So, good stuff.  Here's what we've got so far:

• 1a. We recognize that self-esteem is really freaking important and that everyone needs it;
• 1b. We recognize that we have emotional needs, and that it's our responsibility to get them met;
• 2a. We've identified some things that we think are cool and are doing [or at least planning to do] them;
• 2b. We've identified some of our emotional needs and are prepared to treat them like K-Rails.

So, what's left?

In my mind, two things — 3a and 3b.  They're sort of the Advanced Course, if you will.

The first two things (1a & 1b) are purely about thinking; the second two (2a & 2b) require some action; and these last two are more abstract and require changes to our underlying mental-emotional operating systems.  That means ongoing contemplation, and working on fully admitting the truths we find and integrating that knowledge into thought and action.

But you all are smart, so you'll be fine with that.  ;)

What you might not be fine with is how big these two concepts are.  For that I apologize, but I don't know any other ways to put them (yet).  As has become normal for me, I find it easiest to borrow metaphors and phrasings from Eastern philosophy, but these ideas can be found in many places — wherever other people enlightened enough to know them, and smart enough to articulate them, have gone before us.  ::bows to those ppl::

The first one you may have heard me talk about once or twice before…

V.  Recognize the Primacy of Attention in Defining Your World.

Attention is everything.  I can't overstate that, and neither can anybody else, because it's quite possibly THE most fundamental truth of the self-aware human experience.  But what does it mean?

It means, in short, that your focus determines your reality.  A man who stares intently at the dirt has dirt-life; a woman who stares intently at the sky has a sky-life.  For most people, the focus of their attention is pulled around by whatever pokes them the most on a subconscious psychological level…two people may have very different experiences of the same situation, but we largely assume that this is just because of "who they are", not because they had any choice in it…and this is wrong.  Just flat wrong.  You can choose where your attention is, and by exercising this ability you can have a HUGE influence on the content and context of your life.

"Of course I can choose where my attention is," you're probably thinking; you do it all the time — you put it on this book, or that site, or that television; but when it comes to this emotion or that one, this pain or that pleasure, you probably often feel helpless to control it.  You're not, though; it's just about getting better at it and learning how.  There is one key trick to it, too, and that's recognizing when you can affect your attention…you can only change where it is right now.  You have NO control over where it was, or where it will be — and that may sound silly but it's desperately important, especially since when you look at where your attention is right now, you very often find that it's not here at all, but rather focused on the past or the future, where it can't have any effect whatsoever.  

Having your attention in the past or the future is akin to having left your most powerful weapon in your other pants.

Your attention, and therefore what kind of life you have, is determined by exactly one moment in time — the only one your attention can be moved in!  THIS ONE.  

So point 3a, Attention, leads very neatly into point 3b; and this makes sense, since they're incredibly closely related, and mastery of one cannot happen without master of the other.  3b, of course, being:

VI.  Recognize the Supremacy of the Present Moment over the Past and Future.

Life is made of moments:  A blurry bridge of them leading backwards, and a foggy bridge leading some distance forwards, and one crystal-sharp one that you're standing on.  But if you haven't noticed, all those moments that you're not standing in exist only in one or more squishy, fallible human brains — the farther away they are, the less certain; but even ten minutes away they're nothing a smart person would bet his life savings on.  Past and Future are made of pure mind-stuff, and it's neat that our minds have the ability to stretch a little ways in both temporal directions, but that stretching produces images — movies, recordings, fictions — not real things.  

(Please go read that last paragraph again.  I just realized that to give it the proper emphasis, I would have to type it all twice.  ;)

THIS moment, though, this one has the force of all Reality behind it.  All of the Past — the stuff we can remember and the stuff we can't, every molecule of it — is real and solid and manifest right now and nowhere else; and similarly, the entirety of what the Future can and will be is alive, now, here.  

Don't fuck with the Now:  Next to it, the Past and Future have as much hope as sock-puppets in a blitzkrieg.  ALL their power comes from their ability to make you focus on them instead of Now, to do things out of fear, regret, etc. instead of in response to what actually is.

To say that more clearly (as if anything could be clearer than socks and bombings, right?), Attention is the most powerful defining force in any human life, and attention can only be controlled in the present moment.  

You have control, in other words, of the most powerful thing in your life, right now.  But if you don't wield it right now, you can't wield it at all.  

And like all wonderfully simple truths, this one is a bitch to get the hang of.  It doesn't really work in your daily life (though it will give you awesome flashes of wonderfulness as soon as you start to really contemplate it) until it becomes one of the most basic, fundamental parts of your being — not your thinking; farther down than that.  The canvas upon which your thinking happens.  So how do you get it there?

(Get ready to want to smack me.  This next thing is part of the reason Zen teachers often went about armed, I think… ;)

It takes long, irritating work — in other words, that thing we call PRACTICE.  The practice is generally (but not always) difficult and unrewarding, and often daunting, especially as you just start to get the hang of it.

PRACTICE turning your attention to the best possible place for any given moment (which means practicing paying attention TO any given moment, which is harder than you think it'll be if you've never consistently tried it).  Get used to the feeling of full attention versus splintered attention (both can be useful if done on purpose).  Practice waking yourself up during any and every activity, and asking yourself where your attention is, and if that's where you think it should be.  Especially practice putting your attention fully on other people when you interact with them, and note the results.  When you're bored, practice moving your attention from place to place, inside and outside your body, onto different objects and scenery, and note the difference it makes to your experience of being alive.  

PRACTICE THIS, SERIOUSLY.  It is, in my ever-so-humble opinion, the single most important skill anyone can ever have.

And every time life gets difficult on you, turn your thoughts to attention as soon as you can:  See where it is, and what it's doing, and if possible, move it to somewhere better (if nothing good presents itself, move your attention to your breathing, which is always a good standby).  Get used to thinking of attention as the key ingredient in every situation, and give it the, well, attention it deserves.  And get used to taking attention away from the useless mental television of past and future, where it can't do you any good, and bringing it to the single slice of the present moment, where it's a vorpal sword.

And that's why, at the end of the day, Attention and the Present are key ingredients in real, lasting self-esteem:  

Being Advanced Shit, this also comes with a caveat:  You may have noticed, if you're cagey, that not all the other human beings work like this.  In fact a pretty darn small sliverchunk of them do; and as you get the hang of the primacy of Attention and it begins to affect how you see and interact with the world, you do, in fact, run the risk of 98+% of humanity possibly thinking you're a weirdo.

I can't make any apologies for this, nor offer fixes for it, because quite simply I think this is much better than the way most people go about their lives, and personally I will always take "better" over "widely-accepted", no question.  I can, however, say that when it comes to "people in general", I don't worry about convincing them that this is the way to do things — we all have to make our own choices, and it's not my place to say that this way is the best for everybody.  But it's sure the best that I've found, and I think those who live by it are empirical evidence for its awesomeness.

To finish up, here's why this abstract-seeming ubermeta stuff is so important to self-esteem, particularly:  The only cure for lies is truth.  The only answer to darkness is light.  For people whose demons are relatively benign or superficial, there may be other answers that work; but when your hatred is yourself and your demons are all about making you your own worst enemy, there IS no answer — no real, lasting, complete answer — short of the Absolute.  You need a reset.  You need to go all the way back to scratch and Find Yourself in the purest sense…and Attention and the Present Moment are the stones on that path, for certain.  They may not be obvious or easy to get ahold of, but what that's fundamental is, right?

Thank you again, Internet, for reading along as I get this stuff down on paper.  It's been really good for me to make it somewhat logical and de-entropied, and I'll probably clean it up even more later for easier consumption, which means EXTRA thank you to those who read it now!

~END~

If you find somebody who thinks you're The Specialest Favorite, how far will you change to suit their lifestyle so that you can live together Foreverish?  And how long do you figure that is?  What if they don't agree?

What if you change?  What if they change?  How much priority can you, or are you willing to, give to staying in the same place as someone else Foreverish?

All of that depends on who you are, of course, which means that it depends on really knowing who you are — without that, how can you answer any of those questions?

Knowing who you are depends on having your EYES OPEN about who you are.  And that means having self-esteem, because convincing yourself that you're awful is just as dishonest as convincing yourself that you're Hercules (and has none of the potential benefits of the latter, either).

If you got past thirty years old, and made a bunch of huge life-decisions, all while having really awful self-esteem, then it's safe to predict that you will probably find yourself holding a basket filled with some pretty amazing mistakes.  I'm writing this to confess that that's precisely what I did, and that in the last couple months a good chunk of them came due — as mistakes do — and knocked down quite a lot of the life I'd been building for the last seven years.

So things have been unstable and uncertain and emotionally really difficult lately.  My near-term future holds more of that plus loneliness, financial difficulty, and an intimidating daily workload that, to be frank, I can't at the moment see how I'm going to pull off.  I'm sure it'll work out somehow — things do, after all, and panicking never helps — but I feel like I have to be honest with the people who read my blog and send me emails (which I haven't been good about answering lately *at all*, sorry) looking for advice that I'm not exactly lifestyle guru material lately.  I am, in fact, mid-lesson on some really useful shit that I'm sure will turn into some great advice I can give to others once I've figured it through…but the figuring-through is a long and tricky process, and while I'm in the middle of it I'm hardly a good example to anyone.

My idea of a "sleep schedule" lately is "try to stay awake until I'm tired enough that I can't lay in bed with my thoughts whirring unpleasantly, get up when I have to after probably far too little sleep, and snag naps if there's an opportunity when I get so tired during the day that I can't think straight anymore".  I couldn't even tell you when or how much I sleep, and there's no name for the schedule I'm on other than perhaps "yikes".

My idea of a "diet" lately consists of snacks, comfort food, restaurant food, coffee and beer.  I try to make healthy choices in the snacks and restaurant departments, and to drink at least some water every day, but that's about the level of attention I've been able to give it.

I do still get a good amount of exercise, thankfully — I've learned over the last few years that it leads directly to better mental health, and I need all the help I can get, so I've been sticking close to kungfu and swimming whenever time permits, and throwing in situps and simple workouts whenever I can steal them.  I also have no car, so I walk a lot, and I always do so quickly and while paying close attention to my form.  I still have visible stomach-muscles, woot.

BUT, and this is the important thing in my mind, I HAVE largely* fixed my self-esteem problems.  And that's a big deal for me…I'm not coming from "a bit of body-image issues" or something, but rather a background of full-blown self-hatred and self-harm.  The things that fell apart on me lately were things I'd built with "I don't deserve better" in mind, and so, difficult as it is to stand in a smoking field and try to contemplate a suddenly scary future, I'm hopeful because I know this is the right direction.

Path, not goal.  Follow proper principles.  Eyes and hands open.

All hail the fishes swimming up waterfalls!  ;)

*The necessary breakthroughs have been made, but as with all such things, there's a sensitive period afterwards — much like the second two weeks of an adjustment to polyphasic sleep — wherein one must be careful not to slide back into old habits.  That's where I am now.

However.  This bit of it I came to on my own, and a while ago, but man has it been relevant lately so I wanted to write about it a little, if that's ok.  I call it…

EYES AND HANDS OPEN.

This is a way to approach life that, I think, minimizes suffering in all possible ways.  (Yes, that's a big claim.  Deal with it.  ;)

EYES OPEN means to value HONESTY foremost, and especially honesty with yourself, and to make it primary to all other logics.  If you don't have a clear view, any of your judgments could be wrong, and wrong judgments are likely to hurt you, period.  Whenever I'm making any hefty decisions, I make sure to pause and ask myself if I'm seeing as clearly as I could:  Time or effort spent getting a more honest view of things is always worth it

And how do you do that?  Many ways work, but here are some of mine:

• Let the water settle.  Stirred-up water is muddy, and if you're gasping from emotional rollercoasterism, you may very well have trouble seeing.  Sit quietly, watch some telly, go for a walk, do some pushups, or pour a stiff drink:  Whatever helps you settle a bit.
• Say it in words.  If you have a good sounding-board to state your claim to for bullshit-detecting, lucky you; otherwise, write it down and read it back to yourself (this is especially useful if you can combine it with letting the water settle; wait a while and then read it back).  
• List the factors.  Identify clearly what might be coloring your perceptions in this case.  What are some fears or past experiences you know you have that might be affecting you?  What about recent events that caused strong emotional reactions?  You don't have to discount what you're thinking just because it might be affected by something else, but knowing about those interactions can help you spot cognitive errors before they become problems.

HANDS OPEN is a little more complex, though I wouldn’t claim that either of these are actually trickier than the other.  They're both tricky, but also both within the reach of anybody's doing — all you have to be in order to do these is determined.

There are two components to Hands Open:  Accepting What Comes and Letting Go.  Again I will resort to the safety of my bullet-points:

• Be OPEN TO RECEIVE things that come your way:
  • Don’t let fear of the future stop you from undertaking things.
  • Don’t insist to yourself that if you can’t keep what’s coming, it’s not worth taking – accept good things for as long as they last.
  • Don’t let yourself think you don’t deserve it:  You don’t deserve a lot of the bad things you get, too.  Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward:  Things come as they need to, to you and everyone else.
  • Enjoy it, even if it’s small or seems silly:  Sunsets, fresh breezes, unexpected good songs on the radio, soft towels:  They’re all there for a reason, and they can make the difference between a tough day and a great one!
  • Look for things within reach – your life contains as much awesome as you see the potential for!  Grab a bike ride or a walk, enjoy a nifty view, have a beer in the shower…don’t be shy about enjoying the awesome stuff that’s right within arm’s length.

•  Be prepared to LET GO when it's time for things to pass:
  
  • Don’t grasp, grab, cling, struggle, or freak out.  Breathe, remind yourself that things come and go, and that it’s normal for it to hurt but that the hurt will pass.
  • Don’t constantly poke the things or people you have, looking for assurances that they won’t leave you.  They will:  It’s a guarantee.  Even if everything goes perfectly, you will eventually die and have to let go of everything, so just stay used to the idea that letting go is part of having. 
    • Clinging and seeking assurances are also great ways to wear the things you have thin, which sometimes makes them leave you sooner!  Relax and take what they’re offering now, and you’ll keep them as long as possible.
  • Every time you feel the fear of things leaving you welling up, remind yourself that the only thing you can do to mitigate that pain is to appreciate those things as much as possible now. 
    • This, by the way, really works to alleviate the pain and fear!  Knowing that you are doing, and did do, your best to appreciate things and people while you had them is very calming, especially once you get used to doing it.
  • Letting things go may hurt, but it’s the only way to make room for new stuff.

In conclusion, pulling this off is really a feat of relaxation.  (And those aren't easy!) Relax your eyes and brain, and let the truth in – even if it shows you something icky, it’s better than not knowing.  Relax your hands: let them come unclenched, so that some things can fall away and others can land.  

To the extent that I've been successful with this part of the Theory, it's really helped me.  Hopefully it helps someone else too!

I don't believe that men build civilization to impress lazy women who keep saying no to sex, because we don't understand what it's really like to want it. I believe men built most things because women were shut out of political power, job opportunities, and education for most of history, and instead forced into servitude towards men in the home. I believe my theory has a lot of evidence for it, in the form of all of history.

But I really loved this bit at the end, because it gets to a point that's really hard to find your way to if you start from anywhere socially-acceptable: The point where we discuss how, you know, women DO want sex, and some of them in fact want it quite often and/or a lot and/or care quite a bit about the sexual attractiveness (not just the "being a good provider"ness) of their sexual partners. I loved how this was put:

More importantly, men get to feel hornier because they're socially supported in this. The whole of society is geared toward titillating men and discouraging female sexual desire. It's inherent to the Nice Guy® complaint, where men are entitled to feel physical attraction, but a woman who wants more than "nice" is shallow. It's evident in the way men and women dress, with women always mindful to wear stuff that makes them sexually attractive, whereas men have the opposite problem, and have to avoid being too sexualized lest they seem feminine. Naked women are draped over every inch of public space, and the internet is full of visually interesting porn for men, but our society barely can imagine what it would be like to try to attract a female eye. [...] It's easy for men to know right away how to be sexual, whereas women are still largely expected to figure it out for themselves—and even that's a recent invention, because pre-feminism, women were mostly just expected to do what men wanted. To a large extent, that's still true, but we're at least getting a few glimmers of liberty for women, but in many ways, the past few generations of women are real pioneers in trying to figure out what sex means when we're actually allowed to want it, even a little.

But even with the small amount of freedom we have, it's worth noting that a 30-year-old woman who admitted obliquely to having had non-procreative sex in Congress created a month long, nationwide scandal. Until that kind of pressure disappears completely, we can't even begin to measure what the "natural", unadulterated female sexuality would look like, and how it would compare to the celebrated and constantly titillated male sexuality. 

Either way, stop blaming sex for misogyny. If all men wanted was women to fuck them more, the English language wouldn't even have the word "slut" in it. 

via pandagon.net – it's the eye of the panda, it's the thrill of the bite.

(I can usually do that, because I soaked up all the grammar I learned very easily, since it was just attaching rules to things I already knew — though my early education was pretty horrid, so I wasn't exposed to a lot that people who went to better schools were.  …And no, this doesn't mean that every bit of English I write has perfect grammar; sometimes I get "entitled" about knowing how it should be, and change things because I feel like it; plus I like to experiment — especially with punctuation and word-formation — and sometimes I just go fast (ahem, quickly) or am lazy, like most people.  That said, though, this post and my general disposition totally does give anybody the right to nitpick at me for any grammatical errors they may find in anything I've written, and yup, I'm okay with that.)

(Also, excessive parentheses are a stylistic mistake, not a grammatical one.  ::sticks out tongue::)

So here's my conundrum:

• the phrase "a day's worth of stuff" contains a possessive form of the singular noun "day", which therefore has an apostrophe.  The apostrophe goes in front of the "s" rather than behind it because "stuff" is a collective noun, I think, referring to the heap or chunk rather than the many items that compose it, and therefore gets treated as singular.
• the phrase "a day's worth of things" contains a possessive form of the singular noun "day", which has an apostrophe before the "s" even though the object-noun "things" is definitely plural — which is normal, so okay.  But this establishes that when "day" is plural in this phrase, there's an apostrophe-s regardless of whether the object-noun is singular or plural
• both the phrase "many days worth of stuff" and the phrase "many days worth of things" seem (intellectually) like they ought to have apostrophes following the "s" in "days"…but "many days' worth of things" just looks wrong to me (a good sign that it is wrong!).  Furthermore, Googling produces about a 80/20 preference for not using the apostrophe, including in well-respected publications!  SO WHAT IS THE DEAL?

Ah, life mysteries.  If only they were all so tiny as the waveform of an apostrophe….

This poignant article describes [what it's easy to think of as] an edge case in the abortion battle:  A married woman who wants to keep her baby, but who is faced with knowing that if she does, it will be born with horrific disorders that will cause the child immense suffering for as long as it is able to live.  

There's a lot to address here, so I'm going to step through it one thing at a time, and try to be as plain and clear as possible.

First, this is not really an edge case:  There are a million reasons a woman might want or need to terminate a pregnancy.  More than a million – as many as there are individual circumstances.  The anti-choice camp has done a great job picking a term for everyone to use — "abortion" — and defining that term narrowly, so that every time we hear it, we think of irresponsible unmarried women who totally could have their children but are just cold bitches and don't want to.  (And I'll spend some time later arguing why this isn't the clear-cut immorality it sounds like either, but for now we'll skip it.)  Look at how the woman in this article reacts when she realizes that the term "abortion" applies to her case too:

She started with an apology, saying that despite being responsible for both my baby’s care and my own, she couldn’t take us to the final stop. The hospital with which she’s affiliated is Catholic and doesn’t allow abortion. It felt like a physical blow to hear that word, abortion, in the context of our much-wanted child. Abortion is a topic that never seemed relevant to me; it was something we read about in the news or talked about politically; it always remained at a safe distance. Yet now its ugly fist was hammering on my chest.

It's important to remember that the thing we call abortion — a pretty ugly word for it, too — is the same procedure, governed by the same laws, in all these cases:

• a woman who's addicted to drugs and knows she can't birth a healthy baby or care for it

• a woman who has lupus, has severe diabetes, has a family history of horrible life-threatening complications from childbirth, or for any other medical reason knows she can't birth or care for a healthy baby

• a teenager, career woman, mother, or older woman who was raped or coerced into sex

• an intelligent young girl with a bright career ahead of her who fell in love with an intelligent young boy, also with a bright future, both of whom could lose their scholarships and careers for good thanks to a broken condom and a snafu trying to get ahold of the morning-after pill

• a woman like the one in this story who desperately wants her child, but finds out that that child has no chance of living anything like a good life, if it lives at all

• a woman who knows that the process of having her child will kill her, depriving her other children of a mother

• a girl barely into womanhood whose abusive family-member got her pregnant, or who was impregnated while being whored out by her family

…All the same; all "abortions".  

We need to learn to say that word, if we say it at all, very, very carefully.  Personally I prefer "ending/terminating a pregnancy", which feels more neutral (to me), but putting the thought into it matters a lot more than which word(s) you use.  We can't forget that the termination of a pregnancy is a 100% individual decision based on completely unique circumstances every time; in that sense, there are no edge-cases, because every case is an edge case and must be decided on its own merits.

Second thing:  Imagine for a moment that you have to make such a decision, either as the woman or someone close to her.  What's the last thing you'd want to be, if your goal was to make the best possible decision, morally, ethically, and for your family?  

Right.  The last thing you'd want to be is rushed.

My doctor went on to tell us that, just two weeks prior, a new Texas law had come into effect requiring that women wait an extra 24 hours before having the procedure. Moreover, Austin has only one clinic providing second-trimester terminations, and that clinic might have a long wait. “Time is not on your side,” my doctor emphasized gently.  For this reason, she urged us to seek a specialist’s second opinion the moment we left her office. 

That's on the same day, same doctor-visit, that this expectant mother found out that her child wouldn't survive.  How much shit can you take in a day and still make good decisions?

But wait — we don't want women to make good decisions in this case, do we?  We just want them to stay pregnant…because even if there's no possibility of a good life, a healthy child, or any possible outcome from that pregnancy other than pain and suffering…at least it keeps that woman oppressed more than she would have otherwise been.  As a person in power, I have SO much less to fear from a dead woman, a grieving woman, or a woman sinking all her money into palliative care for a disabled vegetable of a child, don't I?  

And YES, that is horrifically fucking ugly, AND IT IS ALSO TRUE.  Prove me wrong and I will thank you.

My counselor said that the law required me to have another ultrasound that day, and that I was legally obligated to hear a doctor describe my baby. I’d then have to wait 24 hours before coming back for the procedure. She said that I could either see the sonogram or listen to the baby’s heartbeat, adding weakly that this choice was mine.

“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t wantto hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.”

An argument that gets made a lot by the anti-choice side is that they're "just trying to prevent suffering".  This is patently false.  A fetus can die, but it does not suffer, because however physically developed you want to claim it is, it does not have emotional memory.  A girl or woman, her partner and parents and friends, however, do; and furthermore the things surrounding childbirth are some of the trickiest, hardest, and most potentially painful events this life holds.  

To fuck those things up in horrible and irrevocably injurious ways for the thinking, feeling adult participants and then claim that you're "preventing suffering" because a clot of tissue (that in a year might have finally developed the ability to burp and shit) doesn't have to die is absolutely.  Bone.  Stupid.  To make that argument shows without a doubt that you have no idea what suffering is, or any ability to think past your own nose enough to actually empathize with anyone.

The doctor and nurse were professional and kind, and it was clear that they understood our sorrow. They too apologized for what they had to do next. For the third time that day, I exposed my stomach to an ultrasound machine, and we saw images of our sick child forming in blurred outlines on the screen.

“I’m so sorry that I have to do this,” the doctor told us, “but if I don’t, I can lose my license.” Before he could even start to describe our baby, I began to sob until I could barely breathe. Somewhere, a nurse cranked up the volume on a radio, allowing the inane pronouncements of a DJ to dull the doctor’s voice. Still, despite the noise, I heard him. His unwelcome words echoed off sterile walls while I, trapped on a bed, my feet in stirrups, twisted away from his voice.

It really bothers me that more medical professionals aren't refusing to cause this suffering, too.  As the one notable loud voice calling for civil disobedience on Scalzi's blog points out, it's far from unusual for doctors and nurses to be used as political weapons…but that doesn't make it any less a clear violation of "do no harm".  And just think what this world could be like if the medical community would lock arms and refuse every time a power structure tried to force them to do harm?

Just think of it.  Wow.

But what good is the view of someone who has never had to make your terrible choice? What good is a law that adds only pain and difficulty to perhaps the most painful and difficult decision a woman can make? Shouldn’t women have a right to protect themselves from strangers’ opinions on their most personal matters?

It's a very obvious good, if you're defining your goods instrumentally, and you have a sexist view of the world:  It keeps more women pregnant and saddled with raising children, and therefore out of politics and science and religion and business and academia and other places they might sneakily be making a difference.  

In fact, attacks on abortion specifically have a very powerful impact, because the women who want to terminate their pregnancies are precisely the ones whose lives will be the most negatively impacted by those pregnancies continuing.  For every ten woman you deny birth control, you may wind up with five who do less with themselves than they would have but still lead good lives; for every ten women you deny an abortion, though, you have a much higher percentage whose lives are impeded, ruined, or just plain ended.

I think the last sentence in this article, by the way, is a perfect example of how these issues get minimized, even by the people they so profoundly impact.  This is about so much more than the right to not be influenced by a stranger's opinion.  This is every bit as visceral as the right to not be dragged away in the night, to not be imprisoned without cause, to not have unapproved medical procedures done to you against your will.  This isn't about being told you can't wear a certain t-shirt in school or at work.  This is about being told that you must remain pregnant, no matter what you think or want, no matter what sound medicine says, and no matter how much suffering doing so is going to bring to you or anybody else.

I feel pretty okay about my ability to protect myself from a stranger's opinion, generally speaking.  I can tell a stranger to fuck off, or choose not to care what they think.  But when the stranger has me under the thumb of an oppressive tyrannical power they hold to not just influence, but outright decide, my reproductive status?  THAT scares me.  

And the mere concept that protection against that might not be a right that I have makes me want to grab people and scream, "First world country?

…REALLY??"

Stars from Space 

[HD video, really worth your time to let load, hit fullscreen, sit back and get ready to grin like a maniac]

[Not that complicated of a point, and barely even a pun...but a bit of a mouthful to keep your righteously-witty face on while telling at a subway stop.]

::adjusts collar nervously::

(By the way, on a similarly no-I-swear-I'm-just-a-nerd-not-an-alien note, the category on this site called "logos addict" refers to the Greek word logos, not to the plural of "logo".  And it did not occur to me that this could be interpreted as anything other than the Greek until someone brought it up to me in person, is the sick thing.  ::sigh::)

In dwelling, be close to the land.

In meditation, go deep in the heart.

In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.

In speech, be true.

In ruling, be just.

In business, be competent.

In action, watch the timing.

No fight: No blame.

-Chapter Eight

Look, I understand.  You have these moments, these long dark nights of the soul.  They’re really hard.  The world yawns away from you like a black ocean’s opened up beneath your feet, and this angry voice demands from the depths, What the fuck is wrong with me?  (Or some version of that specifically tailored to your deepest fears.)

Sometimes they’re short, those moments.  But sometimes not so short. And sometimes they come back, repeatedly, every time there’s a free second to fit them in, for a whole night, or for a week, or for years. 

When this happens, you learn to avoid free seconds at all costs.  And that, of course, will really screw up your life. 

The trick is not to let them win, and you do that by not playing their game.  The game is this:  They boil up on you unexpected, and are so dark and horrible and scary and say the nastiest possible things, and you go AUGH! and turn away immediately and seek some form of comfort – you hide your head under the blankets, as it were, where “blankets” is food or weed or beer or sleep or rage or shopping or whatever.   

You win by not playing your part — by not turning away immediately.  You take a breath.  You look straight at them.  You let yourself acknowledge that that yawning yammering pit of demons is there; that you’re having one of those moments; and furthermore, that it will eventually pass.  Then when you move, you do so deliberately, slowly, keeping your eyes on the monsters as long as you can.

Even if what you do next is the same thing you’d have done anyway, you aren’t doing it out of pure knee-jerk zombie-apocalypse fear.  With just that tiny Space of No Fear to build on, you can start to beat them.  It's not even hard:  you just keep doing the same thing.  You make the space wider; you look longer and deeper; and pretty soon there's just clarity and peace where the fear and distractions used to be.

Attention is the vorpal sword here; are you surprised?