Life at All Costs

Today my brother Joey and I were going to Farmington from MAC (jazz ensemble had to rehearse today, despite the holiday from classes). It's not the usual route home, but we had to stop by Ironton before going home, and passing through Farmington is the best way to get there. As we traveled South on 67, about a mile outside Farmington, I saw two billboards with pro-life messages on them, spaced no further apart than a tenth of a mile.

Prolife Across America is really overdoing it, I thought. I might have dismissed the posters if their proximity had not allowed me to recognize the similarities between the two. They both feature a smiling baby's face, well-lighted against a black backdrop, and the text on both address fatherhood; one has the words A father's joy hovering over the baby's head like a gold-font halo, and the other assumes the baby's expression, giving it the exclamation, "Daddy is my hero!"

I find it interesting that a pro-life group is targeting a male audience. Partially because I am a male audience. But for more reasons than that. Why do they feel they need more support from men? Do they already have the female demographic under their sway? Are men less likely to hold pro-life sentiments, and thereby need more persuasion? Or are men more likely to favor pro-life stances, and the dual-poster barrage is intended to rally the base of pro-lifers? I still can't grasp the odd, redundant placement of the two billboards.

I've seen the exact same sign in Park Hills.

But seeing them so close together made me consider their arguments, and finally I realized the underlying correlation uniting the two signs, along with every pro-life poster ever! They appeal to emotion, attempting to discourage abortion by implying unwilling mothers would be killing a baby that could have been a doctor, or a lawyer, or a billboard model. I had a heart before I was born! one baby apparently proclaims. What happened to yours? is the implication. 

Some even go so far as to say that, because ethnic minorities are more prone to abortions, black (or Latino) children are in more danger inside their mother's womb than they are in impoverished homes on gang-ridden streets.

Assuming the figures are correct, 37% of 12% means less than 5% of Missouri's African Americans have abortions.*

And that's what bothers me about pro-life arguments. Emphasizing the stages of an embryo's development guilt-trip the population into thinking abortion is an act of murder. This is especially dangerous when aimed at ethnic minorities living in poverty where the last thing they need is to raise a child they can't properly support. Appealing to the fatherhood instinct in men works to empower patriarchal dominance and thereby taking control of a woman's body away from the woman. Not to mention references to God as the final authority on abortion manipulate a population's religious convictions to advance a political agenda (I'm not a big fan of that).

Even the name of the position--pro-life--implies that those opposed favor baby-slaughter while enabling its proponents to don an air of self-righteousness. 

In an abortion-free world, babies are in such abundance you can adopt them right out of a box!**

Southeastern Missouri probably isn't the buckle of the Bible Belt, but I'm sure it's only few holes away. I'm therefore accustomed to an abundance of anti-abortion arguments. What I'm not used to seeing is people challenging the flaws in pro-life logic. It's easy to oppose baby-killing, if you believe that's all abortion is. What takes some effort is asking yourself, Why would someone choose abortion? Should a woman have to raise a child during an unstable time in her life? Those who are pro-choice are not anti-life. No one is. Pronouncing yourself as pro-choice is more like saying,

"I am pro-life, but only when I am ready."

Why can't that be on a billboard?

*Computation aside, all those percentages are meaningless because the total population and the number of abortions is unknown; therefore, they have no frame of reference. Ahh, statistics!

**Too far?

The Book of Meme

As an ardent Twitterer, I take great pleasure in the use of the hashtag. I like using the ones on the top trends, but every so often I like to devise my own in the hopes they will catch on and trend worldwide. 


But when you have 160 followers on a social network with more than 300 million users, this is asking quite a lot. Still, I have some hashtags in mind that I just know would trend if I had enough followers, or would at least generate a really good response. My most recent concoction is #TheBookOfMeme, in which the idea is to take a Bible verse and splice it with an Internet meme. I thought the results would be comic gold, but after two response-less tweets with the hashtag, I figured it was just best to stow it away and bring it back when (and if) I have more followers.


I also decided that, since I like this hashtag so much and didn't want the thought I put into it go to waste, I would share with you the tweets I would have tweeted had it been more popular. Enjoy!


In the beginning, God accidentally everything. #TheBookOfMeme


"If you are the Son of God," the devil said to Jesus, "Y U NO TURN THESE STONES TO BREAD?" #TheBookOfMeme


And then Peter said, "i think Jesus is a pretty cool guy. eh dies for you're sins and doesn't afraid of anything." #TheBookOfMeme


Life begins when babby is formed. #TheBookOfMeme


Then the Lord opened the donkey's mouth and she spoke to Balaam, thus becoming the first advice animal. #TheBookOfMeme


"so i herd u liek apple," the serpent said to Eve. #TheBookOfMeme


It may not be popular now, but I think it has a lot of potential. Maybe it's more for the Reddit community, though.

Where I Live

Blatantly ripping off my friend Emily who shares a Creative Nonfiction class with me, but I haven't posted anything in a while, so I say it's okay. We recently read an excerpt from Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck and were told to mimic the style. Emily posted her version of "Where I Live," so I felt it was only fair to share mine. No shame in that, right?

Where I Live

1. I live at my computer. It sits on my desk, which is situated so I can tilt my head up and look outside the only window in my bedroom. I tend to look from one window to the other, seeing an organic world outside one and an interconnected world inside the other. From my computer I do homework, talk to my friends, and learn what’s happening in the world. Occasionally, I eat meals there, and I’ve even been known to sleep with my head resting on the keyboard. When I do this, I usually wake up to find a sun shyly peeking over the mountain out one window and an unfinished essay (accompanied by a long chain of kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk, lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll,sssssssssssssssssssssssssss, or some other home row letter) inside the other.

2. I live on the Internet. My browser even saves my usual hangouts: Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Mineral Area College’s home page, and Sputnikmusic.com. When I want to laugh, I read a webcomic. When I want to learn, I search Google. When I want to say something, I go to... well, that depends on what I want to say. If I want to say something mildly personal, or if I have a witty remark, I tell Twitter—a task I used to reserve for Facebook, which I now only go to if I want to say something that will get some likes. Twitter is practically an extension of my brain. I think in tweets now. Yesterday my friend Jenn was showing my the theater campus at SEMO, including the part of the scene shop’s ceiling where someone actually wrote the word gullible. Like that joke kids used to pull on each other in middle school. I reached for my cell phone to take a picture. “This will make an awesome tweet,” I told Jenn, and then thought to myself, “I’ll tweet it with the caption ‘You’ll never believe what someone wrote on the ceiling. My followers will love it.” Nobody replied to it, nobody re-tweeted it, and nobody favorited it. I go to Twitter to talk to others, to tell jokes. It’s like I told the joke to myself.

3. Good thing I also live at MAC, where I can actually talk to people, in person. Because of my active involvement in the college’s theater program, I have two choices: drive to MAC for classes, come back home, and drive back for play practices, or drive to MAC and stay there after classes are done and wait for rehearsals to start. It’s easier just to live there.

4. Having said that, I do live in my car, despite trying to spend as little gas money as possible. On any given day, I spend at least an hour in my car in transit (my house is half an hour away from everything). I listen to more music in my car than I do anywhere else. It’s got a decent radio, and when I got bored with the local stations I can plug in my iPod and listen to my own music library until I get bored of it and switch to the radio. I probably sing in my car more than I do anywhere else, too.

5. Well, maybe not. I live in my trailer (it’s separate from my actual house), which is where I keep my guitar and amplifier. The trailer is far enough away from the house that I can crank it up as loud as I want, and sing as loud (and/or terribly) as I want. The trailer is quiet. It’s not like Twitter and Facebook, where always has something to say, and it’s not like my car, where I have to turn up the volume to drown out the sound of wind roaring against my car at sixty miles per hour. Yes, the trailer is quiet. And I like it. It lets me think. I can fill it with my own noise, or just enjoy the lack thereof. It’s great for pacing back and forth and just... thinking. It’s the only place I live that’s quiet enough for that. And it’s a good place to sleep (which I’ve been known to do).

On Writing My "Why Teach?" Essay

I have to write a short essay about why I want to be a teacher in my Foundations of Education class. But, I'm having a hard time admitting that I'm going into teaching because I'm afraid I wouldn't make it as a writer. Or an actor. Or a musician. Or anything else.

Should I leave that out of the paper?

A Stupid Little Update, Plus A Challenge

I feel like I'm making a high school MySpace blog post with this one, but I'm seriously in the mood for writing about what I've been into lately. As you might know, school started up for me this week, and this is how I've been surviving it.

Music I'm Listening To
End Measured Mile by Make Do and Mend
Grey Britain by Gallows
Death is Birth by Gallows
Let's Talk About Feelings (re-issue) by Lagwagon

Books I'm Reading
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I used some of my Christmas money to finally get some new music, which I'm glad I did. Now that classes at MAC have started up for me, I have a lot of time to listen to that music while driving to and from school. Gallows really satisfies my craving for some quality hardcore, and since Grey Britain is such a good album, I'll probably come back to it over and over again when I feel like listening to something on the heavier side of punk. Death is Birth is good, too, despite featuring an entirely new singer. Even for EP standards it's pretty short (four songs totaling 7-and-a-half minutes, one of them literally under 40 seconds), but it demonstrates how well the band is adapting to losing their previous front man Frank Carter (who carried a lot of weight in the band's songwriting) and welcoming their new one (who used to sing for Alexisonfire). Death is Birth has an uncharacteristically berserk feel for the band, but what that tells me is that the band isn't going to chase Frank Carter's shadow--rather, they're accepting the loss and taking on a new direction.

But for now, I'm done boring you with my tedious opinions about music, haha. Instead, I want to bore with something that came up while I was reading Tuesdays with Morrie (which I'm really liking, a bit to my surprise). While the main focus of the book is about Mitch Albom revisiting his old college professor Morrie Schwartz on his death bed, there are occasional flash backs to Mitch's college courses with Morrie. In one such flashback, Morrie convinces Mitch to write an honors thesis. Despite Mitch's initial hesitation, he eventually writes a 112-page thesis on how football has become ritualistic in American society.

Hold the phone, I thought. One hundred and twelve pages? I've never written anything even close to that length. Even my semester-long research paper for Comp 2 was little more than eight pages when I finished it, and that was the biggest writing assignment I've ever had. To me right now, it seems insane to write anything beyond 15 pages. It scares me to even think of it. I'm too accustomed to 3-5 page essays, a usual requirement for my college courses. But I realize if I want to be a better writer, I'm gonna have to write more than simple essays someday. Suppose I decide to write a novel? Can't very well fit one of those into 3-5 pages of intro-body-conclusion, can I? And what if I want to write short stories? Some of F. Scott Fitzgerald's best are well over 20 pages (at least in the compilation I've been reading).

So that's how I came up with this challenge. This year, I'm going to write something longer than anything I've ever written. In this case, it means I have to write something longer than 8 pages, so for now I'm shooting for 10. And after that, I'm going to write something longer yet. And I'll keep going until 112 pages doesn't seem like such a horrifying task.

As long as I've dragged out this blog post, I'm probably not off to a bad start, haha. One more thing before I wrap it up, though: I do want to say that I'm getting more out of Tuesdays with Morrie than dwelling over one detail completely inconsequential to the story's plot. I admire Morrie's outlook on life through the lens of death, and I wish more people would examine their lives as though they were dying. I know death is normally a morbid topic, but I think bearing your death in mind brings you closer to actually living. I think that's what Morrie is trying to teach Mitch, but I still have half the book to read.

People You May Know (Or Not)

"Add this person, you have 17 mutual friends!" Facebook tells me. But is that really a lot? I mean, 17 friends in common is only about 5% of my 300+ Facebook friends, and an even smaller percentage of her 600+ friends. Facebook recommends I add a lot of people I've never even met just because we have more than two mutual friends. And half the friend requests I get nowadays are from people I'm not eve sure I know--I have little doubt it's because people flip through their recommendations and add anyone with a seemingly large amount of common friends.

Facebook could curb such confusing instances if it based those friend recommendations on percentage of mutual friends, not just the number itself. For instance, it makes sense to recommend someone who shares 47% of your friend list, doesn't it? That could be hundreds of users, depending on your activity on the site. But what about someone who shares 47 of the 1028 friends on your list? That isn't even 5% common friends. What's even the point of saying you might know each other? Why doesn't Facebook skip the recommendation and find someone with higher percentage chance of you knowing them?

Of course, the percentage system isn't perfect. What may be only a handful of friends on your list could very well be half of someone else's. That's really the biggest problem with basing recommendations off of percentage of mutual friends: users with hundreds of friends could possibly see fewer recommendations than those who are new to the site or those who are stingy with the Add Friend button. And the likelihood of users finding it harder to expand their friend list after it grows beyond a certain point poses a great threat to a site that feeds off user connectivity as voraciously as Facebook does.

I suppose that's why Facebook bases friend recommendations on number of friends in common, though. =/

Messages Unsent

I made it a new year's resolution to write more often, thinking that I hadn't done enough during 2011, outside the writing required for classes. But writing is more than pencil and paper. I looked at my phone's drafts folder, where it saves text messages I type up but never send, and it turns out there are quite a few. They're mostly ideas for tweets that don't turn out as funny or witty as I intend, or one-liners for songs/poems I want to remember for later. Others are just thoughts and oddities I should write more to. Point is, I wrote more than I expected, even if it wasn't in my usual medium.

So, I thought I'd share a few of these drafts with you. Enjoy!

Songs that sound ineresting: An American Elegy, To Challenge the Sky and Heavens Above, Shenandoah by Frank Ticheli, The Whistler and His Dog

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A pastor doing cartwheels. That's hilarious.

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"If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it." ~Matt Taibbi, on Occupy Wall Street

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URGENT: Do NOT walk past band room between 1 and 2. Nick Shannon encounters imminent.

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Overheard at MAC: "Junkyards are so existential."

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11:11 is for people who can't count. It's their favorite time because it's all ones.

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>People playing music from their phones and singing along to it.

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Reminder: draw a P.O. Box

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For some context, the songs that sound interesting are pieces of music I filed while working at MAC, and P.O. is supposed to stand for pissed off. I later drew a picture of a box yelling at the world. Yeah.

Also, mini tangent rant, I put the > < signs before the phrase, like in the ">People playing music..." draft. That's the way I first saw it done. Now I see tweets and Facebook updates like "Stepping out of a hot shower into a cold room<" where the signs come after the phrase. To me, it looks STUPID that way. I don't know why it started being done the other way around, but it needs to stop. Thank you.

To end this on a better note, I did get my hands on some new(ish) music. I got a Best Buy gift card for Christmas, and I spent some of it on the re-issue of Lagwagon's album Let's Talk About Feelings. Here's a track from it I've really been digging.