A/anyone who writes like T/this. A/always.

5. Using metaphors that are only obvious to you, but are not obvious, or even decipherable, to anyone else. “Well, if you think about the implications of teleology as applied to the political situation in Nazi Germany in 1943, you will immediately see that life is a battlefield seen through endless masses of Jell-O.” What?

Some metaphors can be figured out from context; if a restaurant has signs on the restroom doors reading “Popeye” and “Olive,” most adult Westerners can figure it out from social context. If the signs read “Turtles” and “Tortoises,” then you have a problem.

Some people think in metaphor more easily than others, but even so, a metaphor that relies on some connection or association known only to you and your fifth-grade science teacher, and nobody else in the world, will not succeed for anyone. Often, the cynical side of me suspects that some people, particularly in some parts of the New Age community, use incredibly flowery, over-the-top metaphor merely to impress themselves, or to conceal the fact that their central idea is weak.. (I see this on the World Polyamory Association mailing list from time to time, for example.)

An actual, real-world example: “Not only have the fnord weavers exploited the normal Human needs for love, acceptance, shelter, belongingness and justification by making us feel that we must join one of the state-sanctioned types, they also exploited and reinforced our natural xenophobia when we encounter those outside of our group. When we encounter the rare, indefinable, personality we have been taught to go into panic mode.” This particular post, taken from a newsgroup I read, goes on in this vein for hundreds and hundreds of words.

How to avoid it:

– Do not make assumptions about your audience; in particular, do not assume your audience can read your mind, or understand the way you use words if you do so in a radically unconventional way.

– Be clear in your own head of what you plan to say before you say it. If you can not explain something to your grandmother, you probably don’t understand it yourself.

– If you must use words in an unconventional way, explain your usage. If you are using a metaphor that your audience may not follow, explain the metaphor.

– If you introduce something into your post which you believe is relevant (in the case of the post I cite above, it touches on everything from Hebrew numerology to clothing to mathematician John Nash), explain the relevance of this thing. You’re not going to win points and impress people by name-dropping or dropping references to things you think will impress your audience if those people or references are not clearly connected to your idea.

In which Franklin gets very, very, very cranky

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In his book The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan writes, “The siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.” The book was published in 1988, when trickle-down economics and alien abductions were all the rage, and it is hard to imagine anything more appropriate today.

The last six years or so have proven Sagan right in a way I doubt even he could have imagined. In 2006, nearly twenty years after those words were penned, we have an American President who is a fundamentalist Christian and who seems to believe that science and highfalutin book-larnin’ never did nobody a lick of good; anti-intellectualism is rampant in American society and politics; and people are actually arguing about “Intelligent Design”–Intelligent Design, fer Chrissakes!–as if it were something for real that should, y’know, be taught in schools.

And frankly, it all pisses me right the fuck off.

Shelly tends to get frustrated with me, because I get so frustrated whenever I see credulous, anti-intellectual claptrap spewing out of some hole somewhere. And, to be quite blunt, it’s everywhere. It’s as if somebody plugged all the sewers in New York City, and all this brown stuff is bubbling up out of the manhole covers and flooding the streets, and nobody notices.

Hell, people seem to like it.

And it pisses me off. It pisses me off because these people should know better. It pisses me off because gullibility and credulity are corrosive to society; the United States today dominates the world politically, socially, and economically largely on the strength of our belief that the world is knowable and comprehensible, and that the pursuit of reason is a valuable undertaking. (I’m sure the Chinese, who could not hope to compete with us otherwise, are more than happy to see us abdicate our global leadership as a powerhouse of knowledge and research; they don’t have to defeat us; we’re happy to defeat ourselves!) It pisses me off because reason is the greatest single gift that humankind has, the thing that sets us apart from all the rest of nature, and to squander that gift–to fritter away our reason, to exchange knowledge and understanding for faeries and pixie dust–is a travesty beyond imagining.

Faeries and pixie dust are remarkably seductive. Continue reading →

It’s hard to find good protesters these days.

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Every day, on my way to work, I drive past a small women’s clinic. Last Tuesday, there was a group of about five or six people standing on the sidewalk in front of the clinic, waving signs showing pictures of fetuses. They’d unfurled a huge yellow banner that they’d placed across the sidewalk, reading “ABORTIONIST!” in large block letters with an arrow pointing at the clinic.

On Friday, the number of protestors had dwindled to three. The big yellow banner was gone–possibly because it had been blocking the sidewalk, or possibly because it was just too much hassle to set up. (Putting up a six-foot-long banner is more work than it seems.)

Saturday and Sunday, nothing. Apparently, protecting the unborn children is important, but not something you’d want to, y’know, give up a weekend for.

Monday and Tuesday, the same three protesters were back. Fewer signs this time, and they just seemed all so…disspirited. Today, the protest had collapsed to a single dishevled man, who looked for all the world like he was homeless, standing in front of the clinic and shaking his fist and screaming incoherently, and, bizarrely, pulling branches off the large tree that sits in the corner of the lot overhanging the sidewalk. I filled my car with gas at the gas station next to the clinic and watched him for a while.

Now, it used to be, back in the day, that people took this protesting thing a lot more seriously. I moved to Tampa in 1992, and then as now, my path to work took me past the clinic every day. (Funny thing, life.)

Back then, there were always about twenty or thirty protesters outside the clinic, every day, rain or shine. I worked at a place called Printgraphics at the time, and one of the protest organizers actually came into the ship once, asking me to design some anti-abortion signs and placards for him. I declined, and he went away and got someone else to do it for him.

But I digress.

They were there every day, chanting and waving signs and holding prayer vigils to, I don’t know, call down a rain of toads on the place or something. The toads never materialized, but that didn’t seem to bother them.

And then, overnight, it all just kinda fell apart. I can even point my finger to the moment when it happened.

It started one day when a young couple and a doctor walked up to the clinic. Someone in the group of protesters thought that saving an unborn child’s life was just absolutely the most important thing imaginable, and such an end justified any means, and he started throwing rocks at them. Next thing you know, a bunch of people had joined in, and showered the couple and their doctor with rocks and bottles. Made the papers and everything.

Problem was, they weren’t going in for an abortion. As it turns out, the couple were going to the clinic because they were trying to conceive. The doctor? He wasn’t an abortion doctor; he was a fertility doctor.

The point was well and truly driven home a few nights later, when one of the protesters decided to vandalize the clinic. The clinic was surrounded with a chain link fence at the time (it’s since been replaced with a more attractive metal fence), and he decided to ram his car through the fence, and…

At this point, I need to stop and digress for a moment. You know those Hollywood movies where you see someone, usually some hero with a beautiful and sexy young woman in his protection, drive a car through a chain-link fence? Forget it. It doesn’t happen that way.

You see, chain link is flexible and giving, but it’s also very, very strong. There ain’t no way you’re driving through a chain-link fence in anything short of an armored, treaded vehicle like a tank or a self-propelled howitzer. It’s not gonna happen.

What DOES happen, in the real world, is that the fence bows, and the car rides up onto the fence and gets caught.

Which is exactly what happened to the hapless protester. His car got hopelessly hung up on the fence and he couldn’t figure out how to free it, so he eventually just abandoned it and walked away.

I saw it there, still hung up on the fence, the next day when i drove to work. the police came, ran the registration, picked the guy up, and that was that.

After that, the protests ended. They just plain stopped, and stayed stopped for years. Too embarrassing, I suppose.

In a way, that’s been a microcosm for the organized anti-abortion movement in the nation as a whole–arguably the most inept and ineffective social movement the nation has ever seen. Groups like Randall Terry’s Operation Self-Aggrandizement Operation Rescue have been good at getting newspaper inches, and have proven very adept at raising money from the faithful. Some of that money goes to administrative costs, a lot of it goes to keeping Randall Terry in his signature $1,000-a-pair alligator-skin boots, and the rest of it seems to be spent on researching new and ever more spectacular ways for the movement to shoot itself in the foot.

Now, the Senate still tosses the issue around whenever they feel like dodging real work, like getting runaway government spending under control or managing the dramatically inept war in Iraq. But for the most part, their heart just doesn’t seem to be in it any more. They’re like that tiny handful of people marching around in front of the clinic last week–but not on weekends and only if, y’know, the weather is nice.

Time was when you could really count on the fanatics. They had the holy light of God (or the holy light of murder–sometimes, they kinda look the same) in their eyes and a fire in their bellies. They would stop at nothing to save a child’s life–or at least, nothing short of, y’know, actually adopting an unwanted baby with cerebral palsey or something.

But today? Today we see one homeless man shaking his fist and pulling down trees. Kinda sad, really. Where’s the real spirit? Where’s the real chutzpah? Where’s the photo op of a bunch of True Believers standing in the rain? I wanted to take pictures, dammit!

I can’t log on to OK Cupid

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Now, this might not ordinarily seem newsworthy, except that I can’t reach OK Cupid, either.

That, of itself, also isn’t newsworthy. What is newsworthy is the reason behind it, which has to do with corporate greed and very poor behavior on the part of some very big companies.

Two very big companies, to be exact. Level 3 Communications, an enormous and giddily spam-happy ISP, and Cogent Communications, an enormous and less spam-friendly ISP.

Cogent is pricing bandwidth very aggressively, and Level 3, they don’t much care for that. So Level 3 has ended its Tier 1 peering agreement with Cogent.

Essentially, in quick and hopefully not too technical terms, it means that two of the biggest carriers of Internet traffic are not speaking to each other right now. What that means is that the Internet has been split; for many end users, there is no way for people on one side of the divide to reach Web sites on the other, and vice versa. For example, right now most RoadRunner customers cannot reach OK Cupid.

Level 3 has been known to do this sort of shit before; in fact, there’s an article on Slashdot about it. Cogent is dealing with the problem by offering current Level 3 customers free connections to the Cogent network, on account of Level 3 being a bunch of mewling, lice-infested, pus-oozing filthy bastards and all.

Cogent Communications has released a statement about the issue. I can’t read it, because I’m on the wrong side of the divide and can’t reach Cogent’s servers.

By all accounts I’ve seen, Level 3 is being a bunch of right bastards here.

So if you’re having trouble reaching certain Web sites, that’s why.

Edit: Less than ten minutes after posting this, OK Cupid became reachable. Clearly, I should have complained sooner!

Blasphemy

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I hate Linux.

There. I said it. Linux is rubbish; the emperor has no clothes.

Okay, it’s got some things going for it. As a server operating system, it’s very useful. It’s so much more secure than Windows that comparing the two is like comparing Fort Knox to a child’s piggy bank. For high-volume Internet server applications, it can’t be beat for the price.

But as a general desktop operating system? It’s bunk. Want to know why? Because there’s a dirty little secret about open source software…it’s made by amateurs!!!

And until those amateurs get their shit straight when it comes to installers, it will never beat Windows regardless of how many problems Windows has and how many security holes Windows suffers from.

So last night I tried installing Fedora Core 4 on one of Shelly’s computers. Fedora core 4 uses a graphical installer called anaconda, which is the worst pile of crap ever to disgrace a computr screen. Want to know why? It’s the user interface, stupid!

I’ve had problems with various Linux installers before–they’re all pretty and friendly and turnkey until the slightest unexpected thing happens, and then you find out that they’re poorly debugged and as fragile as a soap bubble, and when they crash, man, it ain’t pretty. See, writing installers isn’t all sexy and doesn’t give you street cred the way writing kernel software does, so nobody really wants to do it. It’s the castor oil of programming; people have this vaguue notion that installers are good, somehow, but nobody wants to get near them. And you get things like anaconda, which crash into exception traces and stack backtraces when they don’t like a particular brand of network card, or which don’t have even basic error checking and recovery.

Take the problems I had last night (please!). It took four tries to get the damn thing to install, even from media that had been verified and was known to be good.

The first problem was my fault, kinda. See, FC4 fits on four CDs. You run the installer, and when it’s done with a CD it pops out and asks for the next CD. You put the next CD in, click OK, and off it goes, and so on.

Well, when the installer asked for the third CD, I popped it in, and then (stupidly) clicked the OK button right away, before the CD finished spinnig up. Now, any other program I’ve ever used for any other operating system waits for the CD to finish spinning up, then does its thing. Not anaconda, oh my, no. Instead, if the operator foolishly hits the OK button before the CD finishes spinning up, he instantly gets an error message ‘The CD can not be read. Sorry, this error is fatal. Click here to reboot.” No “click here to try again”–no, that’d be too robust, and we don’t want Linux to be robust, do we?

The next three attempts to install met with similar fates. Even though I carefully waited until each CD finished spinning up before I hit OK, at three random times during the install, I got a message “A file could not be read or written. This may indicate a problem with the media, with the hard drive, or with your hardware. Sorry, this error is fatal. Click here to reboot.”

Yeah, it may indicate a problem with the media, or with the hard drive, or it may indicate that the goddamn installer is crap, with poor error checking and no error recovery.

Now, the Linux users of the world pride themselves on the overall robustness of their operating-system-cum-religion, yet write crap installers that fall down if the wind blows from the wrong direction.

I once had a problem with a Windows CD. The CD-ROM was defective from the factory; it had a scratch on it that caused some of the sectors to be unreadable. Want to know what happened when the installer hit that spot? Listen up, Linux boys, there’s a lesson in here for you. Ignore this lesson at your peril:

It displayed an error message saying “The CD could not be read. Click here to try again, or click here to cancel the install.”

“Click here to try again.” My goodness. What will those satanic Redmond monsters think of next? Retrying an operation that failed is just…it’s just…well, diabolical!

I finally got it to install, by holding my breath and making the proper incantations, but lordy, I have yet to be impressed.

Some thoughts on partnership

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A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from someone who’d read my BDSM pages on my Web site. He said he’d been married for twenty years, had always wanted to explore and experiment with BDSM, but had never shared this with his wife or told her about any of his fantasies.

Now, I get a lot of emails like that, and my response is always the same: “Tell her! You can’t expect to get what you want if you never ask for what you want.”

About three days later, I got another email from the same person, who said “I told my wife I wanted to explore BDSM, and she said that she had always wanted to do the same thing, but never told me. In fact, before we met, she was active in the BDSM community.”

Now, I get that response rather often, too–you’d be amazed how many people, after finally working up the courage o share their deep dark secret (whatever it may be) with their partners, hear “Oh, yeah? I’ve always wanted the same thing!”

But still. Twenty years. Twenty years these people were married, and they never told the other person about their fantasies and interests. Twenty years. Twenty… YEARS.

Jesus Christ. Twenty years???!! What the hell have these two been talking about for the last two decades? The weather? The TV show “Friends?” How do you spend two decades in an intimate relationship with someone, and never once talk about what you want your sexual life to look like?

Some thoughts on being lucky

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“Oh, you’re so lucky.”

I hear it all the time–in emails people send me, in conversations, in feedback on my Web site. “Oh, you’re so lucky.”

Why am I so lucky? For reasons that have nothing to do with luck. You have a girlfriend who likes bondage? Oh, you’re so lucky.” “You have more than one partner, and everybody is OK with that? Oh, you’re so lucky.” “Oh, you own your own business? You’re so lucky.”

It’s profoundly annoying. No, I am not so lucky. I have the partners I have, and I live the life I live, because i sat down and made conscious, deliberate decisions about the way I want my life to look and the people i want to share it with. Luck has nothing to do with it. I own a business because I chose to start a business, and accept the risk that comes along with that. I have the partners I have because these are the people who I have chosen to share my life with, and they are with me because they have chosen to share their lives with me.

“Oh, you’re so lucky.”

It seems as if people actually do believe that their lives are all about random chance. The job they have? Luck. The partner they’re with? Luck. The shape of their lives? All random happenstance; luck of the draw, that’s just the way it turned out.

I cannot rightly apprehend what would make someone feel so profoundly disempowered in his life. “Oh, you’re so lucky”–this is the cry of someone who sees something he wants but feels utterly powerless to have it, someone who goes through life seeing only a random collection of unrelated events, driven by pure chance, with no connection between them and no hope of comprehension. The person who feels empowered–the person who feels like he can have the things he wants, if he just puts his mind to it–does not see luck.

“Oh, you’re so lucky.” I live with a woman who enjoys being tied up because I share with my partners the things that interest me, and the things that I like; I communicate with them, and build a foundation of honesty and trust and mutual respect. This is not luck. I have received countless emails from my BDSM Web site that are variations on one of two themes–“I want to try this stuff but I’m afraid to tell my partner, what should I do?” and “I have always wanted to try this stuff, but I didn’t tell my partner, and after we’d been together for fifteen years he told me that he’s always wanted to try it too.” Well, see, there you go. If you don’t ask for what you want, don’t expect to get what you want–luck isn’t going to help you.

Of course, a person who does not believe it is possible for him to have something is not going to feel empowered to seek it. I wonder, though, what does he see when he sees other people living the way he wants to live, but believes is impossible? What is it that makes him feel so disempowered? Why should these things be accessible to others but inaccessible to him? “Oh, you’re so lucky.” We make our own luck. A person does not start a business by accident; it’s not like you’re walking down the street one day and you see a busines lying on the ground that’s fallen out of someone’s pocket and say “w00t! Lookit that–wow, I’m lucky!” And the conduct of a romantic relationship is no different. One does not choose a partner by luck; one does not have an exciting and rich sex life by luck. “Jeepers, you got Betty Sue in the Mate Lottery and I got stuch with Sally May–I hear Betty Sue’s really kinky. Boy, you sure got lucky!”

So a person who feels disempowered in his life, who believes his life is nothing more than a series of random unconnected events–how does he choose a partner? What does he say to his partner–if he does not see any hope of controlling his life, and does not see any way for him to effect any control over his destiny, what does he talk about?

“Oh, you’re so lucky.” Every time someone says that to me, a part of me wants to grab him by the shirt collar and scream, “Do you have the faintest idea what you’re saying? Do you even realize how much it says about you and the world you live in? This is your fucking life, and nobody is accountable for the way it looks but you! If there are things you want in your life, then for God’s sake, why aren’t you going after them??! What’s holding you back? This is your fucking life, man! It’s the only one you’ll ever have! DO something about it, already! Don’t insult both of us by telling me how lucky I am because I have something and you want it, go and get it already!”

“Oh, you’re so lucky.” It’s insulting and baffling at the same time. Insulting, because it totally misses the decisions I’ve made that have made me who I am; baffling, because anybody can make these choices, and indeed people do, every day. A person who wants something but chooses not to pursue it turns his back on what he wants, and then is surprised when he doesn’t have it. What the fuck? Your life, every day, is shaped by the choices you make. Don’t like the music? Change the tune!