A while back, Peter made the comment that men tend to acknowledge who is and is not “out of their league” while a lot of women seem to wait and wait for someone out of their league to ask them out.

I don’t think that I agree with Peter on this. I think that there are cases in both directions where people have an exaggerated perception of their place in the dating market. To the extent that there is an inequality, it would not surprise me if it were more likely guys with the unrealistic expectations. Rather, it is guys that would have a self-perceived standing greater than their actual standing as girls tend to be much more self-critical than are guys (I believe, but am too lazy to look it up, there have been studies on this). I suspect, though, that the percentages are irrelevant and that what you would probably see is an unequal distribution. So if you’re in one sector of the dating economy, it can appear very much skewed in one direction. If you’re in another, it can be skewed the other.

But really, no matter where you are and what gender you are, it’s going to be skewed against you. I’ll get to that in a separate post.

Phi became famous based on a post about women and alphas, suggesting that the sexual revolution has given women the idea that if they can sleep with a man of certain quality that she can expect a relationship with a man of that quality. But that’s not the case because the criteria of men sleeping with a woman is different than entering a relationship with her. Therefore, women have painted themselves into a corner with expectations a notch above what is realistic where they are turning down guys that should be good enough in hopes of netting one of the guys she has sexual access to.

Phi uses alpha-beta terminology, but I am not go on this post because I think that it’s better to look at the entire spectrum of people rather than a false dichotomy where people are necessarily one or the other based on subjective measurements.

I think that there’s something to all that. Rather, I think that there’s something to the notion that people mistake one kind of access for another. And there have been cases where I’ve seen female-types try to net a guy and “hang in there” because they erroneously believe that if he keeps having sex with her and he’s not a terrible guy that it must mean something. So I could see that dynamic at play.

At the same time, I think that it’s something that guys see a lot more often than is actually there. If a guy asks out a girl that he believes is in his league and she says no, he will quite possibly come to the conclusion that she has unrealistic expections. Meanwhile, it could be that his expectations are unrealistic. But often, it’s actually none of the above. She is not necessarily looking for someone better than him, but rather she has some criteria that she doesn’t meet.

This is a dynamic I’ve seen repeatedly the other way around. Dharla was, physically speaking, out of my league. Particularly the second time around. She was shapely in all the good ways and had a smile that could light up a room. Yet she was more interested in me than I was in her. It wasn’t that I was holding out for someone better. Just that I was holding out for someone different. I am relatively certain that dynamic is in play in the other direction. I can certainly look at some of the people I’ve asked out and been disappointed because I thought my chances were reasonable and can say “Yeah, she needed a guy pretty different than me.”

But back to the original hand, clearly there are cases where women have unrealistic expectations for one reason or another. Phi’s reason is as good as any. There are also some women that have a celebrity fixation (not where they only date celebrities, but they want to date people that look like celebrities… who are invariably more attractive because they look like celebrities).

There are also cases of men with unrealistic expectations. Men that view any body fat as hideous, who have off-kilter self-assessments, and so on. A lot of men believe that since looks are not as important to women as to men that looks are (or ought to be) irrelevant. Guys that believe that being a nice guy will make up for any other deficiency and so latch on to way too attractive girls as friends and then get angry when they’re shut out.

And, of course, that’s the male counterpart to Phi’s theory about women. Guys that believe that if a woman gives them platonic attention and he’s a nice guy that he is owed more. So he continues to ingratiate himself with attractive girls out of his league hoping that he can create a romance like in the movies where the woman realizes that all that she’s ever wanted has been right there the whole time.

Popular entertainment itself is another factor. Entertainment media of course displays primarily attractive men and women, but there are two crucial inequalities in the portrayal. First, the physical standards for women are simply higher. Actresses tend to come in exactly two sizes: attractive and unattractive (read: fat). So you have Katherine Heigl and Camryn Manheim, but not a whole lot in between. So guys can dismiss the obviously flawed women as being unattractive and then can stratify the remaining women, most of whom beautiful and fit enough to be among the most popular at any given public high school (provided that they don’t have personalities that get in the way).

The second way that portrayals are unequal springs from the first but is still a second bird. In the Hollywoodland where the fact majority of women are extremely attractive and men run the spectrum, partnerships between so-so looking men and really attractive women happen with regularity. Rosanne Barr gets John Goodman, but Drew Carey gets Cynthia Waltros (as sorta does Jorge Garcia, Hurley from “Lost”). This feeds into the notion that “looks aren’t important” to girls and gives guys the notion that they might be able to slip through the cracks and get them a Courtney Thorn-Smith.

I suppose you do see the opposite happen as well. You get the “normalish” (radiant beauty aside) protagonist suddenly get the attention of a high-status male. Carol Seaver (Tracey Gold) from Growing Pains being a good example, a nerd-girl who nonetheless got the attention of the star quarterback. However, I think that this is generally undercut by the fact that the normalish girl is, in fact, radiant. So while it exists, I am not inclined to grant it as much of a weight as the male counterpart.

But the bigger reaosn I think that guys are at least slightly more susceptible is because our field of vision is directed at the most attractive. We look at the girls that are on TV, the girls that we are interested in asking out, the girls that are most our type, girls that are just plain pleasant to look at, and so on. The rest are, as a friend of mine perfectly put it in a conversation a while back, “background furniture”.

Now this isn’t a problem if a guy learns how best to approach women and ask them out and learns from his mistakes. He asks out those he is most drawn to, is rejected, and changes his premises accordingly until he learns were exactly he fits into the scheme of things.

However, if a guy is too chicken-spit to actually ask girls out, he will never recalibrate his expectations. He will instead nibble around the edges of the unattrainable, engage in false-friendships, and so on. And he will never notice the girls that, if he took the time to ever actually take an interest in, might take an interest in him, too. I think that this is why guys are more susceptible to realizing, long after the fact, that a girl was into them than are girls. Who notices the way that background furniture looks at them?

Girls, meanwhile, get a more natural gauge by the quality of men that ask them out. If they harbor delusions that they would be a good match for the jock or the class president, the fact that she gets asked out by a lower-class of male specimen is more likely to be noticed. They get a gut check that guys generally don’t, except in the somewhat rare case that a girl pro-actively expresses interest in them.

And even when a girl does express interest in them, it’s not as useful a gauge as it is the other way around. Girls bring pro-active towards guys come in generally one of two varieties: chicks that are attempting to punch above their weight class and chicks that are crazy. There are some exceptions, but the signal-to-noise ratio makes for lousy data-crunching.

These things are never sure, but I would speculate that the problem is worst for guys that have little experience asking girls out. These guys harbor unrealistic hopes that they are understandably afraid to put to the test. Having little or no practical experience, they live in a fanstasy-land where you know if they just keep trying to hit for the fence, they only need one home run. Ironically, though, it’s probably the guys in this group that are most likely to complain about women harboring unrealistic expectations.

If there is an area of womendom that is most afflicted, if there is any credence to Phi’s theory then it would be those attractive enough to garner the sexual attention of the “alpha males” but not really the romantic attention. Not being female, I don’t know how often this is the case and am inclined to say that if there is a problem with female expectations it probably has less to do with the quality of guy that she will catch and more to do with what she can generally expect from the guy she does catch.

The thought occurs to me as I read stories about Clancy on this site that I sometimes portray her as something of a hard-ass. I have commented in the past that she is the sort that “suffers no fools” and have often played her straight-laced posture against my own more freewheeling (sometimes kinda sorta reckless) nature. When I read over posts that involve her, it seems to unduly establish her Hit Coffee persona. Accuracy of characterization is not a premium on this site by any stretch. It’s not that I make an attempt to be inaccurate, but there are occasional indulgences and exaggerations. But mostly, I think it’s a function that the sum of my stories is largely only half of the story. The cases where I am freespiritedly eating convenience store hot dogs and she reacts unfavorably are more interesting to write about than cases where she and I are both of the same mind on something. So while she and I have a lot of similar views and values on a lot of things, they play off one another. I think my “characterization” is less distorted simply because I am the narrator and my interactions with Clancy are countered by my interactions with others and so on.

But when you think about it, the perceptions you all have of Clancy are the sort of stuff that we deal with in life all the time. I take for example Clem “Golden Boy” Hartford. My characterization of him was grossly unfair. He has a side to the story that I don’t bother to tell and, to be honest, that when I was working with him I did not extensively concern myself about. What I cared about was that he was my nemesis. That was the role he played in my life. No matter how much I would try to understand him and relate to him as a person, his very existence in my surroundings caused me grief. He was everything that I disliked about suck-ups, know-it-alls, and certain kinds of Mormon men. But beyond that, he was a rival. His success made my life more unpleasant in very real ways. His departure from our department made my life materially easier and better. So in the story that was my employment at Falstaff, he was the villain.

No doubt, though, he could tell his story and I would be the villain. I would be the one that sabotaged his chances at a promotion. A conspirator who made his life difficult. My motivations would be beside the point. From his perspective, my actions in regards to him were who I was. From his perspective, he tried exceptionally hard to be friendly to me and I rebuffed him. My reasons for doing so don’t matter.

The other day I was going through some of the employee photos of Falstaff and picking out some to show up on my slideshow screensaver. I saw his picture, with the goofy and (to me) insidious smile and I actually grinned. And I added him to the slideshow. I remember how gratified I was to hear that he was unceremoniously fired from Falstaff and that his fate was playing video games while his wife worked and supported him. But now, a few years later, I don’t care. I wish him well, I guess. Now I see him as a goofy guy that was the source of all manner of humor, mischief, and drama. He is a memory and not a threat. Now, with all of this distance, I can remember that he was someone that meant no more harm than a dog that won’t stop humping your leg. He is, however, the same person he always was. But he’s an entirely different character now.

It makes me think of comic books, in a way. in the DC Universe, you have characters like Batman and Superman who are portrayed differently by different writers. More than that, when they make guest-appearances in other comic books they fill different roles. When Batman tries to hunt down the Vigilante in the latter’s series, he is the antagonist. When he runs into some no-name character, he is an idol. And so on, and so on. A whole lot of different perspectives on the same (albeit fictional) guy. Also in the world of fiction, it’s something that has made its way into my own writing. One character has been in every novel that I’ve written and that I plan to write that take place in the same “universe”. It’s the same guy, but in the first book he’s an aloof member of a rival group of the novel’s protagonist. In the second he is the male lead. In the third he is a sidekick of sorts with certain blue-collar accents that for various reasons don’t show up in the previous piece. Same guy, different character. Similarly, the protagonist in the third will be the object of revulsion in a later one (if I ever get around to writing it), seen as arrogant and entitled and cold and cruel. h

The same is true even without the site or the fiction. The way that we perceive people is based on our incomplete experiences with them.

To use Clancy as an example again, there are some patients that she has that really dislike her. Because they wanted a doctor that would prescribe drugs and she is rather tight-fisted about prescriptions. But for other patience who want actual care, she is golden. Far from being the hard-ass that she is sometimes portrayed to be here, she is exceptionally compassionate. Ironically, she does particularly well with patients that are the fools that she does not suffer. She listens to them in the same way that other doctors don’t. And they latch on to her. When she was in Deseret, she built up nearly twice the practice as the next-highest resident. Patients would see her through the lottery and then would ask to see her again at rates far higher than other doctors. Some of that is because she is an absolutely awesome doctor (not that I’m biased or anything), but a big part of it is because patients are very comfortable with her.

And of course I couldn’t personally marry a hard-ass. Not a real one. Clancy is one of the warmest people I know. That I am who I am and that she is with me demonstrates a lot more versatility than I sometimes give her credit for. There are some guys I know that I have commented on that need to marry a “drill-sergeant”, but I’m not really one of them. I sometimes need a straight-man (or woman), but I am one fool that she fortunately suffers gladly.

The paranoid part of me thinks all of these things and wonders how others see me. I don’t just mean in the sense of “do they like me?” but rather do they see me for what I am? I will take being liked for the wrong reasons from a purely pragmatic standpoint, though of course I would dislike being disliked for the wrong ones for a few reasons. But I also wonder who sees me as a person that they would not like to get to know even though they are exactly the kind of person that I would get along with. And I have more transparently been in situations where I wonder “Why does this person like me? Who does this person think I am?” and I’m annoyed, though I go along for the sake of pragmatism and because I believe that it’s good to have people to lean on whether you like them or not.

I don’t know where I picked up the phrase “It’s the principle of the matter that bothers me” but it took years before I stopped annoying my friends with it.

Despite the pseudonyms and fictional locales and the barriers that exist between my life as it happens and as I report it to you, you all are let in on a little detail that most people that I meet and talk to on a regular basis don’t know: I am someone with a lot of opinions. Opinions of everything.

For a variety of reasons, I have become less opinionated with age. I discovered along the way that opinions are often wrong, for instance. And that loudly voicing opinions is socially dangerous in ways that I cannot generally afford. Oh, and people that feel the need to express their opinion on everything can be very obnoxious. So I often keep my opinions to myself, which actually has the effect of reducing the number of opinions I have and the ferocity of these opinions.

One of the big things that broke me out of the “principle of the matter” habit was Hubert. Hubert had a hair-trigger temper not unlike mine and I noticed that whenever his initial outburst seemed disproportionate to the amount of harm done, he would retreat to it being about the principle of the matter. Proportionality doesn’t matter when you have principles, after all. It was a great way for him to re-evaluate his responses to things and perhaps even be greatful that things were not as dire as they had initially appeared.

So in response to him, I became much more of a live-and-let-live person. And a fan of that saying “let that which does not matter truly not matter.”

I meet with varying success.

When I was living with Hubert, I used to crack wise about how “In the World According to Hubert…” followed by a reaction relatively out-of-proportion with the consequences of the offenses. For instance: In the World According To Hubert, it’s vitally important that people signal when about to take a forced turn so that drivers behind them know that they will be slowing down to take said turn” with the implication that a failure to so turn is yet another example of the downfall of society.

As the saying goes, we criticize in others what we dislike about ourselves. And of course one of the reasons that I pounced on it was because howevermuch I mocked The World According to Hubert, there has always been a World According to William.

So periodically I will be posting World According to William posts, outlining the relatively inane aspects of society that I take objection to. -{TWATW}-

I’ve mentioned before that I am broadly opposed to premarital cohabitation. It’s the product of, among other things, my upbringing. Premarital sex was rarely mentioned because that would have meant talking about sex, but Mom was adamant about premarital cohabitation. Not everything she taught me stuck, but that one did. Her take on the issue was rather simple: If you’re far enough along to move in with someone, you’re far enough to marry them. If you’re not far enough to marry them, you’re not far enough along to move in with them. Breathtakingly simple as Mom has the tendency to be sometimes.

Of my three brothers, I’m the only one that stuck with that counsel. My brothers, though, at least waited until they were engaged and that was enough to pacify Mom. Clancy and I waited until we were actually married. Interestingly enough, Mom sort of reneged in my case, telling me not to let a desire to premaritally cohabitate get in the way of an awesome thing. As it turned out, Clancy was of the same mind on the subject that I was. Dad, who had never really voiced an opinion on the subject, disapproved of Clancy and I moving in together until I pointed out that we were talking about after our wedding. Clancy’s parents always respected her decision, though her sisters and cousins were somewhat derisive on the subject.

Clancy is the only person that I’ve ever dated and discussed the subject that agreed with me. Julie thought it was just one of my “weird things” and Evangeline was adamant about cohabitation being a part of the process that culminates in marriage. Eva lived with her now-husband prior to getting married and Julie lived with Tony for a few years before that fell apart. Though I have views on the subject, I’m not sure that there was ever enough conviction behind them to stick with them while watching someone I loved walk away. Fortunately, it never came to that.

We live in a different world than the one that my mother talked me against. One in which premarital cohabitation is the norm and the more traditional views of Clancy and I cutting somewhat against the grain. At least among our peers. I’ve never been positive that I was right on the subject. It was something that I’d never really had to confront. I used to have some great statistics about the likelihood of a marriage surviving when comparing those that cohabitated prior to marriage and those that did not, but my friend Rick (who has lived with his girlfriend for a long time with no marriage in sight) pointed out that those statistics can be marred by a number of other variables. For instance, premarital cohabitants are more likely to cut from slices of the population more likely to get divorced in general. People too poor to get married at first, for instance, are also often going to be poor enough that money is going to sink the wedding that they do have. Family-minded people are less likely to cohabitate and less likely to divorce. And on and on.

So with the world having changed, and with the possibility that I could be wrong, one thing that I have had to consider is whether or not I will carry the torch and warn my kids against premarital cohabitation. I believing in picking one’s battles and picking battles that you’re doing to lose will often hinder your fighting the battles that might otherwise be winnable. Warning your kids against any premarital sex may convince them not to engage in premarital sex but could also convince them that you are ridiculously out of touch and that they should ignore your advice on other subjects as well. So I haven’t been sure whether to put up a cursory fight on the subject of the appropriateness of premarital cohabitation or to just let that slide in favor of the areas that I might be able to get through. How important is it, really?

I’ve been thinking about that the last couple weeks and have come to the determination that it’s important enough. As with many things where my parents’ advice became wiser with age, I think that this is one of them. It’s more complicated than the picture that Mom laid out about cows and free milk, but it’s still a point worth making even if I (likely) lose on the subject.

The primary problem with premarital cohabitation is, in my view, that it allows couples to put off making decisions that need to be made. It can make things too comfortable to progress. It removes one of the final carrots between dating and marriage. Talk about how if a relationship doesn’t become a marriage because of cohabitation that it won’t become a marriage anyway is at once partially true and utterly beside the point.

I have become extremely suspicious of Sour Grapes arguments over the years. They’re too pat. For instance, the notion that if legalized prostitution is all that stands between a marriage working and falling apart that it can’t be a good marriage to begin with doesn’t ring true. It’s sort of like arguing if you need guard rails to stop you from driving off the cliff that you’re too bad a driver to be driving near cliffs to begin with has an element of truth to it, but it’s not helpful. People will drive near said cliffs and the damage done by a marriage that’s at a weak point with and without a prostitute in the picture can be vastly different. This isn’t an argument that prostitution should be illegal (I’m conflicted on the subject), but that there are tradeoffs on the balance of pros and cons.

The same is true of marriage more generally, where some argue that if you need a piece of paper to validate your bond that it can’t be that strong to begin with. Maybe, maybe not. But for serious-minded people, having that piece of paper changes everything. Four years in, I simply could not have left Clancy the same way that I left Julie. That doesn’t mean that I stayed in an unhappy marriage not worth saving (our marriage has never been like that), but it did force me to confront issues as they arose out of fear that if left unaddressed they could lead to a situation in which leaving might be an attractive option. The difference between being married and not being married is a significant one. That I acknowledge its significance in no way makes my marriage weaker than the next person’s. Rather, it demonstrates a respect for marriage that in my view makes my relationship stronger than an unmarried or married couple that views the institution as a “piece of paper.”

We are vulnerable to our surroundings. Someone in a moderately happy relationship that flirts with danger, so to speak, is more likely to tank than someone in a marriage’s down-period that sees his situation for what it is and denies all temptations. Even well-intentioned people will fall victim to temporary lapses in judgment. One of the tricks to avoiding an explosion is not to dance around in a powder keg with a cigarette lighter in your pocket. Not to allow yourself to get too comfortable with undesirable situations. Best case, you stay uncomfortable. Worst case, in a sudden need to break free you make a tragic mistake.

I spent some time a couple weeks ago counseling a friend getting out of a relationship that lasted four years. My ex-girlfriend Julie lived with a Tony for four years before it broke apart. Julie and I never lived together, but we nonetheless held strong for… four years. I read an article about the Seven Year Itch once that suggested that the pattern is actually four years. For some reason, that’s when relationships that have reached a point of stasis start to crater. I expect that if, during the ebb that often occurs after four years, you don’t have the guard rails of marriage that a lot of relationships that could otherwise make it won’t.

But the real danger is not in sidelining relationships that could evolve into marriage. I am actually willing to concede that most of the time the cohabitation-proponents are right. If a relationship is going to make it, premarital cohabitation probably won’t hurt your chances. Too much, anyway. The bigger danger is not in the relationships that otherwise might make it, but rather in the ones that won’t. The danger being that they still won’t work, but that they will take a lot longer not to work. And this will come to light after a lot more has been invested in the doomed relationship.

One of the benefits that the existence of marriage provides is a gut-check on the long-term viability of a relationship. It’s no mistake that in all three of the above cases, the cratering occurred when the man was wrestling with whether or not to propose. When he (I) decided not to, it meant not only the non-existence of a proposal but the end of the relationship. The perspective of the man being that if this wasn’t permanent, then he needed to find something that was. In the case of Tony and Clint, I believe that premarital cohabitation enabled stalling until they simply could not stall anymore. The women were waiting and getting somewhat impatient, the pressure was on, and they determined what in other circumstances what they would have determined a long time ago: this wasn’t a lifelong relationship. My case with Julie is slightly different because we weren’t living together, but the demands of college and the lack of firm footing in the world provided the same sense of not being forced to confront the unpleasant reality of sunk costs.

The primary danger in premarital cohabitation is that it allows people to put off making the decisions that need to be made. This is the case even when there is absolutely no bad faith on the part of the man. This is the case even when he genuinely loves her and is not particularly unhappy. It’s just that when he looks over the horizon he sees a void. Who wants to look at a void? No wonder he hasn’t been looking. He’s no fool.

But by withholding everything that marriage has to offer except the guard rails, he is allowed to avoid it until he can avoid it no more. But by saying that they will not live as a married couple until they are actually married, it forces potential issues sooner. This can mean that the situation is assessed and it is determined that the two people need to go their separate ways, it can mean that they want to move forward, or it can mean that they want to move forward but there are things that need to be addressed first. I believe that there are scenarios in which Julie and I, Tony and I, and Clint and Margaret could have made it if some of the underlying problems had been addressed before they had calcified with time and habit. Instead, the habits were formed, the issues left unaddressed, and the guard rails to make darn sure that they had to be addressed without consequences considerably more serious than finding a new apartment being accrued. But as it was, by the time they were noticed, it was too late.

So I plan to tell any sons and daughters that I may have to try as hard as they can to avoid that trap. I will particularly focus on my daughters. Not because I believe that women have some moral obligation to be the breaks, but because (a) women seem to be the ones pushing for cohabitation and (b) women far more often appear to be inflicted the most damage when it ends. In the case of (a), I think it’s a misguided belief that cohabitation is progress on the route to marriage (which it may be, but not necessarily) and a cohabitational relationship is more committed than one where separate apartments are kept. And I think that it’s her way of doing what the guy later does: Not ready for marriage yet, but want something now. As far as damage assessments go, I’m not sure if it has to be, but it certainly seems that way. The ones I’ve witnessed (not all of which I am going into here) seem to usually break this way. Further, the cohabitating couples that have not split up seem to be cases where if it did happen that he would much more likely land on his feet than she would. In fact, if I saw a breakup, I see him doing it rather than her. By virtue of the cohabitation and the lack of marital security, the man seems generally to possess more leverage. Indeed, the lack of the piece of paper seems almost uniformly to be his idea. That’s not a good arrangement. It’s probably often the case that if she had insisted that he fish or cut bait earlier that he would cut bait… but again, this is something that I believe is better confronted sooner rather than later.

None of this is to say that there are never cases where it can work out. Clearly it often does. I’m sure that there are even cases where something could have worked out but didn’t because one party or the other chose not to cohabitate. I’m particularly sympathetic to cases where you’re dealing with leases and have couples that are already engaged (especially when there is a planned date). I’m also sympathetic to their being times when one party or the other has to find a place to live rather suddenly and cohabitation makes the most sense. But if a couple is to embark on that path, I think that they really need to do so with an ending in mind. A sort of agreement that after six months or one year that they will make a decision one way or the other. Something in place to avoid getting too comfortable with the status quo to question it either in progress or dissolution.

I recognize that some of this may well be class bias. Most people I know are not financially in a position where they have no other options. So I try not to be too judgmental, though I also figure that with the kids that I may someday lecture on this that will not be the case. I also recognize that I am saying this as someone that squandered four years on a doomed relationship, squandered another two trying to get one off the ground, and knew within two weeks of meeting my wife that I wanted to marry her.

Clint and I were sitting in the living room as he unloaded everything that had been going on in the past month. I was surprised and unsurprised at the same time. It was one of those things where you have to sort of re-orient yourself to a new surrounding and a new reality. Eight years earlier, I had been congratulated by a friend on my impending engagement and I had to inform him that not only was no engagement forthcoming but that Julie and I had gone our separate ways. The framework changes from one of a future to a thing of the past. Reality changes and we’re left to re-orient. When we planned this trip, I thought I was going to be helping Clint strategize his proposal. Instead, he was telling me of the destruction of everything and we were sitting there, talking and looking around an apartment that was soon to be entirely dismantled. A strange feeling to be somewhere that soon was no longer going to even exist.

Six months before all this he had told me of his plans to propose. Almost two years before that, he had been expected to propose but had not. It had become a sore point. A weight under which it was extremely difficult to put any of it right without it seeming anything more than an effort to shed a burden. There. I proposed. I did it. Happy? Or was that not what you had in mind? That’s why I can’t propose today. Or tomorrow. Or until this burden lifts. What do you mean this burden won’t lift without a proposal? That puts us in quite the pickle, doesn’t it?

About two weeks before our conference in the condemned apartment, he sent me a somewhat mysterious email telling me that there was a lot going on and that he wished it could be a good thing. A month before that, Margaret had tried to contact Dave and I about the two of us going to Shaston to surprise him. I emailed Dave and told him that we needed to put any plans on ice for now. Though Clint’s relationship with Margaret had previously been reported happy (albeit burdened), I had run through it in my mind and determined taht there was no other “not good thing” he could be referring to. His job already wasn’t very good, but he’d learned to accept that. His financial situation wasn’t very good, but he’d learned to accept that (and it was on an upward tick at any rate). The only good thing that being something other than good would be news was his relationship with Margaret.

About a week before the conference, we made some plans for me to take a trip down there. The timing wasn’t ideal with all that was going on at work, but it was obvious that there were some things he needed to chat about.

The day before we sat talking in the soon-to-be dismantled apartment, he called me three times. I couldn’t answer because my cell phone was in a test harness at work. He called me a fourth time after the phone had been taken out. I could tell by his voice what he was going to say.

“I’m sorry to do this, man, but I’m going to have to cancel our plans this weekend.”

I waited for him to tell me what was going on, but he didn’t. “I’m guessing no explanation is forthcoming?” I asked. Yes, I really talk like that sometimes.

He paused. “No.”

That the plans were cancelled was one thing. That he wouldn’t tell me why was another. But what stood out most was the tone of his voice. Clint does things that trigger drama, for sure, but he is not on the whole a dramatic person. He is actually anti-drama. If he were to find out about a girlfriend cheating on him, his response is “How can I make this go away? This doesn’t mean our relationship is over, does it?” instead of making a big show about the betrayal and his victimhood and how is he ever going to be able to trust her again. That he was so obviously affected told me that something was very, very wrong. And completely out of his control. She was leaving him. Not in the gradual sense that one realizes that a relationship is not going to work out, but rather that she was leaving him right that minute. Or was kicking him out. Something was happening to him that meant that I couldn’t come down to Shaston. I shot him an email telling him that I heard his distress and that if he needed me down there I would go down there even if it meant driving straight back or getting a hotel for the night.

In the late morning of the day of the conference in the pre-dismantled apartment, he called me back and sent me an email telling me that if I could come down he would greatly appreciate it. I told him that I needed four hours and that I would be there. There was some pretty monstrous traffic that made it take longer than expected. When I walked in, he informed me that Margaret had gone to a hotel for the night. He was wearing a Parallax Productions shirt and some pajama pants. When we have something to talk about, we usually small talk for a little bit to oxygenize the atmosphere before getting to the heavy stuff. Not this time. He immediately told me the story of one of the worst days of his life. The previous day when he had called me in distress to tell me not to come down.

It started a month or so prior. He met Kirby. The rest of it unfolded, one aching detail at a time, how I knew it would the second the presence of a third party was mentioned. Infidelity, remorse, the promise never to do it again, repeat loop. But her presence was both on-point and beside the point. Affairs come in two varieties, cause and effect. A causal affair is one that ruins something great. An effectious affair is the crowning acknowledgement of one party of how far from great a relationship is. This was the latter.

Thoughts drifted back to my meeting Evangeline. How even prior to meeting Evangeline I’d had the growing sense of unease with Julie. But Eva had become the point. Meeting her and feeling how I did about her brought everything into focus. It provided the startling contrast between what I was capable of feeling and what I did not feel towards Julie. Evangeline made it impossible for my relationship with Julie to be repaired. Impossible for me to view it the same ever again. Re-orientation.

Kirby did the same for Clint. Kirby embraced those parts of him for which Margaret made him feel ashamed. Kirby brought out those feelings and sensations in him whose absense had made him feel so isolated and the length of said absense so long that he had forgotten that they were missing. Re-orientation.

The main difference being that he had betrayed Margaret physically rather than emotionally. I had managed to end things with Julie in time for that to happen. But the existence of Kirby was secondary. She merely filled a particular void. I regreted how things imploded with Evangeline shortly after I took the leap away from Julie, but even in Evangeline’s absense I never for a moment felt that leaving Julie was the wrong decision. I knew that the same would be true of Clint. You can’t re-forget what has just awoken from a long, sustained sleep.

Regardless of what happened, the apartment was going to be dismantled. Their possessions split. Their lives apart. But what happened was that Margaret realized what was going on and unearthed the proof. She had done so the day before. The long, heartfelt conversation that he had envisioned with him telling her that things were coming to an end were replaced with a never-ending string of expletives hurled at him by a woman scorned. A conversation so deeply unpleasant that you want nothing more than to escape it. Yet a lecture so deserved that you have no choice but to endure it.

And after the explosion she left. He was torn between the feeling that he should tell her not to go and helping her pack her things because he knew that one of them needed to. Why it was her I do not know since these situations usually involve him being kicked out. Into a doghouse, preferably, or an outhouse, ideally. Most likely, her leaving assured her that he would not end up at Kirby’s place.

Though she wasn’t there, Margaret was less than pleased with my presence in their apartment. She had visions of my reassuring Clint that he had done nothing wrong and that everything would be okay. But neither temporary occupant in the apartment whose dismantling was pending pretended that Clint had done nothing wrong or that anything would be okay. My presence there saved her from the much more grotesque reality that if I hadn’t been there, Kirby likely would be. He had no one else to turn to. But that was assuredly of little comfort since while my presence there excluded hers and was not based on forgiveness for his transgressions, it was a cold strategization session for getting him out of that relationship with as much of the remainder of his life in check as possible.

It’s not uncommon in sitcoms for a guest character to become a member of the cast by throwing that person into the main character’s life in some unexpected way. Such as, for instance, getting a job where the main character works. Kirby had gotten a job at the shop where Clint worked and was technically a subordinate since Clint was of managerial status. So we strategized how to prevent him from losing his job. We strategized how to prevent him from losing a weekly gig at a local bar that was one of his few ties to the outside world (and that, despite his having met Kirby there, his resignation from would not help save his relationship with Margaret even if Clint were hopeful of doing so).

There was all manner of havoc that Margaret could wreak and would be largely justified in doing so. But it would be destructive and would not achieve Margaret’s desire for reconciliation nor ultimately make her feel better. So it was planning and strategy in the pre-dismantled apartment on that Saturday afternoon while she laid in a hotel bed and melted across town.

Among Margaret’s other fears of my presence there, she was afraid that he and I would just be laughing it up while she cried. The injustice of that was palpable. There was laughter, but the dark sort that has the main purpose of allowing one to forget about their pain, however temporarily. Clint forgetting the pain, even temporarily, is certainly not what Margaret wanted or deserved. But what she needed was frankly of secondary importance. He couldn’t give her what she wanted and any effort on Clint’s part to sacrifice everything to give her just a little of what she wanted quite simply wasn’t going to happen.

One of the comments she made during the never-ending parade of expletives on the day before that I did not come down was that the Clint she knew would never do what Clint had done. I’m not going to air too much dirty laundry at this point and I am certainly not going to defend Clint’s actions, but put in the situation that he was in (a situation more than partly of his own making), there was really not much else he would have done. That she didn’t know him well enough to know this about him was relevent, both in terms of how well she knew him and how honest he was with her about himself. The impressive part was that he held out as long as he did. The damning part was not that he slept with someone else, but that he did so prior to the inevitable separation. The difference between what Clint did and what most people would have done, in that situation (if they got into it in the first place) was largely one of timing.

It’s human nature, I guess, to look for a sense of justice in times of personal torment. It’s why, though logic would dictate otherwise, being left for someone else is more personally offensive than being left for no one. Because when you’re left for someone else, you know that while you are alone and miserable and crying in a bed that they have rebounded in ways that they do not deserve. Whatever guilt they feel is tempered by the human contact that you lack. In essence, Clint had been rewarded with a pillow to break his fall by his own willingness to partake in infidelity. She had hit the concrete because her moral structure makes infidelity unthinkable. She had suffered for her morality and he had been rewarded for the lapse of his.

It’s the impossibility of fully grasping the injustice of that which makes people avoid it at all costs. When there is no way a wrong can be made right, the inclination is not to try. There is nothing Clint can do to make the situation right. The best thing that he could do is to grovel and try to repair things, but she had him doing that well before any transgression on his part. He can tell her that he realizes that he is not a good enough man for her, but she had him feeling that way before. He can try to repair the relationship to where it was before, but it was already broken. She never forgave him for his failure to propose two years earlier. She was never going to forgive him for this.

There comes a point where you simply have to accept the injustice of the situation. Not so much on the part of the sinner who needs to feel enough pain never to commit that particular sin again, but particularly on the part of the sinned against whose first order of business is to let go of the anger and bitterness as quickly as possible. In both cases, the sharp pains of reality are sufficient to keep the learned lessons learned. This type of two-penny wisdom is always easiest for those that are not in pain to spout.

Margaret was to return the next day at noon. At which point, I was to make a hasty exit. It was obvious that our rally conference was not going to be concluded in time. So much of “What happens now” depended on what kind of mindset she returned with. If she decided that he was the only thing that she had in her life, he would need to find a way to dislodge that notion from her mind. We kept hoping that she would come back and tell him that he needed to leave and that she never wanted to speak to him again. Few sinners are ever so fortunate as to achieve perfect exile.

She arrive half-an-hour ahead of schedule and unfortunately I wasn’t packed yet. She made a beeline to the balcony and just sat there, looking out into oblivion. Clint helped me scramble and gather my things as quickly as possible.

He mouthed to me, “I don’t know if I should go out there and talked to her.”

I shrugged. “Wait until I leave,” I mouthed back, as much for my sake as anybody’s.

For my part, I didn’t know whether to say goodbye to her. I was never going to see her or talk to her again. I knew that much. Given the situation, there was no “right” thing for me to do. There was only the insult of failing to say goodbye after all she’d been through competing against the slight of self-importance of the guy that thinks that I factor into her thoughts worth enough a damn for her to give an excrement that I was leaving.

I decided that I would take self-importance. I told her that I was leaving. She graciously thanked me for stopping by. I left as quickly as I could.

I am of the mind that “hypocrisy” is a charge thrown about far too often. And often disingenuously. To me, hypocrisy has one of two definitions. A narrow one or an expansive one. The expansive one is to say that anybody who denounces something while personally doing it is a hypocrite. The narrow one, which I prefer, is one that denounces something while believing that it is okay for him (or her) to do it. I prefer the latter definition because it is the most morally useful one. The former definition, in my mind, reduces the notion of hypocrisy into morally useless territory.

If we are to say that everybody that denounces something that they do is a hypocrite, then we are all hypocrites. More than that, we should be hypocrites. To be otherwise is either to live a perfect life or to rationalize away everything bad you’ve ever done. If someone is doing something that they recognize to be bad, they should be able to say so. Ideally, they should admit to what they are doing, but for various reasons that is often not a good idea. I am sure that, for instance, the wife and family of an adulterous politician would prefer the dirty laundry not be spread around.

Likewise, President Jed Bartlet concealed his smoking habit from the public because he did not want to lend his habit the veneer of respectability. He did not want, by his own actions, to suggest that smoking was okay.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is somewhat more forthright about his relationship with “Uncle Phil”, as he’s called in the Truman home:

That Obama has just signed legislation designed to reduce cigarette use, it’s easy to suggest that Obama is worthy of condemnation for the hypocrisy. Obama deflects this in the same way that parents across the country do: For the love of god, do what I say and not what I do. In fact, Obama takes it a step further and uses himself as an example as to why this legislation is so important. Some would call this political posturing, but when I was coming of age the people that warned me the most sternly and effectively against smoking (I didn’t start until I was 22) were smokers themselves. Whatever the level of his sincerity (which we have no way of knowing), he is saying what a lot of sincere people do.

Criticizing Obama on the hypocrisy, though, is the easy way out. I feel the same way about Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) and the recent revelation of his affair. And Senator John Ensign (R-NV), David Vitter (R-LA) and former Governor Elliot Spitzer (D-NY). They’re mostly cheap shots. They’re useful in the context of weakening a political figure. People who vote for Sanford on the basis of his alleged commitment to family values should probably know that he does not live up to them himself and he should be called into account. He can try to defend his actions or (more likely) admit that they were wrong and then the voters can decide whether they believe him or not (which they will miraculously do or not do along party lines).

But he should be called into account for what he actually did. It should not be used, as it has been, to attack his position on gay marriage. Further, revelations of infidelity should not be important primarily (or solely) if there is a hypocrisy angle. If it’s wrong for Ensign to cheat on his wife, then it’s wrong for a pro-gay marriage politician to cheat on his. The only time there’s really a distinction is if the pro-gay marriage politician is prepared to say that it’s different for him because he doesn’t believe that cheating on his wife is wrong.

A morally useful hypocrisy charge carries an implication that what the hypocrite has been caught doing is not actually that bad. Or at least is not as bad as saying that people should behave differently. Because it is criticizing the hypocrite not for what he did but rather for his condemnation of it. For instance, Ted Haggard was an anti-gay preacher caught in homosexual acts. His critics did not care that he was engaging in homosexual acts. In fact, they support the right to do so as free from consequence as possible. Haggard, despite his oopsies, continued to disagree. Haggard’s continued belief that what he did was wrong undercuts the hypocritical charge. So even when the charge is morally useful by virtue of forcing Haggard to confront the difference between his stated morality and his private actions, it did nothing to really prove that Haggard’s views on homosexuality were actually wrong.

There are some cracks in this, though. Democrats, to great effect, used hypocrisy against the Republicans during Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings. The hypocrisy charge was successful not insomuch as it defended Clinton’s infidelity but rather the right of Clinton not to have attention brought to it. Since most people are skittish about the airing of dirty laundry (though not so skittish as to not pay attention to it), the message resonated and it’s one of the comparatively few cases where I can lend some credence to it. And so criticizing Ensign (who made some harsh statements directed at Clinton) on those grounds possibly have some sort of standing… except that it involves an issue ten years stale. So to suggest that now, ten years after the fact, infidelity is relevant and should be made public is… inconsistent. Perhaps hypocritical. Either a politician has a right to keep his private failings private or he does not. Saying out loud that these failings are failings does not, to me, really enter into the equation. Further, it is completely useless, though, to bring infidelity (or Haggard’s homosexual adventures) up in the context of gay marriage because that is an issue of public, not private, sexuality.

What disturbs me about this is that the charge is levied most frequently not to discourage immoral behavior but rather to discourage the condemnation of it, which in turn is to defend it. Otherwise, the hypocrisy is somewhat beside the point. The issue is that Haggard engaged in homosexual acts, that Sanford cheated, that Al Gore uses too much fossil fuel, and that Obama smokes cigarettes. If one considers these things bad then the hypocrisy angle is tangential at top and at bottom is appreciated because better they at least advocate doing the right thing rather than defend doing the wrong thing.

All of this brings me back to Obama and cigarettes. To suggest that hypocrisy is the issue, it implicitly assumes that what Obama is doing actually isn’t bad. For hypocrisy to be more important than smoking, then it’s his public face that’s wrong. And it’s difficult to say “they’re both bad” because either smoking is bad (and thus Obama’s public face is right) or it is not (and thus his private face is doing nothing wrong).

The stronger argument is that he shouldn’t smoke because it sets a really bad example. This is, of course, true. Of course, it wouldn’t be such an issue if the press didn’t keep asking the question. But then if they did that, I wouldn’t have had anything to post about…

-{Note, this post is not meant to be a platform for grievances against Obama, Sanford, Republicans, Democrats, liberals, or conseratives generally. Condemn or forgive the hypocrisy or the specific underlying behavior as you see appropriate, but let’s avoid comments like “I don’t care about x, I really hate him/them because y” and so on. I know these requests must seem tedious, but there are so many other places to discuss actual politics and politicians and some of the issues I like to talk about can easily get sidetracked into formulaic condemnations of people whose philosophies differ from our own}-

The latest show that I’ve been consuming through my earpiece (as well as watching when I have a spare eye) is Grey’s Anatomy. So far I’m enjoying it. One of the more interesting aspects is the non-romance between lead Meredith Grey and her rejected suitor George O’Malley. In some ways it’s the classic case of a chick rejecting the sincere beta in search for her alpha. The alpha, in this case, being the unhappily married Derek (“Dr. McDreamy”) Shepherd. But it’s clear from the outset that Dr. Shepherd is not the only obstacle in George’s way. The primary obstacle is the fact that Meredith doesn’t even notice that he’s interested (or acts as though she doesn’t). This is problematic not just because it means that O’Malley has to do the heavy lifting to make anything happen, but in my experience if you’re hot for someone chances are good they either know it or the way that they see you is completely devoid of any sexual attraction.

O’Malley stands by in utter frustration as Meredith gets her heart broken repeatedly by the conflicted Dr. McDreamy while he knows that he would love her and never hurt her if he just got the chance. O’Malley gets some disingenuous advice from their mutual friends to go for it. I guess it’s something that people are expected to say, but it’s pretty bum advice when it’s equally obvious to everybody that it’s going to end badly.

And, of course, it does. As O’Malley is about to make his move, he catches Meredith having sex with somebody that she absolutely, positively should not be having sex with. He flies off the deep-end. Things tumble for Meredith until she is feeling beyond miserable about herself. In a moment of weakness, she receives O’Malley’s sexual advances. Long story short, the whole incident ends in a way beyond humiliating for O’Malley and he moves out (the two of them were living together with someone else), everyone takes his side, and Meredith is left feeling lower than dirt. Which, in his mind, is what she deserves after the awful way that she humiliated him. And most of her friends are willing to give her no quarter (their mutual roommate says flat-out that if it comes down to it, she’s siding with him). She apologized again and again, but he would have none of it.

As I watch and listen the whole situation unfold, it’s hard for me to experience too much sympathy for O’Malley. Of course, I can completely and entirely relate to the guy that loves the girl that doesn’t love him back. His hurt was understandable, as was a fit of rage after the humiliation, but a little perspective casts a pretty different light on things. He circled around her like a vulture. At her greatest moment of vulnerability (some of which caused by him), he made his move. Things didn’t work out like he’d known all along they wouldn’t until he saw his moment to strike, and he is indignant. None of this is to suggest that Meredith is free of blame. Though her reactions were the product of her own torment (much of it self-inflicted), self-destructive behavior becomes less tragic and more unforgivable when it has a radius beyond the self-destructive individual. And to be honest, O’Malley’s actions themselves were also the product of his own hurt. The main difference, in my mind, is that she has apologized repeatedly and neither he nor anybody else acknowledges the role he played in his own destruction.

This makes me think of the plight of a lot of beta males. The source of his pain was not entirely his own doing. It’s not like there was something that he could have done in order to win her over the “right” way. He had no chance. And to some extent, you can’t help who you are attracted to. But what you can help is (a) how much you cultivate that attraction and (b) how you respond to it. O’Malley followed the path that a lot of us do. He at once acknowledged that she was out of his league and so didn’t make his move but then did not acknowledge that the next move was his… the move away. Moving out of the apartment or trying to tackle his futile emotions. The romantic in all of us says that love is not something that can be contained, but to say that of O’Malley is also to say that of Meredith. The main difference being that she at least had a shot at her dream at one point.

There is supposed to be a romantic tragedy behind the love of the unattainable. I think that popular entertainment presents us with it so often (and make it love actualized sometimes) because we can all relate to it. But I view it as a truly destructive force. The inability to get someone out of your mind or to let a former lover go is one of the greatest sources of self-inflicted misery I’ve seen in those around me in my somewhat privileged life. It’s human and to some extent unavoidable, but I find Hollywood’s exaltation of this impulse to be problematic. I’ve complained before about how Hollywood misleads men by making them thing that persistence counts. But it misleads women into thinking that men will come around, too. And it misleads all of us into thinking that there is something beautiful about unrequited love and dreaming the impossible (Mc)Dream(y).

There isn’t.

And it isn’t just that it makes people unhappy. It’s a contagious sort of unhappiness. It leads to O’Malley the Vulture and Meredith the Succubus. It leads us to overlook the options that we do have. It makes us less pleasant for our friends to be around. Unless you’re a tortured artist, there isn’t much positive that can come from it. I think that we search endlessly for the bright side so we invent one. And though it never makes the pain stop, it makes us endure abuse and neglect and it makes us deal it out to people that are not the ones abusing and neglecting us. And, for that matter, exactly to the one abusing and neglecting us for the same reason that we are doing the same. Of course, that assumes that you’re in a position to deal the pain you’re experiencing. These people can be the most insufferable because they think that a dearth of available victims makes them benign.

Update: As if to make a fool out of me, O’Malley apologized in the episode I listened to today, outlining a significant portion of what I said above. He has regained his status as my favorite character. Most excellent.

I’ve seen it discussed here and there the correct pronunciation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. The correct pronunciation is apparently So-to-may-OR while a lot of people gravitate towards So-to-my-er or So-to-may-er with the emphasis being either on the “So” or the “my/may”. I personally pronounce it as though it were spelled Sotomeyer with no obvious emphasis.

One school of thought is that you pronounce a name as the person whose name it is does so. Since she pronounces it SotomayYOR, so should we. On the other hand, you have others saying that we should resist “unnatural pronunciation” and it should not be insisted upon.

I’m honestly sympathetic to both points of view. On the one hand, we should try to call people what they wish to be called. Doing otherwise can be seen as (and is often intended as) disrespectful. It’s sort of like having a friend named Frank and insisting on calling him Francis because that’s his name. If the two of you know one another and it’s an inside joke or something like that, it’s one thing. Otherwise, it’s one of the things that people do to demean someone else in a way that they see as perfectly defensible because it has its own accuracy. It’s not entirely dissimilar to those that emphasized our president’s middle name or the first name of the governor of Louisiana and objected to all objections because, you know, that’s the legal name. Similarly, calling her Sotomeyer despite her preference and the custom of the language can be seen the same. People that make a point of pronouncing it differently are due particular scrutiny. Of course, you can pronounce it right in a disrespectful manner to. Someone that says “Justice Sotomeyer… wait… sorry, have to be {insert air quotes here} politically correct… sotomaYOR” is being more disrespectful than the guy that happens to pronounce it wrong.

On the other hand, I foresee people being accused of being disrespectful when they’re not intending to be. As Conor Friedersdorf points out in the aforelinked American Scene post, some people are just all jazzed up about accusing people (particularly people with whom they frequently disagree) as racist. But failing or declining to pronounce her name correctly is not racist. Nor is it inherently disrespectful. Some names are just hard to pronounce. To me, the correct pronunciation of Sotomayor is about as unnatural as names come. Something about the four syllables with the accent on the last syllable just ties my tongue in knots. I can pronounce it correctly, but it requires a degree of conscious effort. Maybe somewhere down the road I’ll get it right, but for now if I am mentioning her it’s because I’m trying to convey something about her and it obstructs clarity if I have to take a time-out to construct the pronunciation of her name correctly.

Interestingly, when President Obama announced her nomination, he got it right on the first pronunciation but then in later references he slipped into somewhere in between Sotomeyer and the correct pronunciation. When her name was the object of the sentence, he got it right. But when her name was just included, our well-spoken president wavered. I suspect that this is going to be an ongoing thing. In that vein, I hope that people will do what they can to pronounce it correctly, but I also hope that Sotomayor’s defenders will not use that as a bat to club the people with whom they disagree. And ultimately, I wish that Sotomayer herself would just consent to the pronunciation that is going to cause people the least amount of linguistic gymnastics.

Actually, Sotomayor (if confirmed) would not be the first Supreme Court justice whose name I have difficulty with. At least half the time, I pronounce Antonin Scalia as AnTONin Scal-yah. The first because it’s one letter off from the name Antonio, which I’m more familiar with. The last name is one that I have just never heard with any regularity until I started following the news. Now that I know, I am still used to the old pronunciation and the correct one, while not as unnatural as SotomaYOR, still doesn’t flow off the tongue. It’s kind of funny that I mispronounce an Italian name by my association of it with a Spanish one. It also goes to show that contrary to the assumption of some, it’s not out of disregard for Hispanics that some people have difficult with (or quite trying to find) the correct pronunciation of her name. Some people have only recently learned out Souter’s name is pronounced. I had once thought that it was Sowter rather than Sooter, but once I found out how it was pronounced it was a really easy one to switch to since Sooter/suitor is already an English word.

Interestingly enough, this is an area with which I already have some experience. My name is difficult for Asians to pronounce. Or at least it’s difficult for the Japanese to announce. So when I was working under a Japon in Estacado, he could not pronounce my name to save his life. It would usually come out as Wi-ih or more commonly as Wi-er or Weer. He struggled with this mightily. I could see him try to get it right, but he could not for the life of him get it out. I actually tried at one point to tell him that he could call me Wier if that would be easier for him. He seemed kind of offended by the suggestion. I then lied and told him that it “Wier” was sometimes used as a nickname for “William” and so Wier Truman I became.

Do any of y’all have a difficult to pronounce name? My last name sometimes gets goofed up and my wife’s name gets goofed up regularly. Some people consider it sad that people shorted or anglicized their name when they came over, but I admire their willingness to do so. I don’t know if I would be willing to do the same, but then I’m not the sort to migrate to a new country permanently. Slate had an interesting article a while back on the trend in China to come up with English names. If I were to move to a foreign country, I would at least consider adopting a local first name. Particularly if it were difficult for the locals to pronounce correctly.

* – As most of you know, “Will Truman” is a pseudonym, but in real like my common name actually is Will or contains an “L” in it. The story is essentually true.

-{Note: This is a post about pronunciations of names. It is not a post about Sotomayer’s qualifications for the bench, her ideology, nor the president that nominated her. This marginally involves the conduct and moral turpitude of her supporters and detractors, but I do not want the comment section to veer in the direction of suggesting that people whose opinions on her nomination (or the underlying worldview behind those opinions) differ from your own are morally or intellectually lacking. Please contribute, but contribute with care.}-

I’ve written before about the sometimes-troubled friendship I’ve had with my ex-roommate Hubert Graham. Hugh and I had a lot of the wrong things in common and I really disliked in him what I disliked in myself. He was who I feared that I would become if I didn’t watch myself. Short-tempered, self-centered, awkwardly social, and more. None of this is to say that I saw him as a bad person. Even when I reviled him, I could at least recognize that he was a decent guy. But living with him for four years, working at Parallax Productions with him, and more proved too much for the longest time.

Also standing in between us was a sort of rivalry. A need to one-up one another. To prove that we could get the better girls, be more successful, prove our superior intelligence, and invade one another’s turf. He is smarter than me, so I had to try to be smarter than him. I am more creative than him, and so he had to try to prove his creative mettle. The rivalry extended to everything, at one point getting so ridiculous that I was hurling expletives at my Epson printer because it had the nerve to be worse than Hugh’s HP.

The mend came in part when we had nothing to compete over. With the rivalry dead and the overextended intimacy of living together passed, we were free to approach one another on the grounds that made us friends in the first place with a lot of shared memories to boot.

He got the better job, but I have excuses for mine and it’s not something I care about. He has integrated himself better socially in the world, too, but I’ve never needed that as much. Our wives are too different to stack up against one another. I’ll be more comfortably financially in the long term. He’s won, I’ve won, and we’ve more or less settled in our respective places.

Anyway, he called me yesterday and we talked for a while. This is the first call since the whole Dead Babies incident, so I was glad to hear from him. For those of you that don’t keep track of my castlist-in-the-dozens, his wife gave birth to twin girls about fifteen weeks ago. So as we were talking he was raving about how insanely brilliant his little girls are and how they’re exceeding all of the charts of baby progress.

I am of course thrilled for him, but an ugly little part of me started creeping back. I had visions of trying to convince Clancy to undergo IVF so I can one-up him with triplets. And I have visions of talking to my young daughter, saying, “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up, sweetie… as long as you’re better than Lucinda and Emmilou Graham.”

I’m pretty much kidding, by the way.

About the triplets.

And maybe the other thing.

Maybe.

A post by Will regarding a MamaPundit outburst brought up an old memory.

My experience with abortion, in a “firsthand” sense, stems around my aunt. She and my uncle were overjoyed the first time they found out she was pregnant, as was the rest of the family. I, my siblings, and my cousins were told (just as we had each time before) about how wonderful it was. We were about to get a new cousin. Somebody new to be around for Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving at my grandparents’ place, someone for me to (eventually) babysit for, someone to play with, someone to show our world to as they learned about theirs.

Unfortunately, my aunt then ran into a nightmare of a problem – 5 months in, doctors determined that my unborn cousin was either going to be stillborn or not going to live for more than a few days. Part of his brain had not formed, and he would have been born with an “open” (e.g. lacking partial bone structure) skull. (I’m sure Clancy could fill in more “medical” terminology but that’s how it was explained to us).

Between that, and the various hormonal complications the pregnancy was causing, it was determined to “terminate” (e.g. abort) my aunt’s pregnancy. From the perspective of my relatives, there was no doubt that this had ended a human life, but it was better to stop the pregnancy than to risk taking my aunt’s life as well. My stillborn cousin was baptized and buried in a small, private family funeral; I did not attend as most of us cousins were deemed “too young” to attend or fully understand the circumstances at the time.

For much of my family, the thought was that this was a heinous necessity. This was, to them, “the taking of a life.” The fact that my cousin would be born essentially already dead or “brain dead” and only kept alive with machinery didn’t matter to them – they wouldn’t have aborted a detected Down Syndrome baby, or missing a limb, or any other congenital condition. The single fact that made it acceptable and not a “sin” to them was the life of my aunt, who (had the pregnancy been carried to either “birth” or natural miscarriage) would have had to endure pain, suffering, possible internal organ damage, possibly even the loss of her ability to try again, and as an outside but not “insignificant” risk, perhaps even death. From my perspective, I can’t say that I was (or am today) as severe as they were on it, but I can understand where they were coming from.

I also have to wonder – how much of the ongoing abortion debate is medical, how much is pragmatic, how much religious, and how much the functional argument between those who want and cannot have, want and can have, and don’t want but do have, children? The difference between my aunt and uncle – who had been trying and trying to get pregnant – and someone who is “surprised” pregnant and doesn’t even know who the father is (or knows full well that the father will only be so in a “sperm donor” sense) may be a vast gulf to bridge indeed.