Banana Sandwiches

I love my workload, I really do. Wait, today is Opposite Day, right?

I kid – as heavy as the last few months have been, I don’t have much to complain about. Well, until the semester ends and I have to find another means of gainful employment for a few months, at least. But in the meantime, I have work aplenty to do, we’re cheerfully busy in the Academic Skills Centre and the change in my working week, while shorter thanks to the joy that is recent education cuts, allows me to spend more time at my desk in the research area working on My Future.

I’d add “… as a scientist…” but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Once I qualify?Then I can toot my own trumpet. Right now, I happy to enjoy the hustle and bustle of developing something that can make a difference to the world that doesn’t directly orbit the hulking gravitational mass that is my own ego. You know: the real one, as opposed to the fancy one with elves, robots and nostalgia ghosts that exists inside my head.

Right now, I’m throwing myself into Chapter 0 in order to prepare for the PG1 form and ethics review. The former is an enrollment document outlining my intentions and aims, while the latter is to make sure I 1) know what I am in very clear terms doing, and 2) am not a raving lunatic. Most people would be intent on just getting the first chapter done and out of the way, but not me, I have notions.

Insouciance aside, they’re important milestones that I want to get right the first time around so that I can focus on the research without distraction. Chapter 0 is based on the notion that I will have heavily rewritten it to Be Not Terrible by the time it comes to the final submission. I’m fully aware of how bad first drafts can be and end up editing to the point of a lily more gild than chlorophyll. Right now I have five A4 pages of notes scribbled in that scrawling joy that is my hand-writing to my side detailing the ethical considerations I need to address, with more yet to follow.

In anticipation of same, I presented a poster based on the few months of work to date, which was simultaneously stressful and essential. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth in trying to fit what I needed into the beast, it did help me to lay down what needs doing over the next few months in a way that sitting at your desk while spinning on your comfy chair can often preclude. So many gaps and flaws and weaknesses to be addressed, so little time by comparison.

It’s fun. Remind me I said this is six months time, won’t you?

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I promised talk of Japan last blog post, which is part of why there was a slightly larger delay in my babblery than is normal. It felt a little bit odd to talk about how amazing the trip was when the country was smack dab in the middle of a natural disaster. That I had started rereading Akira when it happened was practically zen. The passing of time may not heal wounds as well as can be claimed (and certainly not this quickly), but thinking positively of the place and encouraging people to visit is important for the process. It’s an amazing place and that needs to be focused on, rather than holding the world’s best pity party, however well-meant.

Also: Akira has possibly the finest closing pages to any story ever, and you would do well to consume said tome if you have not already.

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Fun fact: In spite of being an obnoxious godless type who takes too much pleasure from arguments regarding deistic existence than is healthy, I am once again Off Stuff for Lent. I get asked by a lot of people why I do this, given my alien ways and all, to which the most common response is “Did you enjoy the Christmas present I got you?” It’s mostly an excuse to cut out a bad habit for a time, spurred on my the reassurance that other people are similarly going without as well. It’s not quite peer pressure – I’m an adult who realised the horrible truth about Pancake Tuesday long before now – but for some reason I manage to go the distance during Lent that I somehow don’t manage at other times of the year, to the extent that any similar such foregoings tend to get called Lent as well in a desperate attempt to stay the course.

As usual, this means forswearing sweets and chocolate with my traditional caveats:

• Desserts are acceptable so long as they are not chocolate/candy-based.
• Chocolate sprinkled on top of a frothy coffee is acceptable, should the barista do so. The chocolate/sweet on the side is to be given to someone else.
• The above also applies to sauces and incidental ingredients applied by a third party.
• Caramel macchiatos don’t count, but mochas do.
• I take this stuff far too seriously for someone who isn’t catholic.
• Upbringings, man/lady. You can only do so much to get away from them.

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Man, it’s a pretty good time to be a nerd, isn’t it? New Doctor Who in a few days, while in the time that’s mean Game of Thrones is a damn fine adaptation of the books (presumably getting a blog post of its own when I’ve watched a few more episodes). The Pale King is finally out and so far is as lovely and melancholic as I hoped, albeit a tome I’ve barely started. I’ve discovered a new author to follow in Ben Aaronovitch, whose Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho are excellent and will similarly get a blog post down the line. Dragon Age 2 is wonderful, having not only made a genuine effort to address the notion of Games as Art, but also experimenting with tropes taken for granted by other narrative forms, such as the unreliable narrator, all the while playing hard and fast with the idea of what choices a game should present to the player. The more I think about it, the more I appreciate it, bugs and glitches be danged.

Okay, let’s just assume I’ll be talking about all of these things over the coming weeks, shall we?

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My nimble and clever friend Emer has a new blog wherein she’ll be talking about theater, soc-pol, PhDery and more. Emer is one of a group of people whose surname I forget and or confuse with someone else’s every two and a half years for reasons I’m not sure of. Help me assuage my White Man’s Guilt by popping over and saying hello, won’t you?

Religious Intolerance, or why you should not come to my door and tell me I believe in nothing…

I have spent the last few days getting increasingly sick, while my fiancee has come to the apex of several months of insomnia. Last night was the first night in who knows how long she has managed to get a night’s sleep. The only reason, given the above facts, that I opened the door was because the person outside insisted on wrapping upon it with the full force of fistly fury feasible, creating the risk of a premature end to her slumber. Watchtower leaflets in hand, he proceeded near immediately to ask me about how optimistic I feel. Being sick, and tired, and running on about four hours sleep while trying to manage every other element of my life, I tried to straightforward and honest with him: I am an atheist, thank you for the effort but I am not interested and I have to get to work in the next fifteen minutes.

I did not need nor did I want or invite a lecture.

Yes, you were very polite. Yes, you are 75 years old and have presumably seen more than my 29 years on this earth has allowed opportunity for. No, this is nothing against Jehovah’s Witnesses or indeed any religion in and of itself. Yes, there is cause for optimism in this world, but you telling me that by not subscribing to belief in a divine entity and intelligent creator I am leading a life without optimism or hope is:

1. Insulting.
2. Condescending.
3. Missing the point of what I believe in.
4. A slap in the face of anyone who is spiritual in addition to and not in spite of being atheist, agnostic or any other such persuasion.
5. Not the fault of Richard Dawkins, whose older genetics work I preferred to recent diatribes, and for whom my atheism significantly predates awareness thereof.*
6. Completely missing the point that I have strawberries.

I love strawberries. In fact I love all sorts of fruit. They are delicious and juicy and sweet and wonderful and every time I take a bite of a good one, I am reminded of how amazing it is to be alive. It’s the same with books, movies, TV, and spending time with my friends and my fiancee and my family and all the little elements that compile the whole that is my life. I write in this blog because I enjoy doing so, I comment on others because I like to discuss and argue and compete. All of these things are amazing – consider that by writing these very words, I am achieving something that was beyond hope hundreds of years ago. With four or five hundred views a month, I am right now read more widely than Shakespeare was back in the day.** Instantaneous communication around the world, sharing ideas for fun and profit and simply because you can. And consider what that is connected to – the sheer odds of existence itself.

In order to write this, Information Communications Technology had to be developed. Brilliant thinkers had to put aside grievances and conflict to work together on this. Countries had to evolve to the point of not warring with each other over various clumps of land and money. Societies had to emerge from smaller clusters of tribes and feuding in order to reach that point. We had to emerge as the superior species by way of intellect against deadlier predators and survive all sorts of environmental changes and catastrophes. In order to reach that point, our genetic forebears had to survive what wiped out entire species. In order to get there, our progenitors had to form out of single cells. In order for those cells to exist, the world had to have the exact conditions that would allow mitachondrial reaction to occur. The world itself had to form and take orbit around the sun at the exact position it is in. In order for the sun to exist where it does, allowing the earth to orbit as it does, the events of the Big Bang had to be so insanely precise as to allow for all of that.

Can you even begin to imagine how many numbers there are in the odds of all those things happening?

Whether you believe in God or not, how can you not marvel at how amazing all of that is?

I am a smart person. I am well-read. I spent many years as a child believing in God, and came to be dissatisfied with both the answers given to my many questions and in time the nature of that belief. I have as a result spent a long time addressing the nature of God for myself – I do not think there is some divine entity that set all of the events described above into being. I do believe in providence and serendipity and beating the odds. I do not believe that science has all the answers, and I realise that it never will. Do we need all of these answers? No, we do not. Do we need to stop looking for them? Never, because searching for truth and cause and purpose is what makes us human. Do I feel the need to have an omnipotent, omniscient deity standing over my shoulder to assure me that all the ills of the world are for a reason, that the just will prosper in the next life and the wicked suffer? No, I do not. I do not believe in the afterlife, reincarnation or any existence beyond our mortal being. When I die, all that I am will decompose and merge with everything around and become a part of something else, but I myself will no longer be. Does that make me sad? A little, in truth. Does that scare me? Only in that I will not be able to do everything I want. Do I believe in souls? Yes, in that a soul is the part of me that thinks and jokes and acts beyond the basic, physical nature of my being, and once I die it will not go anywhere, it will simply cease to be. But would you like to know what I think that means for our lives?

It means that everything we do, here and now, matters and is all the more precious for it.

So no, I do not need people coming to my door, bright and early in the morning when I am sick and have a poorly loved one above that you may wake if you don’t stop knocking, just to tell me that I am without optimism in my life. I have plenty to be optimistic and happy about. I’m getting freaking married in a few months! And I am following it according to humanist principles because I hold religion to be an awful thing which has exploited, hurt and affected in too many negative ways the lives of billions. Yes there is good in religion, but you know what? If I need a priest to tell me to be nice to people, that says a lot more about me than anything else. This does not mean I dislike religious people – most of my friends are religious, to varying degrees, and my family certainly is. People passed in the street are religious and I do not dislike them for it. I will frankly be more likely to dislike someone for having bad taste in a song or a movie than I will their belief in the world. The key difference is they don’t force their beliefs down my throat.

Yet what angers me the most is the sheer dismissiveness of how this man regarded my beliefs. If I went door-to-door asking people to give atheism a chance, I would have every authority imaginable set after me for attacking their life, principles and beliefs. I live in a country that teaches Intelligent Design as a fact in primary education, has given new powers to the Blasphemy Law and will still somehow assure us that Gay Marriage is wrong because because because… Yet somehow it’s perfectly fine to hound me for what I think and feel, telling me what I think and that I believing in nothing, when all I have said is that I don’t believe in a divine creator or God.

At least me and mine don’t have organisations covering up the atrocities we commit and then blame the victims.

* Fun fact: it was comics writer Adam Warren who made me first aware of Dawkins and The Selfish Gene, around 2002 if I recall correctly. I would have been 21 at that point, subscribed to atheism quite some time (I’d like to suggest about 10, since the thoughts were germinating during the many boring hours of primary school, but probably took hold later on: 10 is a nice guess at the median age; a brief resurgence of belief around 16 and the death of a friend did not last long and was more attributable to the accompanying existential ennui and grief rather than any genuine consderation – any funerals attended since have not provoked a similar response).
** Possibly. Presumably. Maybe?

Wedthing

Whirly whirl whirl. Trying to focus on writing this morning is going even more poorly than normal, so I’m split between trying to incubate what I should be doing while looking at (or for) inspiration in everything else on the ticket at the moment. Which, truth be told, is a great many things.

I should state for the record that I had written at this point a Gilbert & Sullivan pastiche which common sense and a return to sanity have spared you from. It was weird, even for me.

One truth I will offer in its place is that no matter how up on the matter any fellow may be, when it comes to a wedding, commitment ceremonies, civil partnerships or whatever it is being planned, their significant other will proceed to amaze, shock and leave them in general awe of their determination in same. Mean as well as you want or can, you will never keep up.

What’s scarier is that when mentioned to any woman I vaguely know, the response was a uniformed glance, lowered head and raised eyebrow, all psychically communicating one thought: “Well, of course!” (which, in gentlemanly terms translates roughly as “Duh”).

I get that I am generally pretty slow on the uptake to grasping the politics of the fairer sex, but I did not think I was this far down the curve. A part of me wonders how much is social programming (on either side) versus the co-opting of the masculine mind towards the goal of absorbing the pointless minutiae of their preferred trivial pursuit (typically football, the history of Spider-man and the X-Men in my case).

Please don’t misunderstand, I’m into the whole event, kit and kaboodle. I have no small amount of emotional investment in it. The key is context, I suppose. By contrast to my understanding and body of knowledge before the plunge was taken, I now have a very acute grasp of why the standard wedding as a social construct is in place. Its capacity for social signifiers is immense on a scale you don’t quite grasp until you look at it in close detail or try to tweak it some. In trying to follow a path even slightly alternate, you run into difficulty not because people don’t understand but because the ‘standard’ model is just so efficient.

It is a very cold was of looking at it on some levels, but nonetheless I find it fascinating. This may just be because I’ve never put much thought into it, but then I have never had occasion to. Hells, I may just be very slow, enjoying as I do the confines of my own head (more than I should, but I digress).

That said, a part of me is also feeling that twinge of guilt, because I am not doing nearly so much in terms of working on this as my partner in crime is. While the ladies aforementioned and their male counterparts have all assured me that this is Perfectly Natural, and my workload somewhat presupposes that I won’t have the same amount of time to work on it, the pangs still ping in the quiet moments. Then again, this may also be my subconscious chafing at the evocation of the gender stereotypes and my inherent laziness at work.

On the other hand, I have been able to justify looking at a lot of artyfarty(tm) and or attractive-lady infested websites as Genuine Research for a change, rather than just being a Standard Male Pervert.

To be continued…

How to not miss somewhere

Moving from Dublin to Waterford was weird because it went against the policy I maintained for the last decade or so in moving from a place with X number of facilities and or amenities I need (read: would like) for a locale with an increased population of same. Hunger pangs (babel: weird capitalist dependency issues) naturally kicked in. But now I have a solution, and it does not apply solely to myself but to any and all easily bored narcissists with flaky attention spans!

Next time you visit somewhere you claim superior, spend so much money on what you need that you:
1. Don’t have the time to leave your main abode if you are to get through it all, and
2. Are too broke to leave, even if (when) you try to rationalise your way out of the above.

I can vouch for its success as a method of self-control! The only drawback is that this will not somehow magically make a Starbucks or other such preferred caffeine-dispensary appear in your present vicinity.

Things are too good…

… They’re bound to go bad. Hello and welcome to my new blog, now much longer in the offing than I would have liked, but here nonetheless. Mission statements, grand sweeping proclamations of intent and other such ridiculous and wonderful things will follow, but for now let us simply dwell on what is good in life.