The Republic of T.

Dwight asked a question on a post two weeks ago, that I’m only just now getting around to answering.

I never really thought of ADD being something that lasted over a life, beyond childhood and yet I’ve had the experience of lacking direction, getting burried in life. Some of this time was marked by depression (I imagine poverty, not moving ahead, etc.) added to this

But I never thought of ADD as being very relevant until your posts. And as someone who spent many years in the foster care system, I admit I get almost Tom Cruise -ish when I think of things like medication, being part of the mental health system.

So my question was..how does ADD plug into your experience and what sort of actions did you take to change direction?

How does ADD plug into my experience? I think it’s colored my experience from day one, long before I knew anything about it.

How does it does it plug into my experience? Well, let me put it this way. For more than a week now, I’ve had four pieces of writing I wanted to do, including this one. So far, I’ve had time to write exactly none of them. That is, except for this one. And this one may yet take me more than a day or two before I’m done writing it.

Writing is an activity that I find immensely rewarding and enjoyable, but it isn’t my job and it doesn’t have to do with taking care of my family, so there is always something else that takes priority. That includes sleep, since I often find myself nodding off at the computer at night, when I finally do have the opportunity to write something

That’s partly because of ADD-related problems with time management, but it’s also partly because I’ve arrived at two entirely different places in my life all at once, and at a time in my life when there doesn’t seem to be room for both.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a while since I’ve joined in on a book meme, or even blogged about what I’m reading. (Not that I haven’t been reading. I still have my commute to and from work to get in a bit of reading, and I manage to get in a few pages before passing out at night.) So, now that Philip Barron of Waveflux has tagged me with a familiar-sounding book meme, I guess this as good a time as any to hit the books again.

It goes a little something like this.

Instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

So, here goes.

Would you believe right now I’m reading Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynast? I have to confess a kind of morbid fascination at just what kind of family spawned Dubya. (Basically, I’ve been reduced to asking over and over again “How does someone get that way?”) After Bush on the Couch, I decided I wanted to know more, so I picked up the Kelley book and David Corn’s The Lies of George W. Bush via Bookmooch.

I just picked up The Family yesterday.  On page 123, the next three sentences after the 5th sentence are:

Dotty spoke up from the front seat: “You’re in a jam with Abraham.” Ryan laughed, and the next day Prescott used the phrase, “Don’t believe that sign that says you’re better off with Ribicoff,” he said in a speech. “The fact is, you’ll be in a jam with Abraham.”

Not terribly juicy, I’m afraid.

Now I have to tag people. So, here goes: Katharine, Kip, JW,  Chris, and Rachel.

Let’s leave politics aside for the moment. It’s been a long time since I’ve written about things that really matter, and asked really important questions like “When did you know you were heterosexual?”, “What made you fall in love?”, and “What turns you on?” Too long, in fact.

So, allow me to make up for it now with an equally important question. Do you like to kiss? Before you answer, though, you might want to take a look at the latest research on kissing, and see if it matches your experience.

Here’s a hint, apparently as with the questions above, men and women tend to give different answers. And after reading the Washington Post article I find myself once again having to read between the lines when science doesn’t include or acknowledge another experience. Which is a shame. Because gay people kiss, and gay people have brainsÑwhich is apparently where the real action takes place anyway.

Fisher believes kissing is all about choosing the right mate.

“There’s so much information exchanged when you kiss someone that I just thought it must play a vital role in mate choice, and this paper is elegantly showing that,” Fisher said.

A disproportionate amount of the brain, she noted, is geared toward interpreting signals from the mouth.

“When you look at the brain regions associated with picking up data from the body, a huge amount of the brain is devoted to picking up information from the lips and tongue,” she said. “Very little of the brain is built to pick up what happens to, say, your back. There have been case reports of people being stabbed in the back without even knowing it. But even the lightest brush of a feather on your lips and you feel it intensely.”

This isn’t exactly breaking news. According to a press release, the research was done and the report published last year. I haven’t read the full report (available in PDF format) yet, but what’s in the WaPo article holds true for me, at least for the most part.

For example, I can relate to the three hypotheses that were pretty much confirmed by the research: that kissing is a way to assess a potential mate, promote bonding, and a way of inducing sexual arousal. Those all make sense to me, but at some points in the article it felt like I was looking at the world from the other side of a looking glass. If men and women kiss differently, and for different reasons, then I have to admit: I kiss like a girl.

Sort of.

But let me back up and answer the initial question: Do you like to kiss?

Oh. My. Good. Good-ness. If by “like” you mean that I can be perfectly happy doing that and nothing but that for hours at a time, with the right person, then my answer is yes.

It wasn’t always that way, though. See, I’ve kissed girls before. Yes, it’s true. It was just a few times when I was fooling around, just before I came out around the age of 12 or 13. I tried it, for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what the big hairy deal was that made it such a popular pass time with so many people.

Then I went off to college and kissed a guy for the first time. Not to put too fine a point on it, but all of a sudden, there it was. Big. Hairy. Deal. My brain exploded, something that never happened the times I kissed girls (during which I was thinking I must not be doing something right). In fact, an awful lot of time passed before I even thought about the fact that there was even more stuff we could do.

And I think part of what turned me on about that kiss is part of what seems to turn heterosexual women on; something I’ve written about before.

I have a confession to make. I love how men, some of them anyway, smell. Not a big surprise, I guess. After all, IÕm gay. ItÕs not unusual for me to take a deep breath, when a good looking guy happens to pass by me, stand in my general vicinity, or sit next to me on the train. In fact, itÕs almost instinctive, and Ñ depending on the guy Ñ could make me a little lightheaded and more than a little interested. The last time it happened on the train, an attractive young (20-something) got on the train Ñ hot and sweaty, fresh from an evening jog Ñ and ended up standing right next to me. If it hadnÕt been for the pole I was holding on to, I would have swooned. When I hold my husband, I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

ItÕs something that goes back at least as far as middle school, around the time puberty hit. (Which, incidentally, was around the time I came out.) It was also around the my male classmates got an extra ingredient added to their sweat. Something that drove the girls wild. And me too, of course, though I had to be a quieter about it then.

It’s similar to the way heterosexual women respond to male pheromones, and more than a little related to their motivation for kissing, too.

Women place more emphasis on the taste and smell of the person they kiss than men do, the researchers found.

“That clues us in that females may be using it more to make mate assessments than men,” she said.

Women were also more likely to refuse to have sex with a partner unless they kissed first. More than half of the men said they would have sex without kissing first, but fewer than 15 percent of the women said the same.

That’s also where I dismissed any doubts that the study was limited to heterosexuals.

As a single gay man, kissing was a part of sex for me, in part because it gave me some important information. There’s a whole category of men who have sex with men but identify as heterosexual, and kissing is one thing they don’t do in situations with other men. (Actually, there’s a whole list of things they don’t do, in order to protect their apparently precarious position as “straight” men.)

So, a guy who said “I don’t do kissing,” was likely to get “Then I don’t do you,” as a response. That’s partly because some of those guys have a nasty habit of panicking after having sex with another man who does identify as gay, and the gay guys end up dead. (See the “panic room” posts from the LGBT Hate Crimes Project here, here, and here for more.) And it’s partly because half the time those guys have girlfriends, wives, and even children—none of whom know what they’re up to. That’s something I just wouldn’t do.

But my real question is this. Why does research into why human beings kiss seem to miss entirely the reality that some human beings are same-sex oriented and kiss members of their own gender for a lot of the same reasons? I don’t know, but I’m willing to give the researchers the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t actively seek to exclude same-sex couples. Maybe they just couldn’t find any who were willing to participate. (Though I doubt that, because in most  college towns you’ll find at least a small gay community.)

But I do which researchers would think about this and take some actions to include gays & lesbians in this kind of research. Maybe they can’t go out and recruit gays specifically, because it would undermine the credibility of the research because the sample wasn’t entirely random. Still, something important is being missed when this aspect of human experience is left out.

There have been scientific studies suggesting that gay men respond similarly to heterosexual women and lesbians respond similarly to heterosexual men where pheromones are concerned. What would have been discovered if same-sex couples had been included in this research? What might have been discovered about why lesbians kiss? What might have been discovered about why gay men kiss (or why heterosexual men who have sex with men don’t kiss men)?

Nothing in the article suggests that such inclusion was the case, and that’s a damn shame, because we might have learned a lot more; like a kiss ain’t just a kiss most of the time, no matter who’s locking lips.

So, per yesterday’s post and despite what I said earlier, I did vote in the Maryland primary this morning. It turns out Kucinich was still on the ballot, so I voted for him on the presidential slate. When it came time to vote for delegates, I voted for the “uncommitted” ones rather than the ones who were already committed to one candidate or the other. (I threw in a couple of Edward’s delegates too.)

But one big reason I went to the polls this morning was Montgomery County’s school board election. You can get the whole story at Vigilance, the blog Teach the Facts. Basically it came down to whether I want the fundamentalist theocrats at the Thomas Moore Law Center dictating the curriculum in my kids’ school district. You can guess my answer.

It started back when Montgomery county launched a gay-friendly sex-ed curriculum for 8th and 10th graders. PFOX got involved, and somehow managed to slip flyers into student’s backpacks in 2006, and later a local group of fundies funded by the Thomas Moore Law Center threatened to sue the county into oblivion because everyone knows that hearing anything about gay people—let alone the notion that maybe LGBT kids shouldn’t be picked on an harassed, but treated with the same respect as anyone else—will turn kids gay. (Because everyone knows that you’re heterosexual from birth, but gay people are apparently asexual until adolesence, and then only if someone gives them the idea.

Well, only four percent of students opted out of the sex-ed pilot. (Shows you how many parents in Montgomery County objected to it in the first place.) Nonetheless, the Moore-funded fundies took the school district to court, and ultimately lost.

But they don’t give up easily. I have to give them that. They’ve vowed to sue again, and the candidate they supported for the school board last year ran again this year.

I don’t want anyone backed by these folks (the same ones who defeated in Dover, PA) making any decisions concerning my kids’ education. Period.

So, to the polls I went.

Technorati Tags: maryland, montgomery county, sex education, sex ed, thomas moore law center

When George W. Bush first spoke of “the ownership society,” he led most Americans to believe, and many did believe, that he was talking about them. Now, four years later, it’s easy to conclude that the president, his party and conservatism itself has failed to deliver the ownership society.

But the very crises now described and decried in both the new media and the old can actually be taken as signs of conservatism’s success, depending on one thing: identifying who really belongs to the ownership society. Conservatism, depending on how you look at it, has successfully built the ownership society — a very small, narrowly defined one — and strengthened it by building or expanding its essential support: the society of the owned.

Read the rest of this entry »

It was one of those moments any new parent treasures. The baby has finished a bottle, burped, and finally drifted off into what would be a couple hours worth of naptime. You’re not sure what do with that time—do you finally load the dishwasher or take that nap that you’ve been dreaming of since dawn?—but that moment is probably more peaceful than any you’ve had all day.

And it was for me. The hubby had just taken Parker off to his swimming lesson. I’d finished feeding Dylan, burped him, he’d just drifted off to sleep on my shoulder. I was thinking about going to sleep myself, and then the doorbell rang.

It was someone from the Obama campaign, out canvassing with his kids. He saw me with a sleeping baby and didn’t keep me long, just long enough to make sure I was voting in the Maryland primary, and whether I was voting for Obama. I assured him that I would vote in the primary. But I demurred when it came to who I’m voting for.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ed Note: This was so much fun, I decided to update the post with a few more casting choices and bump it back up to the top of the blog.

I admit it. I’m one of those people who reads the tabloids while I’m standing in line at the grocery store. (I figure I still have some time before Parker figures out what I’m reading.) I already knew that Oliver Stone is planning a Bush biopic. What I didn’t know was that Josh Brolin will portray Dubya. At least not until I noticed a tabloid headline blaring that Brolin’s stepmom, La Streisand, is furious that he’s doing the part, (and Brolin is allegedly furious that she’s furious) because she’s worried that Dubya might get a sympathetic portrayal. (Meanwhile the folks at Fox & Friends are worried that Streisand’s stepson in the lead role means it’ll be a “hit piece.”)

The tabloid piece got me thinking: who else would I cast in the picture? Brolin is the only cast member listed right now, so the rest of the cast is anybody’s guess. The folks at Radar have already taken a stab at guessing. And while they’ve made some interesting choices, including a few I would have also made, I think there’s still room to make some suggestions of my own. (And, Oliver, if you’re reading this, all I ask is a brief walk-on and/or casting credits.)

So, here goes.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are natural disasters and man-made disasters. There are those who look upon the aftermath of disaster and see things as they should be. We call them conservatives.

As I write this, the seeds of disaster and an aftermath of Katrina-like proportions have been and are being sown in the shadow of the nation’s capitol, by a conservative philosophy that—as a matter of principle and policy—neither prepares for or prevents disaster, nor provides relief in its aftermath And when disaster befalls those most vulnerable to its ravages, conservative philosophy declares disaster the fault of and its consequences deserved by those least able to defend themselves against either.

When disaster strikes Washington, D.C.—whether in the form of a disease outbreak, a dirty bomb, or another terrorist attack—it will be the fault of those who cannot get themselves out of harm’s way, and not the fault of conservative philosophy that makes disaster all but inevitable. Read the rest of this entry »

This just in. Obama is not Jesus. Or Buddha, or Krishna, or any other deity or near-deity. If he’s elected, he may opt to walk instead of ride (as some presidents have in the past) following his swearing in, but even if he does he won’t be stepping out on the Potomac. And the fare at any inaugural dinner will probably be the usual “rubber chicken,” not loaves and fishes. That is all. Now, I’m gonna go answer that knock at the door…

After stumbling upon it a year ago—months after the flames died down, only to end up stirring up the embers (and to eventually have someone more authoritative than me say basically what I’d been saying all along)—I some how missed the anniversary of Blogroll Amnesty Day (B.A.D.), which Jon and Skippy called on others to remember by linking to blogs at various points down the long tail. (I think a few links even came my way as a result, which I appreciate.)

It’s funny what changes. A year ago, when I wrote that post, I was working parent of one child and a moderately successful mid-level blogger trying desperately to climb the steep slope between me and the next tier. A year later, I’m moderately successful mid-level blogger who’s now a working parent of two, who’s not so much trying to climb to the top as clinging to my particular ledge and trying not to slide further down the slope. These days, just holding my own and not losing any ground counts as success.

I think I stopped trying so hard. After the Clinton blogger lunch debacle and the Blogroll Amnesty Day experience, I made a conscious decision to stop trying to be “one of those people,” whoever they are. I’m not sure if I’ve slowed down, or what’s changed, but it marked a change for me. So, today seemed like a good time for a round-up, in honor of Blog Amnesty Day.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I was a little boy, growing up in Augusta, GA, I wanted to be famous. Actually, I wanted to be a star. I sang along with the radio and one day discovered I had a voice, and eventually—happily—discovered that some people even enjoyed hearing it.

My sister, her best friend, and I used to dream of fame. We made up songs, and sang them into tape recorders. After we saw The Wiz, we learned all the songs, cast ourselves in the parts (I was the scarecrow) and acted out scenes. We dreamed of moving to Hollywood, where it would all happen, of course.

Now, decades later, I’m no closer to fame than I was then, and light years away from stardom. But what I’ve seen from this distance has me thinking that perhaps my youthful dreams are best left that way. I’m not sure I’d want the glare of spotlight that never, ever shuts off shining into every aspect of my life, or on my family. Not based on what I’ve seen and read lately.

Read the rest of this entry »

This Friday, I had something anyone who’s ever lived through the first few months of parenting a newborn will understand is something to be treasured: a day off. The rest of the family left the house in the morning, and I went back to bed. But, of course, we never take a day off from being parents. Not that I want to, mind you, but those few extra hours of sleep Friday morning (I went back to bed. Surprised?) were sweet.

I’d taken the day off, because Parker’s pre-school was having a special performance, and of course we were going to be there to see it. Parker had been talking about it for the past month. At first he decided he was going to dance, and after he picked a song I burned it to CD so that he could take it to school with him and practice. But I know my son. He’s very stage shy. At home, with us as an audience, he sings, dances and puts on quite a show. But he generally prefers not to be in the spotlight and not to be the center a big audience’s attention.

So I wasn’t surprised when he announced that he’d volunteered (with one other child) for the job of handing out tickets. (Pieces of construction paper colored by Parkers class served as “tickets.”) I told him, “That’s a very important job. If nobody handed out tickets, there’d be no audience to see the show,” and that Daddy and Papa would be there so he could give us our tickets. And he did, as well as handing tickets to other parents as they arrived. He even helped with some of the props for the other students performances.

We were very proud and we told him so.
Read the rest of this entry »

Saw this over at Kip’s and couldn’t resist chiming in.

The inevitable, even clichéd, response on the part of theists to this litany of woes is to ask: what about Hitler and Stalin? Yes, the question resorts to the hackneyed rhetorical ploy of et tu quoque (Latin for “So’s your old man”). But at least the question’s inevitability forces the atheist to show his hand. Thus Dawkins lamely avers that Hitler did believe in God (of sorts) and, hey, Stalin attended an Orthodox seminary in his youth! If that retort seems a tad desperate, England’s most pious unbeliever concludes with this wan distinction: “Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t, but even if he was, the bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.” So it’s not atheism that’s the problem, only atheists!

Once and for all, can we put this in the same category of ridiculousness as Kirk Cameron calling the banana an “atheist’s nightmare,” or that the human eye could not possibly have evolved?

Here again we approach something akin to the mental blockage otherwise known as irreducible complexity, which—when boiled down to gravy—isn’t all that complex. It’s tempting here to apply one of the common corollaries to Godwin’s law: that, in any debate or discourse, whoever mentions the Nazis or Hitler first “loses” the argument.

But that seems almost too easy. Especially when it’s even easier to debunk this with just a little thought.
Read the rest of this entry »