Returning Home

I was gone for a long time on my trip.  It felt good to finally sleep in my own bed, and have a chance to cook my own food.  I didn't realize exactly how long I was away until I got back.  I returned to LA to find that my company had technically sold the department I work for to someone else.  And then once I got back home, my dad informed me that he is now engaged to be married, and is planning to sell his house and move.  My brother also moved to North Carolina while I was away, so there has been a lot of change around here.

On top of that, I got quite sick the last few days of the trip, which didn't make the flight home any more enjoyable.  I am still trying to recover from that, but it is hanging on.  That leads to the ever present question as to where the balance is between relaxing and recovering, and wasting time.  I have gotten a couple hours of productive work in ever day, but relatively little has gotten accomplished, and I am not feeling much better.  So it would appear I haven't found the proper balance yet.  It has been really hard to focus on anything useful for too long, which is the biggest issue.  Even writing this is challenging.  I wonder if this is what it is like for other people all the time.

Among other things on the to-do list, I need to start going through all of the stuff I may want from my dad's house, before he moves.  I have been working on this for the last year or two with no real rush, but that is going to change.  It is always interesting going through things from the distant past, because while I have a pretty good memory, other little details are still triggered by looking through things I use to have and use.  I am going to throw a lot of stuff away that we have probably been keeping for way too long.  But every once in a while those things do come in handy, and I am the type of guy who knows where I keep things, even after years.  Two days ago, I found my old camp staff manuals when sorting through boxes at my Dad's, and placed them in the garbage pile.  I thought more about it, and while I would never need them directly, they might be good reference material to create a new one somewhere else.  So I took them home instead, and this morning someone starting a camp unexpectedly came by the house to meet with me, and asked for them.  But outside those corner cases, most people keep all sorts of stuff that they are never going to need.

I have a fairly small house, which should help that issue, but a huge barn that does not.  Both my dad and my brother are hoping to store things there in the near future, and not small things.  The biggest thing I need to sort through and move, is my Lego collection.  I intend to give it to my children someday, and have already come to recognize that they will almost certainly destroy them.  I broke a few as a very deliberate kid, and they are old and more brittle by now, so they don't stand a chance.  But they are toys, and toys are meant to be played with, and not just sit in a back room assembled into well designed and engineered models as a permanent shrine to my ingenuity as a child.  I thought that the Lego movie was brilliant at addressing that issue, even as a guy who values order and perfection.  So I have to go through and pack them all up, which is a task that will be impossible to stay focused on, so it will take a while.

Marriage Rant

This is the second of two politically charged rants that I have had fragments of floating around in my notes for quite a while.  It was originally going to be focused on gay marriage, but it has been getting broader in scope as I ponder it.

 

The main question is: "What is marriage?"  Spiritually, it is two separate beings becoming one.  Socially, it is the only way to bring someone else into your family, besides adoption.  Legally, it affords a pair or partners legal protections and incentives.  Practically, it provides companionship and support, especially when times get rough.

 

That spiritual bond is hard to quantify, but it in some way ties to sex.  It can't hinge on sex, both because there are those who are incapable of having sex for one reason or another, and because that factor fades with age.  But sex is an important factor in that process.  On the flip side, marriage doesn't last forever, which I still haven't fully come to terms with.  Biblically, it is a covenant that lasts until death.  But there is no marriage in heaven, so the two that became one, become two again.  This simplifies the issues of remarriage the fate of single people, but it still bothers me in some way.

 

There is a big difference between family and friends.  Friends, even very close ones, usually come and go over time.  Family is a more enduring connection.  It can recover from years of lapse, and last through generations.  People will occasionally host distant relatives who they have never met, if they are traveling in the area.  They are total strangers at one level, but that hereditary relationship never goes away.  You can un-friend someone, but you can't un-sibling them.  That is set at birth, and locked in the DNA of every one of our cells.  Outside of adoption, marriage is the only way to graft an outsider into that level.  Marriage takes one from friend to relative (in-law) like no other process.

 

Legally, marriage is a contract, recognized and sanctioned by the government.  It includes incentives to promote marriage, including tax breaks and other legal and financial rights.  The point of incentivizing marriage is to promote strong families and child-raising.  Having children is in the country’s best interest, as is having their citizens paired off, to assist each other in times of trial.  Otherwise it falls to the state by default, if someone can no longer care for themselves, or even just needs support through a rough period of time.

 

I am not an advocate of outlawing homosexual relationships, because I am aware that you can’t legislate morality.  It just doesn’t work.  But I am opposed to the government deliberately incentivizing immoral choices, which is the exact opposite of legislating morality.  That appears to be what is happening in the case of gay marriage.

 

People claim that they should have the right to marry whoever they want.  But it seems pretty clear that they don’t have that right.  The partners must be human, not related to you, and not already married to someone else.  People generally accept those requirements, as well as the implicit requirement that the party in question be willing to marry you.  So heaven forbid we add the requirement that they be the opposite gender.

Anti-Choice Rant

I read a couple of articles this week that I can't get out of my head.  I usually stay out of the debate, because I have no respect for the "other side" of this issue, but I am opposed to abortion, for all sorts of logical and moral reasons that should be overwhelmingly obvious.  I am not opposed to sex education, or even contraceptives, and I am opposed to rape, but none of those are excuses that justify a need for "safe access to abortions."  The vast majority of unplanned pregnancies are the result of irresponsible actions taken by a generation of people who are used to being shielded from the hard consequences of their own decisions.  The idea of "Reproductive Rights" is an invention, and a recent one at that.   No one had ever heard of that a hundred years ago.  Rights have to be based on something, and I see no basis for that one besides wishful thinking.  You don't have a right to choose when to become a parent, but you do have a right to choose when to have sex, and you have to deal with the consequences of that decision.

Currently those reproductive rights are ascribed to women but not men.  The same basic principle given to men would be the end of child support.  Women who get pregnant and choose not to be mothers are labeled pro-choice.  Men who get a woman pregnant and choose not to be fathers are labeled deadbeats.  After reading a good article about that principle, I thought this logic would be a solid argument against abortion, with no reasonable counter.  I was wrong.  The very next article I read, was from someone arguing in favor of this exact scenario, of releasing men from the responsibility of being a father.  5 years ago this article would have been dismissed as political satire, similar to how that proposal from Australia a while back about killing babies as post-birth-abortions was misinterpreted, but it is clear to me that the author is serious.

Their idea is that if a woman gets pregnant, she should be required to notify the alleged father, and he has a window of time to decline paternity, abdicating him from all responsibility for his actions.  Legally he would be considered similar to a sperm donor.  The woman then can use this information, to make an informed "choice" about how to deal with her pregnancy.  If she delivers the baby, if the father has accepted paternity, he is responsible for child support in return for usual paternity visitation privileges and such.  If the father has declined, the proposal is that she would then qualify for state-sponsored child support.

I can't even begin to describe how much I am offended by this entire idea.  First off there is the whole abortion issue.  Then there is the idea of avoiding responsibility for one's actions, especially in legally sanctioned ways.  Then there is the idea of legal encouragement of deliberate single parenting, which is not an ideal environment for raising children.  Then lastly there is the direct financial involvement of the government in the situation, through state sponsored child support.  Who would come up with something like that?

Besides the offensive issues, let's look at the logical outcome of a system operating on this premise.  The government is basically paying people to have kids.  The more children you have, the more state sponsored child support you will get.  There is no requirement to verify that they spend that money on the child.  The children may not even be still alive, you can just borrow some in the rare event that someone from the state comes poking around to see where all those checks are going.  The system would be putting a financial incentive on irresponsible actions.  I think the government should stay out of that entirely, but if it is going to go around trying to "improve" the lives of its citizens, let's incentivize responsible decisions and productive actions instead.  That is the type of activity that needs to be encouraged.

Yes, one really bad choice can "ruin your life."  Deal with it.  That is the way life is by its very nature, regardless of what culture or society you live in.  So I would strongly recommend everyone being real careful not to make any really bad choices.

Rough Housing

I have spent the last week surrounded by young children, lots of them.  That is not a situation that I have too much experience with.  It is interesting to see how much their parents have adapted to the constant chaos and noise, and it is even interesting to see how much I adapted to it in just a week's time.  Explosive crying isn't as jarring to me as it was a week ago, but I can't tune it out by any stretch of the imagination.

We were out on the trampoline yesterday, and after a couple hours of other types of general rough housing, they decided that they wanted to try to tackle or wrestle me to the ground.  There wasn't really a discussion about it, they just started.  Presumably, I wasn't their first "victim" to be waylaid this way.  And five on one, it was almost a fair fight.  Obviously my primary objective is not to injure any of them, but I have no intention of just surrendering either.  So we probably went for close to an hour, in an epic conflict.  Eventually the did get me to my knees once, but that knee landed on the one who was pulling on it, removing them from the battle.  Whenever there was a break in the conflict, where I had broken free, I would ask if they were finished, and they would surge onward.

Eventually they were pleading with me to give up.  As in for me to give up, and let them win.  To which I asked, "What would be the point of that?"  Basically it came down to their pride and wanting to win, on any terms, and maybe wanting to maintain a perfect record of defeating anyone they had invited into the domain of their trampoline.  As a guy who builds rope course elements that many people can't climb, I am not one who is concerned about ensuring that everyone wins, whether they earn it or not.  Things started on their terms, and it wasn't even that imbalanced.  It wasn't like I was C.K.Louis taking on hundreds of toddlers.  There were quite a few times that they nearly had me, and that is probably what kept them at it for so long, because they knew they were so close.

So obviously I am a stubborn guy as well, and not interested in losing, but I don't feel too bad about that.  I am preparing to teach a workshop next week on pushing people farther, and that doesn't happen by rolling over for them.  I think that our culture does far too little pushing, and far too much caving.  We make things way too easy, always catering to the lowest common denominator.  And a little rough housing is probably good for people too, as long as it doesn't get taken too far.

Computer Games

I greatly enjoy playing certain computer games.  I haven't spent much time doing so for the last few years, for a variety of reasons.  It is all about prioritizing one's time, and computer games haven't been making the cut for quite a while.  I usually have more important things to spent my time doing.  It is not that recreation is not important, just that I have preferred relaxing in other ways.  For example I have spent much more time playing physical board games with my family and friends.  But for a number of reasons, those opportunities have been limited recently, which may explain my renewed interest in computer games.  Ironically most of the ones I still like to play are very old.  The newest game I play was released in 2006, and my most frequent one is from back in 1999.

I feel a little conflicted about computer games, because so many people spend far too much time using them, which I consider to be a waste.  But just because certain people abuse certain things in life, doesn't make them inherently bad.  I attribute much of what I learned growing up, and my success in school, to things I learned from computer games.  Civilization taught me lots of world history, and MSFS taught me how to fly, while more education centered games taught me math and spelling.  So computer games have a legitimate role to fill in the world, although I am not sure about angry birds.

I have spent the last few days writing up an idea I have for a new computer game.  It is an idea I came up with 15 years ago, but dismissed at the time due to technological and game play limitations at the time.  My idea was too complicated to create and operate on computers of the time, requiring a massive world to be hosted on a cluster of servers.  This is now commonplace for any massive multiplayer game, none of which I have ever actually played.  My idea was also very complicated, and I figured players might find certain aspects of the game play to be too tedious.  But after an article I read last week about a massive online battle that was months in the making, and then seeing the mechanics of a game my friends at work were playing, I realized that the pieces were finally in place to make my idea a realistic possibility.

Ironically I spent four years in college learning how to develop and pitch creative ideas.  And I have never done that even once, even though that is a significant part of what my primary employer does.  I have always focused instead on engineering solutions to properly execute ideas that have already been "sold" to someone.  I am much more comfortable with my role in that stage of the process, but for some reason feel inspired to break out of the mold for this particular idea.

But I am not sure how I feel about the possibility of success.  Even if I was to successfully sell the idea, and get the game made, I don't want to spend endless amounts of my time developing the final product.  But I wouldn't want someone else to "screw it up" either.  I am quite happy with the current direction of my life in regards to career, and have no interest in changing my primary focus to computer games.  So it will be interesting to see how all of this plays out, if I manage to flesh out a fully polished proposal.  No idea were the drive for this one came from, but I didn't consciously go seek it out, so maybe there is some reason for it.