As the tens of readers of this blog are no doubt sick of being reminded, I was the victim of a violent assault about a year ago in Washington, DC. It’s impossible for me to give you any meaningful explanation of the psychological aftermath of such an event in any brief form. But one particular …
Monthly Archive: November 2011
Nov 22 2011
You’re So Smart! No I’m Not!
I tell my almost-two-year-old son Toby how smart he is all the time. It was said to me over and over when I was a kid. Decades later, I know in hindsight that I believed my “smartness” to be innate and unrelated to effort or discipline. I therefore, in turn, also believed that when I …
Nov 20 2011
My Atheism Will Not Save the World, Ctd.
Friend-of-the-blog Marty Pribble picks up on my lamentations about the state of atheist/skeptic activism, and explains my point about there being a deeper core of crisis than religion alone better than I did: I feel we are lacking focus. The problems of the world are not caused by religion alone, rather abuse of religious privilege, …
Nov 19 2011
My Atheism Will Not Save the World
After working professionally in the atheist movement, something about my passion for the cause dwindled. This happens a lot to me — I take on a given subject as my profession, and I subsequently grow disillusioned in said subject. Something about a thing becoming one’s job can spoil it. But after putting aside theatre a …
Nov 17 2011
Those Delightful Social Media Squirts
Michael Erard tells the tale of his avoidance of indulging in the trope he calls the Social Media Exile Essay, a report never written of his exit from Facebook: … I wrote a draft of an essay about writing about why I quit Facebook, which was clever but did not contain any of the things I have already said I didn’t write …
Nov 16 2011
Know Thine Enemy, Or Look Like a Damned Idiot
Might as well be Hitler. Few things are as frustrating to do-gooder liberals like myself as when other do-gooder liberals go off the deep end. Whatever the cause, however so worthy it might be, crossing the line from passionate to goofy is so easy, and happens to often. Then, of course, the cause itself loses …
Nov 15 2011
Superiority over the Superior
David Brooks, from his fixed position as Moral Center of the Universe, bemoans our collective feeling of superiority over those who failed to stop the horror of the Penn State scandal. Commentators ruthlessly vilify all involved from the island of their own innocence. Everyone gets to proudly ask: “How could they have let this happen?” …
Nov 08 2011
The Fashionably Late Don’t Get to Be President
”Hey, ev’rybody! What’d I miss?” ** I don’t think anyone could have foreseen Rick Perry’s dizzying drop in support during the past few weeks. I, for one, definitely feared him as some kind of unstoppable teabagger-infused jugger-nut who might very well fool the American electorate into making him president by virtue of his swagger and …
Nov 06 2011
It’s Not Meningitis!
So, I thought that getting through the anniversary of my violent encounter on the streets of DC would be something of a relief, a release of some psychological pressure that’d been building up for some weeks. As I noted, the event itself passed almost unnoticed by me when it actually came, so there was some …
Nov 01 2011
The Attack, Ctd.
This past Wednesday marked one year since I was assaulted by two thugs outside a DC Metro station, and everything changed. What’s odd is that I had been kind of bracing for the first anniversary of the event, as though there was a sort of rent in the universe where it happened in time, and …
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