Category: Other People

The Globe:

“In an effort to make playgrounds safe, planners recommend not including the sandbox that could harbor dirty needles and basketball courts that could attract the older teenagers who might carry weapons or have drugs. Even a bench can be used to climb a fence or as a place for teenagers to gather. Instead, some planners say, playgrounds for tots invite fewer troublemakers.“

Are dirty needles in sandboxes like razor blades in candy? The whole thing seems implausible to me, but I haven’t got any data. Could be an issue.

But the thing that gets me here is that they’re suggesting that people avoid creating places that are inviting to teenagers. I feel like our society has an irrational (ok, maybe not so irrational) fear of teenagers. So we do things like try to keep them away from public places. But where are they going to go? In many cases, it doesn’t much matter whether you build the park for older kids or younger kids. The older kids will show up at nightfall, and if they don’t have a basketball court they’ll hang out on the swings and the slide. You can’t get rid of them– you can to a certain extent move them around, supervise them, channel them. But you can’t make them go away, or stop doing stupid or dangerous things.

In general I think that groups like the Trust for Public Land are doing some of the most important work in this country– making sure that kids have somewhere safe to play, that there’s enough green space to balance concrete and help to clean the air. But people expect too much from them and from the design of the public sphere.

A place can be safer or less safe, but it can never be perfectly safe. It can discourage crime or provide really easy places for crime. But it won’t eliminate it. At best it will shift it around. People are infinitely devious and will find ways to misuse anything you give them, and if you blame a public planner, landscape designer or an architect for the high crime rate in a public park, you’re laying blame in the wrong direction.

Today one of the sysadmins in the office looked me up and down as I walked past. Then he said, “Interviewing?”
“No. Why?”
“You’re all dressed up.”

To me, it’s obviously not interview wear. I mean, for starters, no tie, no jacket, unpressed shirt. I’m dressed… like marketing on a regular day. Apparently I also have the same haircut as the boss, which is kind of weird. It wasn’t deliberate, but now it’s the Aaron and Charlie haircut.

Mom always said to go outside and quit lying on the couch or you’d turn into a couch potato or a slug or some horrible thing would happen. You never believed her, did you? You did it because she threatened you with a stick. But she was right: you can eventually get stuck in the couch and die as they try to surgically remove it from you.

For some reason, the wingnuts at the AFA seem to think that only one state representative actually opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment. I love being on that mailing list: it’s the political version of reading a trade journal from someone else’s industry.

Now, many liberals, or “progressives” as we now prefer to be called, oppose the FMA because it’s bigoted and stupid. Many conservatives, however, also oppose it, because it’s stupid and because they regard it as overreaching. There’s that weird collaboration between the religious right and the Republican party. Oh, sure, it’s all there in the political history. But look at the Log Cabin Republicans: they want government out of the boardroom and the bedroom, making them perhaps the only philosophically consistent group in Washington. And everybody thinks they’re the crazy ones.

Experience is what enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

It would help if I’d learn from my mistakes.

We started at the Enormous Room, then went to The Good Life, The Cellar, The People’s Republik, Hong Kong, and Charlie’s. Anna was wearing a stunning pink cowboy hat. Cynthia wore a variety of hats. Che appeared at People’s, and Dana said I should buy him a drink. This proved awkward because he arrived and started drunkenly hanging on to Cynthia. She tolerated his revolutionary rhetoric and broken English a few minutes, and then we were off to the next destination. Duncan just turned 21 recently, and it was fun having him out at the debauched proceedings.

Is there anything funnier, on a gloomy Thursday, than an exploding toilet?

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who saw the Globe item and wondered What Would Gelwan Think? and so now he’s responded with an in-depth discussion of the issues. Sadly, it boils down to “Dammit, I’ve said this before: inadequate staffing, for-profit insurance-gaming, misdiagnosis, inadequate supervision, overestimating the usefulness of drugs, poor explanation of illness and treatment, and sensationalized journalistic coverage all lead to death, disaster, and scandal.” Accurate and insightful, I’m afraid.

Man, being crazy isn’t the world of sympathy and Hallmark cards it’s cracked up to be.

Earlier, I posted about trouble and beauty and it didn’t necessarily make a lot of sense. I didn’t mean to say that Kitty is totally losing it, because she’s not. I didn’t mean to say that beauty is only there when people suffer. Just that sometimes when people go through rough spots, and you’ve been reading their blogs, or looking at their art, you can see it reflected there in a particularly touching way. A particular beauty that disappears with the return to happiness and normalcy.

It shows up in disease-recovery blogs that get less interesting as people get better. It shows up in the funny ones, where people work out their demons through ranting and self-destructive hijinks, and then get their shit together and suddenly they’re not as acerbic or funny any more. It shows up in rock bands that quit taking drugs and start pacing themselves and decide they want to live past the age of thirty, and totally aren’t as cool anymore. It shows up in my own life, because I’m not as driven and upset and lonely as I was when I first got to Boston and would stay at work for thirty hours straight and go home and laugh because I was way too tired to sleep.

It’s not always there, of course. There’s plenty of depressed or angry or upset or drug-addled people that are boring and horrible when they’re low. Just look at LiveJournal or, god forbid, Xanga. And I don’t mean to say that creative output is worse when the creator feels better– I’ve been reading Kitty for years now and she’s great all the time. But a week or two ago, I knew she was upset. She posted pictures that remind me about how visiting home turns the familiar into the strange, and day to day life sometimes seems confusing and it made me want to cry because it reminded me about going home and things feeling inexplicably weird, or walking down the street and feeling like there’s something huge I’m just not getting.

And when people get better and that odd shine goes away, and they’re back to normal, they feel better. It’s just not as intense, and the blog readers, well, they were there for the intensity in many cases. I feel guilty for missing that intensity in blogs. I know I feel stupid for missing it in my own life. I miss being depressed sometimes, because it gave me a clearer sense of who I was. I was a person with a mental illness trying to get through the day, not some fucking yuppie who’s medicated away his emotions and is incapable of feeling empathy for anyone, not even kittens.

Anyway. I don’t mean to patronize or imply that things are, in fact, always beautiful when they are damaged, broken, or falling apart, or even when they’re in rough seas. Just that sometimes, beauty shows itself off in a new light when the world around it gets ugly.

As Bookdwarf says, I can be terribly insensitive and sometimes trivialize horrible things like, oh, the Soviet prison system. But today I want to talk to you about something really serious: eating disorders. You may know that they affect millions of women and increasing numbers of men. But did you know that even animals can get eating disorders? It’s true. I should know, I have a bulimic cat.

Hey, if trivializing the suffering of millions is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.