Editorial Note: This post was written by Wes Fenza, long before the falling out of our previous quint household and the subsequent illumination of his abusive behavior, sexual assault of several women, and removal from the Polyamory Leadership Network and banning from at least one conference. I have left Wes’ posts  here because I don’t believe it’s meaningful to simply remove them. You cannot remove the truth by hiding it; Wes and I used to collaborate, and his thoughts will remain here, with this notice attached.

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Most poly people encounter a phenomenon where a heterosexual couple decide to open up just slightly, so that one or both members can have sex outside the relationship with women, but not with men. Most tend to call this a “one penis policy.” I think that term is boring, so I’ve taken to calling it “Highlander Penis.”

Needless to say, I find it incredibly frustrating, not only as a man who slogs through the dating world, but also because it almost always seems to rely on sexist assumptions about the difference between men and women. Whenever I encounter it, I just roll my eyes and think of this:

I don’t think I have anything to say about the election that hasn’t already been said, but I wanted to put it out here in my own words, with my own perspective. On this morning after the election I’m feeling more hopeful about my country than I have in several months. The biggest things that I’ve been turning over happily in my mind are these…

You still can’t get away with trivializing rape or forced pregnancy
This picture sums it up pretty nicely (click to see the whole thing). What appalled me about these quotes wasn’t that there are people who actually think these things — I knew that was true. What appalled me was that these professional politicians judged those statements as safe to make. They thought enough Americans would agree with them, and enough of those who disagreed wouldn’t care, that coming out in favor of requiring a rape survivor to bear her rapist’s child wouldn’t lose them the election. I am unbelievably heartened to see that they were wrong. America has a lot of problems, but we aren’t that far gone.

You also can’t get away with pandering only to white people
From Nate Silver’s coverage:

Forty-five percent of those who voted for Mr. Obama were racial minorities, a record number, and he made gains among Hispanic and Asian-American voters.

Even Bill O’Reilly agrees! Aside from the hyperbole of calling the white establishment a minority (which is a common mistake people make when they go from having ALL the power to just MOST of the power), I thought he was basically correct in his remarks. In fact it’s kind of eerie to read them over and think, “Yeah, man, you’re right! Wait, you probably think this is awful.” People do want “stuff.” Stuff like jobs, and affordable healthcare, and security for their families. I know I want that stuff. I voted for the person I thought was most likely to provide that stuff, and I’m not sure how saying I did that is supposed to be a condemnation. But back to minorities. Seeing “the white establishment” become weaker and weaker against the diverse needs of the diverse population of our country… that’s pretty excellent.

More states have taken steps toward marriage equality… and they voted it in
It’s been said that permitting same-sex marriage is something that can only be legislated or ruled on by a judicial bench, never voted on by the people. Not anymore. The majority of voters in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington are in favor of the rights of gays and lesbians to marry the people they love. A friend of mine posted a facebook status that gave me the warm fuzzies:

A lot of people take it for granted so they won’t know how great this feels: we woke up married in three more states than when we went to bed.

I’m so glad more and more people are willing to expand their idea of what love can be.

Score one for observation and analysis over intuition and obfuscation
I came across Nate Silver’s election stats a couple of months ago, and it’s done wonders for my blood pressure. While numerous pundits were calling the election a toss-up (apparently tightness is a salient attribute of razors?), Silver’s analysis showed a solid Obama lead for most of the race. In response, the pundits scoffed. A whole lot of people were watching the election results with two filters: Who will win the election, and who will win the election predictions game?

This is important to me because a lot of people still want to believe that intuition can beat out careful analysis. A lot of people feel that “we just can’t know!” is a more satisfying position than “actually, we have pretty good data and analytical tools to get us within a reasonable confidence level.” What’s interesting to me is that these two positions aren’t, strictly speaking, contradictory. Nate Silver never claimed to know who would win the election, just like scientists never claim to know the absolute truth about the universe. “We just can’t know!” is fundamentally true, and likely always will be. What’s important is what you do once you’ve acknowledged that. Do you throw up your hands and let that be the final word? Or do you then say, “But let’s see how close to accurate knowledge we can get?”

Throwing up your hands has certain advantages. It lets you continue to believe something unlikely to be true without cognitive dissonance. It lets you keep doing your job, if your job is to keep viewers glued to your story for several months. It gives you the occasional heady rush of being right without requiring any work, or specialized knowledge or skills. The whole cycle of gathering data, interpreting it, and re-calibrating both your data-gathering and interpretation methods based on the quality of your results makes for a long hard slog, and the only reward you get is tending to be right more often, which is not always rewarded in society.

Obama’s win doesn’t prove Nate Silver was right. (The close conformity of state-by-state results to his predictions provides stronger evidence that his model is good.) What it does is give the public a dramatic example of the power of numbers and correct analysis. We humans need big victories and dramatic stories to get really interested in something (in that, the pundits are quite right.) So what we have here is a big victory and dramatic story about the power of rational analysis. My hope is that it will inspire many to follow that road further.

Hello! Happy Halloween!

You may have heard that there was a bit of hurricane that blew up the Northeast Corridor, and so state governments around here have been rescheduling Halloween for this coming weekend and beyond, but for much of the country today is still The Devil’s Christmas or whatever the kids are calling it during this time of rampant immorality.  After all, we’ve got preachers saying that The Gays caused Hurricane Sandy and it’s certainly fitting that it would fall right around the most immoral of all holidays.  Halloween: When women all dress as the “slutty” versions of favorite childhood characters and when gay people are…gay…or something.

Look, I’m just looking forward to the election being over, alright?

In honor of the holiday, we at the Polyskeptic Compound have been watching various thematically appropriate pieces of media.  For instance, we have all the seasons of Are You Afraid of the Dark…and I am not ashamed to admit that I am loving it.  I didn’t have Nickelodeon growing up, and this is one of the shows that I watched when I got the chance at my grandparents’ house or something.

Of course, Goosebumps was on broadcast television and I watched the hell out of that.  Mental note: Download Goosebumps also.

Last night, we watched the movie Pet Sematery, based of course on the novel by Stephan King.  Jessie is a huge Stephen King fan and I admittedly have not read or seen very many of these.  I started reading Pet Sematary once and got terrified and put it down. But I figured that I’d watch it because at least it didn’t have a bunch of twisted, blue, cat children like all the Japanese horror movies of recent acclaim.

Several years ago I went to see The Ring in theaters.  I went with three friends and it was a while after its initial release, so the theater was empty.  I spent most of the movie peaking sheepishly from behind my jacket and when I left, I was fairly convinced that I was going to be dead in 7 days.  I had a television in my bedroom at the foot of my bed and my door didn’t close properly and my window was in an odd place so the air current coming from it never reached me, but it would reach the door.  For 7 days I kept expecting a fucking phone call telling me of my fate, kept hearing the door creak in a sinister fashion from the wind convincing me that a weird hair-faced girl decided to take the stairs instead of the television…and then remembering “no, that’s stupid.  She’s totes coming out of the tv…at the foot of your bed.”  I only breathed easily after 7 days…because I’m a jackass.

What I’m saying is, I scare easy.  This is why I don’t go to haunted barns anymore.  Also haunted silos…and prisons…and hay bales.

Anyway, I learned an important lesson from watching Pet Sematery.  Namely, if the people in my house were the family in the movie, the movie would have been about 20 minutes long.  And so for your Halloween Reading Pleasure, here is a comparison:

***SPOILER ALERT!  IF IT’S, LIKE, 1989 OR SOMETHING***

The movie opens with us meeting a young doctor, his beautiful wife (Tasha Yar), 7 year old daughter and 2 year old adorable son. There is also a cat named Winston Churchill.  They’re new in town.  They have a nice house on lots of land, but beware, there’s a big nasty road nearby.  FORESHADOWING!

Their neighbor, an old an wise man, comes to introduce himself and warn them of the big nasty road nearby. Everyone thanks the old man, but don’t really think anything of it, nor do they do anything about it.  Within minutes in the movie, the little kid has already run toward the road in a haphazard fashion.  FORESHADOWING!

OK, so at this point we already have a problem.  If this was the Fenzorselli/McBrownigal household, I would already be pushing pretty hard for some kind of fence.  We have a crazy dog who likes to run around and not particularly come when she’s called outside.  If we also had a gaggle of unaware kids and cats that liked to be outside (which we do now)… Hell, I barely trust myself not to walk into the road in a haphazard fashion.  We would build a freaking fence.  So…at that point the movie is basically over.

But let’s assume that we build a shitty fence…which is certainly possible.  Wes and I are all about the half-assed projects.  Why use all of the ass when you only need to use half?  EFFICIENCY!

The doc gets ready to go to work. He’s also bringing the cat into get fixed because unfixed cats wander or something.  His daughter asks him to promise her that nothing will ever happen to the cat.  He doesn’t want to do that since it’s a bold faced lie.  Tasha Yar tells him to anyway.  FORESHADOWING!

Obviously, no one in my family would tell the kid that the cat is immortal.  Knowing us and our household opinion that cats are universally assholes, we would talk about cat stew recipes and how maybe the road will do our dirty work for us…because we’re terrible people.  But even if we weren’t going to talk about caticide, we would tell the kid that the cat is going to die well before any of us.  Then we would talk for the cat and say in a high scratchy voice, “AND I WILL COME BACK TO HAUNT YOU…UNTIL YOU GIVE ME MORE CAT FOOD!  ALSO, I WILL GHOST POOP IN YOUR BEEEEEEEED!”

Meanwhile, the old man has taken the young family on a field trip to the local pet cemetery at the end of the big nasty road.  The camera pans to a weird pile of sticks or something and ominous music plays.

Gina sez: Hey, old man, next time can you pick a less terrifying place for us to picnic in? Jeez! Also, I’m never coming back here again.  I don’t know if you noticed, but we have ample land on which to bury our animals.

Rest of the family: Yeah, this place sucks.  Also, old people are weird.

Meanwhile, a teenager gets hit by a Mack truck on the big nasty road and dies.  The doctor tries to help him, despite the fact that he is pretty much a lost cause.  The teenager’s ghost comes back to warn him not to go past the eerie pile of sticks in at the Pet Semetary.

My family: Yes, no shit, ghost.  We already said we’re never coming back here again and you’ve made fucking liars out of us.  THANKS.  Also, are you evidence of ghosts or do we just need to drink more?

The doctor’s family goes away for Thanksgiving.  The doctor’s father in law hates him for some reason so he decides to stay behind and eat turkey by himself.  The cat gets hit by a car.  The old man finds the cat and tells the doctor.

At this point, most reasonable people would say, “Well, shit.  I guess it’s time to bury this cat in non-weird soil…better yet, let’s cremate it.” That’s what we would do.  Hence, the movie would once again be over.  But let’s say we don’t just bury the cat and let the old man talk.

So the old man takes the doctor to an old Native American burial ground and tells him that it will bring the cat back to life.   This way, the doctor gets to lie to his daughter some more and nothing bad will happen!  The doctor asks questions that get no answers and instead of, you know, not burying the cat in the spooky burial ground that the ghost told him to stay away from, he does.

Presto change-o the cat comes back to life…as a total asshole!  Now, we at the Fenzorselli/McBrownigal household wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the new “evil” cat and one of our standard cats.  In fact, while watching this movie, we decided that Tandoori must have been buried in this place before we got him.  I laughed hysterically every time the cat did something dickish because it was just so darn familiar!

Meanwhile, because the family didn’t build a damn fence, the adorable little boy gets hit by a truck and dies.  The doctor is understandably grief stricken and, seeing this, the old man warns to not bury the kid in the burial ground.  He tells a tale of a friend of his who did that, and his son came back as a crazy flesh eating monster.  The old man (and a bunch of neighbors) came and burned the house down with the crazy flesh eating monster in it.

At this point, we’d all be asking this jackass why he told us to bury the cat in the asshole generating soil in the first place if he has first hand experience with its “magic”.  And we definitely would have not considered burying the kid there after a story like that.

But this doofus decides that this sounds like a great idea because he probably thinks the old man is blowing it out of proportion and that the worst thing that will happen is that the kid will come back as a hipster or something.

Aaaaand the kid comes alive, finds the doctor’s scalpel and starts slicing everyone up…like you do.  So, the kid kills his mother who comes back just in time (with the aid of the ghost who seemingly wanted her to die with all his freaking help) to get killed.  So the doctor shows up, re-kills his son and then decides that he should now bury his wife in the asshole generating soil.

She comes back to life, shows up at his house, they make out for a while and then she stabs in the head.

The end.

Being skeptics, it’s possible that we would have tried the burial ground for the cat…but probably not because we would have thought the old man was off his rocker…and this would have been a good decision.  But in the name of the scientific method, we might have wanted to prove to ourselves that burying things in the Native American Ancient Burial Ground was a terrible idea.  Upon getting a really big asshole of a cat back (where there was less of an asshole before), we wouldn’t test it again…right?  I mean, I guess reproducibility is the best route to declaring something a law.  But we’d probably test it with hamsters or something…not people.

But as I said in the beginning, this all could have been avoided if they had just built a fence.  Or more importantly, it could easily have been avoided had they hired competent people to build a really good fence.

Also, I would encourage us to either not follow the old man into cemeteries, or encourage him to be more upfront with his horrifying tales of horror from his past BEFORE burying things in spooky places.

The Fenzorselli/McBrownigal movie: Move in, heed the warnings about the shitty road, hire someone to build a decent fence.  If the cat dies, bury him in the backyard and don’t lie about it.  The End.

Man, pretty boring, right?  Well, whatever.  Fine…we’d put some scenes of us in our hot tub or something, ok?

There’s a song out by the band Imagine Dragons that, despite being catchy from an arrangement point of view, annoys the crap out of me because the entire point is that the narrator is the same as he always has been and won’t ever change.  The line that rings out often is “I’m never changing who I am”.

Now, you might be wondering why this would annoy me.  As Americans, growing up in the land of “Individualism” or whatever (I hear that’s part of our cultural identity, but you wouldn’t know it by how differentiations from the norm are dealt with), we are raised to believe that one of the ultimate quests of our lives is to figure out “who we are”, and once we do that (if we manage it), we must stand by “who we are” and not change just because of…anything.  Our identities are extremely important to us.

It annoys me because we should never be so attached to staying the same.

As you know, I have been engaged in a massive overhaul of my mind lately.  Well, for the last few years and now it’s getting into high gear because I refuse to waste another decade being miserable.  At 31, I look back at my 20’s and wonder what the hell I was doing with myself.  In my 20’s, I asked the same question of what I was doing in my teens.  I have accepted that I was likely depressed all that time and refused to seek out treatment because I disliked a good deal of people in my life and they seemed worthy of dislike, so my poor emotional state made logical sense.  But I wasn’t paying as much attention to it as I am now and I keep wondering how much I could have helped myself had I thought about the issues as also chemical, as also warped thinking that I needed to work on.  It’s easier to see it now because the people in my life are amazing and yet I am still not OK most of the time.  But it took me 20 years to see this.  I will be looking into medicinal help since the physical response to my ridiculous thinking patterns is doing me in.  I have started to exercise more in the morning, which helps keep me calm during the day.  I have maintained my no caffeine rule for many months now and no longer crave it.  I have noticed a huge link between my ability to handle stress and not only the amount of sleep I get, but also to any other low energy times during the day.  I have cut back on carbs, replacing them with protein and other lighter healthier stuff to attempt not to crash in the afternoon.  I am trying very hard to get this under control once and for all (with habits that will last a lifetime).

But none of that will change the way I think about myself, and that is the hardest thing.  As such, I have been thinking about identity a whole lot lately.

Identities are made up of “good” and “bad” things we think define us…but we define what is “good” and what is “bad”.  One of my issues is that I allow others to define these things for me often and I take things to extremes.  For instance, I have defined myself by my willingness to change and by the fact that I always look to myself first in difficult situations.  I generally assume that I am at fault, or am wrong.  It is not generally important to me be “right”.  And I see this as a virtue.

The problem here is pretty obvious.  My being willing to change IS a good thing, but the change has to come because I personally view it as necessary, not because someone else does.  It took me a long time to learn this and I still struggle with it.  Similarly, being willing to look at yourself in a critical way is great IF you are capable of coming to the conclusion that, after reviewing the facts, you aren’t wrong sometimes.  I very rarely do that.  If I had anything to do with something, I will take on as much blame as people are willing to pile.  I am stubborn about it because I think it’s better to be agreeable.  As such, I don’t really look at myself as an authority on myself.  I look at other people as that and require their validation and approval constantly because otherwise, I have no idea of my worth.  I have made it so my entire sense of self worth comes from outside.  Add to that the fact that I generally have a low opinion of myself, I have gotten to the point where I don’t even believe people anymore when they say good things about me.  But I still rely on the validation, so if people don’t say it, I assume that it’s because they don’t think it anymore.

Obviously, this is completely fucked up.

I’m not writing this to get a bunch of eHugs or anything.  I’m writing it because I’m kind of astounded by the discoveries I’m making about my perception of the world and my place in it.  The image I have of myself is completely ridiculous.  Take these statements commonly heard in the hallways of my mind:

“I am a bad person because I am selfish sometimes.  Being selfish sometimes means that you are a selfish person and that you don’t care enough about other people.”

“I am good as long as I keep doing things for people.”

“I had a hard time figuring out something that ultimately was easy.  I am not smart.”

“I get sad a lot.  I am not succeeding at my emotional goals and am therefore a failure…at everything.”

“I don’t know a lot of hard chemistry off the top of my head.  I am a lousy chemist.”

But even worse are the things I think when I want to be appreciated.

“I did all this stuff for them without getting asked to.  Why are they not praising me profusely??”

“No one else tries as hard as I do to be better.  Why don’t they appreciate that???”

Sometimes I wish that something awful would happen to me so that people could appreciate me and be worried about me and all that.  It’s terrible and I would never ask anyone to come into my head.  It’s a really aggravating place to be and sometimes I wish that I could have a lobotomy for a day just to not care.

So, yeah, I’m getting help and I’m looking to get more because I’ve had enough of this horseshit.  But I bring it up because I refuse to say “This is just who I am” anymore.  Fuck that.  They say that people don’t change and that’s a load of crap.  The truth is that you can’t change other people.  You only have control over yourself.  And change is hard so a lot of people won’t do it, but it doesn’t mean they can’t.  The key is deciding for yourself if you’ve had enough of something and that being a certain way causes you a lot of trouble.  My problem in the past was that I was trying to be what other people wanted.  I still struggle with that, but now I am making changes for me.  Sure, other people benefit if I’m happier and more confident and secure, but ultimately this is so that I can be comfortable and secure within myself based on my own merits and perceptions.  Change is an important part of life and stubbornly stating “This is just who I am” doesn’t do anything useful.  If your flaws and virtues become your identity, then having their “goodness” or “badness” questioned results in a lot of difficulty.

Maybe this all seems really obvious to you.  It wasn’t to me.  For instance, I always thought that being a nice person was a good thing, but it also means that people take advantage of you, so you have to balance that.  I always thought that being selfish was bad, but if you never do what’s best for YOU (regardless of other people), then you suffer and often for no good reason.  I thought that amount of work you do for someone is directly proportional to how much they will love you.  I thought I had control over people happiness if I was just as perfect as possible…and that every sign of imperfection would people question their decision to be associated with me.  I saw perfection as possible and hated myself every time I proved that it wasn’t.

I talk about this in the past tense because I am aware of it and am working on changing these thoughts, but I still have them all the time and I drive myself crazy with them and won’t let them go.  Letting go of “I am a person who works the hardest”, “I am a person who is nice”, “I am a person who will take only after I’ve given more” is extremely difficult because these are things that people liked and I want to be liked.  I want to be loved and while I have unconditional love from people, I am suspicious of it because I learned stupid lessons growing up that I incorporated into myself as profound truths.  I hear “You would have to become a completely different and despicable person for me to leave you”, but it translates to “If you don’t do the dishes as much, I won’t like you anymore.”  I have every flaw on equal footing and look at it like our country’s drug policy: Pot and Heroine are equally horrible.  I have no hierarchy when it comes to this stuff.  I have things I don’t like about myself and therefore I am probably not really likable.

My journey to mental health keeps taking me deeper to the roots of my problems and my identity seems to be the deepest root.  This idea of good and bad and the need to be loved has warped how I perceive everything.  I have not yet gotten to the point of generally digging myself while also seeing what has room for improvement and accepting that I will never be perfect.  I keep saying “I will let go of this whole perfection thing” and then I can’t because I just don’t believe it’s impossible.  I can admit that it’s an asymptotic reality, but because I have made a lot of progress I just see myself being able to get pretty much there and I just won’t stop.  I don’t know how to accept the imperfection is guaranteed and keep working on myself.  There has to be an endgame and I don’t know what that is if it isn’t perfection.

I guess that is the number one thing I have to answer.  An overall increase in happiness is certainly a goal, but what about everything else?  I don’t know yet.

Next time I’ll talk about Imagine Dragons’ other song which suffers from the same “decent arrangement, stupid writing” problem.  Accept, I’m much more scathing of that because “Radioactive” is an apocalypse themed song…you can tell because it has a line in it that says, “This is it.  This is the Apocalypse.”  Please see my explanation of why this is annoying in this post. Ugh.