The Height of the Matter

Every year on my daughter's birthday, we mark her height on the doorjamb of her room, although if it were up to her, we'd mark it every few weeks. It's astonishing to look at all those marks further down the woodwork and think about how much I didn't know back then, and what I hadn't even guessed at yet about who she (or I, for that matter) would come to be.

It's got me thinking this week about height. When I sat down and started making notes about it, it really became shocking to me about how prominently height and size influence cultures around the world. And, frankly, about how surprising it is that it's shocking. We come into this world so much of a smaller size than just about everything in the world around us. The people that we're closest to tower over us, and the impression never leaves us that we have to literally "look up to" those who are stronger and in control of our lives.

I think this is probably why people look up to the sky when they think about their concept of God, and the power He represents. We're looking for the ultimate parental figure, to care about us the way our parents had (or perhaps the way we wish they had), and the heavens are the only place that is forever bigger than us. And part of most religious rituals is to kneel or supplicating in prayer, becoming even smaller and lower before whatever power you’re praying to. Even when we attempt to elevate people and other gods to greater-than-human status, the best way to do that is portray them in larger-than-life ways... Sometimes these representations are intended to inspire awe by magnification (Michelangelo's David), to deify (the statue of Zeus in his temple at Olympia, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.), or can sometimes be seen as symbols of subjugation (Mount Rushmore?), but in all cases, size equals power.

This trend even continues into fashion. Think of all the things people do to make themselves appear larger than they are. You can immediately tell the hierarchical status of a Catholic priest, Egyptian king, or French chef by the height of their hats. When women first started coming into the white-collar work place in force, they augmented themselves with extra-high heels and shoulder pads, trying to make themselves as physically present as they grew in boardroom power.

The simplest sign of humility before someone of greater authority is to literally make yourself shorter by bowing or curtsying. The elaborate Japanese custom of ojigi takes this into the realm of art, with correct posture and form conveying fine levels of meaning. It’s similar to the Islamic religious postures of ruku (bowing) and sujud (prostration). Even when the humility is mostly for show -- such as performers bowing to their audience, even though they've been the center of attention for the duration of the performance -- it still forms a connection of a particular sort between people.

This distinction is so woven into our cultural fabric that people still consider it when choosing partners. Women will think twice about dating a man who is shorter than them, and men will do the same about a woman who is. Of course, this is only a tendency. Still, I can't help but notice that cultures who on average tend to be taller also have more freedom in choosing who they marry... those where the decisions are made more by arranged marriages, or with regard to familial and political alliances – basically, things other than physical attraction -- seem to have men and women of about the same average height.

Physical size, and height in particular, is perhaps the one true universal human trait, which has been noted and woven into all of our cultures in an amazing myriad of ways. As much as we’ve changed, these traditions have persisted because they derive from our common physical form, and the process every single one of us goes through as we move from childhood to adulthood.

Aaron's Top 50 Shades of Grey

Every now and then, there are pop culture phenomena that we somewhat grudgingly partake in, just because we just want to see what the big deal is. We don't want to be the only one at the party who doesn't know what all the others are talking about. That's how I came to read 50 Shades of Grey.

I had heard a whole lot of things about the book before I had even cracked its spine: that it was fantastic/terribly written, that it was a huge step forward/backward for feminism, that it was harmful/liberating to the mental states of women/men, that it was the true dawning/deathknell of the ebook. It's not often that some work of art comes so quickly, fully, and multi-controversially into public view, and even less when that thing is a book. So I felt that I had to give it a try.

I don't think it's my place to tell you here whether 50 Shades, in and of itself, is good, bad, sexy, or offensive. It's one of those things that personal beliefs and taste figure into even more than usual, so for me to attempt to tell you what you're going to think is kind of pointless (I felt the same way about The Passion of the Christ, which is perhaps the weirdest comparison you’re bound to hear someone make about either of these things). I also realize that, being a man, I'm not even in its target audience. But what's really intriguing for me is the way it's made me address a dichotomy in my own head that has been there for a while, and which I wasn't even truly aware of.

When I was a kid, my mother owned a bookstore. If I'm remembering this correctly, there were a pair of shelves that were dedicated to Harlequin romance novels. I think the order-seeking part of me liked the way they were set up... all the same color, all the same thickness, so different from the riot of colors and sizes that were in every other section. It was as if hundreds of copies of the same book had been neatly lined up. I had only a vague idea of what these books were about, or why they all looked the same, but the thought was implanted that they were just as they looked -- nearly identical, completely interchangeable.

This stereotype was perpetuated when I worked at the local public library during high school. There, we had an alcove where the romance novels were stored. While there was a little more variety in their color and size (this was in the late 80s), they still weren't managed the same as other books. There was no order to the way they were shelved, and when the patrons checked them out, we didn't even keep track of which titles they took, just the number of books. There was at least one woman who, every week or so, would faithfully bring in a shopping bag full of them, only to leave with it filled again. The lesson was consistent: these are disposable. They barely even qualify as literature.

I remember telling one of my fellow Borders employees how so many romance novels seemed "predatory" to me -- I actually used that word. It's hard to argue that books with titles like "The Oil Tycoon's Secret Love Child" were created by people doing anything other than looking for women who wish that some rich, powerful man would fall helplessly in love with them just for being exactly who they already are. I saw it as a completely unrealistic view of adult love, and not only that, but it might actually damage the person reading it. Wouldn't some women, after immersing themselves in such a fantasy, I thought, end up closing off to real-world love and affection, just because it couldn't hope to live up to the dreams concocted for them during a Harlequin board meeting?

So this is the prejudice I found myself fighting against when reading 50 Shades. But then I realized something... you could make (and I have actually heard) the same argument against pornography. While I realize that I'm starting to speak in generalities, it seems to be for men what romances are for women. At their worst, both forms of entertainment gravely underestimate the intelligence of the sexes. In truth, these two genres really are means to the same emotional end, and play out surprisingly similar fantasies: someone suddenly appears and sweeps you off your feet, who exists only to provide intimacy to an idealized avatar of you, removing all your worldly cares, allowing you to live in the moment, and making you feel alive.

What it's taken me over 200 pages into this story of dominance and submission is to figure out exactly how the story does what it does. And, to my surprise, I've found that it's really not all that far from what romance novels -- and pornography, for that matter -- have been doing all along. It's a clever melding of the two, in fact.

To figure out what the reception of 50 Shades really has to tell us, let's take a look at how that new sensibility is used in this book, as well as the flurry of BDSM-themed romance novels that have come out in its wake. In a traditional romance novel, you've got to find a way to get your characters together and realistically build their relationship, in both the physical and emotional senses. Now, If BDSM is the backdrop you set your story against, you can effectively drop all pretenses. No meet-cute is necessary, nor any extraneous plot devices. As an author, you can take the quickest short cut to the reason romance readers come back to the genre time and again: intense relationship moments between characters. Issues of trust immediately need to be questioned, insecurities revealed and worked through. In this sense, 50 Shades and other BDSM novels are like a concentrated distillation of other romances. They skip nearly all the preliminaries and kick in with a starting gear of what usually amounts to two months' worth of relationship.

The really fascinating part is that I never even realized that I still unconsciously look down on this whole genre of literature. But when I compare this new, more hardcore style of romance with the identical, disposable Harlequin romances of yesteryear, I've got to say the new stuff at least feels more honest in its intent. Really, it’s just like any other kind of “genre” fiction: it puts real, accessible feelings against an unrealistic background in order to draw attention to them and help us process them in our everyday lives. And when it comes to learning the landscape of such a tricky, complicated landscape as ourselves, that's not necessarily a bad thing. So here’s my formal apology to the romance readers/writers/lovers out there… I’m sorry, and while I’m still not going to start reading it regularly, I think I’m closer to understanding it now.

The Myth of Ownership

As members of a consumer society, we often find ourselves tied down by our objects, the things that we accumulate over the course of a life lived. At times this instinct can get out of hand (see: Hoarders), but mostly what I've been thinking about this week is how media storage is changing, and what that means to the concept of ownership.

Sometimes I take a look at the racks of CDs that occupy a good portion of my bedroom and wonder: I hardly ever have an occasion to play CDs anymore, mostly because I've ripped them all to my computer, store them digitally, and can listen to them in any manner of invisible ways. So why am I hanging onto these physical copies?

One day, I made a little thought experiment. We moved into our house eleven years ago this summer. There are a sizeable number of CDs that I packed up, brought to the place I now live, unpacked, arranged... and haven't touched since. So how much have I paid in total for the physical space that just one of these CDs occupies?

Well, first I calculated the volume of a CD case (and keep in mind that these are all very approximate values): CDs are five inches in diameter, so the case appears to be about five by six. And if we assume a half-inch thickness, that's fiften cubic inches. Now, let's compare that to the volume of my house. All told, it's close to 1500 square feet, and if you allow eight feet of vertical living space for every story, that gives you 12000 cubic feet, which translates to 20,736,000 cubic inches (because a cubic foot = 12 inches * 12 inches * 12 inches = 1728 cubic inches). So that means that each CD takes up .00007% of the space inside my house.

So, what's the cost of storage? Using the capacity numbers I've figured out, and picking a $1000 monthly mortgage as a nice round number, that comes to $.0072 I'd be paying every month to claim ownership of the space that this CD occupies. Multiply that by 132 months (11 years). That means that, since we moved in, I'd have paid a total of ninety-five cents for every CD in the place, whether I've listened to it or not. And since I'd conservatively say I have fifteen hundred CDs, that comes to just over $1425, purely for the space it's taken to house the collection, above and beyond the original cost of purchase.

I know that doesn't seem like all that much, especially spread out over more than a decade. But CDs are far from the only objects in my house that can also be stored in digital form. They're not even the smallest. There are hundreds of DVDs and probably thousands of books in my house as well. Many of these are in mostly out-of-the-way places (since I don't think a six-year old should have ready access to my Hellraiser box set), and there's just no room in the place for all the books to be anywhere else other than the basement -- the kitchen is the only room in the house that doesn't have at least one dedicated bookshelf as it is.

The question now becomes whether it's still worth it to continue this ownership. As more of our purchases and consumption methods become digital, the question becomes more and more relevant. A digital bookshelf is, actually, more egalitarian than a real one. Every title on a e-reader is the same size, in the same place, at eye level. I have to say, I'd be more likely than to try to wade through my copy of Ulysses if it were sitting right next to my Clive Barkers and Ray Bradburys, rather than on a shelf in my basement behind an unused mattress and a pair of oversized stereo speakers.

The key to the future, I'm starting to understand, is balancing the two. Clearly, I wouldn't want my daughter to turn in her shelves of full-size, full-color Dr. Seuss, Kevin Henkes, and other picture books (some of which belonged to me or her mother when we were little) for a dedicated tablet. But there is a lot of stuff in other places that is just taking up space. But if we're going to live in a world where just about all media is accessible through a screen, doesn't it make sense to hold onto only the physical forms of stuff that you have the deepest connection to?

Even the things that used to be the strongest symbols of our culture are becoming less important as an outward show of that culture. America used to be a car culture, but now companies like Zipcar, which is basically an on-demand service where people in cities can arrange for the use of a car only when they need it, can have a million subscribers. It's rapidly becoming that case that a car implies nothing about the person driving it, which wasn't the case as recently as twenty years ago.

I can see that this mentality is starting to take hold. It's a slow, evolving process, but we're starting to move away from the idea of owning objects, and toward the idea of having access to what they represent. It already doesn't matter whether you have a 5000-piece CD collection or a phone with enough memory to hold it all. In the future, who knows how far things will go... Maybe your sense of personal freedom won't be wrapped up in having your own car, but the knowledge that you can get one whenever and wherever you need it.

I'm not trying to predict the future. If we've learned anything, it's that -- if I may paraphrase my favorite online repository of weird information, Cracked -- the future will be awesome in ways that we can't even conceive of yet. But it does seem like the allure of product is well along the path to giving way to the allure of content.

Four Random Musical Thoughts

-1-

When I was in grade school, I saw a skit put on by some older kids from a different school. I don't really remember the context of the event, but the skit was a futuristic version of War of the Worlds. I had no idea of it at the time since I hadn't heard the Orson Welles version yet, but the kids who put it on stuck to the radio show's format of storytelling, with news reports of an alien invasion repeatedly breaking into a music program. While the original had a ballroom orchestra being interrupted, these kids took the idea of "futuristic music" and ran to an extreme, almost to the point where it overshadowed the story they were trying to tell.

Every time a news report would finish, the music show would kick back in, and by that I mean that a couple kids wearing amorphous masks and holding armloads of painted egg-crate material shaped vaguely like guitars would jump around while lights would flash, and a random barrage of electronic sounds came out of the speakers they were using.

For some reason, that spectacle has stuck with me, and it's turned into a running self-dialogue about what music is, what it's for, and how it's defined in general compared to how we define it for ourselves. In particular, I think this singular musical experience (which wasn't even designed to be one!) started pushing part of my tastes to look for sounds and structures that I'd never heard before... to look for the sound of the future.

Often when I hear a new song, or a new artist, I ask myself, "Is this something that couldn't have existed ten or twenty years ago? If I heard it back in 1983 what would I have thought?" I guess I'm trying to figure out if music is really progressing. And I'm finding that while fringier styles come and go (and are always more interesting than the Top 40), pop music stays pretty much the same. Now there's thumpier drums, less ballads and kookier sound effects, but the general style is pretty much the same. It's been amazing to see how hip hop has taken over, been blended into EDM, and had the resulting mixture draped across the same melodic structure that pop music has had for fifty years now.

-2-

We all talk about how music is such a personal thing for us, even though I'm guessing that just about everyone my age has at least a 50% overlap in the breadth of music that we're familiar with. Ironically, it's that commonality that makes it so personal. For folks my age, we all heard this overlap music at roughly the same time, when it first was new. We paid attention, we bought mostly tapes and CDs that we knew about from the radio/MTV (back when those things were almost the same). Granted, a fair amount of it wasn't good, but it's become a touchstone for us. It defines a time, a place, and the people we hung out with. It plugs us back into another time, and that's the purpose it serves, a shortcut to emotions -- often simpler and stronger ones -- that we want to relive.

With the modern ability to distribute music for free to potentially everyone in the world, it's now possible to grow up side-by-side with someone and have virtually no overlap in the music you're both familiar with. So maybe the "music of the future" isn't defined by how it sounds. Perhaps it's better defined by how you experience and assimilate it. There are be many less common cultural touchstones, but sharing your personal playlist with someone can be as intimate as sharing your most guarded thoughts.

-3-

I've recently heard about what's being discovered about the nature of memory. It seems that memories aren't actual packets of information stored somewhere in your head. When you recall something, your brain re-fires the same pattern of neurons in your mind that went off the first time you experienced something. You're actually re-creating the memory each time you recall it, and then it's gone again. Not only that, but subsequent experiences and random noise can color the memory each time you do. In this sense, the purest memories you have are the ones you'll never recall again.

Memory, it turns out, is extremely malleable. There are things that I recall very clearly that I simultaneously know didn't happen quite the way I remember them. We all have stories that we've been told so many times that we think we remember them, although they happened to someone else, or if it's something we didn't even witness at all. Memories don't come from a storehouse that we revisit. They're conjured anew each time we bring them to mind. So in a sense, there really is no past. (As a side note, this also means that your most influential memories -- the experiences that make you *you* -- are only stories that you tell yourself anew every time you recall them.)

Music, though, is the same every time, and that might be the key to the power it has. Songs from our past might be the only memories that haven't changed due to the passage of time, haven't dimmed or been altered in even the slightest way.

With music we love, we can see songs almost from outside time itself, knowing full well what's coming, what's happening now, and how it changes what's come before. (Personal examples: when I hear Nine Inch Nails' "All the Love in the World", the pleasant but broodingly nondescript first half is all anticipation for the shift in gears that comes at the midpoint, where the whole thing reboots and a soft, thudding bass drum and piano slowly build layer upon layer toward the titanic wall of sound at the end. Similarly, the soaring, convergent harmonies in the chorus of Hot Chip's "Take it In" wouldn't mean nearly as much if the verse that came before wasn't so discordant and almost atonal.)

I know you probably don't know these songs in particular, but maybe you get the idea, and have favorite examples of your own that you turn to over and over again, because of this intimate knowledge of their structure. In this way, music has the potential to be even better, more mentally engaging, than our own memories. (And, now that I think about it, these thoughts about being outside of a linear work of art and seeing the whole in a way that can't be done in life can be applied to storytelling of all kinds, can't it?)

-4-

I recently read a fun book called Year Zero by Robert Reid, a sci-fi tale in which the plot hinges on the fact that humans turn out to be the best songwriters in the Universe, and have unknowingly charmed all alien races with this fact. Every non-Earth being has a personal device on which has been downloaded every piece of music that humankind has ever recorded (some 25 million, in case you were wondering how many that was), and can potentially spend their entire lives combing through our terrestrial back catalog.

This got me thinking, though, about what aliens would really make of our music. What would someone with no context get out of this semi-standardized set of chords and song structures? Wouldn't it all sound pretty much the same, on a cultural level?

And that, in turn, made me realize how ingrained in us music is. The fact that we can tell the stylistic difference between singer-songwriters, when there are really only a dozen different notes and about fifty chords they typically play, is really amazing. It seems so limiting when you think about the sheer number of tone combinations that are possible. But we're so finely tuned to it. When we hear a song for the first time, we're immediately assimilating it into this vast library of archetypes... major chords are happy, minors are sad... uptempo connotes excitement, downtempo can mean somber or contemplative. And those are just two of the near-infinite shadings of meaning that music can convey, simply by comparing it to all the songs you've ever heard before and what you have learned that they represent.

So the question then becomes... do minor keys really make us feel sadness at the cellular level, or have we just been conditioned to think that they do? Does the four-note simplicity of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" really lift our spirits, or is it just the context it's been presented to us in? Is it maybe the way the human performers make it sound, telegraphing their own interpreted emotions to us? How much of the emotion we hear in music is really there, and how much of it is caused by collective emotional shorthand that we've created over time?

There's a physical aspect to it, too. The way our body registers musical vibrations and transfer them to the brain has so many steps: ear canal to eardrum, to tiny bones, to the liquid of the inner ear, to little hairs that shake and send electrical impulses to deep recesses of our brain. The patterns that those impulses form are either harmonic or dissonant. Any being with different physiology wouldn't even hear the same things we hear. How could we hope to get them to understand all the emotional associations that go with it?

So maybe music -- at least our version of it -- is a singularly human art form. It's only in the human body that it will register the way it's designed to, and all the memories it recalls will be called up from the particular arrangements of neurons, and then go back to nothing. It gives the whole process a very ethereal, magical quality.

Join Me in the Fast Lane

Yes, I'm that guy. You're on the highway, approaching a clearly marked construction zone that is going to require that everyone in the two left lanes will have to merge with each other. Per social contract, you move over into the lane that will survive the interchange... and come to a screeching halt. After a few moments of creeping along, someone comes zipping down the vacant left lane, bypassing everyone already who's gotten over, and they breeze along until the barrels force them to finally merge.

Well, that's me. And after you hear my argument as to why I do that, I'm hoping that you all will join me.

Let's kick things off by considering what highways are for. Our great nation has developed a colossal system of roads, from two to five lanes across in each direction, that can (theoretically) take us from one coast to the other, and just about anywhere else in between, without stopping. They're designed to get us all from where we are to where we need to be, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

So, when a portion of that road is blocked, and that efficiency necessarily diminished, why do we then feel the need to make the situation even worse?

Think about it: the most efficient way to keep things moving is for we people to -- within reason -- maintain their speed and utilize all the available road. If you pull over before it's necessary to, you're doing two things wrong. First of all, merely by changing lanes you're making the back-up twice as long as it needs to be. That's just math. If everyone gets over, you're filling one lane with two lanes' worth of cars. Secondly, it's an established fact that most traffic back-ups are caused (or at least made worse) by people either hitting their brakes or changing lanes. And chances are that if you have to figure out where and how you're going to get over, you're doing both of these. This usually causes the person behind you to slow down, and as things progress further back, it's more likely that the next person will have to hit their brakes harder because they don't see the situation that created the need. That's how you end up with standstills.

Now, given that there's inevitably going to be some slowdown as everyone combines lanes, wouldn't the best way to minimize that be having it occur in a pre-specified place? Like the place where the road actually runs out? Some of the scariest traffic situations I've ever seen have been caused by people just starting to realize that everyone else is getting over, so they hit their brakes and try to find a way in, so as not to break the aforementioned social contract, endangering everyone behind them with their seemingly random activity. All this jockeying and tentative "Can I go? Are you letting me over, or do you not see me?" is what creates far more problems than it solves.

So, by getting over "when you're supposed to", which I'm sure varies greatly depending on the situation (but you're intuitively supposed to know anyway), you're actually making the situation *at* *minimum* twice as bad as it needs to be. To me, there's nothing more ridiculous than a line of creeping traffic that is totally ignoring the *completely* *usable* *lane* right alongside it. We're all trying to get where we're going. Let's make the most of what we have to work with to get this to happen.

Believe me, I've completely turned around on this issue from how I used to be. I once was one of the drivers who cursed those who -- in my mind -- thought they were better than everyone else and didn't have to get over until the last second. I likened it to line-cutting, which in my mind is one of the most heinous crimes of modern life. But I've had a lot of time to think about it during the 60 miles a day I've driven to and from my job for the last year. And when you get down to the logic of it, the way we are "supposed" to handle situations like this doesn't make sense.

Say you're standing in line at the grocery store, ready to check out. There are two lanes open, but people are only using one. It's not a matter of the lane just having opened... the register is just open, the cashier standing there idle. Everyone in line for the other register sees this, but still don't get over. How much reluctance would you have in moving over and using that other register?

But still, the social contract persists against logic. I've had people honk at me as I go by -- clearly not because they think it will do anything, just from self-righteous frustration -- and then there are semi trucks that will take it upon themselves to police the closing lane, pulling into it and slowing down to the speed of the clogged lane. This is actually a step up from what usually happens, because people seem to be willing to stay in the closing lane as long as they're not first. Hooray, we're suddenly we're using two lanes again!

Look, we're all just trying to make getting from A to B as small a piece of our day as necessary. There are roads out there designed to help us do just that. But when we start imposing illogical rules on ourselves for using them efficiently, we're just slowing ourselves and everyone else down. So come into the fast lane with me. Let's keep things a-rollin', folks.

Viva La Punctuacion!

I keep coming across a quote by Kurt Vonnegut in which he professes his hatred for semicolons. He calls them "... transvestite hermaphrodites, representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." Now, as much as I enjoy and respect Kurt's work, on this he couldn't be more wrong. Not just about semicolons either; I think our whole palette of English punctuation is horribly underused. Like most aspects of English, I think people will avoid using a word or punctuation mark rather than run the risk of using it incorrectly. As a result, we end up with one of the most expressive languages on Earth that uses basically only four punctuation marks (,.?!). I say that we should do the exact opposite of what Mr. Vonnegut proposes and use *more* punctuation.

I understand the reluctance to do this. I always point it out when someone uses a word incorrectly in the grammatical sense, and it makes me physically angry when public signs use "'s" to pluralize something, or when people use double quotes when they really just mean to emphasize what they're saying. But if no one uses semicolons, colons, dashes, ellipses, and the aforementioned parentheses out of fear, what will become of them?

There's a balance that people try to strike when they write, a kind of uneasy, simultaneous allegiance to both the way people talk and the way people think. Looking back as recently as Victorian fiction, you can see how ornate the sentences are, running on, changing direction, nesting ideas inside of other ideas. I've always admired that kind of structure. They actually use the shape of the language to add to the feel of what they're saying. Paragraphs about a summer in the country can meander like a river, or a tense encounter can look as clipped on the page as it should sound.

The era where brevity is the most important thing, I think, started with the Gettysburg Address. I've read that the reason it's such a famous speech is because of the way its words are laid out. Up until that fateful day, public speeches were constructed the same as if they were meant to be read, overblown and stuffed with filler. The attitude was that sheer volume added value (or at the least the illusion of value) to the ideas contained in it. Among all the other speakers that day near a battlefield in Pennsylvania, Abraham Lincoln stepped up and gave an almost unbelievably short speech, his ideas neatly parsed out in short sentences, clear and to the point. It caught the ear, emotive and succinct, easily memorizable, and that's why we still remember what he said that day. It was the first step in an evolution that has led us, for better or worse, to the era of the sound bite.

Today, this derivative, journalistic bent has crept even into everyday fiction. The prevailing opinion is that you should walk away from the page knowing everything there is to know. It all has to be explicitly there on the page, no ambiguity or subtlety added. I blame Hemingway for popularizing this style, and James Patterson for perpetuating it in his endless parade of thrillers with half-empty pages in each 500-word-chapter.

I'm much of the mind that we need to retain a place in our psyches for old-style, more long form sentences. But we also need to infuse it with the energy and immediacy of the words that we type with our thumbs. In order to do this, we need every punctuation mark at our disposal. This is why I wonder what Vonnegut was thinking when he disparaged semicolons. He apparently didn't know what to do with them, but they add a layer of subtext that you then don't have to convey with the words themselves. Here's what I do with all these wonderful, various marks:

Semicolons: I use these when what I'm about to say explains what I just said, but I don't want to put them in separate sentences because they're so closely related. "When I was a child, I was constantly climbing trees; I couldn't get enough of feeling the cooler, higher air on my face." Isn't that so much better than splitting these two related ideas apart? If you didn't, you'd think that the writer would get the same feeling by opening up a third-story window. But no, there's something about the fact that he's specifically climbing a tree that makes you think about it differently. A semicolon has a metaphorical and literal hook to it, which links it to the next clause.

Colons: Not only do I use these for introducing lists ("We need three things from the store: bread, baloney, and a gun"), but I also use it to show how one thing leads to another, like an arrow -- which is really what the list-introduction thing is doing too -- ("The thing you have to remember is this: even Vonnegut can sometimes be full of crap.") To me, the mark itself even feels like I'm looking down on the pillars of a gateway.

Parentheses/Dashes: Both of these marks are used to add little extras and asides into the text, but are subtly different. To me, parentheses are like the edges of a hole that reveal something beneath the page, something hidden or not-so-obvious... "Greg refused to eat mashed potatoes, even in restaurants (as a child, his mother had often refused him dessert unless he had eaten them all)." Dashes, though, create a kind of pedestal to lift the words up above the rest of the text... "We ran out of the school doors -- let's go ride our bikes! -- and dashed down the street."

Ellipses: These are my favorite. Three periods in a row, that physically trail off into empty space the way sentences that end with them would if they were spoken. I use them to indicate that there's more to a story than is being told, or a conclusion is being implied that the reader has to divine for themselves: "I wasn't the only one who hated summer camp that year...". I also use it when someone is being thoughtful, and is stating a fact but maybe hasn't figured out all of what it means yet: "Maybe there's a reason people are fascinated by this...". It's the most interactive of the punctuation marks, drawing the reader in and asking them to participate in filling in what's been left unsaid.

I was reading a bilingual children's book with my daughter a few weeks ago, and we started talking about how, in Spanish, there are upside-down exclamation points and question marks at the beginning of sentences, as well as the normally oriented ones at the end. And the concept struck me as brilliant. When you have a sentence that requires being shouted or asked, shouldn't you find this out before you're done reading/saying it? This makes perfect sense. English appropriates words and phrases from other languages all the time... this is one idea we should start using right away.

My point is this: English is a fascinating patchwork of other languages, taking what works (or is particularly insightful) from elsewhere and folding it into itself, always in the process of reinvention. And I'm not just talking about the written language. Our spoken language is expanding in amazing -- and amazingly fast -- ways. At the same time, people are wringing their hands and saying (as they have every time a new form of communication comes along) that we're losing it to the Tweetering and the LOLing and emoji-ing. I say that if we want to keep our written language vibrant and alive, it's got to be able to express what we feel in a way that can also represent the way people think. That's what it's there for, after all. And that process is different now in the 21st century. So let's give English some breathing room. Forget the random rules that Vonnegut, Strunk and White have tried to foist on us, "thou shalt not split infinitives" and all that. Let's allow sentences to flow and breathe and get the hell punctuated out of them. And if an informal, texty sort of English evolves alongside a lengthier, more expressive written version, then so be it. The Japanese have been doing it since their language's inception.

Being bilingual is never a bad thing.

Thermodynamics II: Electric Boogaloo

Let me kick this essay off by saying that I have no inherent problem with Creationism as a belief. It takes many forms, from radical Young Earth believers to micro-evolutionists, and my intent here isn't to try to convince anyone or prove/disprove anything. I don't believe these theories myself, but I live with and love someone who does. So while there's disagreement, I'll defend to the death the right to say what you like, if I might paraphrase.

The one thing I can't abide, though, is misinformation. And I keep hearing the same bit of it from the more outspoken Creationist side of things. Just as there can be evolutionists who are jerks about calling Creationists stupid and wrong, the invective can flow the other way too. And when it does, the old chestnut that states that evolution defies the second law of thermodynamics usually gets pulled out. This might sound like a compelling argument to someone who isn't familiar with this scientific principle before, but it's easy to misunderstand, and this misunderstanding is what's being perpetuated.

So I'm hoping to set the record straight on this one issue, at least. I just can't watch the work of Isaac Newton and some of the other brilliant minds that have contributed to this discovery being misused this way. So here's my counter-argument...

The second law of thermodynamics states that, left to its own devices, order always runs to chaos. It's the basis for the idea of entropy. An example of this is that hot food left on the table will always move toward room temperature. Energy never spontaneously moves in the other direction. Now, some people will take this idea and extrapolate it, saying that this thermodynamic law contradicts the theory of evolution. They will ask: how can something as ordered as life start, not to mention evolve from simpler to more complex forms, all the way up to and including humans, if everything tends toward chaos? Doesn't that have to mean that some kind of divine hand is intervening, adding a counterbalancing force of some kind, in effect making an exception for us?

Well, no. They've got it right that entropy does exist everywhere and without divine intervention, no exceptions are made. But the folks who argue against evolution in this manner forget thermodynamics’ one caveat... that entropy only constantly increases within a closed system. Increasing order is possible, if there's a source of energy being applied. Life, after all, is only the redistribution of energy, changing raw material into structure, then using that structure to turn stored energy into a combination of motion and heat.

But Earth is *not* a closed system. We have a constant energy source, infusing our planet with something like 33 billion watt-hours per square mile every day. The one thing missing from their thought-experiment is the Sun. Absolutely, entropy works. But on the other hand, your food won't cool to room temperature if you keep hitting it with heat lamps. If order always ran to chaos regardless of how much energy you put into it, then we would see exceptions counter to known physics (other divine sparks) in every baby that is born, and every time a seed, dirt and sunlight turns into a blade of grass. However, that just isn't the case.

So that's one point. But it still doesn't fully explain how constantly adding energy makes it possible for life to arise naturally. Other arguments you might hear are that this happening is less likely than throwing the constituent parts of the human eye up in the air and having them land together perfectly, or watching a tornado pass through a junkyard, only to leave an assembled car in its wake.

Again, a compelling-sounding argument, but these are two wildly inaccurate analogies. Neither the human eye nor a car spontaneously came together whole, but incrementally, and every step in their creation led toward the next, more complex, step. Evolutionists believe it's the same with the start of organic life. We're not proposing that a spark of lightning in a murky pool created a little swimming creature. Not at all. What we're suggesting is that, sometime in the billions of years of history of Earth, at least one happenstance combination of organic compounds didn't get broken apart by its violent surroundings quite as quickly as its counterparts.

Those organic compounds had only a slightest of advantages of "survival" over those around them. But that was all they needed. Eventually there were more of these clumps, again found by quintillions of random molecular interactions over the course of hundreds of millions of years. And later on, a variation of this arrangement came along that worked even better. Thus began a constant process of trial and error, favoring the random designs that worked and winnowing out those that didn't. Not only did the sun provide the energy to keep these compounds interacting and floating in liquid water, but its cosmic rays also caused many small random changes that assisted the process (aka mutation). This is where the random-eye/tornado-car analogies break down. It's not a case of nature throwing random stuff together until a perfect form appears. It was a constant refinement of possibilities, building each new step on top of an earlier one. There are at least six kinds of eyes that have independently developed in the animal kingdom, which also shows that there's no one "perfect" way to do anything when it comes to biology.

Maybe part of the anti-thermodynamic crew's problem comes from the use of the word "law", and I agree with them on this one. It always makes me cringe when someone in authority calls anything scientific a "law" -- be it evolution, thermodynamics, or even gravity -- because science should never assume it has spoken the final word on anything. Case in point: One of Isaac Newton's other famous postulations is about the clockwork-like workings of gravity. His formulas worked perfectly well 99.9% of the time, until we realized that it doesn't quite account for objects that have unusually strong gravity, or are moving unusually fast. Einstein stepped in three hundred years later and course-corrected our ideas with special relativity, which solved the remaining .1%. Today we consider the theory of gravity to be complete, but it would only take one verified defiance to tell us that we have further refinements to make. This mutability is one of science's biggest strengths, and has kept us from discarding new discoveries simply because they didn't feel intuitively right. Keep what works, erase what doesn't... A sort of evolution of thought, you might say.

So those are my thoughts on these "scientific" arguments against evolution. True, there are logical ways to attack evolution, just as there are logical ways to promote Creationism, and there are even ways to combine the two. But thermodynamics just isn't one of them.

Although I have one final problem with those who promote this "contradiction", and it's really the most insidious one... who is this particular argument for, exactly? I can't imagine that a person who understands thermodynamics is going to disavow their beliefs after hearing it. This can only mean that people who parrot this argument are, knowingly, using incorrect information to reinforce something *that* *they* *themselves* *believe* to others, who probably already believe it anyway. This is an even worse crime, I think. You shouldn't need to deceive to get your point across if it's a valid one.