Julia wants me to write this.

I have the word “reality” in the title of this blog, but it occurs to me that I look at the concept of what is “real” in a bit of an eccentric way.

Many people say “real”, without thinking, to mean “physically existing.” For example, if I tell you about my friend Julia, and someone asks me “is she real?” they are probably asking me whether she is a person I meet and talk to, not whether there exists a concept that I label “my friend Julia”. Even more extreme is those people who differentiate between something that happened on the internet and something that happened to them in person by saying that the offline event happened “in real life” (or “IRL”).

The more I live, the less I make this distinction. To me, “real” is a term that means that something exists in some way. Love is real. Mercy is real. Curiosity is real. Beauty is real. We perceive these things, and therefore they are real (even if someone else might not perceive them in the same object, or at all.) Yet they are, I might argue, less physical than something that happened on the Internet. And, subjective as they are, they are as real as the concept in my head that is “my friend Julia”. They are also as real as the physical person of Shakespeare, as the latter has long since ceased to physically exist; yet because he lived once and because we collectively have memories of the things he has done, we call him real.

What is the most real of all things? Existence itself. And existence is not only what is physical; it is also our perception. If humour and grief exist, if the colour orange exists, if our own identities exist, then we must admit our perceptions to be part of existence. To me, that makes them real.

So even if my friend Julia turns out to be someone I completely made up for the sake of this example, she is real, because you and I are sharing the perception of a friend named Julia. Moreso if I use her as an example often; if I find this concept to be useful, if I like the idea, if other people start envisioning her in their minds– all of these things will reinforce her importance to me and to anyone else who reads this. And the more important she is, the more we think about her, the more this concept exists strongly and powerfully in our minds, the more this concept becomes real. And then, even if she is not a person physically going around being human, there is a very real “friend named Julia”– that friend just happens to be a concept rather than a physical girl. But is she a real girl? Certainly so, conceptually.

And even if it’s true that I met Julia on the internet rather than in college, she is every bit as real. To think that what happens on the internet has no reality is preposterous. I am, fairly obviously, a human being (did you think this entry was generated by a computer?) and so, I trust, are you. I am saying things and you are reading them. This affects us both. Is that effect imaginary? No, I’d say it’s quite real. However you are reacting to what I’m saying right now is real. (Even if no one reads this, I am imagining a hypothetical reader reacting, and that concept is real, as a concept.) You and I may not know each other from Adam, but just because we are strangers does not make us any less real, and nor does it make our interaction somehow imaginary. I often think that the failure to parse the internet as a real place is what causes a lot of trolling, flames, and other rude internet behaviour: the callous person’s rejoinder is often “lol, this person takes the internet way too seriously”, but why would anyone take human interaction any less than seriously? The word “callous” is carefully chosen here, being the antonym of “sensate”: a callous person has forgotten to sense reality and notice the truth– that there is a real exchange taking place between living human people, and that that is just as serious as the meeting of any two strangers. (Of course, if they think that no interaction between strangers can ever be serious, then they are insensate in a different way.)

So what do I mean when I ask you to “embrace the warm facts of reality”? I mean for you to embrace the warm facts that exist. Whether these come from the world around you, or from interactions between you and others, or from inside of you, or even from the idle fancies of your own mind, I want you to hold them close to yourself and remember how beautiful they are. I want you to bask in all of those things that you find positive and pleasant, to cling to them and never forget how precious they are. I want you to not dismiss anything that makes you happier, however trivial, even if you’ve made it up. I want you to know and care about and spend your precious life thinking about things that fulfil you, and I don’t want you to push any of them aside because you are afraid that they are unimportant, figments of your imagination, or dreams that might not come true. I want you to love what makes you happy, because it is the best way to spend your life.

Oh, and my friend Julia thinks so too.

Wonderful thoughts to sidetrack me from complaints

I have been not so well lately. I have every reason to be in a bad mood: I’m tired, I’m feeling nauseous, my sleep cycle is a wreck, and my seasonal allergies are acting up on top of all that.

But I have cats. I’m not in a bad mood, because every morning I wake up to the two most adorable kittycats ever to roam the earth (okay, so I might be a little biased, but they’re certainly in the running.) I usually have a kitty snuggled up by my head and one on my feet, possibly taking up half the bed, and being so cute at it that I can’t bear to push her aside. And all day long, the cats will follow me around and sit next to me and snuggle with me, and they’ll meow for attention and get underfoot if I’m walking about.

All it takes is my cats. Or– if I’m not at home– a pretty photo from the internet, or an unexpected donut day at work, or seashell windchimes, or a particularly nice shade of green, or anything else that I like. Each of these things is a wonder in itself, a beautiful thing that didn’t have to happen, but because the world is full of beautiful things, it did.

In the past, I would brush these things aside: sure, I got a free donut, but now I have to go do chores, and I’m feeling sick, and these pants are wrinkled so why did I wear them, complain, complain. I would mentally complain to myself about all of the things that weren’t right, thinking that if I focused on the things that were wrong, I could then make them better. And while there was some merit to that thought, focusing so much on all the things that needed to be fixed meant that I never had time to enjoy the things that didn’t need to be fixed.

I would say to myself: well, of course this thing is bothering me; it’s a hindrance, a problem; if it weren’t getting in the way of my enjoying other things, then it wouldn’t be a bother. And then I would feel justified in fretting about the problem until it got fixed, on the theory that anything particularly bad would make me keep on thinking about it. But I forgot to realise the other half: anything particularly good would make me think about it, too. It wouldn’t be an enjoyable thing if it weren’t brightening my day and making me forget about my gripes. It makes every bit as much sense to be distracted by the good things as the bad ones.

So that’s it. Instead of thinking about all the bad things that didn’t have to happen to me, I’m going to think about all the good things that didn’t have to happen– and yet somehow, marvellously, did. I will let those things sidetrack me and take up my attention, because that is what especially good things do. What are the odds that I would have come to exist and be so privileged as to get to see ducks in the pond while I was out today? Yet it happened, and that is nothing short of truly amazing.

What’s wrong with punishment

The day before the execution of Saddam Hussein, I remember hearing a newscaster say something that I don’t think I can ever forget. I have a terrible memory for events and for quotes, but when I heard her say this, it chilled me.

She said: “There will be full justice. Not just partial justice, but full justice.” She was referring to the fact that he was to be executed, not just jailed. I was squirming in my seat after I heard that. I wish I could say she is wrong– but I can’t, because I don’t know that she is wrong; I can only say what I think.

I don’t think an execution can ever be justice. For one thing, people are prone to saying “well, he killed others, so now we’ll kill him.” But even in that eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth system, it’s not justice and never will be– he killed too many people for that, and we can only take one life from him; it’s not enough, nor is the suffering of anyone who would mourn him enough, to make up for what he’s done. That’s more like “a tooth for a mouthful of teeth.” That’s not justice; there’s no way that taking his life would ever equal the things he did; there’s no justice ever to be had, in that sense, towards a person who’s done as much as he’s done.

But quite aside from that, and compounding it, there’s also the issue that I can’t imagine an execution being a fair thing to do to anyone. I think an execution is the worst thing I can imagine. Counting the days, the minutes, the seconds of life, I could only imagine the sorrow as each last thing passes. What would you do when you’d never see night again, when you’d never see sun, when you knew that this meal was your last? How could you stand that knowledge? How hard could you possibly focus on each thing you did, the amount of smiles or breaths you had left in you before you died? I would hyperventilate feeling each breath, and I’d be sad that I couldn’t see more. I would fall apart at the last minute just knowing I’d never again see a kittycat or a tree, never taste strawberry or read a book, never again. Even the amount of suffering and fear I’d feel just from the anticipation, that alone is more than I could fairly wish on any human being no matter what they’d done. I just can’t stand the fact that executions happen. And to hear someone call it justice, as if it were a matter of fact– someone like a newscaster who is well-spoken and authoritative enough that many people may find themselves nodding their heads, thinking, that makes sense, without really thinking it over carefully– made me sad.

I don’t see how anyone could ever equate Saddam’s crimes with his execution and call that fair and just. Regardless of whether they’re viewing things as tit-for-tat, or as “a non-cruel-and-unusual punishment fitting the crime”, I can’t imagine any scenario, any worldview, any definition of “justice,” in which an execution is a fair and fitting end that corresponds with the crime. Calling it “justice” seems to me like writing it all off: writing off the horror of causing another thinking, feeling creature to cease to be, and writing off that there is never, has never been, and will never be a punishment that fits this crime, except perhaps to make him understand the horror of what he’s done, which we can’t make happen.

But I suppose what tops it all off the most is that I don’t think punishment itself is right. Confining people so that they can’t commit a crime again, that I can consent to, to keep things safe. But doing so with a view to punishing people, that I can’t consent to, and never will. If we put someone in jail, it shouldn’t be a punishment, it should be a safety measure. If we had to execute someone, it should be a safety measure. It should never be a punishment. There is no such thing as “just deserts.” People do things for their own reasons, and we might all agree that they’re bad reasons, and even the people who did those things might agree that they did it for bad reasons and that they were wrong and that they should never have done those things, but even if so, even if people intentionally commit atrocities, punishing them isn’t the answer. Hurting someone does not take away all the hurt and wrong they’ve caused. I don’t think that a punishment is an appropriate response to anything. Stopping the wrongdoing is appropriate; punishing is not. We, as human beings, should all try our hardest to make life better for everyone, collectively, and that means stopping the wrongdoing, but it doesn’t mean causing even a tad more suffering than we have to in order to make things safe for others. When we try to “punish” people, that’s causing suffering for the purpose of causing suffering, and that to me is wrong.

Punishment is a socially acceptable way of expressing how deeply we were hurt by something, and I think we want to express it, especially to the criminal, because we do feel that the most appropriate thing is to show criminals what they’ve done so clearly that they can’t help but feel guilt and remorse. That is why “an eye for an eye” makes sense to people; that is why when people are outraged they want to hurt whoever was responsible in equal measure, out of hope that the criminal will finally realise the gravity of what they’ve done. Part of the problem with this is that it’s not very logical; we can’t know that the criminal will feel at all the same as the injured party did. There’s really no way to make someone feel the guilt that they should feel. But the other problem is that we are inflicting something other than guilt; we are inflicting injury, and it is no more fair for us to injure someone else just to make them understand what they’ve done than it was for them to injure others in the first place. After all, those who commit crimes already feel subjectively wounded. Anger and hate aren’t pleasant things to feel, and they are denying themselves the peace that they need.

Since I’m trying to think positively in this blog and elsewhere in my life, since I’m trying not to be cynical and hopeless about anything when I can help it, I’m going to try to find something good in all of this: at least my hearing about the execution provided me a chance to review and clarify my feelings about punishment and crime. Until I started refining my thoughts with respect to this incident, I knew that I was not in favour of severe punishment in general, but I did not realise how strongly I felt that it was wrong to harm another person unnecessarily, even in the name of “justice”. I have been able to sort out my feelings on the matter a little more clearly since then, and I understand my feelings that the idea that people ought to be punished springs from a social agreement that we can express our anger about what’s happened to us by inflicting harm on the criminal. I think I understand some of the logic behind why people insist on punishment, even though the logic that I can understand seems twisted and invalid. Knowing what my own views are and how they differ from other common viewpoints is always a useful thing, and so at least one bit of good, however small, has come out of the situation– something good of which I am the beneficiary, so I myself had better contemplate and enjoy it, in order that it not be lost.

The best lesson is caring, not scaring.

Let me tell you a tale of two signs.

I’m talking of the sort of signs found outside of churches, with changeable letters– often displaying sermon themes, Bible passages, or invitations to bake sales. Where I live, you can hardly drive down a road for long without seeing one, although the church denominations are at least diverse– and display some quite different angles on religion.

The first sign I want to mention, on a wooden mailbox across the road from a church, stood by a beautifully painted house. Its message: JESUS HAS THE RECIPE SO YOU DON’T BBQ FOREVER. I did a doubletake when I saw this sign. Perhaps it was because of the sinister implication I thought of first: that Jesus had a recipe to make something better than BBQ when he eats you. But aside from that disturbing misreading, there was still something that made me read it as a threat. The full thrust of this sign was fear, making Christians afraid that if they don’t follow the exact steps in the recipe, they would be tortured for all eternity.

I thought: surely this sign is not going to make anyone happier. It can’t be comforting to be reminded that God is judging you and that one false step, one little substitution in the “recipe”, means eternal agony. It brings up the looming threat of hell, by way of mentioning that, oh, if you’re super-careful, it won’t actually happen. Although it talks about how not to go to hell, its only offer of consolation is to perhaps make you a little less afraid of the very thing that it just reminded you about. If it hadn’t reminded you in the first place, you wouldn’t be thinking about hell and you wouldn’t need the consolation. All in all, it’s a pretty scary sign, reminding people of the most negative aspect of their religion, reinforcing their fears.

The second sign was outside a plain brick church, one which frequently updates their sign with optimistic messages about helping one’s community. This sign read: GOD IS MORE POWERFUL THAN YOUR WORST FEAR. Assuming of course a benevolent god, as Christianity does, this is a reassuring sort of message: whatever happens to you, God is still even greater than that. It doesn’t remind you of anything to be afraid of; rather, it tells you that anything you already are afraid of, don’t worry; there’s something bigger and better and more important than it is.

I couldn’t help but think that I wish the person responsible for the BBQ sign would take a lesson from this hope-giving church. I’m not Christian, so perhaps I shouldn’t speak for Christianity, but I was always told as a child that Christians believe in a benevolent, loving, forgiving god; someone to comfort you, not to instil fear. Wouldn’t a good god want you to feel secure and happy, rather than constantly looking over your shoulder for Satan and worrying over whether you’re following all the proper steps to the letter? Wouldn’t he love you and let you trust your judgment a little to know how to do the right thing, instead of giving you a laundry list of “how to stay out of hell”? If anyone in this picture would want you to fear, it would be Satan, who is said to take pleasure in people’s suffering, not God, who is supposed to love you so much.

No matter what you believe about God or Satan or heaven or hell, my question for you is: would it make sense for a kind and caring god to want you to be afraid all the time? I, for one, don’t think so. Even if he has rules, he wouldn’t want you to tiptoe about your life, terrified of the consequences of breaking them. He would want you to follow them cheerfully and gladly, not with paranoia and anxiety. Because surely he wouldn’t want you to spend your life constantly being upset like that, not if he loves you even a little, and Christianity holds that he loves you a lot.

I also don’t think it makes sense to worry about hell nearly as much as people do. If God is indeed loving and kind and good, and if he knows all about you, then surely he knows what the world looks like through your eyes, and understands why you do the things you do. Even if he doesn’t like them, even if he thinks they’re wrong, he’s got to have some empathy for you because he knows your reasons. If he loves you and understands you, and if he is merciful as he is said to be, then surely he would not punish you as severely as that. Surely he would try his hardest to forgive you, and even if he couldn’t forgive, could he really bear to cast someone he loved so much into eternal torment? Why would he want to do that?

So many people seem to have this image of God being both supremely loving and willing to consign people to hell for breaking the rules. I think that anyone remotely as loving as Christians say he is would forgive everybody, easily, gladly, because he would want to, because he loved them. Yet I know a good many people who are less punitive than God is expected to be, people who wouldn’t inflict hell on anyone, let alone someone they cared for at all. It’s hard to imagine a god who is supposed to be completely good and completely loving and yet less merciful than many humans I know.

Regardless, even if you disagree with me on the above points, please remember your neighbour’s feelings, their worries and insecurities, and take care with their hearts. There’s no reason to scare people by reminding them of the possibility of hell all the time; if they believe in it at all, then they are surely doing the best they can, and fear won’t help them become better people. What they need to become better people is love and understanding and reassurance, so that they can come to feel safe and so that they can reflect it back to others. That seems like what a loving god would do, and what he would want humans to do, as well.

Teach the field, not the exercises.

I’m increasingly coming to think that one of the big failures of required college survey courses for non-majors is that they just present the material without taking the time to explain to students what the field they’re dabbling in actually is, and what people in the field actually do. In my opinion, this should be an extensive and important unit. I know there’s often way more material than there is time to cover it all, but I think it’s much more important that students come away with an understanding of what that field actually is about than that they understand Jane Eyre or the quadratic formula.

Doing some basic freshman-level exercises in the subject doesn’t equate to understanding what the subject is actually about, at its heart, for those who do it as a career. But introductory courses, and the reason we require them, aren’t just to make sure the students pass a basic level of competency so we can feel okay about granting them a degree. Ideally they should be an introduction to the field, to help students check it out and see if they have any interest in doing it. They should also give students a basic idea of what their fellow students in other majors actually do, so that departments can understand each other, cooperate, foster mutual ideas for research, etc.

Unfortunately, this is seldom the way it actually goes. It seems like too often, English teachers just throw a bunch of analysis and essay questions at students without explaining why these questions are useful for the students to be able to answer, or why we might care about questions of that sort at all. Math teachers are often the same way. On the same day, I had to explain to one of my fellow writing tutors why math was at all useful, and to one of my fellow computer science geeks what lit majors actually do. I’m constantly being asked by science and humanities majors alike why anyone would want to study the other sort of discipline; the moment anyone hears that I have a background in both, an explanation is in order from one perspective or the other. People who are well-educated in their own fields do not always understand what other majors even do.

I remember overhearing some students complaining about a “useless” question someone had asked in their calculus class, that being why one expression did not equal another one with a superficial resemblance. The students opined that it was stupid to bother with a question like that, and that they just wanted to hear what was on the test and get out of there. I think things would be better if the whole class understood what math is about and why it is valuable. Then maybe those students would have been thinking about the underlying principles of the formulae instead of memorizing them and declaring everything else to be useless, and maybe they’d remember the test material better, too.

I think it is a big mistake that we treat it as more important that these students have extensive exposure to calculus that they’re going to forget because they’re not internalizing the important bits than that they have a unit on what higher mathematics are about and what the important things to focus on in the field might be. I wonder if it’s just that college profs don’t realise what students might need to learn about why their subjects are useful– since the profs know why the subject is useful, perhaps they consider it obvious?– and students don’t ask to the teachers’ faces; they just fake acceptance and then grumble about it when the teachers aren’t around. It isn’t being taught by default, and the students aren’t asking, so the students never really see the point, and they leave the class feeling like it’s a big useless waste of time– and I don’t think that helps their education at all. A basic survey course, which purports to introduce students to the subject, should at least explain what the subject is all about.

You can’t be better now if you were never flawed to begin with.

People, in general, don’t like to hear that they’ve made mistakes– obviously, because it’s not a good feeling to admit to oneself that one has.

But I tend to find that for my part, I’d much rather be told about a mistake than to continue making it. Yes, it hurts to be told, and I don’t like facing my own mistakes any better than the next person. It does hurt, and I hate it. But if I do something wrong, I would much rather know about it, because I want to at least try to correct it. Ultimately, I feel that I am hurt far worse by being allowed to continue making the same mistake than by having someone point it out, feel unhappiness and guilt for a bit, and then fix it and no longer be making that mistake.

If I had a dollar for every bad thing I’ve done, I would be living in a much nicer place and probably retiring early. If I had a dollar for every bad habit and perennial mistake that I’ve corrected in my life, I would at least not have trouble scraping together rent. I have something better than a dollar for those things, however; correcting bad habits and trying to work on my flaws is priceless, and I can’t do those things if I’m not aware of them. I’ve done terrible things (like everyone– I’m not putting myself down, here; I’m just being honest.) I don’t want to be those things. I want to be what I am now; I want to be my future, and the better person that I’m going to be.

It seems that a lot of people would rather refuse to face their mistakes, refuse to admit they’d made one, than correct them. I understand this; really I do. When I was young and immature, I did it a lot, because I wanted to be perfect, and if I’d made mistakes I would be less than perfect, and so I wanted to pretend I’d never made any. But I’d like to think I’m more mature than that now. I know that people don’t have to be their pasts. And furthermore, if I go denying that I made a mistake, I’m the only one who thinks I didn’t make that mistake; everyone else still thinks that I did– and that furthermore I’m still making it– and also I look even more foolish for trying to pretend that I didn’t. No, it’s far better that I face the thing, even if it’s painful, and get rid of it. I might have to get really dirty to clean my bathroom, but it will never be a clean place to live if I don’t suck it up and do it.

I can’t say that I’m perfect at this, and I’m sure sometimes I protest that I didn’t make a mistake when I did– because I don’t see yet why I’m mistaken. I don’t want to protest, however. In fact, I suppose I could say that refusing to face my own mistakes is exactly one of those mistakes that I want to stop making. I know I have gotten far better at it than I used to be; whether I’m good at it or not is not for me to say, since the thing about deceiving oneself is that one can’t easily assess whether one is doing it. In the end, however, I do think that if someone shows me that I made a mistake, I will at least consider that it’s possible that I did, whether or not I immediately react with understanding. And at least I no longer protest out of sheer crippling embarrassment, because of wanting to not have done it in the first place. What’s done is done; at least I can face it gracefully.

I value reality quite a lot. I value not being fake, and not pretending to be things that I’m not. I value saying genuine things and only when I really mean them, and I value communicating only what is true. The last thing I want is to deceive myself just to make myself look better to myself– not only is it childish and against my value of sincerity, but I’m sure that if I am really fooling myself, I will not be satisfied; deep down I will know the truth, and I will only ever be defensive and uncomfortable about that. Of course, if I honestly don’t know I’m making a mistake then that’s different from deceiving myself and I really might not be dissatisfied, but that does not mean that I prefer ignorance. I don’t. I prefer being a better person, and that means not just better in the ways that I perceive myself, for my own self-gratification, but better to others as well. I wouldn’t be a very good person if I were only concerned about making myself think I was a good person.

There seem to be some people out there who really only care about whether they can convince themselves that they are good. They think– insofar as one can say they think about it; these things aren’t necessarily conscious; deceiving oneself is more of a subconscious thing– that if they pretend they are right, then they are. It seems like conscious thought would fairly obviously reveal that it isn’t so, but they don’t let it get to the level of conscious thought. They just go right on convincing themselves that they are doing fine and therefore don’t need to question themselves. And because of that, they don’t correct their mistakes; indeed, if someone points out a mistake, they dig in their heels and find a way to justify what they did so that they can convince themselves (and others if possible) that they actually didn’t make a mistake. But these people are missing out on what happens if you do admit you made a mistake: they don’t get to correct the mistake and actually be better. They would rather live in dissonance and illusion; as long as nothing shatters that illusion they just keep it up and refuse to look at what they’re doing. And they patch any holes in it with more illusion. And I want never to be that way, not when I can help it at all. I’m sure that I’m not perfect about it, and I know for a fact that I acted like that sometimes when I was young, but I hope that it is mostly a trait of my immaturity that has passed and is behind me now. I hope that I am now a better person who doesn’t do that anymore.

I don’t like to judge others on what they’ve done in the past, and I wouldn’t want anyone to judge me on what I’ve done in the past. I don’t know which of these statements caused the other, if either did; perhaps they even developed independently. But I know that I would not like to be forever what I was in the past, as if I couldn’t ever shed my mistakes and begin anew; and I wouldn’t want to force anyone else to be chained forever to their past mistakes, either. I want to be able to say that I am a good person even if I wasn’t before. I would always like to be able to say that I am a better person today than I was yesterday. I think most people would like the opportunity to say that of themselves– but if they are too stuck on insisting that they were never a worse person to begin with, they can’t say it.

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

I’m usually not one to suggest that people follow proverbs, but I think this one is sensible advice: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Because if the basket falls, everything will be broken. People’s hearts are the same way.

Most people don’t want to feel as though they are solely responsible for someone else’s happiness, as though they are the only thing supporting that person emotionally. Because that’s such a lot of pressure, so much to live up to; it’s much more comfortable to think, well, this person cares about me, and yes they’d be sad if something were to happen to me, but they would have someone else as well to pull them through, and wouldn’t be left all alone in the world. They have a support network, something else to make their life worthwhile without me.

There’s a somewhat lighter (if still bothersome) case of this, though, a very common one: someone confesses feelings for you that you don’t return. Suddenly you’re responsible for making them happy. Their emotions are so strong, and they’re breathlessly waiting, and the world seems to hang on your response to them. You know that if you say no, you’re going to make them miserable. Are you going to say yes just to placate them, even if you don’t want to? Or are you going to say no and make them miserable? It’s awfully tempting to say yes, and worry about how you’re going to get out of the pickle later. The problem is, saying yes is worse, because then they trust you and place their hopes in you, and to let them down later hurts them even worse. It’s an uncomfortable situation, because you’re simultaneously presented with this huge responsibility for how the other person is going to feel, and also with the knowledge that the truth is going to disappoint them, that the outcome you need to deliver to them is the worst-case scenario. Sometimes you feel obligated and guilty because you know that your response will be a disappointment, even though it’s not your fault for not happening to love the other.

It’s not that the party who has feelings can help it, mind; love is an emotion that burns to be expressed, that is painful when held in, because its nature is to overflow. But it’s not the other party’s fault for not having feelings, either, and they too are in an awkward and often upsetting situation.

A lot of people panic and handle this badly. There are about a thousand ways to handle it badly, and many people try what turn out to be bad ideas in a desperate attempt to figure out what one should do. The problem is, there’s no way to make the situation all right. No matter what one does, they will hurt someone, and choosing how to handle it can be a painful and confusing dilemma. No one wants to be in this situation– they feel guilty enough, and on top of that, the way our society’s view of unrequited love works, the story is “supposed to” end with both parties finding true love. Society wants to make the person who doesn’t return feelings into the villain, forgetting that it’s an unpleasant and sometimes painful situation for them too.

But the other end can be handled badly, too– someone with unrequited love is placing the other in that painful situation, sometimes over and over again. No one should ever be blamed for approaching someone and telling them of their feelings– by contrast, they should be praised! as it takes such courage to do. But then, if it doesn’t work… don’t keep putting that person in the pain of having to decide over and over whether to hurt you, how to handle it, what to say. I’ve done it to others and I’ve had it done to me. I know it well. It’s bad. I should never have done it to someone and I hope that people do not do it to others either. If you really love them, you want what’s in their best interests, you don’t want to put them through that pain again and again.

Moreover, you shouldn’t be putting all your eggs in their basket anyway; it keeps you from moving on. Look around you for someone or something else to love. Loving itself brings happiness; it is expectations that bring sadness. Perhaps it is time to let the past alone. You might have been severely disappointed in love; you might have even lost a dear friend; but you have more than one basket to fill with your love. You may have baskets labelled “close friends”, “family”, “pets”, even “my hobby” or “appreciation of the pretty sky.” Of course losing someone important will make you sad for a little while, but you have a life to live, and an infinite world around you to love. And if you’re wise, you’ve built up a support network, and your heart depends on more than one person. This is the time to remember how much they care about you and how wonderful it is to have them, how, even if you have lost a very dear person in your life, you have others. Your idea of your own self-worth should not depend entirely on one person; you should not be as fragile as that. Everyone is deeply worthy of being loved and cared about, and everyone needs love and care, and the wise take care to make sure that there is always more than one person in their life providing that.

Deciding to have a bad day

Today was supposed to be a terrible day, I knew ahead of time. I was up far too early to feel well-rested, I’ve spent the whole day in airports, and I have many miles to go before I sleep. When I do arrive at my destination, I’m going to have to put up with a lot of hassle before I can get my stuff home, including swinging by to pick up two cats who will detest the car ride and soil their carriers, and the subsequent cat-bathing that must ensue, probably at 2 AM by that point. I won’t see friends for another month. And this signifies the end of my vacation and the end of my favourite season of the year.

But even though circumstances point to the idea that today is a Very Bad Day, I refuse to accept that conclusion. If I let myself decide ahead of time that I’m going to be miserable today, then I will be. In fact, I will be extra miserable, because on top of all the above misfortune, I will be unhappy about having such a bad day. I can’t avoid the unfortunate circumstances, but I can avoid being unhappy because of a bad day.

To have a bad day, I have to decide that I’m having one. Only I can decide whether my day is going to be awful or not. If I decide that I am going to have a bad day, then I will; but if I decide that I am having a good day, then it will be so.

How can I possibly have a good day when it’s going to be like I described? Because I only described half of it. What I didn’t describe was that I’m going to get home and sleep in my own familiar bed, that I’m going to have access to all of my stuff again, that I’m going to see my cats. I didn’t describe that I travelled vast distances and saw all kinds of people, or that I got to look out the plane window at all the tiny houses below and play the game of imagining what they must look like from the ground. I didn’t describe that I spent the whole day with very little obligation– the only thing I have to do for most of today is make sure I get on both of the planes that I am supposed to get on. It’s not work; my mind is free to wander; I can read or write or listen to music or play video games. All of that stress is unnecessary, since there’s very little that I actually have to do. And I didn’t even begin to describe how good it is to be alive– to be able to see and hear and think and perceive, to be able to wonder about things and search for answers, to stretch my legs after sitting for a while, to breathe air in and out, to listen to my own heartbeat, to drink this unexpectedly delicious strawberry-peach smoothie that I got at the airport. To feel, to think, to know, to be. Even though my back hurts from sitting uncomfortably, that is only one small sensation among a world of wonderful ones. If I weren’t here, if I didn’t exist, if I weren’t so beautifully alive, I wouldn’t be able to experience any of the wonder around me today. How can I call this a bad day? It’s full of the most amazing things. I am lucky to be able to have this experience of living.

All I did here was recognise that there were a lot of good things that I wasn’t paying attention to. I had been only paying attention to the bad things– but of course that’s going to make me unhappy. I try to catch myself when I’m doing that, and pay attention to the good things instead.

Are video games violent?

No. Video games are not any more violent than, say, books.

“But wait,” someone cries. “What about all that footage we’ve seen of horrible graphic video game violence? We know there are violent games. We’ve seen them.” And yes, it’s true; there are violent games. Completely aside from the question of whether violent games can be harmful– which is a different question entirely from what I’m addressing here– it is true that they exist.

But there is a difference between “violent games exist” and “all video games are violent”, one which many people don’t keep in mind. It is like saying “Books are violent” instead of saying “There exist some books that are violent, that glorify violence, that make children want to be aggressive like the characters in combat”– which is as true of books as it is of video games, but we don’t think of books, on the whole, as being violent things. To say that “video games” themselves are inherently violent, that they are dangerous and harmful, that those who play them are likely to become a menace to society, is to assume that all video games glorify violence– and that’s not true.

There are plenty of nonviolent games, and I’m not just talking about Tetris. To begin, with there are games like Mario Bros. where any violent act is extremely cartoonified and less graphic than your average Looney Toons episode, which we seem to think is perfectly suitable for the young. If jumping on the head of an animated turtle is too violent for our children, we probably shouldn’t have any classic cartoons either. And there are games like Katamari Damacy, where you basically roll a ball around the floor and collect objects, creating the stars and moon and planets; yes, you can roll up people, but this is treated as an opportunity for a grand vacation to the moon. There is Dance Dance Revolution, in which you jump on arrows on a floor mat in time to the music– a good aerobics workout, as well as being fun. And that’s before mentioning that some games have stories complex and thought-provoking enough to deserve a place in literature. RPGs in particular– the acronym stands for “role-playing game”, because the earliest video game RPGs were based on Dungeons and Dragons, although little resemblance remains– often have complex and thought-provoking stories these days. Imagine: you’re sent on a quest to arrest some bandits, and then you discover that things aren’t as they seem and that what you did was morally wrong. This is an experience you can’t quite have in a book, where you aren’t the guiding hand behind the characters’ actions. Far from being desensitizing, this kind of story is often sensitizing– highlighting the connection between what you helped the character do and the consequence of that choice. Instead of rewarding you for committing violence, some games show you why you would never want to.

Many people, especially those who didn’t grow up playing games, are unaware of the benefits that said games can bring. Typical examples are people who will tell you that games taught them new words– I definitely learned some words from games, words my mother didn’t even know, like “whelk“. I learned what a CPU is from a game; not from asking about the machine the game was played on, but because it was brought up in the game’s story. Some behaviourists suggest that games particularly help kids develop hand-eye coordination and reflexes, and even if kids could be getting that practice elsewhere, they might as well be learning it from games if that’s what they prefer to focus on. And special controllers, such as the aforementioned dance pad floor mats and Wii remotes and others, can net them a good workout. There’s also the social learning aspect: online PC game players tend to form clans or guilds that befriend each other and work together, cooperating and sometimes nurturing younger players, letting others try out different social roles in a virtual setting. And even violent games, as players often point out, are sometimes an outlet for stress relief to blow off steam; these people at least are getting the opposite effect. Implying that games make people violent is unfair to all the gentle pacifists who would never hurt a fly and also enjoy video games. (If you don’t believe that such people exist, I suggest googling for forums where debates on the subject take place; invariably the comments are full of model citizens who are avid gamers, speaking up for their oft-maligned hobby.)

For those who are still concerned about the existence of even one violent video game that children might potentially get their hands on, consider also that most other activities can involve violence as well. Some movies glorify violence as much as games ever did, by making it look cool rather than showing how horrible it is. There are plenty of books that glorify violence– full of horror, serial killers, spies, and worse, all looking glamourous and enticing– but that’s hardly a reason to stop children from reading. Art, classic art in museums, depicts gruesome scenes as well. In fact, any medium that imparts cultural understanding can equally impart a glorified view of violence. They are just as likely to see it in high culture as they are to see it in games. We want people to watch the news and stay informed, but the news is full of violence more shocking than a thousand zombie deaths. And what of sports– hunting, fishing, football? The former two involve literally harming living creatures, and the latter involves rough play in which people often really get hurt. We see these as suitable activities, not as something that might desensitize people or make children aggressive, but they are full of violence as well. Some people seem to think that these real, physical acts of violence are less desensitizing than ones committed in a game against animations that one knows full well is just a game and doesn’t really hurt anybody. I find that to be a very strange worldview indeed. People seem to think about activities that are traditional (and therefore “okay” and “good clean fun”) differently from how they think about activities that are new and are just beginning to be examined carefully by the generations who actually grew up experiencing them. But that is an illusion of thought; to a child born today, books and video games and sports are equally new, and deserve equal examination and equally careful judgment. And the child doesn’t know only about violent games in the news; the child more likely knows what all the other kids at school are playing, which is perfectly likely to be nonviolent, given the vast array of different games out there.

Even if you are a die-hard proponent of the idea that being exposed to violence causes people to be violent, it’s a huge error to assume that all games are violent. Many of them are not. To react adversely to the idea of video games themselves is to completely write off an extremely varied type of pursuit; some games might be the violent combat you imagine, but some of them are practically the opposite.

Spreading happiness

Hello world!

I hope for this blog to become an expression of positive ideas. I’m a recovering pessimist and cynic; I used to think negative thoughts all the time and was terribly depressed as a result. But I didn’t want to be unhappy, and I was determined to change that. I am feeling much better nowadays, and I find myself thinking: if I’d known a few years ago what I know now, I would have had a much better couple of years.

I want to do what I can to spread positive thoughts and ideas to others, so that they can be happier too. I know that sounds fluffy and Hallmark, but I do think that I have learned some things about how to become more positive. Last year I was desperate to find out how to become more positive, because I was so afraid of sinking back into the worse stages of depression– but I didn’t know how. I thought: of course I don’t try to have negative thoughts; no one wants to be unhappy; but I wasn’t sure how to prevent myself from seeing what I was seeing. I think I understand much better now, although I still have a long way to go; being positive is an ongoing matter, not an achievement that has been completed, and I am always looking for ways to refine it and make it better.

Thus, this journal is for me and for you. For me, as a way of seeking even more ways to be optimistic and pursuing the habit of noticing and writing down happier things. For you, so that I can share with you what I’ve learned about trying to view the world with a positive slant rather than a negative one. I want to help those who would like to become happier, but don’t know how to go about doing it, by suggesting some of the things that helped me– things I wish I had realised in the first place.