I most definitely dream in color

(The following is an e-mail I wrote to myself last October which apparently describes in great detail a bizarre dream I had. I found it a fascinating read, perhaps worth sharing, although I warn that as a dream, it really has no point.)

It is about 5:30 in the morning.

I have had less than one hour of sleep.

I don't care; I'm done. I can't take anymore nightmares. Every night, I struggle for hours to go to sleep, only to wake up repeatedly full of terror from what I cannot remember.

We (and I don't know who "we" refers to) are living in a house that we've lived in for some time, but we've been considering moving. Packing has been a long, difficult process as it always seems to be, yet somehow, it is excruciatingly worse than I could have imagined. Even though I am living with my family (and is it my wife and children? Or am I the child, living with my parents?), I sleep in a room with three other roommates, two of which spend all their time playing tricks on each other in an ever-escalating manner that seems to have neither limit nor logic. This very evening, the two of them had been talking about something that only they thought was funny, sitting on the edge of their shared bed (there are only two beds in the room, and not much else, as the room is too small to fit anything of consequence in addition to these matched items of furniture, and our personal belongings stuffed underneath) when one of them jostles the other and spills his beer, which he'd been drinking out of a pint glass. Angry, yet laughing, the roommate with the spilled beer tries to punch his friend in the arm, but he leaps quickly out of reach, and runs toward the door, necessitated by equal parts room size/layout and desire for swiftness to run over the top of my bed (on which I am sitting, sifting through a large pile of broken electronic devices attempting in vain to find any that have the slightest bit of function, thus implying my need to pack them). As he reaches the doorway, he turns back and mockingly points, laughing; so roommate with the spilled beer throws his pint glass towards his adversary in the doorway, who ducks as with a loud smash of glass against wood, half the room is showered with beer and shards of broken glass. Both pause for a moment, shocked but still gleefully smirking as they survey the damage, then run from the room, switching the light off behind them and leaving me in the dark, surrounded by broken glass and corroded plastic and metal. My mother sticks her head through a hole in the wall I'd not noticed before and informs me disapprovingly that a friend of mine that had dropped by is sitting on the floor of the master bathroom reading through a stack of pornographic magazines instead of helping clean the kitchen, as she thought he had come over to do. Somehow this is my fault, as is the one thing that makes me glad to be sitting in darkness: the third roommate, the one with whom I share a bed, is not present though she is supposed to be. At least the darkness conceals this one thing that I know will only make things worse. I know I've expressed in the past my disapproval of my roommate's activities, not in small part due to my understanding that for some reason it's my responsibility to keep her out of trouble. As it happens, our house is somehow situated right next to the border between the U.S.A. and the People's Republic of China, to which my roommate nightly sneaks through the bedroom window to illegally visit. She's smuggling weapons into the country and trying to convince them to invade, which is odd since they have repeatedly told her they have no interest in military conquest of the West, and would she please just leave them alone?

As my mother leaves, I begrudgingly turn to the task of trying to clean up the glass shards (which I cannot see clearly, but glisten in the moonlight through the open window) without the aid of anything useful like a broom. I'm left to simply pick them up with my bare hands and pile them by the foot of my bed, all the while finding--like one does while on a sandy beach on a windy day--that while it's annoying enough to have glass shards irritating my bare hands, it's not nearly so annoying as continually noticing that somehow my mouth has filled with a not-insignificant amount of glass as well, which seems to diminish in no way as I repeatedly spit mouthfuls onto the pile on the floor. I grow more and more frustrated at the task, until my mother calls me to help her move some furniture in the living room. I stand up and walk barefoot through the glass to the living room.

In the living room a number of people, only some of whom I know, are sitting around talking while watching what's happening on the top of a large wooden table in the middle of the room. The table is covered with several mounds of a gelatinous substance which one might think to be a dessert but for the foul, not-at-all-fruit-like smell it emits and a bubbling noise it makes as though it were a freshly-opened carbonated beverage. I ask what the hell is going on, and my mother shrugs, telling me it was a school project and she didn't realize that the recipe she used would yield so much and she doesn't know how she's going to package it all up to take away but in the meantime could I help her move the table since it's oozing onto the carpet and we'd like to get at least some of the cleaning deposit back. So I grab one end of the table and we start to carry it away, when to my surprise one of the people in the room I vaguely know as a friend of my mother's reaches out and pinches my ass and winks at me. I barely have time to register that the moment feels like something out of a cheesy TV sitcom before I complete what somehow feels like a cliché by reacting with a jump and dropping the table, which of course flips over and dumps its contents all over the floor.

Oddly enough, this is somehow not my fault--even though my mother did not witness my getting pinched--and instead of rebuking me or making me clean it up, my mother leaves to find the vacuum cleaner and charges me with watching that the house pets don't get into the stuff. This is not a difficult task, as our older dog is outside playing with the kids, and the puppy we'd just adopted earlier in the week is far too fascinated with some of the remains of dinner that were left on the kitchen floor: the hide and most of the bones of a buffalo I'd killed that afternoon and brought home to barbecue. A cousin of mine who happens to be among those in the room comments that the sight of the puppy trying to rip a chunk of raw meat off the carcass is grossing him out. I assure him that however gross it may appear, there's nothing unsanitary about it as the meat is rather fresh; in fact, I note to him that I myself had cut a chunk of rib meat off to eat while I was carrying the carcass home, and it was quite tasty. I do comment that we really ought to get it out to the garbage before it attracts any pests, and just then I notice...um...something

I don't know what it is, but it's clearly alive. When I first spot it, it's vaguely snake-shaped, but it quickly recoils at the sound of my voice and in doing so morphs its shape into something more like a jellyfish; not that I would have mistaken it for either of those creatures, as its color is sort of lime green, and spotted. I get down on my hands and knees to look under the counter where it has disappeared from sight and am amazed at what I see there. Whatever kind of creature it is, it isn't alone, as there appears to be three or four more under there, and I say three or four because it's hard to concentrate on counting when I've just happened upon a scene that might as well be a rain forest on the surface of an alien world. Under the edge of the counter, I see from this angle that the lower portions of our kitchen are host all manner of flora and fauna, but mostly an array of bright-colored fungi in a plethora of shapes and sizes. None of it is any life form that I can identify. Something clicks in my mind.

I recall that in the years that we have lived here, we seemed to have a problem with leaks in the kitchen plumbing every few months, but the landlord never seemed to be able to fix it, or for that matter, figure out where the leak was coming from. Each time he'd reassure us that it didn't matter anyway, since there was no carpet in the kitchen to be effected, and wherever the leak might be coming from, at least utilities were included in the rent, so it was really his problem, and he wasn't worried about it. Surely all that moisture and warmth has simply made a perfect environment for all sorts of living things under our kitchen sink, and this is the eventual disgusting result. I hunt through kitchen drawers until I find a flashlight and duck back under the sink to get a better look. In the back of the space under the sink, there is a gap in the concrete wall that I'd seen before in many of our moments of plumbing distress, but now, shining a flashlight into the gap, I see that rather than damp floor behind the wall, there seems to be a deep puddle of standing water that stretches into the darkness past the flashlight beam at this angle. So I crouch down even lower and try to peer in deeper. I can't comprehend what I see. I stand up and leave the kitchen, running down the hallway to the back of the house.

Near the master bedroom, there is a bit of a nook set off from the hallway that we've been using as a sort of a study, and another glimmer of memory is coming to me. I violently shove the computer desk aside, exposing the wall behind it, where there is a doorway with no knob, just a rust-encrusted keyhole. When we had moved in, the landlord was dismissive of the door, assuring us that it merely led to a narrow crawlspace that allowed access to venting for the original furnace which no longer works, and besides, he has no idea where the key is. He had suggested we set up the room as we had, with a large piece of furniture covering the door so as to just forget it was there. I crouch down and lunge forward, slamming into the door with my shoulder. It doesn't budge. I kneel before the door and stare intensely at the keyhole, bringing my arm back and pummeling the edge of the door with repeated punches, noting within the dream's only brief moment of genuine pleasure that flakes of rust and paint are falling with each blow, and the door is beginning to shudder. After less than a minute of focused attack, a crack appears beside the lock. I reposition myself and, giving a hard kick to the center of the door, hear it give with a satisfying crunch. The door swings open, and I see exactly what I feared I would.

Answers in Genesis

I had a friend many years ago who was an atheist. That in itself is not particularly notable, as atheism is fairly common these days, and I'm sure I have many atheist or agnostic friends. What was really notable about this guy was that unlike a lot of atheists I seem to meet on the Internet, he was pretty tolerant toward theists. In particular, I once heard him make what I thought was a pretty insightful statement: that all of the major religions of the world have enough internal logical consistency to believe in them, or else they probably wouldn't exist. I think he was right.

Anyway, I felt pretty bad writing this particular post, not because of the bare fact that I wrote it, but because it seems somewhat unfair that I waited so long to write it. To some extent I do pride myself on being open-minded and fair towards all religious views, but occasionally, I realize that I've developed a bit of a blind spot when it comes to my own partiality with respect to certain religious attitudes. Shortly after writing my recent post about Orson Scott Card, for instance, I realized that if I ever got around to reading the Book of Mormon, I'd really have to be far more generous towards it than I probably would have intended to be under normal circumstances. Anyway, while I don't currently have any plans to read the Book of Mormon, I still on a regular basis write about atheism (and yes, while atheism is not a religion, it's a religious view), and a few weeks ago I had an interesting epiphany about atheism that I really should have put into writing. Well, I can console myself that few atheists are reading my blog, and probably even fewer really care.

In a certain way, it was odd that it was only just last month that I'd come to the realization that I did, since it's largely due to Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, which I read some time in the late '80s. Who knows why it would take me more than a quarter-century to put this together? I really ought to go back and read the book again.

Something that has always bothered me about Dawkins is the way he has over time morphed into a sort of crusader for atheism. Surely, the guy is a great thinker and a giant in the world of biology, but why does that make him an expert on (the non-existence of) God? To a great extent, even though I think I've come to a deeper understanding of why his studies in biology might shed some light on theological issues, I still question what purely physical biology has to tell us about spiritual matters, but no matter (no pun intended).

This is the thing, though; I've made a big deal both on my blog and in more casual conversation that I think it's a shame that many scientists can't seem to accept the possibility of the supernatural. That's certainly not to say that the supernatural has a part to play in science; it absolutely does not, by definition. My only thought was that while studying the purely natural, a person might lose sight of the possibility that there was more to our existence than that. And I consider myself a skeptic; I don't place a great deal of faith in the supernatural myself, despite being a theist. I believe there is a God, and there is a spiritual aspect of our lives, but for the most part we can live as though it were not there. What got me feeling guilty as I prepared to write this today is that I realized I was being guilty of doing the exact same thing as I was criticizing others of doing, but in reverse.

What if the parts of our existence I considered to be purely in the realm of the spiritual could actually be under the influence of purely material forces? Why not?

If the study of science blinds one to the spiritual, certainly the study of religion could blind one to the natural. There is something that I'd always felt to be lacking in atheism, but maybe it was because I'd unknowingly set the terms of the argument unfairly. The thing that atheism lacks (in my previous view) is answers. There are certain questions that it is human nature to ask, and atheism either can't seem to answer these questions, or claims that they have no answer. These questions are things like, "What is the meaning of life?" or "Is there a higher power over us?" or "What happens to our consciousness after we die?" I mean, maybe there is no real answer to these questions, but it seems so unsatisfying.

But what if I (along with others, no doubt) was insisting on spiritual answers because I assumed that these were, by their very nature, spiritual questions? What if there was a need to keep an open mind about materialism in the same way that I always felt one should keep an open mind about spiritual things? If you open up these questions to be answered in a materialistic fashion, didn't Dawkins really answer them?

In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins had a revolutionary idea with respect to biology, genetics, and evolution. (Bear with me, it's been, as I said, about a quarter-century since I read this.) It's funny, because it's one of those things that, to me at least, seems almost obvious once you point it out and explain the principle. There's a lot of misunderstanding about evolution. Does it happen to individuals or groups? Does it happen all the time, or is it a gradual process? Is it a process that has a directed plan of some sort, or is it random? Whatever the answers to these, Dawkins suggests that the real driving force behind evolution is in fact the very genes of living creatures themselves. Genes, for lack of a better verb, "want" to propagate. All biological processes on both the micro and macro level can trace back their base driving force to this fact. It's logical and inevitable on some level: as natural selection posits survival of the fittest organisms, so Dawkins' model suggests survival of the fittest genes. If a gene codes for a behavior or a characteristic in an organism that makes it more fit, then surely that gene itself could be considered fit.

But what does this mean philosophically, or even theologically? "What is the meaning of life?" Why, it's all about obeying our genes, isn't it? This is weird, since on some level this is a sort of "Well, duh," thing. If you understand that what we are and what we do is the product of our genes both on an individual level, and as a species or even an ecosystem, then doing what our genes tell us to do isn't even a choice, it's just what we are. Our genetic code is, in the end, the "higher power over us" in a very substantial way that arguably trumps anything else that might stand in its stead. Especially if you have a materialistic world-view.

Of course, maybe as a theist I still need to stress that this does leave many of those questions unanswered. There's no clue given here to the nature of a possible afterlife, certainly, but of course there may be no answer. There also is no clear indication as to what sort of moral system one should follow, but maybe morality is a separate realm from these sorts of questions. Does admitting these as potentially valid answers to great philosophical questions mean I'm advocating for atheism? Of course not, I'm still a Christian. Maybe I'm just suggesting that which is already obvious to atheists: that atheistic viewpoints have enough internal logical consistency to believe in them, or else they probably wouldn't exist. Am I right?

Mimi's Last Coffee

I was in the process of putting together something for my other blog, and it occurred to me that one of the issues that I was bound to be addressing was the fluidity and vagueness of language. Really, it's not just about the Bible either, but about the way people nitpick details in literature.

Anyway, many years ago, Scott McCloud had made an improvised comic strip called Mimi's Last Coffee. I say improvised because it was part of McCloud's "Morning Improv" project, in which he was taking suggestions from readers for titles and then making them up as he went along. In the associated discussion forums, some discussion broke out after McCloud published the first panel of the comic:

Somebody wondered where the story could go since this appeared to be Mimi enjoying her last coffee, and since that was the title of the story, what else was there to tell? Well, it's been at the back of my mind time and time again over the years, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise in examining the fluidity of language. The fact is, comic strip aside (although McCloud does play with possible meanings of the title in his storytelling) the phrase "Mimi's last coffee" has a near-unlimited range of possible meaning.

Starting at the end of the phrase with the word "coffee", I think a lot of people don't realize that they're dealing with a word that has so many meanings. People probably assume most of the time that "coffee" is referring to the hot brown liquid that many people enjoy with breakfast, but that's just one of a number of meanings. "Coffee" is a word that refers to many aspects of related concepts to that beverage. Coffee is a beverage, yes, but not only can it be prepared in numerous ways (Have you ever tried Turkish coffee? It's a whole different experience!) but the word refers to different parts of the process of making coffee. Starting from the beginning, there is a tree called "coffee", and it produces a fruit called "coffee". The seed of this fruit is known as "coffee", and this seed is commonly dried out and roasted to make a substance known as "coffee". The dried, roasted "coffee" is ground to a variety of different granularities and packaged as "coffee" which people buy and combine with hot water to make the aforementioned beverage. After the grounds are used, they're still "coffee" although nobody consumes them; they either thrown them away or use them for fertilizer (I think).

Being such a big part of our culture, "coffee"" is also used for a number of other concepts related to the food product in one way or another. For instance, "coffee" is a shade of medium-brown. (Mimi could be painting!) "Coffee" can also refer to the food product in a collective sense, referring to types or brands of coffee, as in, "I don't like Folger's coffee or any of the grocery-store coffees; I prefer Starbucks coffee." Actually, if you go to Starbucks or a similar coffee establishment, you'll find that they offer many different coffees. I used to work an opening shift at Starbucks, and before we opened the store, one of the things that had to be done was of course brewing up the coffee; I'd brew a pot of dark roast coffee, then a light roast coffee, and decaf would be my "last coffee". Many years before that, though, I used to have a social gathering at my house in college every week at which I served my friends coffee; such social gatherings are commonly referred to as "coffees". There may be other shades of meaning (including the idiomatic phrase "wake up and smell the coffee"), but that will do for this writing, I think.

So, how about "last"? Once again, devoid of context a person usually thinks of the word "last" as meaning "final" but I think even in that sense of the word there are shades of meaning. Someone who was going to quit drinking coffee and had a hard time keeping their resolve might repeatedly declare "This is my last coffee!" and then have yet still one more, and one more, etc. There are other senses of finality, however. Suppose Mimi were to treat two of her friends to coffees at the local cafe, and having only two hands in which to carry coffee cups, she might carry two cups to the table and then go back to the counter for her last coffee. Also, even if she is drinking her coffee alone, any particular cup of coffee might be her last coffee of the day. If Mimi were working at the coffee shop, even if she intends to come back for a drink after her shift concludes, she could very well call the final cup she serves her last coffee. If she's making coffee for herself at home, and she finds she has only enough supplies for one more cup/pot, she might declare that she has drunk her last coffee, and must go to the store for more.

Furthermore, the word "last" doesn't only carry the concept of finality, but the concept of previousness. Mimi may be enjoying a cup of coffee now, but may have a story about how bad her last coffee tasted. Or if she throws the sort of little coffee parties I mentioned earlier, and you attended one, you might hear about how things went at Mimi's last coffee. There are other senses of the word, too. Suppose that Mimi went to the cafe and found that they were serving a particular coffee blend that was her least favorite; she might declare that that is the last coffee she would ever drink, and have no coffee at all.

Finally, there is, I suppose, the question of who (or what) "Mimi" is. As I already hinted at somewhere above, Mimi need not be the consumer of the coffee, but could be the server, or some sort of host; I also implied the possibility that Mimi could be an artist painting a picture in mainly brown colors. Mimi could be a coffee grower, a coffee roaster, or a professional coffee taster. There's a chain of restaurants called Mimi's Cafe, at which I've never had a coffee, but I assume they offer it, and every day at every location there must be a last coffee served. Mimi could be a company that produces and sells coffee, and "Mimi's last coffee" could be a reference to their most recently introduced product. Mimi could be a family pet that found an unfortunate taste for coffee, unfortunate because coffee was poisonous to her and it caused her demise.

Language is a very fluid thing by necessity, and that has its good points and bad points. Namely, when you read what may appear to be a simple phrase, you can never be 100% sure that you've got a clear grasp on it, so it's best not to leap to conclusions about whether it is stating something right or wrong.

Xenocidophobia

So, I'm reading a new (for me) book by Orson Scott Card, and while I'm generally managing to enjoy the book just for itself, there's something that keeps popping up at the back of my mind, and it's pretty much this:

The short version of the above video (uploaded to YouTube just a few weeks ago but originally made and published elsewhere at the height of the Chick-fil-A anti-gay marriage controversy), which you don't need to watch to understand my point here despite being a very insightful video, is that Orson Scott Card is simultaneously one of today's finest and most popular science fiction writers and one of the more prominent critics of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. If you're not familiar with Card, I would say you're missing out on both/either some excellent writing and/or fascinating culture war. Lindsay Ellis, a.k.a. "Nostalgia Chick" is right that it's a bit overboard to think of Card's writing as fascistic, but I want to suggest that as polite and reasonable as she's being, there are some aspects of Card as a person that can stand being looked at both more deeply and kindly, and I think it's worth doing.

The thing is, I talked about this sort of thing before, but in that case I was only tangentially talking about things that were deeply and more explicitly evil, while here I want to get more in depth with the casually offensive. For the short version there, you can find the single sentence in the linked post that mentions Hitler; I'm going to compare Card to Hitler, but as weird as it sounds, I'm going to do it in a nice way.

So Card is homophobic. So what? A lot of people are, so why do people care so much about Card's homophobia? Hitler was homophobic, but it mattered very much because along with his racism, it led to the deaths of millions. Card isn't killing anyone, but his homophobia matters to people because as a famous person, the statements he makes in the public sphere have more influence than Joe Schmo who would tell the world how much the thought of two dudes kissing grosses him out if only anyone would bother to ask him his opinion on it.

Fame is definitely a part of it, and it's a funny two-edged sword. If you're famous, regardless of the reason, when you speak your opinion people listen. If they agree with you, then they say, "This famous person is terrific; everyone should be listening to this!" If they don't, they say, "This famous person is an idiot; why do famous people think that just because they're famous they get to tell others what to think?" I definitely believe that Card's fame is a big part of why he has a platform that allows so many to know what his opinion is, and since so many know, there is a sense in which the outrage over his homophobia is proportional to the size of his audience. But I don't think that's the whole story.

In the video, the homophobic* things that Card has said are labeled as "dumb shit" by Ellis. Okay, but what makes them "dumb"? I am of course making an assumption that may be taking her statements in as shallow a manner as I'm more or less accusing Card's detractors of taking his, but I assume that what makes them "dumb" is simply that she disagrees with them.

I can't speak for whether Card's views on homosexuality are smarter or stupider than anybody else's since I've never bothered to read them; I am one of those people who chooses to view art (visual, written, or musical) on its own merits rather than through the filter of what sort of a person the creator is, for better or for worse. What I think I can say is that there are a lot of stupid arguments against same-sex marriage, but that doesn't mean that every argument against same-sex marriage is stupid. For every dozen or so arguments on par with "legalizing same-sex marriage will lead to people having sex with ducks," there is somebody pointing out that same-sex couples being unable to procreate suggests something not quite in line with the natural order. Yeah, the latter argument has flaws, but at the very least it feels like there's a nugget of logic in there, you know?

But this is the thing, and in my mind, it's the real central issue of the problem that fans of Card's writing have with Card himself: Card is not stupid. His books almost invariably contain protagonists that are incredible geniuses, and while of course being able to reason your way out of a sticky situation is potentially less impressive when both the problem and the solution come from the same mind (Card's, that is), there is still the strong feeling that the person writing the story has got to be pretty darn clever. Why is this a problem? Because people who denounce things like racism, sexism, and homophobia have the unfortunate (in my opinion) tendency to label those things as "ignorance".

So this is where it all ties back to Hitler, and try and follow me on this because it is weird. In the post I linked to above, I pointed out that as much as people like to label him a "monster", Hitler was a human being, just like you and me. Sometimes you hear people say of politicians these days that "He's the sort of guy you could hang out and have a beer with!" I have no doubt that Hitler was a guy that you could hang out and have a beer with--so long as you weren't a member of one of the groups that the Third Reich tried to exterminate. And what's more, who could really think that Hitler was an idiot? He nearly took over the whole world, which doesn't sound to me like the sort of thing that idiots tend to do. No, Hitler wasn't ignorant; he had an oddly well-informed hatred.

So like I said, I'm drawing some parallels here between people of varying levels of tolerance. I would probably enjoy sharing a beer with Adolph Hitler, Orson Scott Card, or Lindsay Ellis, (although I surely won't because one is dead, one's a Mormon, and the last I'm unlikely to ever meet in person) but that's not necessarily a reflection on their value as a person, nor the value of their personal beliefs. What it is a reflection on is that I have no doubt any of them would be an interesting person to have a conversation with.

My belief--and this doesn't necessarily make me a better or more tolerant person than anyone else--is that when you dismiss anyone's viewpoint as stupid, you're the one who has closed yourself off to learning and growing. This is one of the reasons why I blog, and wish I was more diligent in responding to comments: I want to reach out to people who have opinions that differ from my own, because even if neither of us changes our position, I believe we can learn from each other.

So if you don't like Card's stance on same-sex marriage, you might consider reading more of his writing if only to understand why someone would have the stance he has. In the meantime, it's a free country, so write all the Wiggin/Delphiki slash fic your heart desires.

*I'd like to say that I've never liked the term "homophobic" as a blanket term for anything anti-GLBT. It seems to imply that a "homophobe" is afraid of people in the GLBT community, when often that is not the case. There were times in the past (and maybe even now, depending on how you feel about this post) that I've held and even expressed attitudes that would be labeled as "homophobic", but I don't have any fear of homosexuals. I've always felt that there ought to be term along the lines of "racist" or "sexist" in order to reflect somewhat more accurately the more general concept, such as "orientationist" perhaps? Oh well.

The Tale of the Paper-Wizard, an economic fable

There once was a man who was hard-working and kindly, and because of this, even though he lived alone he had everything in the world he felt he could possibly want, and was happy. One day, after an afternoon's labor of watering fields and chopping firewood, he sat down for an evening's meal of a freshly-cooked bowl of rice. As he was about to eat, a wizard emerged from the forest and stood before him.

"Hello, sir," the wizard said to him with a sly smile, "and good evening."

"Good evening, stranger," the man replied. "I was about to enjoy my evening meal, but as I see you are travelling and seem to have no food, I feel I should offer to share it with you!"

The wizard bowed to the man and said, "That is very kind of you, good sir. While I do appreciate your offer, I am glad to say that I would like to offer you an even more generous kindness!"

Although the man had entertained unexpected guests before, this was new to him. He asked the wizard what he meant.

The wizard reached into his pocket and took out a small object. "I was wondering if you would give me the entire bowl of rice, as I am quite hungry from my travel. In return I would give you this," he extended the object to the man, "a piece of magical paper."

The man examined the paper. Indeed, it did look magical. The whole of the paper was filled on both sides with fancy writing and images of elderly, wise men. "What does it do?" the man asked.

The wizard smiled even wider. "That is the great generosity of this paper; you see, while in appearance it is merely a piece of paper, with the great value imbued upon it by the writing, the owner of this paper may exchange it for twenty kilos of rice!" The wizard pressed the paper into the man's hand and closed his fingers over it. "I know twenty kilos is much more rice than you have in your bowl, but I insist that you take it."

The man was impressed, and he accepted the offer, giving the wizard his bowl of rice.

Well the next evening, the man had done less work than usual and yet felt far more fatigued and hungry. He figured that somehow, as light as it seemed, the twenty kilos of rice in his pocket must be weighing him down. As he sat to his evening meal, the wizard appeared before his house once more. There was an exchange of greetings, a discussion of the weather, and in the end, the wizard left with a belly full of rice, and the man had another twenty kilos of rice in magic paper.

This went on for several days. Finally, the day came when at the time of the evening meal, the man was lying in bed having been too weak to work that day. When the wizard arrived, he entered the house and asked the man what was wrong.

When the man explained how he found himself with no more energy to rise, and made to apologize, the wizard smiled his sly smile again and motioned for the man to be silent. "Sir, you are a very hard worker, and no doubt you have worn yourself ragged with labor. Do not worry about me; instead think of yourself. With all of the magic paper I have given you in the time I have known you, you surely have all the food you will ever need for the rest of your life. So sleep for now, and I am sure tomorrow you will be fine as you will no longer need to labor for your sustenance."

With that, the man closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep. His pockets were full of hundreds of kilos magical rice he would never eat, for he never woke from that slumber again.

Milhouse IS a meme!

Not that it's a problem...

I feel pretty silly about this, but I made a rather random New Year's resolution last year. I promised that in 2012, I would show the world that the Simpsons character Milhouse Mussolini Van Houten is a legitimate Internet meme, by which I meant that I would eventually take the time to compose a fairly thorough analysis of the Milhouse as meme phenomenon. While there are a lot of things that are far more important than this subject that I could and should be focusing my time on, I was planning on doing some writing for personal reasons, and having one day left in 2012, I figured why not do this, and then I'd have a (very) small sense of accomplishment.

C'mon, I swear it won't hurt...

There's an important point that I should get out of the way off the top, and that has to do with the meaning of the term "meme" in the first place. A lot of people know that the word "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins, a brilliant biologist who revolutionized his field in many ways. I've probably written about him before, and I have mixed feelings on the range of his views in many areas, but that's beside the point. The real point here is that in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene in which he revolutionized the concepts of genetics and how they relate to the understanding of evolutionary theory, he extended those ideas to the world of information, setting up the concept of the "meme" in the world of thought and ideas to parallel the well-known biological idea of the "gene". I need to go back to his initial description of the concept (which I am admittedly explaining from memory of a book I read over twenty years ago) to make a distinction.

This is a longstanding issue.

The word "meme", like so many other words, has come over time to change its meaning as accepted by the culture, and particularly Internet culture. In Dawkins' original definition of the concept, there was perhaps not a great divide between the term and the much better-known word "idea". Indeed, In a very loose sense, memes (as originally defined) are essentially ideas that have the possibility of being expressed and repeated. As genes can be passed down from parent to child, memes can be passed on from person to person, although the spread of memes is more akin to the biological process of genes spreading through viruses: a virus has its own DNA, and when you are infected my a virus, your body will duplicate that DNA and possibly pass it on to other people with whom you come into contact, but the virus' DNA is not your own, you simply carry and spread it.

Anyone can be a meme!

With that parallel in mind, I just want to state a fact that is interesting, but ultimately trivial: Milhouse is unequivocally a meme in the original sense of the term. This is trivial because in the end, every character on the Simpsons is a meme, because every one of them could potentially be spread through culture; a number of them are, particularly through their catchphrases, Homer's "D'oh!" and Bart's "Ay Carumba!" being prime examples. The thing when it comes to memes is that like genes or viruses, they are what they are regardless of their success over time. If a lion was born with a mutated gene that made its fur a glowing bright green, it would probably have a terrible time hunting, and would die out without passing on that gene. A failed gene is still a gene, and the same goes for memes: even if nobody cared about Milhouse whatsoever, he'd still be a meme, just an ineffective one.

He takes failure well.

Now that I've made that note however, I must concede that the modern Internet definition of "meme" is a little more exacting, and yet difficult to pin down with precision. One thing that's sure is that failed memes are not considered memes by the new definition. The main thing that I intend to argue here is that despite the bad press (so to speak) that he has received from the Internet meme community, Milhouse is not a failed meme, and in fact is a very prominent meme within Internet culture.

C'est un fait, non?

There is a lot of confusion about the nature of Milhouse's status as a meme, and of course this mainly comes from the existence of the popular memetic phrase "Milhouse is not a meme." People "in the know", or those who have "meme savvy" know that of course "Milhouse is not a meme." is a meme. Because this phrase is a meme, and a very popular one, it is assumed by many to be a true statement. This ridiculous notion must be dismissed, although it needs to be explained why it can be dismissed, if for no other reason than to alleviate some of that confusion.

Guess one of my favorite websites.

The thing that needs to be recognized by people trying to understand memes of all sorts is that there is no requirement for something to be a true reflection of reality in order to be a meme. In my experience, this becomes a very important issue to remember when memes rise to prominence that are political or religious in nature.

lolwut

Towards the end of 2011, there was a popular image macro meme based on Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly. Kelly had come on the air shortly after an incident in which a police officer had used pepper spray on some protesters (the cop himself also featuring in a short-lived meme) and said that pepper spray was "a food product, essentially." People made image macros of Kelly's face with captions such as "Rape? It's surprise sex, essentially." and "Bamboo under fingernails? It's a manicure, essentially." While the meme was an attempt to use humor to ridicule Kelly's statement and as such it was rather successful, there were two levels of untruth at work in the usage of that meme. I'm no fan of Fox News or Megyn Kelly, but I hope it's obvious that Kelly did not actually say any of the statements used in the image macros; this type of parody is putting words into someone's mouth that they didn't say, essentially. Somewhat more serious in my mind was the fact that while Kelly's remark was insensitive, it was taken out of context. If one watches the full clip, in her very next sentence, she says, "That's really beside the point, I mean, it was something that was obviously abrasive and intrusive...several went to the hospital." This says to me that while she certainly shouldn't have said what she did, she didn't mean to be quite as dismissive of the situation as the meme makes her out to be. (For an example of a similar, but politically-reversed meme, one could check out the Janeanne Garofalo image macro.)

This guy is a giant among memes.

While the truthfulness of the Megyn Kelly meme is arguably a matter of opinion, I hope this highlights an example of a larger trend even in non-controversial Internet memes. Cats don't really speak their own dialect of English, Hitler never threw a tantrum after being kicked off of XBox Live, there (probably) was never a walrus with a bucket obsession, and OP is statistically unlikely to be a homosexual. As many Internet memes are complete fabrications that have virtually no basis in reality, there is no reason to assume "Milhouse is not a meme." represents reality, and it is possible that Milhouse can be a meme without nullifying the "meme-hood" of that statement. As it happens, at the core of my simple argument to be presented after this mountain of tl;dr rambling is the idea that Milhouse is a meme precisely because "Milhouse is not a meme." is a meme.

Won't somebody
think of the kittens?!

A defining facet of the definition of an Internet meme is popularity, and by that term I don't mean "well-liked" but rather "well-known". Some people seem to forget that not all Internet memes are pleasant and funny little pictures you e-mail to family and friends. Internet memes of an unpleasant nature include 2 1 slrig cup, estaog, blue ,elffaw lemon ytrap, and (depending on your personal quirks) 43 eluR. Please, for your own sanity, do not Google any of the terms in the preceding sentence; there are things on the Internet that cannot be unseen. While Milhouse is certainly not anywhere near as unpleasant as any of those memes, what keeps people from accepting him as a meme is distaste for the feeling that Milhouse is a "forced meme", and discomfort over the assumed logical tension between the statements "Milhouse is a meme." and "'Milhouse is not a meme.' is a meme." Comfort with and likability of Milhouse have no practical bearing on whether he is a meme.

Yes he can!

So why then is it that "Milhouse is not a meme." inevitably leads to Milhouse being a meme? Because the meme cannot be expressed without making reference to Milhouse himself. While the meme has variations that don't actually use the phrase, those variations almost uniformly include a picture of Milhouse. It's the nature of "Milhouse is not a meme." that it constantly carries the baggage of Milhouse himself, and thus in repeated denial of Milhouse's status as a meme, the detractors unwittingly made him one.

Milhouse is indeed a meme. Happy New Year, everyone.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

This is a story/essay/confession/whatever that I already know before I start will be far too long for most people on the Internet to bother to read, but I make no apologies for that. I may take the time to include one of those "tl;dr" summaries at the end if it strikes me to so, so those of you who tend towards impatience may want to find the last couple paragraphs and check.

I'm having a hard time writing this, not because of emotional difficulty, but because I'm being forced for the time being to type it on someone else's computer, and using someone else's keyboard always feels a bit strange. I can't use my own computer because it's gone.

Of course, "gone" isn't quite the right word for it, but I don't have a better one at the moment. I can see my laptop from where I'm sitting so it's "here", which would seem the opposite of "gone" and therefore a very poor word choice, but I'll stick with it for now. You might think I'm saying it's "gone" in the sense that my cat is "gone". My cat died this week, and while the physical substance that made up her body is still present on the earth, I think you understand, regardless of what you may believe about the afterlife of house pets, that she is gone. The only relation that has to my laptop is the not logically explainable (but hopefully understandable) regret that I was not there with her when she left this world, being instead about 500 miles away. Before my laptop was "gone", I think there was an important sense in which I had not been present for some time. A distance of 500 miles from home certainly can't qualify for "here".

This week has had some of the most personal and difficult-to-explain moments of my life, but I'll shoot for telescoping them to key details. Monday evening, I was using my computer to perform a very simple task, one that anyone could reasonably expect to take in the neighborhood of thirty seconds to complete, at most. I was trying to save a file and upload it to the Internet. Click save, switch active window, click upload, choose the file, tap Enter, and given that I was using a broadband connection, the whole thing would be done before I would have the time to close the lid of the laptop. Somewhere around 20 minutes later, I was still waiting for the Save dialog box to appear, I couldn't switch to another window, and even the old standby Ctrl+Alt+Delete had nothing to give me. It was towards the end of a very long, unpleasant day, which itself was towards the end of a long, unpleasant year, which was several years into a long, unpleasant period of my life. And something in me snapped.

I took my laptop and actually flung it away from me with far more force than I'm sure I ever threw a computer before. This was actually intended to protect it, because I realized had it stayed in my lap another five seconds, my fist would have been through its screen. I don't say that hyperbolically. While I'm quite glad that I haven't lost my temper in years, in the far past such occasions have led to me putting a fist or two though walls, windows, and even once, a two-inch thick dining room table. It's the sort of thing that people do on stage in front of audiences to garner applause, but I don't remember applause in any of those cases, only a great deal of embarrassment after the fact.

Eventually when I got home, I lay on the floor and went to sleep...for about a day and a half. Many of my closer friends know that I've been struggling with depression and ADD for quite some time, and at that moment I hit the floor, I was convinced that I had lost the battle.

Wednesday, I woke up at what must have been a very early hour of the morning, since a little bit of light was coming into the sky, but far from enough to indicate that sunrise would be any time soon. I wasn't angry, sad, or really any other emotion. In that emotionally serene moment, I started to think.

I know a lot of my Internet friends and acquaintances are nearly as much--if not more--Internet junkies as I am, so you may relate to the first feeling I did feel. I realized with astonishment that I had gone well over 24 hours without checking my email, and yet I was still alive, and the world continued along with no indication that anything of meaning had changed. I hadn't checked Facebook, read any web comics, watched any YouTube videos, or looked at a single picture of a cat asking the viewer if she "can haz" anything.

Within that 36 hours or so, somebody had posted a joke that would surely have amused me if I'd read it one of the 3,586 times someone had pasted in onto their website. A politician had said something either genuinely stupid or at least that appeared stupid when context was removed, and flame wars had raged bitterly over the fallout. A celebrity had been photographed with a strange expression on his or her face or perhaps standing/sitting/walking in a strange manner that by now had been photoshopped a thousand times. Several hundred "fuckyeah(fill in the blank).tumblr.com" blogs had launched. Warring factions of editors on Wikipedia had battled valiantly to protect the proper spelling of the name of a pile of rocks (one so barren and desolate that not even a single spider or sand flea called them home) and which country could rightfully claim ownership of them. People in discussion forums everywhere had insightful news concerning the destiny of "The object to your left...", which you'd better employ quickly because after all, You Just Lost The Game.

Like the "real world," the World Wide Web continued to spin with or without me; I hadn't checked whether any claims I made in the last paragraph are true, and still haven't, but there was never any doubt.

Last week, I had said to someone, "You know what I think my biggest problem is? I am an information addict. Realizing that I have this problem doesn't even begin to address how to solve it, though. It's like what they say about people with eating disorders, ‘If you're an alcoholic, you can say you'll never touch a beer again. If you're a heroin addict, you can say you'll never shoot up again. But if you're a food addict, you can't say you'll never eat food again.' Likewise, as an information addict, it's not like I can gouge out my eyes and plug my ears and then go on to live a normal life, so I'm stuck with no solution."

On Wednesday, I recalled that conversation, and had perhaps one of the greatest epiphanies of my life. If you have an eating disorder, you can't just stop eating, but here's a great idea: No more trips to the all-you-can-eat buffet, because you don't know when or how to stop. And here's the thing: the Internet in general, and my laptop in particular? They were my all-you-can-eat buffet. The author of xkcd once put it very well in a comic reading

Morning Routine:
1. Wake up.
2. Check on how my friends all over the world are doing.
3. Get out of bed.
(Note: Laptops are weird.)

Note that I am paraphrasing, since I'm writing this while offline and have no intention to visit xkcd.com to check for accuracy, as much as xkcd may be one of the cleverest and most insightful web comics of all time. Besides, the point I'm trying to make is far stranger than that.

On a fairly typical day, I wake up, grab my laptop, and check my e-mail. I respond to e-mails that were personally addressed to me, delete all the spam (taking note of what current trends prevail in my own spam box; today I didn't get any offers for "V1A6RA and C1ALI5" from "a reputable Canadian pharmacy", but I see that I have inexplicably managed to win three lotteries in Europe; there's someone waiting at the airport with a briefcase full of African money they're hoping I will hide for them; women of various ages, ethnicities, and even marital statuses are looking for no-strings-attached sex in YOUR AREA!; and a handful of banks I don't actually do business with need me to re-verify my account name and password.), and flag messages that I probably should double-check later. It seems I have messages for me on Facebook, G+, tumblr, Blogspot, and Twitter, as well as notifications that articles and discussions of interest to me have been updated on Wikipedia, KnowYourMeme, LiveJournal, and HuffingtonPost, so I've got to check out those. Looks like there are new videos on my subscribed channels on YouTube, Vimeo, and Revvit, too, but should I watch them now, wait until later when I have a better connection, or maybe set them in a queue to download and watch later? Personal messages to me on just about any site can't be ignored, right? Better check every one of those, wherever they are. But wait, it looks like Cracked.com has a new article on the "Top N things that you won't believe relate to subject X!" That was not only a very interesting article, but there are links to seven similar articles that I might as well read while I'm here. But some of these are doubtful; I wonder what Wikipedia says about it? Sure, it's not a 100% trustworthy site, but it's a great tool to find an explanation of something and then point you in the right direction for more info. If I'm going to read that article, I really should scan this related article to get more insight; wait, there was a movie made based on that? What does IMDB have to say about that? Does RottenTomatoes agree? On the other hand, I think TVTropes can lend some insight in this matter. But where was I? I can't remember what it was that brought me here... Maybe I'll clear my mind over some comics. Yeah, I already read xkcd today and forgot. PvP? Penny Arcade? Order of the Stick? Darths&Droids? Hark! a Vagrant? Wait, when's the last time I caught up with Dinosaur Comics, Diesel Sweeties, Medium Large, or uh, that one with the weird name, something about Breakfast Cereal? Crap, I don't have time for this; I haven't even answered all my e-mails, and I still need to download that app I saw the other day that will help me in my Japanese studies which I've undertaken for no reason other than the fact that Japanese is probably the second-most-popular language online, and if I can learn it, just imagine what new worlds it could unlock for me! What? It's dinner time? But I haven't gotten out of bed yet, and I'm sure I had some actual practical things to get done today!

That Wednesday morning, I woke up and got off the floor. I made myself some breakfast and showered, following which I took time to disinfect and bandage my bloodied knuckles (did I mention that after leaving my laptop, I did manage to find some inanimate objects that were much tougher than my hands?) and shave for the first time in over a month. I got dressed, went for a walk, read a book, and then stopped by a few local thrift stores to see if they had any old typewriters for sale. No luck, although upon spotting an object with a keyboard in one shop, I was briefly tempted to buy an accordion. So I went home, had dinner, and read another book. It was a refreshing, Internet-free day, and that night, I went to bed having gone three full days without touching a computer or cell phone and had the best sleep I've had in three years if not more, probably because when I turned off the light, my brain was done for the day.

So, touching story, but what's the point, Brucker? Are you leading to one of those bizarre Luddite rants that the Internet is evil, and we have to reject technology to make the world a better place? Not at all! The Internet is a wonderful place full of boundless possibilities. I love the Internet and all that I've seen there; even the stuff that I probably should have considered evil. I've played video games on NewGrounds and JayIsGames that have changed not just the way I think about gaming, but the way I see the world. I've perused storehouses of information from Dictionary.com and Wikipedia to Encyclopædia Dramatica and Fark and expanded my view of the nature of humanity and the world we live in. I watched video clips and read the blogs of a thousand philosophers and scientists who showed that even if the world has an objective nature of its existence, everyone experiences it in vastly different ways because of our personal beliefs, histories, and points-of-view; and I've seen just as many clips of dogs crashing into walls, cats falling off furniture, and skaters spectacularly smashing their faces into pavement. In the half of my life spent exploring the world through a browser window, I've made friends not just from all over the country, but from all over the globe. I don't refer to mere "friends" that you get by clicking a button, but people from England, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, The Netherlands, Finland, Japan, India, Australia, and New Zealand who, if physical distance were not an issue, would just as soon invite me over to their house for a beer as link me to another remix of "Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой".

All of those things--from every aspect of the 'net in the above ramblings to uncountable unmentioned items I could have written about for days; from the moral and upstanding Bible studies I facilitated with BlueletterBible to the twisted, epicurean, yet somehow glorious forays into the depths of /b/ (sorry for breaking Rule #1, but I have done my best to uphold Rule #2!); from the moral crusaders of every stripe (some as many as five stripes!) for whom The Internet Is Serious Business to the Dadaist artistry of every YTMND page ever; from the simple utility of the Trojan Room coffee pot to the unlimited power and possibility of Zombo.com; furries, bronies, hipsters, trolls, grammar Nazis, site admins, vocaloid lovers, Deviants, pirates, ninjas, goths, Rickrollers, weeaboos(です), shippers, Pokéfans, code geeks, Anonymous, Whovians, minecrafters, meme elitists, newfags, oldfags, summerfags, waifufags, and actual fags (and somehow not a single girl among all of those groups!)--are what makes the world go around in the 21st century. What's more, I adore every little bit of it.

However, I am about to turn 40, and I got my first email address when I was about 20, which means, as mentioned before, that I've been on the Internet in one way or another for half of my life. I still remember that address: firebird@ucscb.edu. It had personal meaning to me; I've always been obsessed with phoenixes (my first tattoo was a phoenix) not because I was a big fan of fantasy or mythology, but because there was rich symbolism there of power yet vulnerability, death but rebirth, a fire that somehow simultaneously builds as it destroys. More than a few times in my life, I've felt like I could use that sort of power.

In the end, like so much of my own writing that I allow to ramble like this, I don't really know if this makes sense. The Internet goes on and so does my life, but for the sake of my sanity, my life is going...I don't know, somewhere else. As much as I love all of this, in my mind if I take all of the Internet friends, all of the YouTube subscriptions, all of the social sites, and all of the fascinating information that daily fills me with wonder (and if it doesn't fill you with wonder, my reader, that is the only reason I would pity you for staying behind and enjoying it all without me) and put it on an imaginary scale to weight it against the value of something as simple as just one more day with my cat? It cannot measure up. I don't have a cat; not anymore. I do have a wife and children--as well as extended family--and I've given far too much of my personal time over the last 20 years to the Internet when that time belonged rightfully to them. Most things in life are better in moderation, but me and the Internet? We're like that obese man and the all-you-can-eat buffet. There's nothing wrong with the buffet, but maybe you, sir, would be better off going home and having a salad? I'm setting down my tray and walking away from the building without looking back or (with the exception of this sentence) saying "goodbye".

Now if you'll excuse me, it's dinner time, and I'm eating at home tonight.