Optimistic Cynic

This month, Smithsonian-Pew came out with the results of a survey of 1000 US adults, asking "From kindergarten through 12th grade, what one subject should schools emphasize more than they do now?" The results, not surprisingly, broke down like this:

30% Math
19% English
11% Science
10% History/Civics
6% Arts
4% Computers
20% Other (in which econ ties with gym and religion at 2% each and foreign language ties at 1% with anti-bullying)

790 adults of America: I disagree. History and science people? Well done.

I love math. I am a mathy person. I wound up with a bachelor of science instead of a bachelor of arts basically by accident, as a side effect of taking a lot of math classes for the heck of it. I think there is a level of math literacy that is necessary for living a sensible life (as opposed to wandering in a fog of superstition and instability). I am horrified when I find out I am talking to someone who doesn't understand probability, can't glance at a statistic and tell whether it's plausible, can't estimate an object's height, and so on. I am even now referring to quantitative survey data. Numbers: they give us useful information and we are better off if we understand what they are saying.

But realistically, do I think most people - even most professional scientists - particularly need to know calculus? I don't. If you can get through Algebra I, usually taught sometime around age 13, you're probably ok. Some geometry/trig is nice. The stuff beyond that - matrixes, derivatives, fourier transformations, and all the rest - you're not really going to use unless it's your field. You need it if you're designing an airplane. You need it if you're responsible for managing the power grid of a city. The people who want to do that stuff aren't going to be doing it with just a high school degree.

So by that measure of "more" math, I don't think we need more math. Does "more" math instead mean we need to teach the early, basic stuff like addition, but teach it more? Well, I do think people are a bit stupid about fractions, inexplicably. Percentages, similarly. A lot don't seem to understand what a square root (or cube root) represents in a practical sense. It would be nice to get that cleared up.

However, I sincerely doubt that the more math people are thinking much beyond "math is important!" I doubt the more math people have looked at how much math is already in the average school curriculum. I doubt the more math people have looked at our test scores in math. I think what we're seeing is a knee-jerk "math!" response to any stiumulus. There's a contemporary cultural idea that math is a magical key that unlocks all understanding of science and technology, and the shortcut to science, technology, innovation, and wealth is therefore more math.

This is about like saying that the key to being well-read is studying more grammar. I notice that Susie isn't particularly literate, so we should make sure she knows that "walked" is a past participle.

I think this partly because on this same survey of 1000 adults, only 47% knew electrons are smaller than atoms. Let me repeat that: less than half of the adults surveyed knew that electrons are smaller than atoms. Fewer than half knew that lasers aren't made of sound waves. These are true-false questions and answering randomly should give you 50% correct.

Being better at math doesn't tell you about electrons. It doesn't tell you about experimental design. It doesn't tell you how photosynthesis works and whether this is the way solar panels operate. It doesn't tell you why making a car run on gas is so much easier than making a car run on anything else. It doesn't tell you about heritability, and whether you're going to have your father's hairline, and why. That's the stuff you have to learn slowly, a bit at a time, through lots of exposure; you can't shortcut science. Breakthroughs come because someone looks at minutia, because they get curious about how something works, and maybe because they draw a paralell to some other thing they found interesting.

So sure, math is important, but not more important than having legible handwriting, or knowing the history of the civil rights movement, or knowing that Afghanistan is nearer to China than to Egypt. When I get into an argument with someone over big political priorities, it's not because we disagree about math; it's because they don't know the average income of a person in Arkansas, or whether a particular quote comes from Shakespeare, the Bible, or a recent scientific paper. To know stuff, you have to know stuff. You have to be able to know when somebody says "this is just like Watergate" that it is or it isn't. You have to be able to know when somebody says Iran is in league with Iraq whether that's likely given their histories. You have to be able to know when somebody tries to sell you a low-fat olive oil that olive oil is 100% fat.

Math is the easiest thing to teach. It's the easiest thing to test. It has exactly one right answer, always, and you can look through the steps someone took to get to their wrong answer and point and say "there you go; there's the problem." Math is clean in a way nothing in the world is clean. Math does not give a damn about your home life. Math does not threaten or undermine your religion or your political beliefs. Math is, to an extent, sudoku puzzles (which do not themselves involve math). Math is being able to call a color kelly green instead of emerald green, and do it with confidence.

If there are a lot of people wandering around in the world, not sure whether to trust the government or a doctor, unable to get jobs beyond a retail level, making decisions about where to live, what to eat, how to vote, feeling unhappy and alone and pointless, math is not going to save them. Math alone is not going to bring them peace. Science, literature, geography, history, civics, logic? They might.

On the recommendation of a psychologist acquaintance I like, Ciro and I picked up a copy of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, by John Gottman and Nan Silver, not because we're particularly having marital problems but because we've been very interested in the findings coming out of Gottman's "Love Lab" in Seattle, which is close to the only place that has done rigorous observational research on what marriage looks like. Media reports about the research tend to focus on Gottman's ability to predict with extreme accuracy whether a couple is going to divorce within six years after only observing them for about three minutes, because this is sexy reporting and seems magical, but Gottman himself is more interested in what causes people to not divorce, and in fact has a very optimistic view of people's general ability to hold together.

The book is not perfect; it kind of opens with scare stories, but I forgive the authors because that's what people are always asking them about and it's reasonable that they'd want to get it out of the way. And there tends to be a bit more "men are like this and women are like this" than I like, although always with the caveat that "we're not saying all men and women or that this is inherent rather than socialized; we're just saying that 80% of couples we've seen are influenced by patriarchal modes of behavior." I'm paraphrasing. Although for real principle four is essentially "get feminist immediately or you are doomed to unhappiness forever." They call it "Let Your Partner Influence You" to make it seem more approachable and equitable, but if you read the chapter, it's pretty obvious my fake title is more representative.

In any case, what the whole thing boils down to is: You're going to fight, and it's fine. Just be good best friends the rest of the time. Here are some exercises and games you can play to keep your friendship solid. And pretty much these exercises also work and would be fun to do with your friends you're not married to, with slight modifications. (And indeed Gottman has another book that does these modifications for you, The Relationship Cure, written with Joan DeClaire.)

Oddly enough, the book has me thinking about Inception again. (Rewatching Brick was a second contributing factor.) Given how well the movie has held up for me over repeated viewings and several years, I have to entertain the possibility that it's one of my favorite movies. (This is one of the questions in the book: What is your partner's favorite movie? Which is a trick question if it's me or Ciro, because good god how could either of us be expected to choose a favorite movie? As my friend Birgitta (also a filmmaker) would answer, "It's Sophie's Choice!")

A large part of the reason I like Inception so much is not very science fictiony: I think the relationship between Cobb (DiCaprio) and Mal (Cotillard) shows a profound understanding of what it means to have a very close marriage with a creative partner at a time of conflict. Part of the reason I don't get caught up in the "oh but is he really awake?" ending is because the emotional payoff isn't really about that; it comes during the moment when he talks to Mal in limbo about what it means to miss her and the depth of what they had together. The memories we've seen again and again in the film are given a new and positive meaning.

Which is what links Inception to the Gottman book. The exercises I found most affecting, perhaps because I am a storyteller and narrative-maker, are about deciding how to remember your past together. When you tell the story of your first date or your wedding or your courtship or the birth of your child, do you mostly talk about the things that went wrong or the things that were wonderful and exciting? Because it's very easy to draw an entirely different emotional picture from the same data. Very easy.

And I could probably talk about this longer, but I have to leave now or I'm going to be late to something.

Incredibly tired today, a combination of health stuff, several days of highly interrupted sleep and a changing sleep schedule so I have jetlag without needing a jet. My impressive accomplishment was sending 6 emails that were almost identical. (Intentionally.) Otherwise I spent almost any given moment counting down to the time when I could go to sleep again without further disrupting my circadian rhythms.

Actually I think I did get some other stuff done, but mostly in fitful attempts to make time go fast.

Busy week. Made final decisions on the Feb/Mar poetry acceptances for Strange Horizons, proofed everything, was asked to join Arc's steering group (my name now to be on masthead, naturally), was an exhibit at the ICA Boston, sent submissions to people who asked me to submit things, and had a million meetings and phone tags along with normal life business. I'm pretty wiped out.

Thankfully, I think this is the end of my hyper-busy interval; I've gotten my urgent to-do list down to "send a thank you note to surviving grandmother for Easter present; fill out routine insurance paperwork."

I'm changing work schedules as of next week, and my day job will now actually be during the day. It's been three or four years since I was last diurnal, so that will be interesting. And my off days will now line up with Scarlett's, so we can start band practice if we want. Or make a film. I could even go to the mall or something, and buy some clothes that aren't four years old, because I will be awake when the mall is open, and might have some time. A little. For a minute.

This was a rough week for me for reasons not at all related to global events - just random shitty day stuff, day after consecutive day, like Ciro's brother having to last-minute cancel a trip to see us, or my needing to buy a new bra that is a different shape than the one I already like (good lord this trip was not successful), and not sleeping well, and a million time-consuming but dull errands, and blah blah blah.

And yes, work was busy. I was mostly shielded from bombing news reports, whether by coincidence or design. (I strongly suspect the kindness of the scheduling department played a role. I am the only Boston-local captioner. I was assigned a lot of baseball.) However, by happenstance, I was the person on emergency standby when the Watertown news broke; I was the first one to jump on a Boston local station with captions about it. I was also the person on duty when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was caught. Those are the only two times I was on local news. I started it, and I ended it. And since I know how to spell the street names, and since I'm the only person in the company who could monitor a visual feed for local stations, the captions were close to flawless.

I did at one point caption someone's exclamation as "they've got flocking guns!" because I forgot my software would automatically censor swearing unless I typed (and it's Boston; many of us use that word as a default intensifier, like other people use "very.") I let it stand, because I thought it was evocative. A stranger on twitter noticed and also thought it was beautiful, although I don't think they realized I exist.

There's a popular screencap being passed around facebook in which the captions name "19-year-old Zooey Deschanel" as the bomber. We are also passing that around a lot and laughing, doing a little "not us! not us!" dance. (We were on channels 5 and 9; that was channel 4.) Non-captioners wonder how you could make that mistake. Captioners totally know how you could make that mistake, or more accurately how voice recognition software could make that mistake. "Hotkey that name, fool!" we say gleefully at not us, not us. It doesn't get old.

I didn't use a hotkey, although I had one set as a failsafe. I used a vocal macro. I told my software to publish "Dzhokhar" when I said "Joker." Because Joker sounds like Dzhokhar. And because he was acting like a Batman villain. It worked perfectly every time.

Rather than doing the many small and hard-to-schedule errands I planned, I spent the day reassuring people who live in other cities that I'm fine, while simultaneously being annoyed with the way news is currently reported by the major networks and radio stations. Neither of these is particularly unusual, because I am friends with a lot of mother hens who worry about whether I am ok even when they have no reason to think I might not be, and spend almost every day listening closely to hours upon hours of news, and noting how much of it is wild speculation, crass emotionality, and irritating filler.

In almost every way that matters, the Boston marathon bombing was no closer to me than the shootings at Aurora or Newtown, 9/11, or the London subway bombings. It was technically closer by, but not closer by in a sense that it's an area I go regularly, or closer in a sense that I lost friends. The full extent of my day's disruption was I lost cell phone service for a while, but my cell phone was out of battery anyway, and Ciro had to catch a different train home. My cousin Scarlett was at her salon more than a mile from the bombing, and will probably receive fewer bookings for a while, but is otherwise unaffected. My sadness over the bombing is the same as anyone else's sadness over the bombing, and is the same thing I would be feeling if I was still in Dallas.

However, this one did make me angry in a way that the others did not make me angry. It's not a "this is my town" sort of thing - if anything, I think Boston is the least harmful possible major city for a bombing. We have a very developed emergency response system, a mostly educated and affluent population that's ready to help and pretty ok with being told to please stay indoors and act calm, and in this case three fully-staffed level one trauma centers within a mile of the blast. Even in the case of a larger blast, our buildings are not very tall and tend to be built sturdy, and our infrastructure has old-school backups like wells and footpaths, and if the city is out of commission for a while, it doesn't really stop the wheels of commerce, travel, or government on a national scale. Academic progress and a lot of R&D get slowed down a bit, but we're not a particularly high-value target.

Instead, this bombing makes me angry because it's sadistic; it strikes me as unambiguously anti-human. Not anti-Boston, or you'd target Fenway. Not anti-US, or you wouldn't target an international event. Not a matter of racking up kills or some other fool bragging right. I am not myself a runner and have no interest in running, and especially not marathons, but you can't watch a runner and not see a human body in a pure expression of its physicality. Moreover, these are people who trained very hard over months and years, most of them for no money and without a chance of winning any race other than their race with themselves. This was a moment of triumph and culmination for hundreds of runners and their families, and each of the runners was running for a different reason. Those individual meanings and stories got taken away, not just in the sense of lives interrupted or potential that wasn't realized, but in complete spite.

It is an act of terror that seems less terrifying (because who is now afraid to run or go out? Nobody, I think) than mutilatory. The mutilation, rather than self-aggrandizement or political speech, seems to have been the point, whether or not the person (or people) who planted the bombs understood their own meaning. Why else strike at the legs of runners, when they have already run so far and so hard that in the legend of Marathon, Phididippides (the runner) collapsed and died from exhaustion when he reached the end? These people did not collapse; instead, they were collapsed. And the many, many more who finished the race but were not at the bombing will not get to celebrate finishing, and the many, many more who were prevented by the bombing from finishing the race will not get to celebrate finishing.

In all other cases of mass killings, I have wanted the perpetrators found in order to prevent further incidents, but haven't had a personal feeling about it beyond a sadness that human brains can go wrong. In this case, I want the person to be found and shot by police before there's any kind of trial, but in some kind of way that's painful before it kills them. Maybe shot in the foot, poetically, and then the hospital is too busy to deal with it until it's too late, and gangrene has set in, and we gradually have to chop off more and more of them but can't give any pain medicine because we don't have the right medical records to know whether it's safe. Something like that.

It probably doesn't help that the running/violence combination makes me think of Gallipoli, as though that (good but sad) movie and that enraging campaign need to be on my mind.

On an unrelated note, I have temporarily made it more difficult to comment anonymously, and even if you have OpenID you may (or may not) be subject to capcha tests for the time being. I know this is annoying, and I'm sorry; hopefully it won't last long. I've been getting some annoying spam and don't have the ability to block an IP address, and I'm hoping this will make that person (or bot) go away.

At best, my gardening could be described as benign neglect. I put some things in the ground, and a few weeks later I go back and look at it, and either it's doing well or it isn't. If it's doing well, I leave it alone. If it's not, I poke it a few times and then leave it alone. If it's dead, I throw it out.

However, I am committed to protracted boundary-setting with the four-story-tall maple tree, which drops buckets full of seeds each year in an attempt to turn my croquet pitch into a forest. It does not matter how many of these seeds we intercept: there are more seeds. If it is not winter, they are trying to come up somewhere. This is what they look like:



While the coffee is being made, I wander around barefoot in my robe, like a vicious and fearsome hunter, pinching up seedlings by the dozen. Until there is coffee, because I'm not some savage.

A few days this week, it's been warm enough to go outside without a jacket during the hottest part of the afternoon, although a heavy sweater is still required. (A few other days this week, it's been below freezing in the evening.) Ciro and I have been taking walks from about 1pm to about 3pm, just for the novelty of being outdoors in sunlight.

I found a seed packet of Cupani Sweet Peas, which informs me that Cupani was the first sweet pea brought to home gardens for cultivation; it was discovered by a Sicilian monk (Cupani) in the wild in the late 1600s. I was duly impressed and have put them in the ground. If they come up (I do not have the best luck with growing from seed), I expect they will be very hardy but small-flowered, as this is my experience of heirloom plants. (Normally, we cultivate things to get bigger blooms or fruits, which of course has a vitality tradeoff. I am not a good gardener, but I have at least a passing understanding of botany.)

I was barely 4 when my little sister was born, and I can't remember it very well, but I do remember being disappointed she wasn't a boy, because I thought I had the girl niche pretty well filled. (Why I would think this, I don't know. I was not gender essentialist in any other way.) I wasn't really threatened; I was pretty sure she wasn't going to be as good as me.

In general, I was not into babies or baby dolls even in the slightest, which I think is fairly unusual for a small child. I counted myself as without question one of the adults, and was mostly annoyed that I would now de facto be grouped as one of the kids, because now there was a "the kids." I think this is the point where I decided to form an alliance with Dad, so that while Mom and the baby were a unit, Dad and I would have our own team. But that didn't last long; I think any baby drama was subsumed because right after she was born, we moved to a new state, and then I started kindergarden a year later, both of which were more dramatic changes than having a baby around.

REL and I didn't get along particularly well, but I think that was more an issue of temperament than rivalry, at least on my side. On her side, she had a longstanding fear that everybody liked me better, and was very obsessive about making sure that we were treated equally even at times when the age gap made this nonsensical. She interrupted me a lot, because she'd get anxious that everybody was going to forget her or leave her out. It took decades for this to dissipate, even though we had entirely separate peer groups, no teachers in common, and she received more attention from my parents automatically because I usually was in another room, reading.

We actually got along fine as long as it was just the two of us, and would happily hang out together all day playing games we made up. It was really only a problem if there was a third party - any third party - at which point REL would become start obsessing over whether she was getting a fair shake. This was more infrequent than it sounds like it would be, because we moved a lot and tended to have a much closer tie to each other than to the neighborhood kids, who we were likely (with a few exceptions) to regard as slightly stupid and not really worth impressing.

In any case, I am sympathetic to younger siblings and think it probably is easier to be the oldest, unless there's a significant age gap (in which case it becomes a bit more like sequential only children). Worrying over how hard it will be for a kid to adjust to having to share their parents seems a bit like complaining because people at higher incomes have to pay more taxes. That younger kid is never going to have that undivided attention (barring a tragedy).

Not that I'm sure undivided attention is necessarily so great. A kid with an instinctive understanding of game theory might even seize on a younger sibling as a means of keeping the heat off. I won't say what kid, but a kid might benefit from that. Two kids together might even run an occasional con or scam, for the good of the collective. If they were so inclined.

I've been in the mood to watch Animal Crackers, my favorite Marx Brothers film, and as always this means the critical crowning of Duck Soup is also on my mind. If the Marx Brothers are even slightly on your radar, and you're the sort of person who watches intro banter on Turner Classics and reads DVD reviews, you know that every discussion of the Marx Brothers, however tangential, works in the observation that Duck Soup is their best movie. It's so rote at this point that nobody even makes a case for it: Duck Soup is the best Marx Brothers movie in the same way that Sylvia Plath was a better poet than Ted Hughes and The Brothers Karamazov is the best Dostoyevsky.* Fact.

Thing is, I don't particularly like Duck Soup. I don't dislike it; I think it has some great bits. But it's not in my top 3 for the Marx Brothers, and maybe not even in my top 5. And when somebody goes on and on about Duck Soup, it's a signal to me that they don't really get the Marx Brothers; Duck Soup is the movie that is most unlike all their other movies. It doesn't use musical numbers in the same way; it doesn't have a romance. It's satirical in a way the other films aren't really. The political subject is appropriately serious for people who find the Marxes too silly, but it's not a terribly sophisticated or accurate send up, even compared to what was available at the time it was released. It's also much more cynical than their other films.

I would summarize the thematic underpinning of most Marx Brothers films as the following: people get into trouble because of their own silliness, but in the end the people with good hearts are forgiven and the malicious people are exposed. As for the romance, there's almost always a union of insider and outsider, which fits with the overall immigrant shtick that's the foundation of the Groucho, Chico, and Harpo characters. Duck Soup cuts most of that out; that could be seen as maturity and trimming the fat, but I take the point of view that it's less progressive and abandons the underlying warmth that is one of their least-acknowledged (but absolutely essential) strengths. If I want nihilist comedy, I'm going to go with Brecht. And I can see that he's ridiculous and not necessarily more adult than the Marxes. (Take a shower, Berthold.)

In essence, Duck Soup is an interesting outlier. I'm glad it exists; the variation allows for situations and jokes the Marx Brothers otherwise couldn't explore, and the contrast with their other movies lets me see the more clearly. I'm perfectly happy to watch it. I especially like the courtroom scene. But when someone uses Duck Soup as his calling card, I'm immediately suspicious that they don't actually like or understand most Marx Brothers movies.

I feel the same way when I see a television critic write a defense or praise letter about Girls in which he says (these are all middle-aged white men; the industry is still pretty monocultural) that it's a great show, his favorite characters are Ray and Shoshanna, although he hates Jessa, and not only is Lena Dunham a great writer but she's much better at writing men than women.

What crap is this? I've seen it way too many times. I like Ray and Shoshanna quite a bit, but they're the easiest characters to write; they're types we've seen in literally hundreds of TV shows. Ditsy party girl with a good heart dating loveable grouch who is a little self-loathing but also totally perceptive about the world at large? TV critics, Ray is basically who you like to think you are, and is served up constantly by every scriptwriter, since most of them are also middle-aged white guy geeks. Ray is well done, but it is like a chocolate cake being well done: if you like chocolate cake, you can pretty much rely on it being on every menu, and even the less good chocolate cake is going to hit the right notes. That stuff is standard.

Meanwhile, Jessa, although she has a lot of problems and weaknesses, just like every character on the show, is a person I have known in real life but almost never on screen. She's not some badly-done femme fatale; she's the only character on the show who is actively vigilant when it comes to patriarchy, which I would say is a fucking essential viewpoint in a show about what it is to be a 20-something woman. She's sexually unashamed but frank about the consequences. She's determined to appear strong and competent even in areas where she really isn't, because she knows that she has to compensate for a societal assumption that she will be weak and incompetent even when she's not. Her choice to live outside "the system" has been incredibly personally damaging, because you can't just live outside of society. But she also can't opt in, or not for long; her story arcs have been attempts to enter or create a family life (because she's lonely), only to remember that she feels disempowered by the societal expectations of that life and rejected them for a reason.

She's the character facing the most profound existential crisis. But if you're a thirtysomething white TV critic, you can make that existential crisis invisible or unrealistic even if it's presented as carefully as any other storyline, and even if a quick look at a lot of the women you went to college with would remind you a lot of them went through the same crisis (although mostly in a less heightened way, since television plots are heightened and compressed for dramatic expedience). You can go ahead and say "I love this show; it's so different for the ways it's the same as all the other shows" and not realize what you're saying. You can assume that what your audience needs to know is that you really like the character who is like you, but you can say it with authority; you can say Ray is the best character. After all, it's what all the other people just like you are saying, all the other people who get paid to make these pronouncements. Must be right.

I've spent a lot of time in a lot of fanfic communities. We're very able to elevate and celebrate minor characters. We're able to read or create plotlines and meanings that are not what the author intended. I think that's great; I think an audience owns a text as much as a writer does (which is not to say more than a writer does), and part of the strength of fiction is the way it allows us to have cultural conversations and explore our own empathy. In order to make moral judgments, we have to imagine what-ifs: if I don't like what this character did here, what would I rather she have done? If I don't like what this character did here, what background would make it acceptable?

But in fanfic communities, we know we're talking about ourselves. We know when we say "oh obviously these characters are secretly a couple; just look at them" that actually, no, they're not secretly a couple, and it's obvious they're not. We get that we're playing along, that we're subverting.

Critics sometimes don't. Critics sometimes say things like "the best part about Girls is the male characters" and think it's flat-out true, rather than reflective of their personal identification as male. Which is a problem when they're being asked to evaluate shows that aren't about middle-aged white males. Which makes them culpable in the continuing fictional dominance of middle-aged white males.

* As you might guess from context, I prefer Ted Hughes and Crime and Punishment.