I feel like a Lethargarian (inhabitant of the Doldrums) from The Phantom Tollbooth

Spring Break. Each year, from the start of my college undergraduate career, I look forward to having that week off in the early Spring. When I am fed up with the fact that I have to go to class and the nagging stresses that tell me that I don’t understand nearly enough of the material in my courses, I can think ahead to having an entire week off from school, where I can sleep in, play games, and do whatever the heck I want to do.

Spring Break. Each year, from the start of my college undergraduate career, I realize on about Tuesday of the break why exactly I shouldn’t look forward to having that week off in the early Spring. It’s monumentally, mind-numbingly boring. I’ve polished off some Dostoevsky, read a short work on evolutionary psychology, watched a handful of movies, researched Nigeria just because I was curious, played about 40 hours of computer games, and slept in as much as I need to. Now I want to DO something.

I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that I need something to do each day (or at least on most days). The fact of the matter is that I’m insanely bored right now. I’m fully out of things to do for the week, and I’ve completed all of my ‘projects’ for the week – including deep-cleaning the grout in my bathroom - with the exception of going to the bank to deposit a check. It should give you some idea of the ennui I’m trying to combat here that I’ve decided to put off the trip to the bank until Friday so as to give me something to look forward to.

I don’t know if anybody is in town right now, but if you are, let me know and maybe we could hang out or something.

Oh, for the love of...

The management posted notices on each of our doors notifying us that the window replacement teams would be working on our windows this week and informed us that we needed to move all items at least five feet away from the windows that were being replaced by at least 5 feet. Needless to say, this posed some difficulty for me, as I was forced to move several large pieces of furniture on my own. Even more upsetting is that both my living room and dining room became unusable for about a half-week as I waited for the workmen to show up (due to the congestion of furniture).

A workman just came and informed me that they will need another day to complete my windows (although they are in the process of sealing up the holes right now), meaning that my furniture will need to remain moved about for another day. I can live with that, though, because I still have my bedroom and den as usable rooms in which to live.

However, he also just informed me that, for reasons I do not understand, they will need to get back to my East windows (which have already been replaced). All furniture and items must be moved away from these windows as well by at least 5 feet. To say that this is a daunting task is certainly an understatement. This involves breaking down my computer and moving it, removing all of the contents of my desk, getting someone to help me move the behemoth that is my desk, unloading half of my bookcases (the contents of which will need to be stored somewhere like my bathroom or something), moving the bookcases themselves, moving my bedside tables and the items contained thereon, and moving my entire bed (which is a four person task unless I opt to take it apart). In other words, by tomorrow morning, I have to take the only two remaining usable rooms of my apartment and make them unusable.

This is not going to be a good night.

Am I missing something here?

My apartment complex is doing its best to ensure that our electrical bills are as low as they can be by improving the quality of the buildings in which we live. Most of the buildings (including mine) have new roofs, and they are in the process of replacing all of the windows with ones that are guaranteed to be more energy efficient. The addition of siding to all of the buildings is also partway done, which adds yet another insulatory layer to prevent internal heat loss.

Well, my apartment's windows on the East side were newly installed when I first moved in, and today, workmen came by to replace my West-facing windows. I only have two windows on that side, and performed all of the preliminary steps which were requested of me by the complex management (moving all objects away from the windows to allow the workmen space to work.

When I was at home with my folks, we had to replace a few windows. My father removed two windows and installed their replacements in a span of about an hour. Admittedly, these fellows have a bit more work to do, since they have to also remove and install new blinds for the windows as well.

That said, it seems as if they are taking their sweet time in finishing the work. They showed up at my front door at 8:15 am this morning. They promptly removed my windows which were out by about 8:40, leaving two gaping holes into the world outside in my front room. Believe it or not, they still have not finished installing the windows, and it is now 1:20 pm. According to my thermometer (which I look at when I wake up) the termperature of my apartment has now plummeted from a balmy 76 degrees (it heats up at night for some reason) down to a chilly 57 degrees. I've had to put on another layer of clothes to remain warm in my own house due to their slow rate of work.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but they haven't even installed the blinds yet. Shouldn't they be gone by now?

Scare me? No... Gullible people terrify me.

In what has to be linked to to be believed, a woman in Southern Africa was conned out of $30,000 by a woman who claimed to be able to find the con-job victim's stolen luxury car... with the help of mermaids. The con-artist told the woman that the money was used to import the mermaids from Great Britain and to house them in a local hotel. Additionally, the mermaids needed money for cell-phones.

One has to wonder whether they can get 4-bars when they are deep in the ocean.

If it weren't so frightening, this would almost be funny.

When will people learn that education's real benefit is the ability to engage in critical thinking to protect you from people making ridiculous claims?

The Devil is in the details.

My family is generally internet savvy. We rarely get computer viruses or spyware installed on our machines unknowingly, and we can navigate the web without much difficulty. There are two exceptions to this general rule of computer-networking literacy: My father and my aunt (one of his sisters).

Almost as a rule, when I return to my parents’ home north of town, I turn on my father’s computer and run both a virus-scan and a removal program for spyware. Despite having installed these programs onto his computer and having left detailed step-by-step instructions to open each once per week to check for updates, no matter how long I’ve been gone from the house he has not done so. Inevitably I discover a few dozen computer viruses and several spyware programs installed to his machine.

Despite my protestations, he continues to use America Online as his primary method of accessing the internet, because “it provides him with better security.” As evidence of this, he points out that on startup, a little box pops up telling him to wait while AOL performs a system scan for adware. Obviously it must work wonders (insert rolling of eyes here) because I only catch a few dozen adware programs when I run the scans.

Nevertheless, I receive an endless stream of worthless e-mails from both my aunt and my father. On almost a daily basis I get an e-mail from one or more of them that is some chain letter or a sappy poem with a dozen fwds in the subject line. As often as not with my aunt, the forwarded message has at some point been actually deleted from the message, although she faithfully forwards me a ten-page header of other people to whom this e-mail has been sent or from whom it came.

About a week ago, I got an e-mail from my aunt forwarding a long message about religion in America. Now, she knows that I’m an atheist (as I’ve explained before, I believe that knowledge of the supernatural is permanently off-limits to the ken of mankind due to how we acquire and process information). I don’t go about sending her links to articles from “Humanist” magazine, and I don’t send her long essays about the inerrancies of her cherished scripture. Why it is somehow appropriate for her to send me a continuous stream of religious propaganda escapes my understanding.

This e-mail message purported to be by Ben Stein and claimed to have been read by him on some television network (claims which I find dubious), but in which he (or the anonymous REAL author) argues that Christianity is under assault by the secularist forces and that, in natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, we are seeing God’s justice meted out for throwing God out of the public sphere.

Now, I’ll ignore the myth that somehow Christians, who compose complete dominion over every branch of government, are being persecuted. I’ll ignore the fact that there are no laws, or even movements, to prohibit individual citizens from practicing their religious choices as they see fit, even in public locations. I’ll pass over the fact that churches receive tax breaks, and pay no property taxes, while secular humanist organizations must pay taxes. Yes, Christianity – the religion of almost 75-80% of Americans is under assault by a group that composes about 1 in 10 citizens.

The real issue I have with the short essay is the nature of the remarks it had to make about justice. As a philosopher, justice is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about. The classic definition of justice is an easy one to understand, although delving into it a bit further reveals ambiguity.

Justice is this: The allocation of the goods of life to an individual according to his desert. In other words, my life should be filled with good and bad things in direct proportion to how much I deserve them. This is why we think it is just when we put a criminal in prison. We are doling out to him some measure of punishment because he deserves it. We would think it monumentally unjust if we took a firefighter who rushed into a burning building to save two small children and stoned him to death for the act. Why? Because we would be allocating something bad to him when he deserved something good.

This concept of justice is not a new one. It is in fact, the explicit first covenant that God makes with the Israelites in the Bible. God demands that the Israelites follow his laws, and if a person does, God will shelter and protect him, and will ensure that his life is filled with good things. If he does not follow the law, he will be punished for his transgression. Indeed, this is precisely the objection that Job makes when his family is killed, his livestock destroyed, and his health shattered. “I followed the Law,” bemoans Job. In a real way, he views this as a contract issue. God made an agreement with him to reward him for his goodness, and here, Job was good and God fell through on the deal.

This notion of justice has been given by philosophers from the ancient Greeks and Romans straight through to the modern day as well. As a general rule, the only change to the notion of justice has been what constitutes one’s level of desert. To the Israelites, desert was measured by how closely one followed the law. Today, in criminal justice, desert is measured by how closely one follows the State’s law. In a moral sense, desert can be measured by how closely one adheres to the ethical precepts involved in whichever moral system you wish to propose.

One factor, however, has not changed. What matters in justice is that individuals are rewarded or punished for their level of desert and that the rewards and punishments be applied to their lives and not the lives of others. For instance, if my brother were to commit a murder, and the police came to my house and arrested me, knowing that I am not my brother and that my brother is the one who committed the murder, we would tend to think that I had been done an injustice. If I threw a baseball through my neighbor’s window, and my neighbors, knowing that it was me that did it, charged the cost of replacing the window to a different family, we would believe that the other family who was forced to pay the cost had been unjustly punished.

Similarly, if a worker invents a new efficiency-generating machine for his factory that will generate millions of dollars in cost-savings for his company each year, we should expect that he gets a raise, and would find it unjust for the CEO to take a huge bonus for the work of another in which he took no part (which of course is exactly what we usually see in corporate America).

In real life examples, this is why I can condemn Israel for the iniquity of their treatment of Palestinians. When a suicide bomber detonates his charge, killing innocent victims in a Disco or on a bus, he has surely committed a wrong. As such, he should be punished. The dilemma, of course, is that he is dead and can no longer be punished. Perhaps his estate could be drained as punishment or something, but what in fact occurs is that Israel sends out bulldozers to level the homes of his family members. Usually, the family is only notified of the demolition of their home minutes before it begins and are only allowed to salvage what belongings they can carry and snatch up as they are escorted from the building by armed soldiers. This is a manifestly unjust action, because wives, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and children are punished (made homeless and destitute) because of the actions of a third party over which they had no control.

In sub-Saharan Africa, it is common to attribute misfortunes to the actions of ‘witches.’ Elaborate trials are set up to identify the local witch, and once identified, they are forced to pay reparations to the family whose livestock caught a disease, or whose house burned down. Such a system is also surely unjust because, barring the existence of witches who can cause such disasters, an individual is being deprived of their property for the chance occurrences which harmed a third party.

This analysis of justice has been leading up to a single point which I’d hope should be clear. There are people out there who whole-heartedly believe that large disasters which kill thousands, cut apart families, render people homeless and destitute, and inflict immeasurable suffering on countless individuals are an expression of divine wrath at removing government-mandated morning prayers at your local high school. While I believe that most Christians would find such an idea ludicrous, the fact remains that a significant number of these people (like my aunt) do exist, and that, if true in fact, their ideas would be the perfect example of a god of injustice. It is impossible to reconcile the infliction of suffering on the innocent with justice, and to suggest that every single person along the gulf coast who lost their lives, property, or any other good thing from their lives due to the hurricane was guilty of being a part of the “secular conspiracy” is surely mind-boggling.

And yet, these people worship a God whose actions are indefensible morally. They do not just attend services where they purport to renew their service to their God, but do so willingly and jubilantly. If their worldview is correct (and I, along with millions of deeply religious people would deny that), they are in service to a God whose actions epitomize injustice and gross iniquity.

Makes you wonder if they are worshipping the wrong one, doesn’t it?

What's not making US news

I've never been a huge fiscal politics nut. By and large, I am concerned with social issues like education, environment, and health, rather than issues of economy. Yet every once in a while, an issue comes along which makes me stop and remember that there is some value to keeping track of the national purse-strings.

President Bush just signed into law a bill which raises the U.S. ceiling on national debt to 9 trillion dollars. Why would we need to raise the ceiling on the permissible amount of national debt? Read this next line very carefully and think about its consequences:

We had to raise the ceiling to prevent a first-ever default on U.S. treasury notes.

That's right. The United States was about to default on our currency. Given that the United States' dollar is the international currency of exchange that's bad news for the world, and particularly bad news for the United States. When buying and selling in the international market, you are more likely to be dealing in United States dollars rather than in Yen or Euros, even between non-U.S. countries. That this is so provides an enormous boost to the value of U.S. dollars because they are much in demand. Why are they in demand? Because we haven't ever had to devalue our money.

To discover that we are close to defaulting on the value of our treasury notes (dollars) is scary indeed. Not only does that put international exchanges at risk, but even the possibility of default should shake international confidence in the value of the dollar causing merchants to choose to rather do business in Euros. If that occurs, the United States will find our economy in the middle of an early-20th century style great depression. Yikes.

I place the blame for this economic disaster squarely on the President's irresponsible and unjust tax cuts for the wealthy. We need to force the wealthy to pay the fantastical benefits that they have inherited from our system. If they are willing to reap the enormous benefits for themselves, they ought to be willing to pay for them. A society will only function for so long as the rich are willing to understand that they owe their august privilege to the oppression and crushed spirit of the working class. 'Noblesse oblige' is not just a phrase, but must be the backbone of any society that desires to avoid (literal) class warfare.

Gullible people scare me

I don't know if any of you have been following this story, but in Southern Nepal, a young boy has been pulling a confidence scam of massive proportions without any apparent outcry from authorities.

This 16-year old lad has convinced a large number of people that he is the reincarnation of the Lord Gautama Buddha, and that he has achieved the blessed state of Nirvana. How has he managed to convince a large part of his country of this claim? By meditating.

He sat underneath a tree, meditating for a solid 10 months without getting up from his spot. Through rain and shine, cold and heat, he has been in a meditative trance for the better part of the year. His closestfollowers (who are also his friends from before his meditation) claim that he has been underneath the tree without food or water for all that time, but adamently refused to let scientists observe him to determine whether he was getting up in the night to eat and drink. In fact, the boy's followers erected barriers to prevent him from being observed during the night.

Thousands of pilgrims came to visit him and meditate nearby, and many donated what money they could spare to his followers, who by many reports have amassed a small fortune from the donations.

Now, I'm hoping that you all are seeing through this scam as it is, quite frankly, not really all that sophisticated. His pals, all in on it from the start, simply have to smuggle him in food and drink at night. During the day, he can doze under the tree, or who knows, maybe do some actual meditating.

All he has to do is keep that up until they reach some preset amount of money they decided on in advance and then end the charade with the boy claiming that he has failed to reach Nirvana but will try again.

Clever, but not terribly complex of a scheme.

Unless, that is, the 16-year old boy disappears, which is exactly what has happened. The authorities took seriously the worry of his parents and have scoured the forest around his tree but have come up with no answers as of yet. Also missing? Lots of the money.

The problem with confidence men should be obvious to his friends now: When playing with fire, don't be surprised when it burns you. A scam-artist will have no compunctions about scamming even his friends.

It's a small world sometimes

I attended my parents' church yesterday, as a prelude to going out to lunch with my mother for her birthday. Aside from the fact that I am dramatically out of place in a church (what with my epistemological materialism and all), I always feel uncomfortable for another reason: people know me.

From the moment that I step into the doors, people I don't know walk up to me and address me by name, asking me how I'm doing. They obviously mean well, and I can usually talk to them for a short period of polite conversation, but the fact remains that I have absolutely no freakin' clue who they are.

The last time that I attended my parents' church with any regularity was when I was a Senior in high school (I stopped going right after a friends untimely death). When I was that age, I didn't pay too much attention to the people that my parents talked to at the church, but now I'm wishing that I had. All of these people, who knew me from the better part of a decade ago, still recognize me, and I couldn't tell you their names if my life depended on it.

Well, this weekend, I found myself in another one of those situations, and I don't mean while I was in my parent's church. I had to run out to get some groceries yesterday, and while I was standing in line to check out with my meager fare, I heard a voice behind me.

"Excuse me, I don't mean to bother you, but are you, by any chance, [Academian]?" I turned around and was confronted with two women standing together who obviously knew me. Once again, I was at a loss as to their identities. My mind was racing trying to pin them down. Were they from one of the several jobs I'd worked in town? Were they from my parents' church? Neighbors of my parents? This time, thankfully, the strangers divined that I couldn't place who they were and introduced themselves to me, obviating the social awkwardness.

This woman (who I learned was a professor at the law school) and her partner didn't know me from the law school. They remembered me from the few times that I attended a particular church that is especially friendly to gay people with my father from when I was in elementary school. I have to give them credit for having stellar memories. I can barely recall what the place looked like, what it was called, or where it was in Topeka, let alone the people that attended that other church. These two women recalled a young child that attended a few dozen times with his father (who still goes to the church occasionally) from more than a decade and a half ago. Wow. I wish I had that kind of mental acuity.

It's a small world after all.

Hello. My name is [Academian], and I'm a...

Flickrholic.

Kansasgirl introduced me to this fabulous website showcasing excellent photography, and since, on an almost daily basis, I browse through some of the photographs posted and ranked as the most interesting on the site. Some are good. Some are a little on the silly side. Some showcase things that I might not otherwise believe, like a set of a student in California who has tamed a large number of squirrels on his campus. Occasionally, though, I find ones that epitomize what the art-form seems to be about to me.

Photography is a way to capture some aspect of reality and transmit it to an outside observer, just as in most other art forms. A photographer has a harder time of it, though, than does a painter, because a painter can create any particular scene as suits her whim to depict content like emotions or abstract concepts. A photographer must work with physical objects to achieve the same effects.

Well, I've come across a photographer whose work I find enchanting. I have to admit that I've developed a little bit of a crush on this Polish woman (her name is Agnieszka) whom I've never met simply because I enjoy her work so much. A large part of her corpus of work involves self-portraits, and I can't hide the fact that she is gorgeous. The cynical side of my mind tells me that this must be the real underlying reason why I love her works so much, but I'd rather try to seem at least a little less shallow than that.

While she is very beautiful, what strikes me about her isn't the shape of her eyes, the curve of her neck, or the way her hair falls across her temples. Rather, I find her beautiful because of the expressive quality of her photographs. She seems to photograph herself as a way to illustrate moods, ranging from quite dark moods to ennui to contentment to triumph. The dark ones are good, but I favor the more playful ones, like these:

1, 2, 3, 4.

I love it.

Thanks Kansasgirl, and thanks Agnieszka.

Political Thoughts

I spent this weekend with my parents in celebration of my mother's birthday. I'm sure it is terribly bad form to reveal a woman's age, but my mother just turned 55. She's counting down the years and months until she reaches the number of points necessary to retire with maximum benefits under the State's compensation plan. My father already reached the maximum number of points to reach his maximum level and retired right afterward. That was 2 years ago, and since, he's been working another job (working at getting a second pension is what he calls it).

Well, this weekend, I had two interesting conversations with my parents. The first was a conversation regarding immigration policy and the second was a conversation about an Anti-Crime System I've been playing with in my mind.

The issue of immigration policy came up while we were running some errands out on the town on Saturday. My mother was getting a new pair of glasses out at the mall, and while she was getting them fitted, my father and I waited outside the store. As we waited, a group of young ladies passed nearby, speaking Spanish. My father's comment as they passed deeply shocked me and (sadly) made me re-evaluate my father's politics again. He said, "You know, I miss the days when an American could be in his own country without having to listen to that gibberish."

Wow.

I protested that his statement was deeply tainted by xenophobia and prejudice for people of a different ethnicity, and it only seemed to encourage him to expound more deeply on his views. He continued on, suggesting that we ought to close down the borders and eject all of the non-Americans. As he said this, he pointed out people he identified as 'non-Americans,' and it was disturbing that he pointed out only racial and ethnic minorities (who are quite likely citizens of the United States). He seemed uninterested in listening to objections to his views, ending our brief conversation with the statement that he thought we ought to re-establish the racial proportions of the 1950's in the United States today.

While my father is a decent man generally, occasionally his racial politics reveal that there is a side to him that I have a hard time acknowledging. Finding fault in your parents in that fashion is a hard thing to confront. It's like finding out that a parent was adulterous once or went to prison once or something like that. It happens in other families, but to find out that something like that happens in your family... Well, it removes the ideal light in which you see your parents. They suddenly go from being larger-than-life figures to being simple humans, no different - and maybe a bit better or worse - than yourself.

The other conversation I had was with my mother (whose politics are far more green and far more socially progressive). We agree on most substantive issues, but differ only in our general respect for freedom. She's the classic liberal democrat, and I'm the classic hard-line socialist. My idea was to implant in each newborn infant a tiny microchip with GPS tracking capacity. You could have each microchip send a signal to a computer database that tracks each person's movements around the United States.

The benefits of such a system seems to be obvious to me. No more do we need to worry about an escaped prisoner. We'll know exactly where he is at any given moment and can pick him up quickly. With as many child-abductions as we find ourselves in the middle of, think of the advantage of being able to track down the child within minutes of being notified of the abduction. And more the point, we'll be able to know who the abductor is simply by seeing which GPS signal is accompanying the abducted child. Deadbeat dad skipping from state to state to avoid child-support? Not a problem. We can track him down in seconds. If someone is murdered in their home, police normally have to interview witnesses, scour the crime scene for forensic evidence, and engage in serious detective work just to discover some likely suspects. With unnerving frequency, there isn't enough evidence even to make a list of suspects. With this system, you could simply find out all of the people who were in the house between given times, when they arrived, when they left, and where they went to afterwards.

It seems that the large objection to this is based in the doctrines of privacy (in which I am deeply skeptical for philosophical reasons). But if we are overly concerned about the privacy, simply seal the computer database. Make the information contained within the database subject to a warrant requirement. Keep the 4th Amendment requirements for warrants. If a cop wants to find out who was in a particular house between 8:00 pm and 10:00 pm on January 22, 2005, make him prove to a judge why he deserves to have access to that potentially sensitive information. If we aren't hesitant to put wiretapping and search powers in the hands of a judge now, why should we become hesitant to put a similar power in their hands? If anything, such a power allows for far less intrusion into individual's lives than the power of a judge to authorize police to enter your house, rifle through your belongings, open your drawers, read documents on your computer, or listen to late-night phone calls between lovers. All a GPS system gives is location of the individual. While this is, indeed, sensitive information, surely allowing a police officer access to a person's private diary is more of an infringement on privacy than knowing that they visited a movie theater yesterday.

I may be a totalitarian, but the importance of this idea is that I think it can be integrated into modern American jurisprudence without significant legal alterations to the status quo.

Must it come to an end so soon? Maybe so.

Well, thanks to the incredibly helpful advice I received (Ahem) from my friends regarding my recent difficulty in my love-life, I’ve decided that I probably can’t in good conscience continue to see the girl I’ve dated a few times now.

On this past Thursday, we went out again (during the daytime between my morning and afternoon classes, actually). As we talked, I started composing what has to be a quite juvenile list in my head of her good qualities and her bad qualities so that I could try to weigh them objectively in my head.

The bad qualities were easy for me to think about. They’ve been the little nagging things about her that have bothered me since before I met her, and in the few times that I’ve been out with her, I found myself fixating on the these things.

She doesn’t really seem overly bright. I hate the way that looks on paper as I write it, but it’s true. What insights I thought she’d had about issues I care about seem more and more apparent as a subtle attempt at pseudo-intellectualism as opposed to a genuine interest in matters that I find serious. I can live with people who aren’t interested in the things I love, but to pretend to be interested bothers me. I love science and enjoy discussing scientific advances in the understanding of the world around us. I don't expect that a woman I date will be a subscriber to "Nature" or "Scientific American," but, for the love of all that is sacred, is it so much to ask that she not say things like "Everything is 'vibrations'," or that she's interested in "the energy fields" of people? It's hard for a scientist (or someone who came close once) not to laugh when someone seriously discusses chakras and energy points in the body. Why not throw in astrology or crystal healing at that point?

She seems affected by some kind of wanderlust that I simply can’t relate to. She’s a world-traveler, and she regaled me with some stories of her numerous visits to Europe and her plans to travel to Africa this summer. While I enjoyed the tales, she made it clear that she intends to continue this habit of taking extensive foreign trips for the rest of her life. While I find that interesting, I’m not really of the traveling nature myself. I will likely never leave the country for any appreciable length of time in my life (aside from Canada perhaps), and what’s more, I don’t anticipate that I will ever really feel like I’m missing out on anything I would otherwise enjoy. I’m a homebody. My idea of a good vacation is curling up on the couch with a movie, a swimming pool, good company, and good food.

I’m punctual – obsessively so, in fact. All my life, I’ve been worried about other people judging me. When I was little and used to go to church, I hated it when we would show up late to the service because my Father would march us down the aisle to the front few rows (our usual seats), giving everybody a chance to watch us come in late, instead of quietly finding a place in the back unobtrusively. In college, if I discovered that I would not make it to class on time, I simply did not go. There were even classes that I would probably have made it to on time, but since I was afraid that I wouldn’t make it there early enough to class, I didn’t go. People in law school always seem to wonder about me when I show up for class a half hour early in the morning, or rush out of class to get to my next one, even when I have 15 minutes until it starts or something. I’m not intentionally snubbing friends who might want to talk, but instead am worried about getting to my next class on time, though it would be difficult to actually be late. I even rush out of class to get to my car and drive home, as if I were on a deadline to arrive at my apartment. This girl, though, has a more cavalier attitude about time than I do. On each of our dates now, she’s been late showing up – once by almost a half-hour – and each time without explanation or apology.

She leads - and desires to lead - a Spartan and ascetic lifestyle. She criticized my home décor as being too ostentatious (my word, not hers) and said that she likes the look of blank walls and empty corners. Though I’ve not seen it, she described her apartment. Apparently, she furnished her apartment with a couch, a table, a chair, and a bed. The walls are bare. She owns no knick-knacks or modern appliances. According to her, having things simply reminded her of all of the things she didn’t need. Perhaps it is the weakness of my will, or some flaw in my character, but I enjoy owning things. I like having a fashionable home, glassware with my sur-initial engraved on the side, and a library of quality books. She described her desire to live in a hut in the forest one day, and my mind is filled with the massive three-floored, glass-and-stone mansion I’ve been designing and decorating in my head for the past decade. (It includes a three-story atrium, an open-air salon with a grand-piano, and a two-story library with the rolling ladder-mounted on the sides…)

I’ll be honest. I love ostentation. I could get around in a beat-up clunker car, but in my head, I’ll always be the guy who wants to drive around in a Lexus. So, to put it bluntly, there are several personality differences here which would cause a lot of friction.

On top of these differences in personal taste, she is coming on a bit too strong. I’m willing to admit that I’m serious about relationships. Dating isn’t some way to go out and have fun without regard for the future. A date is a step in a very long interview process to finding a wife. At any point along the interview process, from the first date to walking down the aisle, the driving question behind dating ought to be “Is this a person with whom I could happily live?” So I understand taking relationships seriously. On our first date, however, she mentioned her anxiety that the rest of her friends are getting older and getting married and having kids, and how she was nervous about being left behind them. On the one hand, I understand what she means. She’s 30 (don’t get me wrong, I love older women), and people my age are gearing up toward marriage. In 5 years, I can imagine that many of my friends and old roommates will be safely ensconced in marital bliss and cuddling pudgy young babies on their laps. But on the other hand, something seems terribly off-putting about bringing up marriage and kids on a first date, out of the blue.

On the plus side of my list, though, I was able to only create one real asset: she seems to like me.
That’s it. That’s really all I could come up with. Now, that’s a big plus to me. Women don’t tend to like me that much. Well, that’s not true, really. Women tend to find me charming and entertaining at times, and I have on occasion been told that I’m a good friend and quite companionate. I was that guy in high school who had several female friends, and who sat at the table with a lot of the most-sought-after girls at lunch, but they didn’t like me because they were attracted to me. They liked me because I was safe. They could confide in me, tell me their secrets, ask me for advice, and they never had to worry that I would try to get them drunk at a party or anything like that.

I know it sounds awful, but I sort of miss that camaraderie. Guy-friendships are usually about sports-watching, back-slapping, and shallow connection. As a kid in high school, I could achieve a level of intimacy in my platonic relationships with my female friends that would just seem out-of-place among adults like myself. Being that guy who is ‘one of the girls’ would probably further enshrine the image people have of me being a little on the fruity side. Sigh.

I digress, though. Although women sometimes like me, they really rarely ever seem interested in me on a romantic level. I know that the few people that occasionally read this probably can’t relate to that statement quite as well as they think they can (due to the fact that they are female and are ALL desirable and highly-sought-after individuals). There is something a bit numbing after a while about seeing a woman’s eyes sweep across a crowded room, pass over you, and come to rest on the tall, handsome guy standing next to you. I’ve had a quarter of a century of that experience, and it just feels incredibly good to finally have her eyes stop on me for a change.

But, stepping back, that’s exactly why I am going to have to end this relationship. The only reason I like her is that she makes me feel good about myself. I don’t seem to like her because of who she is; I like her because of how she makes me see myself.

In the end, that seems like I’m using her affection in an impermissible way, and I’m not sure that I can live with seeing myself as the sort of person who uses other people for personal gain that way. It seems low, shallow, and self-serving, and of the few assets I have, my integrity is one I’d rather not throw away lightly.