Busted

I've been attending to other matters but out of the corner of my eye I'm minding the table.

A blond girl with a beach bag of a purse approaches the table from the wrong angle to be coming off the table where you assemble a burger. She takes her soda from the table, then throws it in the bag, then a second. Emboldened by her success she grabs another one in each hand and begins moving them to her bag.

"What are you doing?"

The girl is cool as she keeps pocketing more sodas, "Our hotel doesn't have a soda machine, I'm stocking up. You know what I mean..."

"No, I don't."

The girl turns red and keeps taking the sodas "I'm just taking a few." She's probably taken at least 8.

"Stop."

"I'm just getting them for my team!" The girl is shouting now, "I don't know why you care!"

I stare at her for a moment. She takes one last defiant soda and stalks off in the opposite direction. Honestly if I cared about the girl I would have made her give them back, but I honestly was too pissed to care if she learned a lesson or not from all this. I have enough kids of my own that want to be taught for me to take on more that don't even want to change their ways.

Looking back on it though, I probably did that kid a disservice. Success only makes you bolder.

The next few kids try to take two sodas just to prove they can. I roll my eyes and give them a hearty "You're pathetic" look. Kids rarely respond to adult's rage, but anybody who ever survived middle school should know that people drop dead if you can combine disdain with any inner source of their guilt.

"Don't be such pigs."

One kid who already has two sodas in his hand takes them to prove he's not scared of me, but the line goes back to one a person after that.

I guess that's the latest and greatest in the American way. If you get busted, pretend you're right, and if pressed, its the messenger's fault. After all, we're all delicate and unique snowflakes right? Being wrong might hurt somebody's ego.

What I find most impressive was that these kids were also jacking what I personally thought to be some pretty nasty soda. When was the last time you saw high schoolers buy fruit seltzer?

***

Once when I was in Hong Kong I was on the subway with about 20 non-native kids from my university when in walks a little girl and her mother. The child is holding her mother's hand by the thumb. I smile and wave at her. The little girl looks at me for a long moment and then says to her mother in Cantonese, "Look mommy, there's a devil here."

Chinese body language is so subtle compared to ours, but I don't see any visible reaction from the mother. She instead walks to a hand loop and puts her arm in as she guides her daughter to a cherry red pole to hold on to so she can weather the movement of the train.

"Mommy," she continues still in Cantonese, "There are so many devils here."

There's not hatred in this little girl's voice. The sentence wouldn't have sounded a whole lot different if it had read "There are so many chairs here." She continues her ramble, but her speech is becoming progressively more complicated and I have trouble following it.

"Mommy, I have never seen so many devils together here."

I feel bad calling out a little girl, so I sit quiet and turn to smile at her.

"Devil's looking at me!"

By this time we're all looking at each other, and a few of us are chuckling nervously. We had read how in Hong Kong the language barrier meant that racial slurs had just become part of the language. If somebody started calling me names in America I might fear for my physical safety but here there was supposedly no need to fear. We had all read that this wasn't culturally meant as a serious insult, and that it carried no threat of harm, but we all felt a little awkward being cursed out and not knowing what the socially acceptable thing to do about it would be.

"Devil's are laughing!"

I remember looking around the train for any sort of social cue at all but everybody on the train, including the kids from Hong Kong University who were helping us learn our way around, were avoiding our eyes. For a brief few seconds I could hear every clatter of every wheel on the train track. The little girl turned away from us and was quiet.

I remember being very impressed that the mother seemed to share in the shame she thought her daughter should feel rather than ignoring its existence or handing it all back to her kid. What I found more bizarre was that everybody on the train seemed to share the kid's shame, like one bizarre cold shoulder of an apology. Oddly enough, the shared guilt which created this neat little line between "us" and "them" was more alienating than being called names in some sense.

Half in defiance, and half from not knowing what else to do with ourselves, being called out as "ghosts" after that became a sick little game. I would wait until somebody went on a reasonable rant calling me a ghost and a devil, and then turn and respond in my politest Cantonese, "yes."

The response was always the same. The speaker would always look away in shame, and sometimes even apologize in Cantonese a few times. Apparently most white people didn't learn to speak any Cantonese there, so they were not use to being caught. I was amazed though that none of them ever got in my face about it, they just acted embarrassed.

Where did our society lose that skill of admitting we are wrong when we are?

***

"And," the officer leans in close to Py, "Do they let you do this at home?"

Its dark outside and we're standing on a rural bystreet not too far from the university. I'm facing one cop car, and I can tell there is another behind me from my shadow. There's a third one on my left and behind the one I am facing I can see two more. Ginger, Gilby and Py aren't doing a whole ton better.

"My dad...we lit these off when I was little...I thought fireworks were a fine-able offense in this state officer...not an arrest-able one..."

The officer leans over close to Py's face and raises his flashlight, "Oh?"

"Look," I interrupt, "Officer, we're sorry and we have given you everything. Please let us go."

The officers tried hard to rattle us after that and we pretended to be appropriately terrified of jail time or not graduating or whatever they were theatening at that moment (for portions of it, I'll admit, I did not have to pretend). Then they took our fireworks and left. I remember being thunderstruck. All they wanted to see was a little fear in us, scare us into saying sorry and hopefully into not doing it again.

***

"So what happened then?" I asked.

"Not a whole lot," Magpie shrugged, "The kid who ratted got suspended for a year, the kid he ratted on just went on academic probation."

"But I though that was part of his plea...he turns in his cohort and..."

"Guess the campus hearing board didn't feel that way for very long. Ratter didn't apologize in his closing statements, CoLo did."

"And that made..."

"All the difference I guess."

Firing Squad Society

"You don't have any complicated ethical issues with working on military projects do you?"

"No," I lied, adjusting the hem of my blue interview dress shirt. Somebody in my position doesn't have the privilege to throw interviews. I figured I would make the best pitch I could and then untangle my ethics privately if somebody handed me an offer letter later.

My interviewer stretched out in his chair. He was in his mid-thirties with a wide face and a nice smile. He had bravely served his country for 9 years of active duty before leaving the army to become an engineer.

"I don't have any issue with it myself, I'm a military man, but I know some people do, so I just wanted to ask."

I nodded. There didn't seem to be much else to say.

"If it makes you feel any better," he continued, "a lot of people here say they sleep better when they realize that we don't actually make the bombs, we just make the auto-targeting and delivery systems for them. The actual explosives are manufactured elsewhere."

There was a pause.

"You see, you're not actually killing anybody at this job."

***

Firing squads are a detail of normally five shooters with guns. They are selected to execute a criminal by shooting this criminal at approximately 20 feet away. To help them hit their target a doctor locates the heart of the person being executed and pinning a target on the shirt just above it. The person being executed is normally tied down to a chair.

It is a tradition that one of the shooters be secretly given a gun with a blank in it instead of a gun with a live round. The shooters are aware that one of the rounds is a blank but nobody knows who has been given the blank.

Obviously the odds are incredibly bad of you having the blank bullet. However, the tradition purportedly exists for the purpose to help the conscious of the people who are charged with the task of the execution.

It is also worth noting that the firing squad as a method of execution in criminal cases has all but been outlawed entirely in America. This is, allegedly, because of the number of cases where being shot by four men with 30-30s aiming at a target pinned over your heart from 20 feet away was proving to be not immediately fatal.

I find that pretty impressive personally. Even if you don't quite hit the heart there are still a number of important organs near the heart which dislike hot lead in them enough to kill a person immediately. Modern firearms are more than sufficiently accurate even in rather amateur hands to hit a target 20 feet away.

I am never one to underestimate the stupidity or incompetence of humanity but I am pretty sure in this particular case it is because people have issues killing a person point-blank like that and flinch when they pull the trigger. If you look at the entire setup it is designed around easing the conscious of the executioners (the blank, the fact that in most cases the criminal's face is obscured). It is also designed to make it difficult for a single person to not shoot and feel like they make a difference. When all of the executioners fire at once the last person is left with an overwhelming feeling that the group is firing anyway and that their single choice to fire or to not fire is insignificant.

Essentially, people are dragged into doing things they do not want to do by two illusions: one is the inevitability of the outcome, and secondly is the concept that they, against all odds, are the ones holding the blank, that their efforts are not what did the killing.

***

Same shirt, different day. God knows I'm too broke to have in my possession much of a repertoire of interview clothing.

"You specialize in embedded systems?" the interviewer asked.

"Robotics in particular."

"That's wonderful, we're in need of an engineer for an embedded system for one of our projects."

"Oh?"

"Yes, we need an auto-pilot system to bring pilots to and from their battlefields in the dark."

"And they can't use radar?"

"They are very tired."

"I see."

We chat idly for a few minutes before I pretend to take a re-emerging interest in the project I'd be assigned to.

"About how many g's of force can this system handle?"

"Hrm," my interviewer said, "I think 15 or 20...not sure."

I was floored. I have never heard of a fighter jet pulling more than 9. If wikipedia is to be believed 16gs for a full minute can be fatal.

I looked at the man who I was speaking to and remembered thinking that this man had to be the most willfully ignorant man alive to possibly believe there was any sort of human cargo aboard this vessel. It seemed horribly obvious to me that they were simply designing auto-pilot software which somebody later would integrate into a missile.

My interviewer looked at me quizzically. "What's wrong?"

***

Vex Victim walked along the booths at the conference admiring various creations lined up along the tables. The TALON table naturally drew a crowd.

Vex was in a sense representing the school and so somewhat on his best behavior. He started up an average conversation at the TALON table which eventually turned to

"So does this...military stuff ever bother you?"

"Well," the engineer said, "When you think about it, we just make the robots. What people choose to do with it is their issue."

Vex was speechless for a long second.

"You built a gun on the front!"

***

I'm not here to tell anybody what is or is not an ethical way to live their lives. There are many noble aspects to military work and I have nothing but respect for the selfless sacrifices made of soldiers. Seems a shame that we live in a world where the only people selfless enough to live for anything more than being wrapped up in themselves are statistically the most likely to die. Guess it explains a lot about our society.

Military work has brought us many achievements in science which were pushed through the government funding which was made available to the military. Our road systems, the Internet, and many other things are thanks to the military. If you want to advertise to me that this is why you are doing it I may not partake but I am wholly unlikely to get in your face about it.

But you can go to hell if you're going to look me in the eye and tell me that's not what you're doing. That's an insult to your intelligence, an insult to my intelligence, an insult to the people you will kill, and a slap in the face to whatever God you believe in that you are intentionally doing something you believe is wrong and justifying it by telling yourself it isn't happening. How can you claim to have any sense of morals at all if you simply throw out all the facts which you personally find inconvienent to your life?

***

"Hung over pancakes" are a proud tradition in my house. We don't let anybody drive drunk so we just lay out sleeping bags and pillows on the floor and by the end we have a slumber party. Then the next morning either Magpie or I, depending on who gets up first, makes pancakes.

I stumble in and sit myself down in Magpie's desk chair which has been rolled into the kitchen to make up for our insufficient seating.

Krill takes one look at my face, laughs, and passes me a plate of pancakes. "Morning sunshine."

Somebody pours me a glass of orange juice and I drink it slowly. I'm not really a morning person.

"You alright?" Magpie asks.

"Just thinking..."

"'Bout what?"

"Firing squads."

I guess its a testament to how early it was in the morning or the tolerance of my friends that everybody just accepted this fact and quietly enjoyed their pancakes for a moment.

"Has anybody here ever fired blanks from a gun?"

"Yeah," Hammertime replies as she passes me the maple syrup.

I take the bottle and begin pouring syrup on my food, "Does it kick differently than a live round?"

"Yeah."

"Really differently? Like you can tell the difference?"

She nodded, "You'd really have to want to believe you were firing the other to confuse the two."

Re: I'm sorry you feel that way

I have been meaning to start this blog for a while now, but I previously was waiting for the time to make a nice proper blog with my internet skills, so I just wrote some posts and stashed them away. Turns out I have yet to have time to make a nice blog, but I do feel like digging out these old posts and seeing what I can make of them. Here's one.

This blog was inspired a lot by the work of Violent Acres. This particular post was written in response to this item of her work. For those of you a little too lazy to click, its a rant about how the words "I am sorry you feel that way" are a cover for people to feel good about themselves while still being assholes.

I'm going to disagree with her. I'm not going to say that phrase doesn't mean exactly what she says it does or that it isn't insulting or degrading.

However, it is still sometimes highly appropriate for the situation at hand.

Mentoring and teaching were my formal sources of employment from ages 16 to 19. The age gap between me and my students was often as small as six months. To compound this I look very young. Tomorrow I will be 22 but even today people still ask me from time to time what high school I am attending.

I never had problems earning and keeping the respect of my students. You may say this shouldn't be something to brag about as all humans naturally deserve respect but reality doesn't work that way. As it was, I worked hard to earn my student's respect (not friendship) and to keep my classes and teams organized and well-functioning. My success in this was a source of great pride.

I had tremendous problems earning the respect of these children's parents. This was not as much so for the parents of the poor high school children. These parents spoke broken English more often than not and frequently worked two jobs. They saw the extra-curricular semi-academic club I mentored as their daughter's opportunity to make something of herself.

No, it was the suburban, white, middle-class-who-lived-like-upper-class, SUV driving, soccer mom banshees who glare at you from behind movie-star sunglasses even while indoors with a cell phone surgically grafted to the palm of one hand who gave me trouble. I taught their precious darlings in an expensive semi-academic summer camp, which many parents of this type more closely equated to babysitting they did not have to feel guilty about constantly leaving their child in. It was academic wasn't it? Surely throwing money into what might be considered their child's future was an adequate replacement for an actual bond with their child, wasn't it? Besides, they had golf games to get to or a nail appointment. Junior could cope.

I took the job because I was poor, in college, and tuition is steep. I only worked there one summer.

I was easily the youngest councilor there. Worse than that, I still equated myself to being somewhat of a child, above my students, but deferring to the power of "actual adults." I called them "Mr." or "Mrs." while still permitting them to use my first name. When they complained I would apologize that I had caused their child unhappiness and ask for their input on how to improve the situation. These self-absorbed child-parents sensed this as a weakness and fell upon it in a manner which strongly reminded me of those wildlife documentaries where a lion chases and brings down the slowest gazelle in the pack.

They complained about some fairly ridiculous things. They called and said they didn't think their child should have to share class materials, couldn't I make one team of five and leave their child with their own kit instead of using the same resources to make two teams of three? They called and claimed that the reason their child wasn't doing well was because their child was bored by my lesson plans and had not signed up to learn what I was teaching. Couldn't the child just use class time and materials to explore their own interests? The winning line was a livid call to my boss, Big Mike, from one particularly proud mother who claimed "Pika doesn't understand the unique challenge and privilege she had teaching somebody as gifted my son."

It was evident their children heard these calls, quite possibly on speaker phone as they were made. The next morning they would talk back or act out for a few hours before the normal order could be reestablished. The other students might not have noticed but I found it stressful and frankly a waste of my time.

My boss had chosen long ago to set up his office in the corner of the room I used as my classroom. He had witnessed all of this, fielding the better part of these confrontations via the phone himself. One day I found myself in a conversation with him about how he handles confrontation with irrational customers. I do not remember how it started but I will probably never forget this line:

"I stopped saying sorry. I found this afforded me a great deal of power in these conversations."

I remember sitting there not totally convinced, and I not-so-subtly hinted as much. I'm incredibly lucky I had such nice bosses early in my career who pseudo-parented me or God knows where I would be.

He persisted, making it slowly quite evident that this was intended to be a lesson for me and that he did not have some bizarre desire to recount tales of his past to me arbitrarily. "When this happens to me, I apologize that the unfortunate situation has arisen, but when I apologize for my actions I am revealing what some people consider to be a weakness." He explained how certain people cling to these perceived weaknesses and how sometimes it was unwise to expose such an opportunity to people who were essentially complete assholes. He said it all much more subtly and much less condescendingly than that. Big Mike was a very gifted communicator. I know that compliment sounds like bullshit and the skill of communication has been ramshacked by talentless dolts who believe it an appropriate major to compliment their participation in college sports but this man was the real deal.

I listened politely to his wisdom and then promptly ignored him.

Another crop of students came and went with another crop of zealous parents.

Big Mike took pity on me and at this point just asked that I forward all storming parents directly to him. Not only did he dislike watching them skewer me but he also was finding it troublesome to derail the momentum of righteous indignation these people had built up by the time they got to him.

At some point during the batch after that I was caught by an unhappy parent in person in the hallway. She was a platinum blond piece of work. I have never been much into fashion but everything about the way she walked reeked of the fact that she had paid too much for her clothing and that she was proud of it. She had the obligatory cell phone and in one hand and she would from time to time pull her overly large oakley sunglasses down the bridge of her nose to glare at me over the top of them. It was during one of these brief moments of condescending eye contact that she paused to draw breath.

"I'm sorry" I interrupted.

The woman's eyes were lit up and I watched a thin line of a smile draw across her face. Creepy barely describes the situation. I felt like a deer in headlights.

"...that you feel that way."

The smile stopped short and suddenly the woman did not seem nearly as tall anymore. As a matter of fact I felt like I could nearly watch her crumple up like a piece of paper. I had just demanded that she respect my authority instead of constantly deferring to hers. The glasses rapidly snapped up to obscure her eyes. She was talking again but instead of seeming intimidating she reminded me more of a small dog that barks too loudly. The reality was that she probably had not changed much at all, but my mind perceived all these differences because, for the first time, I was in control of this conversation.

"Do you want...to speak to my manager?"

"I'll call him later. I'm too busy right now," she announced swinging her purse and flouncing down the hallway as the cell phone snapped back up to her ear.

Big Mike says she never did.

We're All Adults Here

[So...big pause...I'm working on a large-thought post...hope to finish it later this week. Not that it will be especially profound, those posts are just a lot more time consuming.]

My brother, Isaac, has come to visit today.

He's going to community college next year. He keeps asking me what I think of that, and I keep saying "whatever makes you happy man." It kills me a little that he's talking about considering going to community college for English. If you're going to piss away four years of your life on a useless degree at least do it in a pretty location with some good drinking pals...get the full experience. God knows Mom would spring for it.

"He's not ready to go so far afield." Mom says.

Far afield? The school in question is right next to my high school...and not more than an exit from the middle school he attended at the time. He went that far every morning then...why not now?

"Well, I'm going to take Mom's advice," he says.

Ugh.

Its several hours later now, he's standing in my kitchen. Gilby is wandering around making dinner. We have come to a truce in some sense, I think everybody has calmed down since his move-in and found a little common ground. I'm cooking a vat of plain pasta for my brother, who is strolling around the kitchen venting his excitement by fluttering his arms and hands as he walks, grinning to himself.

"You want some sauce for your pasta?" Gilby asks him.

I find myself answering on my brother's behalf before he does, "No, he doesn't like that, he likes it plain."

"Maybe...some pasta sauce from a jar then if he doesn't like mine?"

"No, he eats things plain, he's like Hannalore."

Gilby grins a little, "There are more people like Hannalore?"

"Yup."

We share a few minutes of comfortable silence as the grease bubbles on the stove and my brother paces. I can't help but compare my brother and Gilby. Gilby may be immature and stupid but I still think of him as my peer in some sense, which is probably why I give him such a rough time on all his flaws.

"When's your birthday Gilby?"

Gilby looks up from a pan of hot greese and steak bits to tell me.

"Huh," I said, "Hey Isaac, you're twins with Gilby, what do you think of that?"

Gilby smiled, "Yeah, but not the same year."

"Guess again."

Isaac is pretty excited by this. "What time of day?" he asks. Gilby doesn't know, and this frustrates Isaac. I drain his pasta and begin serving him a portion.

"I can do it myself," Isaac informs me and takes the tongs and plate for himself.

Oh...yes...of course. I stutter mentally. I can't treat him like this, after all, would I ever serve Gilby his pasta? I'd tell him to get his lazy ass up to the stove and do it himself.

I watch Isaac, quietly marveling how much his coordination has improved. He use to be unable to throw and catch a ball. A physical therapist would throw and catch with him for hours. First she would roll a ball to him on the ground which he would capture and return. It was ages before he could catch it in the air himself. He found it infuriating. My parents would bribe him with candy and anything his heart desired to get him to keep trying. I remember running in front of him and catching the ball instead, hoping to get the same amount of praise. It didn't quite work like that.

I've never regarded my brother as disabled. I have, since a very young age, always known he was different, but it had been ages since I had compared him to anybody. I avoid it normally, try to take him as he comes.

I find that he is older than the high school kids I coach, and yet requires more care and supervision. I find that my middle school sister is beginning to overtake him in many ways, and that it is growing far easier to bond to her than to him.

You can't treat him like a normal person. If a normal person talked to me with the same ignorant narrow-minded black-and-white view of the world I wouldn't hang out with them. Depending on my mood I'd probably also tell that person off too. Personal beliefs aside, its pretty difficult to hold conversations with somebody who has, medically speaking, pretty much no sense of subtlety.

Yet, to not take my brother's words and thoughts seriously, to shrug it off as simply as an artifact of a medical condition, is to not take him seriously as a peer who requires my respect as a fellow human being. He can sense when I do this, and it infuriates him. After all, what right do I have to treat somebody only three years younger than myself as a child?

I'm almost positive both of us have expressed at some point in our lives, although never directly to each other, that we wish he simply needed a wheelchair instead. It would be so much easier on so many levels.

I'm telling Gilby and Isaac the story of the bar fight in the pancake house by this point.

"So we're in this pancake place...nice middle aged lady is our waitress...kinda heavset...wears a red checkered apron, big smile, calls you dear, asks you if you want gravy on your gravy..."

"Gravy on your gravy?" Isaac asks. "What about your food?"

"Its..." I pause, "you know the sort of place I mean. The place where everything comes with gravy."

"Ice cream?"

"Well...uh...not everything."

"She's evoking an archetype," Gilby said. He paused for a second. "How do you prounounce that?"

"Ar-keh-type," I responded.

My brother grinned. We were now discussing true and false statements, which is a favourite topic of his, "Yup! That's right!"

I nodded and continued my story, "So, there we are...and one of my friends...this kid is probably the whitest guy I know..."

Gilby grins and nods his head to my brother, not putting down his food, "Whiter than him?"

"I'm actually really pleased with my tan this summer," Isaac chirps excidedly.

Gilby starts cracking up.

"That's not quite what I meant," I said, looking at my food.

Isaac is puzzled, "What then?"

I put a chunk of meat in my mouth to chew to buy myself some time. We can make jokes at our own expense...I mean...we're all adults here...right?

Gilby, for once in his life, seems to be catching on. "Its another archetype."

We finished our meal and cleared the plates. My brother is thrilled. I can tell this meant a lot to him, and that he had a really good time. I walk him downstairs and let him out, then come back upstairs to help Gilby clear.

"Hey, thanks for..."

Gilby cuts me off with a laugh, "No, thank you for not being like your brother."

I feel like a total asshole but I laugh anyway. It definately is a relief when people acknowledge that we're not alike.

"Your brother has white-person syndrome...doesn't he?"

"What?"

"He's Asperger's."

I start cracking up again. It isn't even that funny, I'm just massively relieved.

"He's gone right?" Magpie pokes his head out the door of his room.

"Yeah," I said.

Magpie shakes his head, "You two are so mean."

"Aww come on," Gilby smiles, "We're all adults here..."