Saalon Muyo

This pretty much says it all.

I feel like these come out once every couple of months, but another study into the effectiveness of abstinence focused sexual education has hit, and its results are entirely unsurprising.

In true journalistic fashion, the Washington Post article uses the inverted pyramid technique and puts the money statement right at the top.

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

I know it’s not any surprise that I’m skeptical of most abstinence programs, but this article highlights one of the reasons for my jaundiced view.  Regardless of how you view the morality of sex before marriage, these programs just don’t work.  The range of study results runs the tiny gamut between “does nothing to reduce sexual activity” to “does nothing to reduce sexual activity but does reduce practice of safe sex.”  Why there is even a debate in any government anywhere about instituting these programs in our public schools is beyond me.

I think what this study makes clear is that there’s a certain percentage of the teenage population that’s going to have sex regardless of what you teach them.  Pretending like a promise to your pastor and a piece of jewelry are going to mean anything in the face of, say, a suddenly topless girlfriend is silly.  Not everyone has sex before marriage, but study after study shows that abstinence vows have nothing at all to do with it.

I have two close friends who are pastors.  Of the three of us, only one was never promiscuous.  By promiscuous I mean only one of us had sex only with one partner, and that partner is now their spouse.  That would be me, the agnostic who never attended an abstinence program and stopped going to any gathering held  in a church by 9th grade.  My friends, on the other hand, did a fair amount of fooling around through high school and college despite regular youth group attendance.

What does that mean?  Absolutely nothing.  It means that some people have a lot of sex and some people don’t.  There are a thousand reasons for it, but it’s a fact that no amount of education is likely to change.  We’re programmed to have sex.  Our bodies and minds are built to seek it out as often as possible.  Teenagers have it the worst, as a flood of hormones overwhelms what little ability to reason they have.  People talk about teenage sex being some kind of crisis, and the idea is just ludicrous to me.  Biologically, that’s when we’re supposed to start having sex.  Thousand of years of 14 year-olds getting married should be proof of that.

I think that the delayment of marriage into adulthood is a good thing, and I think trying to keep teenagers from getting someone pregnant or catching the clap is as well.  We’re living a lot longer than we did when Romeo and Juliet consummated their teenage  marriage, and because of that we’ve extended adolescence out further and further.  Creating an environment in which our kids can grow up unburdened with the consequences of a stupid hormonal mistake is exactly what we should be doing.

But we have to do something that works.  That’s my biggest problem with abstinence vow programs.  Every study finds that “ineffective” is the best case scenario.  More likely than not, they’re actually dangerous.  They either ignore protection or lie about its effectiveness, so that when their students inevitably end up in bed they’re more likely to get pregnant or sick  because of it.  We need to accept that by pushing marriage into adulthood, we’ve inserted a decade between our sexual maturity and when we’re supposedly allowed to have sex.  Abstinence vow programs ask our kids to hold off biology for years, but refuse to point them towards protection should their resolve fail.  This, I’m sorry to say, is just plain wrong.

If I have children, I’ll do what I can to teach them to restrain themselves, but I’ll also teach them to protect themselves.  You can recover from having sex with the wrong person.  AIDS not so much.  If premarital sex will send you to hell, you still might as well wear a condom.  No reason to catch that train any earlier than necessary.

I am shocked to discover I am not a real writer.  So says some guy I’ve never heard of who has proclaimed himself a more serious writer than me because I participated in NaNoWriMo and he did not.  Ok, he wasn’t talking about me specifically, but he cast a nice wide net in which I am caught.

Technically this podcast is from last month, but since I found it today it gets nominated for an award I made up on the spot.  It’s basically a 6 minute rant in which Jeffrey R. DeRego lays out that NaNoWriMo cannot possibly be good, under any circumstances, for any writer.  Either you’re a “typist” who’s just cranking out words, or your failure to make it to 50k in 30 days will discourage you so badly you’ll give up on writing.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  Like everyone else on the Internet, DeRego has decided that his personal preferences are universal law.  Congrats!

Let me offer you some advice in the spirit of your podcast: STFU.  Your one story writing credit listed on the Writing Show is published on a site that still has the default Wordpress text on its about page and you write horror reviews under the pseudonym “Big McLargeHuge”.  Exactly what moral high ground are you claiming on those credentials?  Who deputized you into the Writing Technique Sheriff’s department?

I’m not one to write posts solely criticize people for where and what they write.  If you publish your Harry Potter slash on your Geocities website, more power to you.  Writing is hard, and however you find the time and energy to do it I respect that.  I may not like the work, and I can’t promise that I don’t say inappropriately mean things to my friends after I’ve read them, but as I rule I don’t go around bashing writing outlets.  In fact, I apologize right now for any slight I gave to the Escape Pod.  All I’m saying is that DeRego’s publisher is hardly Harper Collins and is little justification to consider himself a superior writing professional.

I”ve read a bit of DeRego’s work, but I won’t comment on it.  The quality of his writing is irrelevant.  He could be a fantastic writer, winning Pulitzers and Hugos and Nebulas and he’d still be a giant a-hole for his podcast.  And he’d still be wrong.

As for The Writing Show, a site whose tagline claims it is a place of information and inspiration for writers, good job on staffing up with people who dismiss entire groups of writers as nothing more than “typists.”  I’m officially inspired.

p.s. Writing 1,600 words a day – the goal for NaNo – is hardly that enormous.  I’ve written 1,100 words for this blog alone in the last 4 hours.  Or was I just typing? Damn.

I’m talking about hospitals, not this blog.

This abortion debate went beyond the point of rationality years ago, but the outgoing administration’s mission to impose one religion’s moral stamp on our institutions further damages the reliability of our nation’s medical care.  The Bush administration has put in place a new rule that allows health care professionals to refuse to give certain types of services, including information about those services, based on their religious beliefs.

Under current federal and state law provisions doctors and nurses can opt out of conducting abortions while the new rule now encompasses all health care workers who can now refuse to provide information, including a referral, to patients seeking an abortion.

If you’re thinking that this isn’t such a big deal, because you can just choose to go to a heathen doctor who will perform your grotesque baby killing for you, there’s something you’ve missed.  This doesn’t just cover the doctors you choose to see on a day to day basis.  It covers every health professional you meet, even during emergency room visits.

While imposing the new rule the administration cited a 2007 Connecticut law that requires hospitals to offer emergency contraception to rape victims and hospitals that object to it can use independent providers for the procedure.

Hospitals are not the place for religious debate.  They are institutions which provide a public service, and so long as emergency contraception is legal, allowing the people charged with providing our health options to withhold information because of their personal religious beliefs is both wrong and dangerous.

Look at the description of the Connecticut law.  If a hospital objects to offering an emergency contraceptive service, they can bring in an independent group to do so.  If you have beliefs that prevent you from simply referring a patient to another doctor, you should not be working in a hospital.   There are plenty of private practices and specialty institutions where you could maintain your personal morals without denying people the care options they deserve.  If you choose to stay in the hospital, you need to play the role you’ve accepted: a servant of the public good.

Let me offer one analogy and one thought experiment.

Let’s say your religion has rules against accepting blood transfusions.  Would you be allowed, then, to not provide someone in the emergency with a blood transfusion because it goes against your religious views?  This is not an imaginary position: The Jehovah’s Witnesses are not allowed to take blood transfusions, and there are over a million followers of this faith.  Should a member of this church who becomes a nurse or doctor be permitted to not only deny blood transfusions but also refuse to suggest to a patient that their family member donate in advance of surgery on their behalf?  Should they even be permitted to withhold facts about the possibility of a transfusion saving your life during surgery?

Now, let’s say a police officer is faced with a situation where subduing a subject requires the use of a firearm, and that shooting this perpetrator will likely kill him.  Should there be a law giving the policeman license to not fire that gun solely out of personal belief?  Would we want our public servant, charged to protect us, to allow a religious prohibition against killing to stop him from completing his public duty to serve and protect?  Or do we want our policemen to put aside all but his duty, as we expect our military servicemen to do in times of war?

A person does not always have the luxury to sort through medical professionals to find the one that will not deny them options.  Since this new rule does not even require that those refusing to give care to must give a referral to someone who would, they are empowered to deny the possibility of  legal medical coverage to patients who may not share their beliefs.  A doctor should not be forced to perform an operation he does not believe in, but he should be required to call in a replacement who will.

This Christmas message has been brought to you by the Archangel Wing Zero!

You, my faithful readers, get a present from me today.  The present? Links you could have – and likely already did – find on your own!

I’m bloody awesome, aren’ t I?

10 Minute Twilight – Come on, Twilight fans, you know it’s kinda true.

A three part interview with Neil Gaiman.

Someone got me this for Christmas, right?

The December Baseline Scenario -Because I’d like to ruin Christmas by drawing attention to the global economic crisis, ‘k?

A Friggin’ Dinosaur Comic – To cheer you up from that last link.

A shot expressing exactly why the inner 10 year old boy in me loves Gundam so much.

What exactly is wrong in the brains of the studio marketing teams who produce most trailers?  How many “In a world…” jokes need to be made before they at least come up with a new formula to run into the ground?  I mean, when even the parody is getting old, it’s time for a change up.

A couple of years ago when Paprika came out, the first trailer to hit the net was a little unpolished, but eye-catching.  It had great music – which turned out ot be from the film’s awesome soundtrack – and a whole lot of really cool and trippy imagery.  I watched it about a dozen times until I got the chance to see the film in theaters.

A few weeks ago, I got something out of Netflix and a trailer for Paprika was in front of it.  I figured I’d watch the trailer again; I liked the film and the music and I could spend the minute and a half reliving some Satoshi Kon style weirdness.  Instead of the cool first trailer, I got this Movie Guy Narration style piece of junk.

I like the movie and after watching the trailer even I don’t really want to see it.  It’s not even a good description of the movie. It’s a really awful back of a novel plot blurb. And the music sucks.

Who cut this and why?  Who is this trailer appealing to, exactly?  Mass market film zombies?  They aren’t watching Satoshi Kon anime anyway, I can assure you.   And even if they were, I seriously doubt there’s a single person watching a trailer saying “Yeah, but I need to know if I’m in a near future where there’s a machine that can control our dreams! I can’t see this film!”

Though if you are out there saying that, please leave a comment.  I’d love to do some psychoanalysis.

I don’t usually get flack on my posts, but when it’s happened, it’s mostly been on one topic.  It’s a religious one, so if this gets you fired up, feel free to exit now.

I’ve argued a couple of times now on what I consider to be the biggest hypocrisy in the practice of mainstream Christian faith: its exclusion of people from the community based on a couple of hot button social topics while it turns a blind eye to equally biblical but less politicized religious issues.  I think these posts may have been written in the days before my last host ran a magnet over my servers, but I’ve talked about both homosexuality and abortion in this context and gotten flamed by close friends both times.

My point is simple: I don’t buy the “X cannot be tolerated because it’s in the Bible” argument because there are plenty of behaviors denounced in the Bible that are most definitely tolerated because they’re harder to single out or are written off as a part of human nature.  I’ve made a variation on this in discussions with friends about Christianity’s single-minded obsession with abstinence at the expense of a number of other, in my opinion more important, ethical issues.

I’m going to make the point again, if nothing else than to give an example.  If it gets me flamed, so be it.

Rick Warren runs the Saddleback Church, which may sound familiar to you if you followed the presidential election this year.  President-Elect Obama and Senator McCain went there for a town hall symposium on moral issues and to kiss the ring of this very influential pastor.   He also wrote a book I have not read but know for its popularity amongst my religious friends: The Purpose Driven Life.

Andrew Sullivan in the above link gives a snippet of an interview with Warren where President Bush’s authorization of torture is discussed:

BELIEFNET- Did you ever talk to President Bush to try to convince him to change his policy?

WARREN – No. No.

BELIEFNET- Why not?

WARREN — Never got the chance. I just didn’t.

Sullivan notes that Warren never discussed the subject of torture with President Bush, but did talk about abortion with President-Elect Obama.  I’ll go a step further.  In the Saddleback forum, Warren asked a question about abortion (and even asked a follow-up about it to Obama), but did not ask about torture.  Feel free to search for torture in the transcript.  It’s mentioned by the candidates, but not by Warren.

When I went to an Obama rally in Pittsburgh in October, a handful of anti-abortion protesters came with their grotesque pictures and signs to wag their moral fingers in our direction.  Where were the religious protesters with pictures of Abu Ghraib torture during this election season? Where have they been for the past 4 years?  Why is abortion a critical moral issue, backed by the Bible and thus so reprehensible that millions of dollars should be spent to criminalize it when torture is not?  Would someone like to make a Gospel centered argument in favor of torture for me?

If you believe that abortion is wrong and wish not to condone it yourself, or in your household, or amongst members of your voluntary church community, that is your right.  But to make a national political issue out of it, insinuating the moral degradation of all who oppose you while you ignore a myriad of other moral and ethical issues is absurd.  People like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly have been happy to engage in ascribing some kind of phony War on Christmas to “secularists” while paying little to no heed for the humiliation, degradation and death of human beings who they have deemed their enemies.

My point has never been that you have no right to take a moral stand on issues.  It is the pathologically focused anger at a handful of easily politicized issues coupled with complete ignorance of far more insidious ethical problems that I can’t understand.

I understand that it’s harder to address school violence than it is to tell people not to have sex before marriage, but that doesn’t make the problem of violence in our schools any less critical.  But we can rationalize the need for our kids to punch someone in the face more easily than to engage in sexy time with someone.  This despite the fact that damage does not necessarily accompany premarital sex as it does any kind of violence.  Name for me a program as well funded and sought after by churches as Silver Ring Thing that addresses the very real and regular pain our kids cause each other in school.  Show me some piece of jewelry our kids are wearing that symbolizes their vow not to degrade and harm their peers. Like maybe a popular ring that says “Jesus said to turn the other cheek” on it.

Because I’m far more concerned about producing a culture of abstinent torturers than I am of promiscuous pacifists.

Sometime last year, as my friend Denys was going through his second February Album Writing Month, I decided that I was going to participate in some creative insanity of my own.  Come November, I vowed, I was tossing myself into National Novel Writing Month.

And I didn’t think about it again until October.

I had no ideas ready to write, and the ideas I had were either too complicated for something like NaNoWriMo or not the kind of thing I wanted to sacrifice on the alter of Many Words In A Month.  At least, not on my first go round.  For a couple of weeks, the NaNo vow teetered on the edge of Broken Before It Could Begin.

Then, about halfway through October, I was listening to This American Life on my ride into work.  David Sedaris was talking about being unpopular in high school and about looking up to the popular kids who wanted nothing to do with him.  At the end of the story, he said that the end of Segregation caused the flight of many of his school’s most popular kids to flee to private schools, leaving the few remaining top dogs to live like deposed monarchy in their own school.

The image of that grabbed me.  I had my hook.  NaNo was on.

For those who have never looked into NaNoWriMo, it’s pretty simple.  The goal is to write 50,000 words during the month of November.  You can do any outlining or pre-planning work your heart desires before November, provided none of the words you put down on paper actually go into the novel.  I could write an in-character journal to prepare, but I couldn’t use anything from that journal in the novel itself.  The whole thing breaks down to writing about 1,667 words a day.

That’s 69 words an hour, 1.2 words a minute or .02 words a second for one month straight. The goal is pretty simply, actually.  The trick is that it’s a marathon, not a sprint, even if it looks like a sprint at first glance.  You think, “Whoa, 50k words in 30 days! I need to step on it!”  That’ll kill you in the first week.  You need to find a pace that you can hit, know when to slow down on the days when life is washing over you and how much you can speed up to make up lost time.  You aren’t putting the pedal to the metal, you’re making sure you neither exhaust yourself halfway through nor allow yourself to fall so far behind that there’s no catching up.

As you write, NaNo provides you with all the help it can.  For me, the biggest help was the little word update box at the top of the screen where you could enter your total word count and see it reflected on a bar graph on your profile.  There was also a cool chart that showed your progress through the month, showing a slowly raising series of bars as your word count went up day by day.  That same chart was a real motivator when I got behind; seeing the chart stay flat for half a week had something like the effect of looking at my401k balance.

There’s also the community, both on the forum and in your area.  In the forums, those looking for help can find people willing to offer plot suggestions or throw out writing challenges like “In your next chapter, include a dumptruck running over a Mini Cooper.”  Anything to keep things moving.  Also, every region has Municipal Liaisons who organize write-ins and events for everyone.  They’ve gone through it before and are there to help out.

I didn’t use much beyond the little word update box, because I’m a lone wolf type, out on the empty road with nothing but a laptop and a Moleskine.  But it was nice to know the stuff was there to help, and the one write-in I went to was fun despite being one of two people who showed up.

Because I came up with my idea a whole two weeks before NaNo started, I only had one goal going into the month: Hit 50k.  It was as hard and fast a goal as I’ve set for myself in a while.  I was getting to that number no matter how much I came to hate my novel.

And man did I come to hate it.  I spend a lot of time thinking over stories before breaking out the laptop.  I journal character and plot ideas, pace around my room with music blaring and have cut trailers to the potential movie adaptation in my head.  This goes on for months. Years, sometimes.  I shake out all of the crap.  Smooth out the rough bits.  When I get down to writing, I don’t want to be trying to figure out who my characters are.  If I need to change directions, I want the core of the story so woven into my thoughts that I can rely on my instincts.

I had  nothing close to this for NaNo.  My novel,  Memorial Day, was barely more than a couple of plot ideas and character backgrounds.  I went into the first chapter without an attachment to my main character, and spent the rest of the novel struggling ineffectively to find her voice.  I was never sure what I wanted the novel to feel like, never certain what the pacing should be or how to properly hurt my characters.

Yet, every day, I had a goal to reach.  Every second I needed to be writing .02 words, or catching up on all the .02 words I hadn’t written in the hours before.  I spent hours at my laptop, watching The West Wing out of the corner of my eye as I agonized over whether I had anything interesting to say for the next 1,000 words.  In most stories, if a chapter wasn’t working I’d delete it and restart.  In NaNo, the last thing you want to do is to move backwards, so no matter how bad the last 1,000 words were, you had to get the next 1,000 words out.

Near the middle of the month, I began flirting with insane, silly things to do to my novel to keep it going. I could introduce a trio of alien swordsmen who would…I don’t even know.  Attack the school?  Raise an army of zombies?  Say “There can be only one!” a lot?  I wanted my novel to remain consistent, even when crazy ideas would have made things easier, so I’d search for something just a bit less batty to get through.

That time I got through by writing my first sex scene, in case you’re wondering.

By mid month I had upped my goal to 2,000 words a day, hoping to finish with a few days to spare.  As it always is, the ending of the novel was easier than the beginning, but not by much.  2,000 words a day is a lot if you’re working full time, especially when you’re writing something you no longer understand.  Somehow, I crawled across the finish line on Black Friday, two days before the end of the month.

It was miserable at times, but it was never a waste.  I wrote more in that month than I have in the past 2 years.  Even 50,000 words of garbage is 50,000 words written.  It’s a lesson many aspiring writers never learn.  Written crap is worth more than imagined greatness.  That’s the lesson of NaNoWriMo, and it’s a lesson you can’t learn by talking about it. You just have to go through it.  Feel the difference between looking at a completed manuscript and thinking about this neat idea that you have that you might write one day and you’ll know what I mean.

So Memorial Day is garbage.  No big deal.  I’ll throw it in a shoebox for a couple months and look at it again.  If it’s worth editing, I’ll take it on.  If not, I still wrote more in a month than I have in 2 years.

There’s a second catch.  Once you’re done with the marathon, you can’t kick back and relax.  It’s no good learning that you can write a lot and write it consistently if you don’t keep doing it.  It’s like pre-season training camp.  It’s hard – harder, in some ways, than playing the actual games – but you come out in better shape than you’ve been in months.  Being in shape doesn’t do you good unless you keep running.

Learn you can run and keep running. That’s what I got out of NaNoWriMo.  I needed the reminder.  If you need it, too, join up with me next year.  I think I’ll be back.

Now everyone wave at Memorial Day while I bury the damn thing alive.

Ok, so I’ve never really liked the FTW=For The Win abbreviation, but I’m meme-sensitive and it’s taken hold.

We’ll try this another way.

How’s that?  No?  Ok, what about this:

In case the message isn’t getting through, I am an official NaNoWriMo winner.  Winner in the “Everyone is a winner provided the set ‘everyone’ includes only people who wrote 50,000 words in the month of November” sense of the word. It’s a semi-prestigious club, populated by approximately 18% of the NaNo community. I’m in the top fifth, baby!

I’m going to leave this nice, celebretory post up for a day before I get into the ugly of what writing 50,000 words in a month is really like, and the even bigger ugly of what the result of that was.

For today, though, let it be known far and wide! Eric Sipple earned a JPEG of a viking ship by writing 50,000 words in the month of November!

NaNoWriMo is done. I’ll get to that later.

In the mantime, I just want to point out how completely stressed out I am with the economy collapsing.  I’m trying to talk myself down, which has become a daily event.  Erin and I don’t have all that many responsibilities, and so far nothing adverse has struck.  But right now it’s hard to see a bottom to it, and I can’t say I had any Steinbeck-fueled romantic desire to live through a Depression, if there are people with that sort of thing.  I’d say not, but let’s face it, someone out there is secretly thinking “Now I can write the great 21st century American novel!”

Or not.  That was just a little fantasy I cooked up to distract myself from the stress.

Anyway, I hope life is treating all of you well, right now. Here’s hoping we get through this minimal doom.