A Jan for All Seasons

When I was in college, I studied history. And the number-one thing you get asked as a history major is…no, it’s not “Can I get fries with that?” but now we’ve got that joke out of the way.

The number-one thing is, “Why is this relevant? Why should anyone learn history?”

Most history majors and history teachers and professors come up with a prepared answer to this question, often involving that quote about how those who can’t remember history are doomed to repeat it and how historical events have relevance to current events and so forth.

But I have a story for you.

When I was a freshman in college in Chicago, I had reason to take a Greyhound bus somewhere. This bus left at a fairly early hour of the morning, so I had the bright idea that I’d take the El down and find the Greyhound station the day before, just to make sure I knew where I was going. I have an extraordinarily bad sense of direction and felt that this might be an issue.

You might think that, as someone with an extraordinarily bad sense of direction, I’d take precautions. Like having a map with me, for example. Or written-down directions.

You’d be wrong. All I took with me was a few bucks to pay for the El fare, a pack of gum, and a hilariously inadequate jacket for the freezing early-spring weather. Oh, and I was wearing a beat-up old pair of tennis shoes. In the snow. Did I mention that there was about half a foot of snow on the ground?

I made my first El transfer with no problem, which was pretty much the last part of this journey that was problem-free. I got off at my scheduled stop and realized that I wasn’t actually sure which direction I was supposed to go. Left? Right? East? West? A map would have really come in handy at this point. I picked a direction randomly and started walking in it.

Before long, I noticed that the cross streets I was passing all had presidents’ names. Madison. Monroe. Adams. Awesome, I thought to myself. The Greyhound station is on Harrison. This means I’m going in the right direction.

Then I got to Jackson. I stopped, looking up at the street sign. Shit. Jackson wasn’t a president. I’d come to the end of the president streets. I must have gone the wrong way after all. I squinted, trying to see as far down the street as I could, but I couldn’t make out anything that looked like a bus station. What the hell does a bus station even look like? I had no idea. I thought maybe it would look like a train station, except with…buses.

I turned around. Adams. Monroe. Madison. I walked until I got to Randolph, who was also not a president. At this point I realized that either my memorized directions were wrong, or I’d made some mistake. Maybe, I thought to myself, as someone with an extraordinarily bad sense of direction does, I’ll just go one street to the north and try this again and then I’ll find my way.

This never works, by the way. Not ever.

I wish I could tell you what happened after that, but I honestly have no idea. I just started walking, more or less randomly, hoping to just run into Harrison St. by accident. The slush on the sidewalks was soaking into my socks, and pretty soon I realized that 1) I could not feel my feet anymore, and 2) this was an improvement over how they’d felt previously.

Eventually I realized that I’d reached the main business district of Chicago, and the reason I realized this is that I looked up to see the Sears Tower right in front of me. I checked a map later on to find out how far the Sears was from where I’d started: About a mile and a half. Although I don’t think I walked directly there, so in my case it was probably closer to two miles of walking at least.

I decided that it was probably time to ask someone for directions. I went in and asked the guy at the lobby if he knew where the Greyhound bus station was. He was like, “There isn’t a Greyhound station around here.” I said, “Yes, I know it’s not around here, but like, where is it?”

He said, “Are you walking?” in the same tone of voice that you would ask someone if they planned to get from England to France by swimming. “It’s no big deal,” I said. “I just need directions.”

At this point I was very glad I had chosen not to wear any clothing that identified me as a Northwestern student, thereby avoiding bringing shame upon my school.

The lobby guy finally gave me directions, shaking his head the entire time, and I set out again. His directions were really shitty, by the way, and tailored to someone who was driving, not on foot. I was able to follow them for about a quarter of a mile and then wound up lost again.

I think this was about the point where I happened to walk past a soup kitchen, and someone standing at the steps gestured for me to come inside and get some food. I swear I am not making this up. She didn’t know where the goddamned Greyhound station was either, incidentally.

After, I shit you negative, four full hours of wandering lost in downtown Chicago, I finally, finally managed to find Harrison St. and the Greyhound station. I felt like Stanley finding freaking Dr. Livingstone in the depths of Africa. It was nearly a transcendental moment for me.

Now. Sodden, freezing cold, and exhausted, I made my way back to the El station to go home, and on this relatively short trek I realized the following crucial piece of information:

The seventh president of the United States was Andrew Jackson.

And that, kids, is why learning history is important.

I’ve been working as a volunteer to help construct a name index for the 1940 census data that was just released by the US Census Bureau. With a name index, you’ll be able to search by a person’s name, rather than just paging through all of the records in the geographical area for the person you’re searching. This, I think, is a worthy goal, so I’ve been putting in a few hours here and there helping out as a volunteer.

Here’s what you do when you transcribe data for the census: You look at a page of records that was handwritten by some census worker back in 1940. This worker talked to the head of the house or the lady of the house (occasionally one and the same, although not terribly often, because this was 1940, after all) and found out a few bits of salient information. Who lived there. What their ages were. Their names. Their relationships to the head of household. Their birthplaces. Their marital status. He wrote all of this down in what I can only assume was his best penmanship, and then he went to the next house and he did it all again.

And I sit here in 2012, looking at his best penmanship — and this census worker got tired by the end of the day, I can tell you that, because sometimes his best penmanship was no more than a child’s scrawl — and trying to decipher it. I type it into little boxes and it gets sent off and processed. So that some far-flung descendants of these 1940 people can know who their ancestors were a little bit better.

There are stories in these scrawls. House number 175 has two women living in it, both in their 70s. Sisters. One listed W for “widow.” One S for “single.” House number 176 has no fewer than ten people under what I can only hope was its expansive roof; the head of household, his wife, their six children, and two lodgers. One has to wonder how those lodgers felt about sharing accommodation with six children under the age of 14. House 183 has a woman with a D for “divorced” and three small children. There must have been a man there at some point, with an M for “married.” Did he leave by choice? Did he go out for cigarettes one day and never come back? Did she kick him out? Is that D a D of triumph or a D of despair?

And there are so many Ws. W for Widow. It takes me less than a second to enter the code that signifies a gaping, ragged hole in someone’s life.

Sometimes when the census taker’s scrawl is particularly bad, I compare notes with the 1930 census records to get the correct spelling, and that sometimes is the hardest. I see that William Smith of Butler County had a young wife of 25 in 1930, and he’d just started a family, with two small children listed in the census. But in 1940, Mrs. Smith has been converted from an M into a W, and there are four children left behind, names and ages listed in cold rows of text. I can put these records up side by side on my computer screen. 1930, new father of two. 1940, gone. Remembered by his family, and by me, 70 years later, living in a future he couldn’t have even imagined.

I didn’t know Mr. Smith, though. Or Mrs. Gabbard or Mr. Robison or any of the other people I’ve looked up. They’re stories to me, apparitions from the past. Not really real.

But then I thought I’d look up my great-grandmother. She’s been gone for a long time now, but I thought it would be interesting to see her census record. Interesting to see what was recorded about her life. So I pulled it up, and there it was, 1930, Muskingum County. Husband still alive. Five children, including my grandmother, aged 5 at the time.

Seeing their names there, listed out in black and white, took my breath away.

It seemed so fundamentally wrong to me that I could look at this data, taken down from my great-grandmother in 1930 while she was trying to manage her family and her household and probably thinking of nothing more critical than making dinner for everyone that evening, and know. Know that all too soon she’d turn into a W, and raise her children alone. And that one of them would grow up and get married and have eight children of her own, and would love her children and her grandchildren more than anyone really has a right to be loved, and then she’d get old, because we all get old if we’re lucky enough, and she’d start to forget things, and then more things, and she’d start to recede from her own life, like a low tide rushing out to sea.

I wanted to put my hand on the screen and reach through to 1930. I wanted to see my grandmother, aged 5, and tell her that she’s going to have an amazing life, a beautiful life, a life worth living. I wanted to tell her that because it’s not right for me to know this and for her not to know, not in 1930 because it hasn’t happened yet and not in 2012 because she can’t remember. Her story is long and lovely and complicated, and it shouldn’t be possible to compress it down into a single line on a census form. It shouldn’t, but it is.

Every single record in the census is a story like that, full of love and loss and triumph and tragedy and joy and full also of the mundane brilliance of an everyday life, and sometimes when I am typing it in, five lives per minute give or take, I think that I cannot stand it.

When you have a newborn, all of the parents of older children and grown children tell you, “Enjoy every moment! It’s gone before you realize it!” You hear it all the time.

It’s meaningless, of course. You can’t imagine, looking down at this rough sketch of a person, that it will ever end. The days at that stage seem endless. Outside time. Not just the bad days, filled with changings and feedings and tantrums; the good days too, the ones where the baby sleeps when he’s supposed to and gives you a wide toothless grin and pats his soft little chubby fingers on the side of your face as though he is giving you his approval for all of this parenting you are doing for him.

This is your new normal, and you adjust to it and absorb it and it becomes part of you, this responsibility. This small person. Everyone says that it ends so quickly, but you know that isn’t true, and really it’s not.

But the reason everyone keeps telling you is because one day you realize that some time ago, when you weren’t paying attention and didn’t realize it was the last time, you lifted your child up in your arms, and it was. It was the very last time. And you don’t know how this happened. You were watching your infant out of the corner of your eye while you tried to get other things done, and you blinked, that’s all you did, no more than a second really, and now he’s playing computer games all day and doing his own laundry (because you tell him he has to) and he’s not a baby and you haven’t picked him up and held him for the longest time and you know you never will again. You will have to settle for hugs, given to you grudgingly and only out of view of his friends.

So you are compelled to say this to new mothers and fathers. You have to tell them, “Look, it ends so quickly. Before you know it, it will end.” You see in their eyes that they don’t believe you, and why should they? It isn’t true. Not for them. They’re still outside time. They’re still in the eternity of infancy.

But one day time catches up with you. The rough sketch becomes inked in, the outline becomes firm, you can see a real person there. And you think, just a second ago I blinked and you weren’t there at all.

When I was 18, I went on a trip to Germany for about a week and a half, and I came home with about 20 photos, no more. I made a conscious decision on that trip that I was going to experience it, and remember it, rather than seeing it from behind the viewfinder of a camera.

Now, I was 18 then, and my memory was sharp as a tack, and I still remembered every page of every book I’d ever read, and because I was 18 I had the vague idea that this would always be true. But even so, there were a few moments on the trip that I deliberately memorized. Not just what I was looking at, but what I heard, what I felt. What it was like to be there in that moment in that place. I remember the gates of Dachau that way, and I remember the bell tower of the Cologne cathedral. I don’t have photos of either of those places, but I don’t need them. They exist now in my mind, and I can go there any time I want.

The reason I mention this is because earlier I went to a wooded park to go for a run, and just as the sun was setting I emerged into a clearing. The trees surrounding this clearing were just starting to tremble with the wind of an oncoming storm — which wouldn’t really come up to full steam for another couple of hours — and the setting sun was just glorious, this blazing golden-amber god hanging in the western sky. It was shockingly beautiful, and my first impulse was to get out my phone, to snap a photo to share with everyone I know.

But then I thought, no. No, I’m saving this. I’m saving this just for me.

So that’s what I did. And I can go there whenever I want.

The time has come — as it does in everyone’s life eventually — to talk about Star Wars.

Specifically, The Phantom Menace, a.k.a. “Episode 1.”

I saw The Phantom Menace on its first night of release, with a bunch of college friends. I remember that my initial reaction was somewhat mixed. I wanted to like it so much that I sort of convinced myself that I really did like it, even though I wasn’t entirely clear on what had happened with the plot, and a lot of the characters seemed kind of…stupid. Like, stupidly written and also just stupid within the confines of the story.

As time passed, I let go of my fear of disliking the movie (because fear leads to anger, and anger leads to hatred, and hatred leads to suffering) and just accepted the fact that no, I really didn’t care for this movie at all. It is not the Star Wars of my childhood or even the Star Wars of my adulthood. To be honest, it is barely Star Wars at all. I won’t belabor the point because so many people have made it already. We’ve all read the Internet fan forums, yes? Yes.

But Phantom Menace is out in 3-D now, and I saw a recent retrospective review suggesting that, you know, maybe this film wasn’t so bad after all. And I thought, you know, maybe this guy is right. Maybe the movie wasn’t that bad. Maybe my high expectations just led me to hate it when, taken on its own merits outside the Star Wars context, it’s at least a mediocre film. Maybe even high-mediocre.

So I took Zeke to see it in 3-D this weekend.

Jesus Haploid Christ, I did not misremember this movie’s badness at all. It is all there in 3-D glory, every stilted line of dialogue, every wasted character, every poop joke.

Here’s the thing for me with Phantom Menace. It’s a Star Wars movie, and I love Star Wars. I love Star Wars a lot. So there should be scenes in this film that resonate with me emotionally even if they sort of suck in and of themselves, because it’s Star Wars and I know what these characters will become. That should pack a serious emotional wallop. But…it just doesn’t. Every time you get some good characterization happening, and the plot starts building to a meaningful moment, the filmmakers deliberately defuse it by throwing in some comic relief. Usually awful comic relief. The moments that aren’t ruined by that are ruined by terrible acting and unbelievably terrible dialogue. And so what should have been, for example, a moving and subtle moment at Anakin’s Tatooine home when Qui-Gon reveals that he is indeed a Jedi Knight escorting the queen — a moment in which Anakin’s mother realizes that her son is being swept up in circumstances beyond their control, and that she will almost certainly lose him to these strange and powerful off-worlders — is completely destroyed so that we could have a joke about Jar-Jar slurping his food with his prehensile tongue.

Really, guys?

There have been a million reviews about how bad the storytelling is in Phantom Menace, so I feel like I don’t need to rehash it. The non-character of Darth Maul, the cartoonish ineffectual droid army, the alien bad guys with Earth-ethnic accents, the fact that you have a burgeoning love story in which one of the participants is a 6-year-old kid, the boring and incomprehensible trade-embargo plot, the nonsensical addition of C-3PO to the story…these things are not new insights.

So instead I thought I’d share the couple of things that I actually liked, and a couple of ways that I think the story could have been made better.

First, the things I liked: The final battle with Darth Maul was pretty good, and not just because it had a really first-class action sequence, and also not because John Williams knocked the score right out of the damn ballpark, although he totally did. No, here we finally see some really nice characterization and insight into the characters of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan. Qui-Gon, faced with an enemy who he cannot reach but who he will be fighting to the death in mere seconds, chooses to kneel calmly in meditation, focusing his thoughts and his energy as he has been trained and taught. Obi-Wan, facing the same situation only moments later, instead paces angrily as though he were a caged animal, his light saber out and ready. That moment speaks to his later failure to properly train Anakin in the ways of the Force.

I also liked the scene in the final moments of the movie when Palpatine, sunny and confident in his newly-secured chancellorship, sweeps past our assembled heroes only to pause briefly, look down at young Anakin, and say, “Young Skywalker! We shall watch your career with great interest.” That’s a nice touch, made even more creepy and ominous by the celebratory glee going on in the background.

So, a couple of things that I think could have made the movie better. First of all, if you’re going to have a love interest, it can’t be the 6-year-old kid. Even hinting at it doesn’t work. You absolutely cannot have a grown female character beginning to feel romantic feelings about a 6-year-old. No. This is out. So instead of deciding that Amidala can only have one love interest for the entire trilogy, and Anakin is it, I think they should have given her a different love interest for the first movie.

The scene that made me think of this was early on in the film, when Amidala sees Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan doing their Jedi thing for the first time. Amidala gets this look on her face — it’s subtle, and maybe I’m reading something that wasn’t there, but it easily could have been put there, is my point — that says, “I’m definitely not going to admit that I’m impressed by your Jedi stunts, you show-off.”

I think they could have developed that relationship further. Obi-Wan is young, brash, and arrogant, and in her way so is Amidala. I think they would have been like oil and water together, and this complicated and antagonistic relationship would have become even more complicated when little Ani grows up in the next movie, and she realizes that she has feelings for him as well. Now, this is just an idea I’m throwing out there, but pretty much anything would have been better than the awful “I’m becoming attracted to a 6-year-old” thing that they actually used.

Second: The droid army should have been terrifying. They played it for laughs in the movie; the droids had a comical, unthreatening appearance, and broke down if you looked at them the wrong way. (Literally, in the case of the Jedi Knights.) This is not acceptable for things that are fulfilling the role of the primary movie villain. Think about the other choices for main villain: Palpatine, who spends most of the movie as a behind-the-scenes puppeteer. Darth Maul, who barely has a handful of spoken lines during the entire film. And the Trade Federation guys?! Don’t make me laugh.

But you do have this massive droid army, and that has real potential. Robot killers should be terrifying. They have no remorse, no sympathy. You cannot reason with them. They are the ultimate order-following machines, and they are machines, so they can be made incredibly powerful and difficult to destroy. If you saw an army of indestructible inhuman killing machines, you would wet yourself, wouldn’t you? And yet in Phantom Menace, the droids are played as a joke. I think it would have been better if they’d been a real threat; have them casually kill half of Amidala’s council as a means of leverage on her. Show that even the Jedi Knights have difficulty bringing them down. Give them a menacing appearance, not the bird-like beaky things that they were in this movie. Make them scary.

I think that what bugs me the most about Phantom Menace is that it could have been so much better. Oh, I’m sure that some people would have complained no matter what, because it can never live up to your expectations. But it could have been a good movie regardless, and it really isn’t. I mean, are you trying to tell me that with all of its vast resources, Lucasfilm couldn’t come up with a better child actor than Jake Lloyd? They couldn’t have hired a competent scriptwriter who could have put believable dialogue into the mouths of Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor? The whole movie looks like someone asked for a committee to brainstorm ideas that should go into the new Star Wars movie, cut and pasted all of those initial ideas together, and then never did another single minute of story development.

Oh, and not really worth seeing in 3-D, either. In my opinion. Zeke, of course, disagrees.

To the frothing idiot who posted in the comments on a recent newspaper story about the school levy:

I understand that you feel it is deeply unfair that you — a taxpayer, for God’s sake! Who pays taxes! In the form of money! To the government! — have to subsidize other people’s children’s education. Especially people who have the temerity to have more than two children, and therefore are sponging off even MORE of your hard-earned dollars in order to send their puling little brats to school. (Well, you didn’t say “puling.” I added that part. My public-school education left me with a rich and varied vocabulary.)

And this brings us to your question: Why can’t we just charge more in taxes for people who have multiple children? After all, it is totally unfair that someone with no kids has to pay for the education of someone who has like… three kids! Or four! Maybe more! Can you even believe there is no law about the upper limit on how many kids a person can give birth to and get an education for?

The answer, my friend, is that the founders of this country rightly believed that democracy is worthless without an educated populace, and so this country has public education built right into its originating document. You pay for it, I pay for it, we all pay for it, and we all reap the benefits as well. Perhaps you envision a different sort of society, in which only those who can personally afford private schooling can send their children to school, and everyone else simply goes without education. I am envisioning that society right now as well. That society sucks, and I don’t want to live there. Neither do you.

So quit your ridiculous whining and use your government-provided education to complain about something worth complaining about.

I wonder if fellow book-lovers will agree with me that one of the worst questions in the world is, “So, whatcha readin’?”

I often hate this question.

When I don’t hate it, it’s because it’s been asked by someone that I know enjoys the type of book I’m reading, and so it’s safe to tell this person, “Oh, it’s a hard sci-fi epic, somewhat reminiscent of some of Larry Niven’s stuff, but with excellent characterization. Good world-building too. I’m 500 pages in and it’s just getting good.”

When asked by someone I don’t know — say, a stranger on an airplane — the above gets condensed into, “Oh, sci-fi.” Now the conversation can branch into one of three directions:

One. “Sci-fi, huh? Never got into that. Seems weird to me. I like books about real things.”

Two. “Ooh! I love sci-fi! I’ve read all of Harry Potter!”

Three, most rare but most beloved. “Sci-fi? Oh, is that Charles Stross? Love him.”

But three doesn’t happen very often. Almost never, to be honest. And it’s not just about sci-fi, it’s about anything I happen to be reading. People have opinions on what you are reading, and they want to share those opinions. Opinions like, “I could never read a 1000-page book!” or “I hate nonfiction, I don’t know how anyone can read anything that dry,” or the worst of all, “What’s the story about?”

That 1000-page hard sci-fi space epic I mentioned just now? Yeah, I can’t summarize that in a few sentences. Nor do I really want to, because it’s a pretty good book, and in case this person had not noticed, I was engaged in reading it before being interrupted.

I have a theory that people who like reading books on planes and people who like chatting up strangers with small talk on planes have almost zero overlap. (Not just planes. Buses too. Doctors’ waiting rooms. Anywhere you are forced into close proximity with strangers for a time.)

But in case you are a book-lover and a small-talk-lover (can you even imagine? But we are speaking in hypotheticals here), I suggest that instead of striking up the conversation with, “So, whatcha readin’?” you go with, “Hey, is that Charles Stross?” or “Hey, young adult dystopian literature! My favorite!” This puts the reader more at ease and lets you skip straight to the good part of the conversation.

And if I ever find out that any of you have ever approached a small child who is reading a book that looks to be beyond her age level and said to that child, “Wow, that’s a pretty big book for such a little girl!” or anything similar to this at all then you are no longer welcome in my house. Don’t test me on this.

When we were packing up to leave Seattle, there were lots of “last moments” that I noticed as they zipped by. The last time I’d pick up my mail at our apartment. The last time I’d go to my “Mom Club” playgroup. The last time we’d drive our car. (Which we ditched at Keith’s mom’s house, and which ultimately ended up in a junk yard, I believe; which is where it probably should have gone at least six months earlier.)

The last time I’d turn off the lights in our Seattle home. The last time I’d close the door behind me. And so on, and so forth.

Seattle always seemed so exotic to me, even after I’d been there for four years. Growing up as a kid, it always seemed like one of those places that you could never quite get to from Ohio. It had a Space Needle, for crying out loud. With a restaurant in it! I knew in my heart as a child that I would never get to visit there. It was just too far away, too remote. Too different.

Then I got there, and it was just as exotic and different as I’d expected. Plants grow there year-round, did you know that? You can garden 12 months out of the year. There is such a thing as winter kale. And rosemary hedges. Hedges! And the whole city is ringed with mountains. Snow-capped ones, young and brash, not like our slouching ancient Appalachians. They have floating bridges going across the lakes. And it rains all the time but nobody carries an umbrella.

I ate at the revolving restaurant at the Space Needle once. I tried to play it cool, but really I spent the whole time thinking, I am really here, oh my God I can’t believe I am really here. At times like this, your inner 6-year-old breaks free of her shackles of maturity and takes the conn. I wanted to spend the entire dinner with my face smushed against the glass, staring down at the city turning slowly past beneath us.

But after only four years, it was time to go. We said our goodbyes and we turned east and started driving, and those lasts kept piling up in the rearview mirror. Last time we left the city limits. Last time we’d see Mt. Rainier looming over us in the distance like some kind of avuncular god.

Seattle is where I learned to garden, learned to make soap, learned to index books. Where I learned how to be a grownup, where I learned how to be with Keith. When I got there, I was 22 years old and fresh out of college, and I can only imagine that most of his friends, a good decade older than me, wondered what he was doing with this kid. (I still wonder that myself, to be honest.) When I left I was 26, and most of those people had become my friends as well. Keith and I had shared lives’ worth of possessions in the back of a moving truck. And we had one child already and another on the way.

I am thinking of all of this today because someone elsewhere posted a photo of Mt. Rainier, and I thought of how much I adored seeing it off in the distance while I lived in Seattle. And then I thought of Seattle and how it changed me. It unstuck me from the Midwest — which I also love; the confines of my heart are spacious enough to hold both — while I figured out who I wanted to be. How I wanted to be. Who I am.

Well, I’m still working on that last one. Aren’t we all?

Today’s post is a response to a Rolling Stone article. The article is here. Go read it before you read the rest of this blog entry. I’ll wait.

OK. Here’s what I have to say about this.

I don’t really see the world in terms of good vs. evil. And I don’t lightly throw around the term “evil,” either. I mean, you hear people say that Google is evil for some search optimization policy or whatever. It’s ridiculous.

But then I read this article, and I see this quote:

“Youth who embrace homosexuality are at greater risk [of suicide], because they’ve embraced an unhealthy sexual identity and lifestyle,” Prichard wrote.

And I think, yes, there it is. That’s evil. Facing families who have lost their children to suicide, after those children were harassed and bullied at school just for being gay, and telling those families with a smug and righteous face that it’s all their children’s fault for daring to be gay — for embracing it, no less! This man is taking the deaths of children and using them to further his own agenda. I don’t know what his agenda is. I don’t know if he is a religious man, or if he simply thinks homosexuality is personally disgusting, or if he is repressing something, or what. I assume he’s religious, but I don’t know. What I do know is that he is capitalizing on the pain and suffering of his fellow human beings in order to further his own personal belief system, to convince other people that his way is right even in the face of this blistering evidence that it is not right, and that it brings suffering and death into the world.

That is the face of evil. You need look no further.

When you work to create a society in which homosexuality is considered wrong, is considered taboo, is considered something that cannot be talked about and something that is OK to be bullied about; when you work to create a society in which gay people are forced to stay in the steerage decks, unable to marry and exercise basic civil rights that are supposedly granted to all citizens; when you promote a culture of intolerance, ignorance, and hatred; this is evil. Promulgated most often by people who profess to care deeply about things like good and evil.

People occasionally ask me why I care so much about this issue. I care because if I were gay I’d want all the same rights and protections that I currently enjoy with my opposite-sex spouse. I care because if any of my children are gay, I want them to have those rights and protections, and to grow up free of shame and fear and self-hatred. I care because I want these things for my friends who are gay. And I care because it is the right goddamned thing to do, and I am going to hold up my candle in the darkness until the darkness is gone, if it takes my whole life.

My daily routine was disrupted a bit today by a stuck screw in my MacBook Pro.

This screw has been a thorn in my side (well, not literally; I’d actually love it if it were a thorn in my side, because that would mean it wasn’t stuck in my goddamn computer anymore) for the last few days. I want to upgrade the RAM in my laptop, you see, and this should not be that big of a deal. You buy the RAM, you open the case, and you swap out the RAM. Job done. Except that I foolishly tried to use a screwdriver that was one size too big for the screws. That was OK for the first nine screws, but the tenth one…oh, the tenth one. It was jammed like a BBC broadcast to Germany in World War II. I tried, Keith tried, we bought a new properly-sized screwdriver and then tried that…nothing.

So this morning I went over to the Apple store and hung out at the Genius Bar for a while so that the geniuses could inspect my MacBook screw. I have to tell you that I do not feel nearly hip enough to hang out at the Genius Bar, but I did have an iPhone and a black scarf, so it was okay. The geniuses reported back that yes, the screw is stripped, and no, they don’t have the drill kit they need to fix it because it’s on loan to another store today, so I could either leave my computer with them overnight and pick it up the next day, or just come back the next day.

A full day without my MacBook? Ha. So I’ll be going back tomorrow.

Anyway, my point is that this disrupted my routine. Usually I drop Gus off at preschool and then go to the coffee shop, get my coffee, and laptop away for the next three hours. Working or surfing or writing or whatever it is I’m doing. Today, though, I already had my coffee (clearly I can’t brave the hipsters at the Genius Bar without caffeinating first) so going to the coffee shop seemed like somewhat of a waste of money. But the public library is just across the street from my usual coffee shop and you don’t have to buy anything to use the wifi there.

So I’m at the public library, and it is just so lovely and delightful in here. There is nothing like that wall of musty-book smell that you get hit with when you walk through the doors of a library. Even new libraries with huge computer sections and modern fittings have that smell. It’s unavoidable. It’s the smell of thousands and thousands of pages all tucked together neatly on rooms and rooms full of shelves.

I’m not a book fetishist — one of these people that loves books as objects, above and beyond the information they hold — and I have a suspicion that before long I’ll have an e-reader and will be buying most of my new books in digital format, as are so many other people these days. But if you ask me, even in this digital era, libraries are still one of the best things we have going.

I mean, think about it: a building full of books that you can go and read and take home with you, all for the cost of simply asking. And libraries, more than most other institutions, have kept pace with the times. You go into a library these days and you’ll find lots of books, same as always, but you’ll also find computers hooked up to the Internet, and digital periodical access, and ebook checkouts. Libraries take their mission very seriously, and their mission is to make information available to the public. Not just information in books. All information. You don’t have to be rich to access this information. You don’t have to own expensive computer equipment. All you need is the ability to get to the library, and it’s all there for you.

And unlike at the coffee shop, I don’t have to put on noise-canceling headphones just to hear myself think.