What Should I Get For Christmas?
Every year, I make a big ol’ Greed List for Christmas, listing every consumer good I am currently lusting after. This is partially in the hopes that I shall be rewarded with presents, and partially because it’s an interesting way of charting my hobbies over the years.
And usually, at the core of that Greed List, are one or two big splashy items that the family can get me: Rock Band Drums, a straight razor shaving set, a king-sized bed.
This year? I can’t think of anything.
Oh, I mean, I can: I’d kind of like to have an XBox One – which, yes, I’ve railed about in the past. But though I wouldn’t want to buy an XBox One because I don’t think it’s currently worth the money, in my mind having one gifted to me is a separate experience. Yet there’s a better-than-even chance that the XBox One will be the loser in this particular console exchange, given the Playstation 4’s selling a million units on day one, and there aren’t any particularly compelling games for the console, either. So I’d be asking for a new shiny thing, at a pretty big cost, that might well turn out to be a regret. (The same could be said of purchasing the Playstation 4, which I’m hesitant to do because I have all of these Achievements on my XBox 360.)
And what I was hoping would be my Big Splashy Gift this year would be Google Glass, which I’m still ridiculously excited about… but the jerks at Google didn’t release it in time. (And if I’m balking at $500 for an XBox One, I’m not going to try for the $1500 of some beta version of the hardware bought on eBay.)
And the more I think about it, the more it seems weird not having a big-ticket item at the heart of Christmas. Because while my Amazon Wish List has been filled with all sorts of books I want to read lately, thanks to my new podcasting habits, if I got all the books on my Amazon list then I’d probably never read half of them. I have a bookshelf which I’ve narrowed down to “Books I’m so excited to read,” and I feel overwhelmed by the handful of unread tomes there as it is. So I’ve been reading a couple of books from there, then ordering a few – and having all the books I’m considering arrive at once would probably have some very good books lost in an avalanche as more new books came out.
I dunno. I feel like I should want one big thing on Christmas, some large-scale purchase that Gini and Mom and Dad can get me and then fill around the edges with two or three smaller purchases. But what the hell would that be? The industry’s let me down this year, and I can’t think of anything in the $400 range that would be sufficiently awesome.
It feels weird. I’ve had a Big Splashy on every Christmas list since I was a kid. And now, nothing. I mean, it’s the definition of a first-world problem and I acknowledge that, but it does take the edge off of Christmas to know that nothing in particular will be waiting for me beneath the tree.
Story Sale! "The Sturdy Bookcases of Pawel Oliszewski," to Intergalactic Medicine Show!
Once a year, I live-write stories to raise funds for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Most of those stories are like most of my stories in that I write a rough draft, decide the effort of revising them would be too much effort, and put them in a drawer forever. (This is not wasted effort; I’ve learned valuable lessons writing those stories.) But in this case, I not only wrote the story, but wrote all four drafts of it live, before an audience.
The end result is a rather quirky tale about a man who did some rather strange woodworking: “The Sturdy Bookcases of Pawel Oliszewski.” People who’ve joined the Clarion Echo have occasionally asked me, “So did that one ever get published? I liked that.” And so I’m pleased to report that Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show has purchased noble Pawel’s tale, for publication later this month. This is a pro market I’ve wanted to crack for quite some time, and so I’m particularly thrilled to add it to my roster.
(Fun fact: I sold another story in the same week to another pro market I’ve wanted to crack for some time – but I don’t announce sales before I get the contract, and this one will be sometime in May. Also, in that case, the story I sold is so hideously dark and scarring I’m actually wondering if they’re not going to yank acceptance of it before publication, because it’s literally the most upsetting thing I’ve ever written. But that was a pretty good week, I gotta tell ya.)
I’d give you the inevitable sample of my story, but it’s probably going to be live in the next two weeks, so why bother you twice? Though given the story’s topic, it would be appropriate…
It Is Wrong To Feed The Dog Chocolate
If someone was feeding their dog chocolate, I’d tell them they were wrong to do so. Mainly because chocolate will kill a dog.
Note that they do not have to be aware of the doggie deadliness of chocolate in order to be wrong about this. The dog will be just as sick, even if they had no idea that chocolate would hurt poor Fido. They can do wrong and be completely oblivious to it until someone tells them otherwise.
Now, when I say someone’s “wrong” to give that Hershey’s to the begging puppy, I’m making some large assumptions – mainly, that they enjoy the dog and wish to keep it alive. If their goal is to hurt a dog, then feeding chocolate is the absolute right thing to do, as is to stop reading me forever because I’ll hurt you if that’s your goal. But regardless, I’m just sort of assuming that the well-being of the dog is mixed in to whatever they’re trying to do.
Now, I got a fair amount of pushback on my entry on the messy girlfriend and the boyfriend who had yet to tell her how stressed out all her clutter was making him feel, mainly from folks saying, “He didn’t tell her! She’s not wrong, just ill-informed.”
No. I’m assuming that her goal is “to stay in a long-term relationship with her boyfriend,” and if so, then cluttering the house is hurting their relationship. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t mean to do that, or that she has no clue that she’s doing it; as I said, intent is not a magic wand. You can feed the dog chocolate and totally intend to give the dog a treat, but the dog’s still hurt. And her clutter is making her partner feel threatened and bad.
Now, assuming her boyfriend’s goal is also “to stay in a long-term relationship,” then he’s also wrong for not telling her, “Hey, this really bugs me to the point where it’s starting to interfere with my happiness,” because it’s not gonna go well if he hides his feelings all the time and doesn’t give her proper feedback. But that’s not really my point here.
My point is that “not knowing she’s doing a bad thing” doesn’t make her behaviors correct. If I’m deep in a programming problem and Gini interrupts me, I may be snappish and hurt her feelings without even realizing it. In that case, I’m wrong. If I’m trying to fix a water heater and shut off all the valves so it builds up to a fatal explosive pressure, I’m wrong to do so even if I have no idea how harmful that is.
You can be wrong without being aware you’re wrong – in fact, that is usually the case.
And of course many people will tell me that I’m wrong, because the proper word is not “wrong” but some other term like “incorrect” or “mistake” or “at fault” or some other term. And the problem is that there is no universally-accepted word for “doing something dangerously harmful to your goals, but unintentionally.” Trust me. I’ve been blogging on relationships for years. If I’d used the term you’d suggested, some other person would have kicked up a fuss because I didn’t use their term, or thought the term I did use was unclear… mainly because too many people link “bad thing” with “awareness” as though you can’t hurt anyone until you know what it is you’re doing.
What’s important, however, is that you understand the concept: “You do not need to be aware of your mistake to be making a large mistake.” You can feed the dog chocolate. Your intent will not help the dog survive. And that behavior is, for whatever term you choose to use, very much at odds with what you probably want to have happen.
Shasta's Breed, Revealed!
If you’ll recall, our dog Shasta is a rescue – and a bit of a mystery. But thanks to the Wisdom DNA Panel, which allows you to send a sample of your dog’s cheek cells off for reading, we have been waiting anxiously for two weeks to know what Shasta is.
If you’ll also recall, Shasta is sixteen pounds and looks like this:
Theories have ranged from Chihuahua to Miniature Pinscher to Spitz to Idris Elba. But the report is in, for those of you who’d like to download it, and the official tally is:
Mutt.
But assuming that’s not enough for you, the official official breakdown is:
Beagle / Miniature Pinscher / Shiba Inu mix.
…seriously? Look at that face. Do you see beagle? I do not. And a Shiba Inu is a big fluffy poofy dog, and Shasta is small and wiry. Which just goes to show you how genetics is weird, because heck, you throw all those three in the bin and wind up with something that every vet was positive was mostly chihuahua, but as it turns out there are only trace elements of chihuahuaness in our dog.
But seriously. If you’ve got a dog and $65 to throw about, download that PDF and check it out. It’s pretty detailed, and it’s a nice way to waste some money if you’re curious about your dog’s ancestry. Thanks so much to Jocelyn Perkins for sending me her dog’s results, which convinced me to get Shasta’s.
…beagle. Beagle? Beagle.
The Lazy Unemployed
When I was growing up, I knew a handful of kids who didn’t want to work. And they didn’t. They sponged off of the largess of the rich, skating through school doing the least possible work, getting arrested, doing drugs. And when they came of age, they didn’t work at all. They just had their parents fly them to Aspen, or send them to party colleges.
It was a tragic sight to see.
Meanwhile, my lower-class buddies struggled like hell to get by. The sons of truckers and store clerks told me, flat-out, “I will not go on unemployment.” And they didn’t, though they had to take some pretty shitty jobs to get by.
The reason I say this is that a recent study has showed there’s no connection between the benefits someone receives from the government and their desire to work. None. And yet there’s all this fury over the lazy poor, sucking cash from the government, as though the poor are poor because they’re lazy.
No. I’ve known some lazy people in my time, and there’s no laziness like a heritage kid with a room full of videogames.
Fact is, some percentage of every group are lazy. Has nothing to do with wealth, which is often – not always, but often – a function of luck. The lazy rich kids are still a drain on private society, from parents who usually come to loathe them, but they remain a drain.
The point is that laziness is not the same as poverty. Nor does laziness cause poverty. Some of the hardest-working people I’ve known were single mothers working three crappy jobs to try to stitch together enough funds for an apartment, and okay, Mister CEO, maybe you also put in sixteen-hour days but I bet those days aren’t spent unpacking trucks. In my experience, the poor are a lot less lazy than the rich, because you really can’t afford to be that lazy when you’re poor.
And none of that’s to say we shouldn’t try to weed out the people gaming the system for government benefits. We should. But there’s a perception that the majority of those poor people are all naturally trying to sponge off the rich, mainly because we know poor people are lazy, and the government is an easy way for lazy people to get money, and as such we’d better crack down on these bastards because the sooner we kick the legs out from under them the stronger they’ll be.
No. Some poor people are lazy. Some rich people are lazy. The sooner you internalize that poverty is not synonymous with laziness, the better you’ll actually help poor people. Assuming that is your goal.