Both Abel and Spungen express some curiosity about my previous comment that the pot-smokers that I knew in Mormon-dominated Deseret were generally cooler than those I knew in southern Colosse and, for that matter, southwestern Estacado.

I first started smoking on a bet that went horribly wrong, but one of the things that kept me going was the social aspect of it. Many years ago, when such things existed, my family sat in the smoking section in a cruise ship dining room. Every time we did that there seemed to be at least one person or couple that didn’t smoke. Why did they sit at the smoking table? Better conversation. Better enough that they were willing to pollute their lungs for it!

Until I moved to Deseret, smoking was generally a social activity. This was particularly true in college at Southern Tech. To be blunt, smoking automatically weeded out the stick-in-the-muds. Not all non-smokers are stick-in-the-muds, of course. Most aren’t. But the number of members among the uptight population find it prudent and worthwhile to light something on fire and breathe in the fumes purposefully. So, in addition to the fact that we would light something on fire and breathe in the smoke, public smokers have something almost instantly in common with one another: Not likely to be stick-in-the-muds.

The same is true, to an extent, of drinking. Other than those that like the taste, people that drink want to relax. People that don’t want to relax don’t drink. People that are really concerned about getting a little too loose and doing something a little (or a lot) unwieldy don’t drink. So drinkers have in common the desire, to an extent, to cut loose.

Though I’m sure social scientists have a precise term for it, smoking and drinking are what I will call social identifiers.

Pot smoking is also a social identifier. However, due largely to the fact that it is illegal, it identifies a different social group. In addition to those that just like pot but not alcohol, it includes people that find some Higher Purpose in flouting the rules. It includes people that don’t want to do what Daddy tells them to do. It includes not just people that want to cut loose (cause most could do that with alcohol, if they wanted to) but people that have their priorities positioned in such a way that they are willing to risk a criminal record in order to do so. Following society’s rules when it comes to drugs and alcohol is not a particularly difficult task from the outset (different of course once you’re addicted), but they decline to do so.

In the land of Deseret, smoking and drinking have entirely different implications than they do in the rest of the Land of the Free. First and foremost, they signal that you are either not a Mormon or not a very good one. The significance of this cannot be understated. If you are drinking or smoking, particularly in public, you are signalling that you are not a part of the dominant culture. But unlike society’s general rules with drugs and alcohol, being a Mormon is a much more difficult task. For one thing, it requires a particular set of beliefs. You believe in the Bible, more or less, as well as the Mormon addenda thereto. Furthermore, you believe the church is the ultimate arbiter of things that are theologically true. If you’re a southern protestant, you can bounce around until you find a church that reflects your beliefs. Not so easy if you’re LDS.

So while you have to actively do something to become a social outlaw (using the term loosely, of course) in most of the country. In Deseret, you simply only have to not do enough. Stop going to church in the South, people may assume you started going to a different one. You generally don’t get to choose which LDS church you go to (it’s districted off like schools) and it’s quite possible you’ll end up with a Missionary on your doorstep if you stop going to church there (as happened to a couple pot-smoking friends).

I mentioned in the original comment that my coworker Simon thought that there were as many potsmokers out there as drinkers and more pot smokers than cigarette smokers. Why? Because everyone he knew that drank did pot. I had to actively convince him that it was just not like that across the country.

Once you’re outside social normity, it’s a lot easier to stray further from camp. The punk movement is absolutely huge in the Mormon capital at least partially in backlash to what is percieved to be (though isn’t really, anymore, at least in that city) the dominant culture. When you’re already crossed the line, there’s much less holding you back from going further.

The Deseretian pot-smokers are cooler because they’re former Mormons. Being a former Mormon (or a non-Mormon) in itself doesn’t make one cool. It’s certainly not the pot-smoking that makes them cool. It’s that, generally speaking, the socially relaxed people that are drinking and smoking in the south are also smoking pot in Deseret, whereas pot smoking in the south is more generally reserved for the agitated and the completely disaffected. In short, people like Carol Goddard are the unusual rather than the typical.

I wish that when they release DVDs of TV shows they would give the customer the option of deleting the laughtrack. It is more-or-less my quest to find TV shows that I believe my wife will enjoy. We’ve found some crime dramas but so far little else. There are some comedies that I think she might like, but she has a vociferous hatred of the laugh track. She feels as though she is being told to laugh at something… and she doesn’t like to be told what to do.

And I agree that it can be distracting. It’s one thing when a show has a live studio audience. When I watch Frasier, I feel like I am at a play and so it’s the people around me that are laughing. But lately I’ve taken to watching some British comedies, most of which are not filmed before a live studio audience and have the laugh track added later. It’s hard to argue that they’re not doing precisely what Clancy accuses them of doing in cases like that. And I’d roll my eyes, too, were it not for the fact that the canned laughter is being released at something that is genuinely funny to me (if it weren’t funny, I wouldn’t be watching, most likely). It’s also my chief complaint about Sports Night, an excellent dramedy that they inexplicably added a laughtrack for.

A few weeks ago I locked myself out of the apartment. I had to walk to Clancy’s work, get some keys, and walk back. Luckily it’s not that far of a walk, but it still caused me to miss my company’s Christmas Party. I decided at that point that I needed to get a set of spare keys. One set of spare keys still sits in a police evidence locker in Deseret (long story) and another disappeared during the move down to Estacado.

In Deseret, we lived in a sleepy suburban-style neighborhood and there was little to fear. And for the most part Zarahemla was the kind of town where you could leave your car unlocked, if you wanted to. I left my car unlocked in the big, bad city of Colosse, too, but that was primarily because I was tired of criminals breaking my window (value=$250) in order to get the stuff in my car (value=$100). And I left my apartment unlocked because apartment management never gave me a key to the doors I actually used and I figured that I didn’t want to have to clean broken glass off my rug any more than I did broken glass out of my car. Turned out not to be a concern because no one, save for a mentally disturbed ex-girlfriend, felt the need to sneak into my apartment without an invitation.

The neighborhood that we currently live in Santomas demands that we keep an eye to security. As for my car, that means more-or-less keeping it free of contents that anyone would want to steal. I have burned CDs which I take care to leave open so that any potential criminal knows that they are of no value. The apartment, on the other hand, is another story. At the same time, locking myself out of anything is not a perpetual hazard because of my forgetfulness. I could keep a key to the house in the car, but I’m afraid a thief might be smart enough to figure out that the housekey in the car may go to the house whose car the driveway is parked in. Criminals are deviously clever like that.

So I ended up getting one of those magnetic keyholders that you hide on the car out of view. They’re handy little things. There’s only one problem with it: the blasted thing has a giant gold key insignia on the front of it. For a split-second I thought that it might be helpful in case I forgot where I hid the thing. Then the thought occured to me: why would I want something I am hiding from potential thieves to have an advertisement as to its contents. Obviously, if they were to see it they would figure out what it was. But seriously, the stupid key insignia reflects light. I can understand the desire to advertise on your product, but this does strike me as something where discretion may be the better part of valor.

Luckily, I think I have it in a place where even if they do go below the car with a flashlight they probably won’t find it.

Which means that I probably won’t be able to find it, either.

As soon as the thought occured to me, I was pretty sure that some quiz must exist on the Internet.

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!

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Said Ravenclaw, "We’ll teach those whose intelligence is surest."

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron’s affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine’s editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter
Quiz ever created.

Get Sorted Now!

I got 67 on Ravenclaw, 65 on Slytherin, 61 on Hufflepuff, and 48 on Gryffindor. After putting some thought into it I figured that I would get Ravenclaw or, if not Ravenclaw then Hufflepuff. The high score for Slytherin came as a bit of a surprise since the Sytherin House sounds like just about everything I hated about my upper middle class high school. A separate quiz said Hufflepuff.

Lest anyone be concerned, I am not sad. This post has been percolating in the back of my mind for a few weeks now. A while back some blogger was compiling a list of the saddest songs. I’d link to it, but I have no idea who it was. Anyway, I noticed the the first four started with “B” and decided to only include singers and songwriters whose names start with that latter.

Carrying Cathy, Ben Folds

By far the most emotional song off his solo debut, it deals with living with someone that has deep depression. There is a combination of lament and philosophy that is really touching. On one hand, he is left with the guilt of his own humanity. He worked while she sat in the corner and cried. He had managed to accustom himself to her depression. He did what he could, but it wasn’t enough. As the refrain said, someone had always been carrying Cathy. It’s not something any person can do forever. The ending is vague as to Cathy’s fate. She either disappeared or died. Either way, she haunts him periodically.

It’s really difficult to have a piece of work on such a weighty subject without resorting to melodrama. If he’d stuck to the down notes, about how awful it all was, the song wouldn’t work nearly as well. The sadness is mixed with some confusion and an earnest attempt to deal with it rather than slump into a depression of his own. The understated tone makes it even more sad than if it contained thunderous weeping.

I’ve dated a number of people with varying degrees of depression, though none as dire as Cathy’s. I did have to talk an ex-girlfriend down from the proverbial ledge, though I don’t think that she would have done it (she disagrees), but that was some time after our breakup. So no single person comes to mind when I hear the song, though it’s familiar enough to resonate. Mostly, I come away saddened for Ben’s character but grateful I was never put in that situation, however close I might have come.

Evaporated, Ben Folds Five

The closing track to their breakthrough Whatever and Ever CD, this outdoes the hit single Brick (also a sad song) from the same album. It deals with the utter emptiness that comes after one has given all of oneself in a relationship that has just gone under. As much as the narrator is hurt, he is as much angry at himself for throwing so much into the relationship as he is upset that he ended. But his anger is subdued, one suspects mostly due to a lack of energy. He gave it his all and it evaporated.

I was in the exact situation of this song when I first heard it. It’s hard not to think back to that moment in my life whenever I hear the song. Sometimes you really do give so much of yourself that when it’s over you wonder what parts of you that remain. What do you have that you didn’t give them? Until you are inevitably rebuilt, the answer is depressing.

Angry All The Time, Bruce Robison (also performed by Tim McGraw)

If there’s one good thing about country music, it is its tendency to touch on human subjects overlooked by youth-oriented romantic songs aimed at younger consumers. Angry All The Time is a song that young people will often have no use for. In the song, Bruce’s character is leaving his wife and the mother of his four children. His wife has sunk into a haze of bitterness and anger (hence the title) and it’s become a destructive force in everyone’s life. So he takes the kids and leaves.

One of the overlooked things about divorce is that it usually leaves the divorcees no happier than they were when they were together. I’m too lazy to look up the studies done on the subject, but they’re out there. Often the problems attributed to a marriage aren’t really the marriage at all. Bruce’s song actually admits this when the narrator says that after twenty years he never made it back to the person that he was before things went wrong, or before he left.

I’ve got no children and I am not divorced. However, at the few points in our relationship and marriage that Clancy and I have not been doing so well together, this is the song that tended to haunt me. It’s a sort of worst case scenario for the marriage that I don’t want to have. Clancy is underrested and under a lot of stress on a regular basis and it gets to her from time to time. And from time to time I get tired of coming home from work and having to help her through it. A while back I played the song for her and we actually talked about it, deciding that if we ever got to the point where she was becoming too embittered or too frequently upset, and I was becoming too worn out and downspirited myself, we would put the marriage (and/or family) first and pick up and move so that she could start a practice elsewhere if we have to.

Match Made In Heaven, Bruce Robison

This song is about a coupling in a smoky singles bar. “He’s a little cocky and she’s a little stocky but all is forgiven in the night time, somehow.” It’s not love and it’s really not even lust. It’s two people with an emptiness in their lives finding temporary relief in one another. Naturally, it doesn’t work. She looks back on her childhood and the future she had before her vague fall from grace that turned her in to something she doesn’t entirely recognize anymore. “I was an angel when I was a child… somehow I made god angry with me… Lord have mercy on the angel who fell.” The guy is too drunk to remember her name and slips away into the night while she pretends to sleep. We don’t learn very much about him, either, but I get the sense that he is every bit as lonely as she is.

I’ve never had a one-night stand and haven’t much in the way of personal experience with the subject matter of this song, which is why it’s a bit surprising how much I like it.

2002, Bob Schneider

This one is almost funny, but the more I think about it the more sad it is. Bob is recounting his year following the breakup with what seemed like a pretty steady girl. Every turn he takes seems to be for the worst (“Thought I’d start a brand new band, thought I might call it Lonelyland, things got a little out of hand, ended up hooked on heroin”). He ends up bouncing around from one place to another from one unfortunate situation to another. The sound of the song is a mixture between hopeful and sullen. There is a feigned familiarity, like he’s talking to an old friend in a bar, but then we come back to the fact that it’s something of a letter to an ex-girlfriend that has cut off all ties (“I heard you got married and you moved away, called your folks but where they would not say, said it was probably better that way, so I just let it be”).

The Wrong Man Was Convicted, Barenaked Ladies

By “convicted”, BNL means “had conviction.” The narrator lost the girl because he wasn’t sure at the exact time that he needed to be. She ended up with a guy a little more assured of what he wanted. He changed his mind and decided that she was what he wanted, but her only response was that he needed to change it back. He’s left with visions of her sleeping with him.

This story rings all too familiar with a couple points in my life. My unfortunate motto was something like “A moment of hesitation, a lifetime of regret…” These events lead me to take the bull by the horns with Clancy when I met her. I did not want to lose something that I immediately knew was special due to my own reticence. Even a little bit of caution would have resulted in us never coming to be.

Some guy named Thomas says the following about people with an INTJ typology:

… if you encounter an INTJ (Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging), there is a 37% probability that his IQ places him in the top 2 percent of the population. The probability is 20% for an INTP, 15% for an INFJ, and 8% for an INFP. These four types account for 66% of the high-IQ population but only 6% of the total population.

Which leaves this INTJ to wonder whether he is a monumental underachiever or if rather just unusually stupid.

It’s been a bad week for convenience store workers. The state legislature passed a law last year that took effect, raising cigarette prices a full dollar. So naturally all week the clerks have been hearing complaints about cigarettes now nearing $5 a pack. I have yet to actually be at a convenience store without hearing someone complain about it.

The funniest complaints are from those that are going to protest the new tax by quitting cigarette smoking. It’s firstly funny because that’s ostensibly part of the point. Cigarettes are fair game because it’s a “sin” tax and the government wants to put a disincentive on sinning. It’s secondly funny because it seems that any state that passes a cigarette tax starts to see revenues fall short and then proceed to complain about it in budget sessions, thus validating the protest.

The most creative complaint I heard was from a young guy that looked like a U of E college student. His complaint was not so much with the dollar tax so much as it was with the sales tax added on top of that. He didn’t understand why he was paying tax on the tax. Sales taxes, he explained, were originally put in to place as luxury taxes, which is why groceries are often excluded. Well, there’s nothing luxurious about taxes except insofar as paying them keeps you out of prison. So why was he having to pay a tax on the tax?

I thought it was actually something of a convincing argument, but the civics lesson was lost on the obviously annoyed clerk.

On the subject of cigarettes and convenience stores, the other day I saw a big sign that said that there was a limit on Philip Morris USA cigarettes of ten cartons per day. Ten. Cartons. What possible use is a 10 carton limit? That’s 2,000 cigarettes. That’s 83 cigarettes an hour, which if a cigarette takes about four minutes to smoke means that they are smoking five and a half cigarettes a time, all 24 hours of the day.

So I assume that they’re worried about reselling, but I can’t even make sense of that. Why would either the convenience store of PMUSA care about that? All that should matter, theoretically, is that the cartons sell. It shouldn’t really matter who to. I asked the clerk about it and she said that it was imposed by PMUSA. Why would Philip Morris care but not Winston-Salem or Leggett? If it was a matter of people stockpiling in one state (with lower cig taxes) and then taking them to another (with higher), that would be a matter for the law to decide. I thought it might be connected to the tax increase, but the signs are still up even though it is still in effect.

How often do they really have to worry about someone wanting to buy more than ten cartons? Does it really warrant a sign that they could otherwise be using for advertising? Is it part of a tobacco settlement that I am unaware of? I’d never seen the signs up until recently and most of those were settled a long time ago. Then again, it seems like it was well after the settlements that the tobacco companies (PMUSA in particular) started running ads just to offer people information on how to stop using their product.

But in any event, if a person is really sincere about buying a lot of cigarettes, can’t they just go to the next store and buy ten more?

The last thing is that I’ve noticed that many of the same people that hate, hate, hate the tobacco companies believe that pot should be legal. Both are perfectly defensible positions and I don’t see anything inconsistent about holding both opinions. What I find ironic, though, is that if pot ever were legalized, who is it that the would-be legalizers think would start manufacturing pot? Who has little to lose PR wise by manufacturing a newly legal drug? Who needs to diversify to compensate for their customers dwindling opportunities to use their product.

My only question is if anyone except the tobacco companies would start manufacturing pot on any significant sale. I bet that they’d drive a whole lot of homegrowing heroes out of business.

Though I favor legalization, it’s hard not to appreciate the unassailable logic of Udolpho:

I used to be in favor of legalizing marijuana, but the persistent stupidity of marijuana zealots has beaten that position out of me, and now I am against legalization just to spite them. Experience shows that even occasional marijuana smokers are not terribly bright, and it is my belief that stupid people need to suffer. Taking away their pharmaceutical pacifiers is a good start.

Most curiously, most pot smokers that I knew had been pretty worthless until I got to Deseret, where they were much more interesting. Not sure if I’ve mentioned this, but my coworker Simon was convinced that there were as many pot-smokers as drinkers. Why? Because once you’re breaking the Mormon rules, you may as well go for the gold.

To be filed under “some things don’t change”, there was an interesting conversation over at Bobvis about how to repel loser guys. The conversation turned to guys that are attracted to the vulnerable:

Even if the general pool of men is only 10 percent these guys, a woman will find herself surrounded by them in certain circumstances(sort of a buzzard effect) that have nothing to do with how she acts or the sort of men she prefers. Being dumped in a bad way by some other guy can bring them on, or any other situation in which the woman may be considered damaged goods.

As long as angry men remain a social and professional liability, women will continue to be indirect about rejection. The more vulnerable in a situation we think we’re in, the less direct we’ll be.

My mother was a young divorcee in California in the seventies. Divorce wasn’t as normalized then as it is now, so it represented a hurdle when it came to finding another partner. A man (or woman, though women might have been more forgiving in this regard) was much more likely to decline to consider marrying someone that had been married before. Among other things, it confirmed that she wasn’t a virgin.

Of course, living in southern California, this was less a problem than it might have been if she were still living in Carolina. What she did run across quite frequently, though, were the buzzards that Spungen refers to. A whole lot of guys thought that she might be awfully lonely since divorcees were supposed to be wilted flowers, damaged goods, and desperate. Some even used the “you must miss sex a whole lot (you poor thing)” to try to get her in to bed.

My mother has her faults, but a wilting flower has never, ever been among them.

As far as Will’s post earlier, one of the oddest and frankly frightening things that can happen to a person has recently happened to me; I’ve begun to feel truly abandoned by my own church.

This isn’t necessarily a new feeling; back in college, a similar state of distancing began occurring, beginning mostly with a falling-out with a former girlfriend who was in “vengeful bitch” mode (despite the fact that she dumped me after cheating on me) and who did her level best to use the rather small on-campus church community as a means to attack me, to get others to ostracize me, and eventually causing me to stop going to weekly services largely because I didn’t know who to trust and didn’t really feel like risking any run-ins.

However, that was a social aspect, a result of “even in the house of God, you find those who are not holy.” In the past year or so, my own church’s positions on any number of things have begun to make me question whether either I, or the church, have lost sight of the bible and of certain principles. Probably it’s somewhere in between, but a few things come to mind:

1) My church, unlike pretty much every one else, completely disallows the option for priests to marry and have families. With a recent changeover in church leadership, many people have hoped this would change, but the new church leadership quickly put the kibosh on that, meaning it’s likely at least 2 decades before another possible revisit. This is sad because the church is currently facing a relative lack of priests, some priests serving 4 or 5 churches and driving between them each week to be sure that weekly services happen, and one of the major reasons that people don’t enter the priesthood is that they don’t feel up to being celibate their entire lives.

2) A number of sex scandals involving said unmarried priests were revealed to have been repeatedly covered up. I can’t say anything but that this makes me worried; while nothing ever happened to me, and the priests I knew were all good and holy men, the worry that they might have done something to someone else and simply never been caught? Especially with organizational policy that moved priests away from their congregations every 5 years even if they were well liked and doing a wonderful job? Scary.

3) A major problem and controversy locally is illegal immigration. The church’s position is that immigration policy needs fixing, that it is too restrictive. This I cannot entirely disagree with. The church has outreach programs for the poor, which (for obvious reasons) attract illegal immigrants. These things I have no problem with. However, the church’s newspaper has recently been trumpeting, loudly, how the church is now organizing bus trips for the sole purpose of bringing illegal immigrants into the country, setting them up, and openly defying immigration law, and multiple churches have been giving “sanctuary” to people who’ve been ordered out of the country after violating multiple laws… and this portion of the stance I simply cannot agree with.

4) The church, too, has been relatively week on defending its own values and standing up for what’s right. In the urge to be seen as the “peaceful” church, concessions have been made to certain other (highly expansionist and not at all kind to women) religions that should not have been made. Incidents in which members of my church were killed by these other religions, simply for not converting to the violent one, have been glossed over in the name of “interfaith solidarity.” While yes, my church has a “turn the other cheek” doctrine, to ignore those who are deliberately trying to kill oneself on that scale is suicidal, and to not confront the violent doctrines of this other church is not (in my view) a good policy.

Now, is my particular church in danger of fracture? Highly unlikely. Most of its fracturing was done a few centuries ago, and it’s the fractured-off portions that seem to keep fracturing into branches, or synods, or whatever else they call themselves. However, the trouble for me is this: I grew up in this church. The basic tenets of the church, I still believe in. I can’t see myself attending any other churches, really, though I have done so on special occasions more for respect of other people (weddings, funerals, and the like) who attended those churches. But at the same time, the things above also signal to me that, at least for the time being, I really can’t attend my own either.

I’m a religious, or at least spiritual, person who doesn’t feel truly welcome in any church.

Does anyone else remember several years back when every Father’s Day was celebrated by various columnists feeling the overwhelming need to point out that there are a lot of dads that ditched their wife, beat their wife and kids, and/or were just generally worthless people? I don’t miss that ritual at all.

It takes a special kind of loser who spends the holiday season on a soapbox for the sole sake of denigrating someone else’s holiday.

The last couple years the target has been Kwanzaa. If you don’t like Kwanzaa, by all means don’t celebrate it. It’s a really simple concept. I personally can’t take it seriously, so I don’t celebrate it. But there are always some people out there that feel that it’s their job to Set The Record Straight and generally be a know-it-all prick.

Are critics of Kwanzaa factually correct? I’ve seen nothing to suggest that they aren’t. Then again, junior high school kids are factually correct when they call the fat kid a “fat-ass”. It doesn’t make them any less a jerk. People who go out of their way to denigrate Kwanzaa don’t do it out of some cosmic devotion to factual accuracy. They do it because it makes them feel superior (Ooooh! Look at me! I’m politically incorrect! I’m a rrrrrebel!!!!!) at best. At worst, it’s a wonderful opportunity to lord it over black people while being able to say that you’re not attacking black people.

The same is true for all of those people that believe that Christmas is the perfect opportunity to point out that it was absconded from the pagans, the Christ was almost certainly not born in December, and so on. Yay for you. You sure are smarter than all those Christian rubes! Haha! You’re right and they’re wrong! You’re wise and they’re dumb. Go you!

Somewhat unrelatedly, it seems that last year the story of the year was the supposed War on Christmas cause stores had the gall to tell their employees for people to wish people a Happy Holiday or whatnot rather than Merry Christmas. All that was missing for it to be accurately be described as war would be dead bodies, killing, armed struggle, territorial dispute, and people’s lives being physically in jeopardy in any way at all.

Luckily, this year the story moved on to something else, which ties somewhat in to the main topic of this post. I’ve seen story after story of schoolteacher, pastor, busdriver, and hall monitor telling younsters that Santa doesn’t exist. I’m curious whether it was a media meme (like the black churches burning in the 90’s and the shark attacks of 2000-01) or whether a disproportionate number of people decided to be idiots this Holiday Season.

So anyway, it’s a little late, but Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Honukkah, Happy Winter Solstice, or whatever else may float your boat!