Watching the Wheels

Is This Thing On?

2010-09-01T17:54:40Z

Ohai! I bet you’d thought I forgot I had a blog.

Long story. Mostly involving life and things happening and the like. Here’s a quick synopsis:

I am incandescently happy with Stego. <3
I’m also still accepting applications for other people to also make me incandescently happy. (I love poly!) There’s a strong new candidate: he’s doing well so far. We’ll see. I don’t know what it is yet. But the fact that it makes me happy is totally of the good.
I am possibly relocating to Florida. I need a job first… Which is proving difficult in this economic climate. So… you know anyone who wants to hire an operations manager with strong experience in communications and new media platforms? …Are you sure? Keep thinking. Get back to me.
I am in the process of re-evaluating all of my private label online ventures. The Examiner gig ended up being not necessarily what I was looking for. I’m not saying I won’t post there again, but I feel like there’s a better way to approach it. I’m sorting in my head.
DRAGON*CON IS THIS WEEKEND! I’m a bit excited. In fact, I will be circling back with my tentative schedule shortly so if you’re going you can find me. If you want. But why wouldn’t you? I’m awesome.

So… yeah. Life is good. I’ve been learning a lot about myself and about emotions and about being part of something bigger than yourself.

But more on that later. XOXO!

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A Brave New World

2010-04-14T21:10:52Z

When I moved this blog over to WordPress, I always did so with the interest of this being more of a personal blog about what’s going on with me. (I live under the illusion that you all want to know this.) What I don’t want to happen is for this blog to become kind of a dumping ground for anything I want to publish.

Obviously not everyone is an atheist, and probably doesn’t want to hear me going on about the Pope. (Although I should warn you… I’m working on a post about the Pope.) Not everyone wants to hear about polyamory. Or skepticism. Or random geekery. Etcetera. It creates problems for me because people come here thinking they’re going to see one thing and end up seeing something else.

So I have several projects lined up… My domain count is now up to seven. Seven! I’ve got a skeptical journalism project in the queue, a national secular news wire, a relaunch of my photography site… I’ll keep you updated as different things come to pass.

I can’t say that this means that I won’t talk about any of these things here. Obviously I’m very passionate about them because they are my life. But what I can say is that I will be talking about them in the context of my life. Not going all soapboxy on you.

I’m very excited to announce the first of these projects is getting off the ground this week. I’ve been accepted as a polyamory columnist for the Atlanta Examiner. Woohoo! Maybe they accept any pretty face that comes along, but I’m psyched regardless. It’s my first step towards freelancing freedom!

So you can now find me on the Examiner site, or – even easier – at http://www.polytastic.com. I get paid on traffic, so be a dear and give me some clicks. Add the feed to your RSS reader while your there. I also encourage you to follow my new account on Twitter, @polytastic.

Thank you all for your continued love and support!

XOXO

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Protected: May You Live In Interesting Times…

2010-04-10T19:15:02Z

May You Live In Interesting Times… (A Precursor)

2010-04-10T16:08:36Z

I spent last Saturday at Frolicon here in Atlanta. I realize that was so last week, but it’s actually taken me a while to (a) process the experience, and (b) carve out time to find an appropriate way to write about it.

Frolicon is an adult science fiction convention held annually on Easter weekend. Maybe it was my one-day limitation, but I saw very little science fiction… Lots of adult, though. (In science fiction’s defense, I did attend a Torchwood panel on the sexuality of the lovely Captain Jack Harkness.) So, it would stand to reason, this post is going to deal with sex. And me. Together. Once you read it, I can’t take it back for you.

I’ve made a decision to password-protect the post. It’s not really overly obscene, but it is something I would prefer not float around my office.

If you’re interested in reading the post, email me or DM me on Twitter and I will gladly share the password with you.

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How Do You Celebrate Atheist Week?

2010-03-31T16:31:07Z

Atheist Week (or “A” Week) celebrates the right to be good without God. Simple. To the point.

It’s a week that most of our religious brethren (most notably those of Christian or Jewish backgrounds) are celebrating major religious holidays. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that… I support freedom of religion as much as I support freedom from religion and the separation of church and state.

Most of the vaguely religious people I know – the ones that aren’t really religious but go through the motions a couple of times a year – go to church or synagogue at some point this week. And therefore it’s also a great time to remind them that there are indeed alternatives. You don’t have to pretend to be religious to be a valuable member of society – look! Here we all are!

Despite this not being a “real” holiday or even organized particularly well (I didn’t even hear about it until yesterday), lots of people have changed avatars, either on Facebook or Twitter. Many favor the scarlet “A” of the Out Campaign, but there are variations as well.

If you’re a non-theist and you haven’t publicly expressed this before, maybe this is your time. Take heart. Look around. We’re everywhere, and in numbers that grow every year. I have several resources in this post’s Further Reading if you’d like to get more involved. If there’s anything I can do to personally support you or answer any questions you may have, I’m happy to do that as well.

One of the best ways to support atheism is just to talk about it. The more it is out in the open and discussed, the safer and easier it is for people to admit to their atheism.

Today I asked Twitter a simple question: “How do you celebrate Atheist Week?”

The most prevalent answer I got back was surprise that there was such a thing! Other responses included new atheist-inspired art projects (that was me!) and writing/performing new atheist-inspired poetry. (You go with your beatnik self, @bg_zeke!)

I suppose I probably should have waited more than five minutes to start writing my blog… Or asked my question earlier… But either way – again – the important thing is just to talk about it. You can see what people are saying by checking out the #aweek hashtag on Twitter.

So how do YOU celebrate Atheist Week?

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Beware the Lack of Black Holes and Impending Doom

2010-03-30T22:32:59Z

Those smart folks at CERN got the LHC movin’ and shakin’ today, with nary a black hole or pesky apocalypse in sight. Brand new physics is happening *right now*. This is a great day for human ingenuity, imagination, persistence, and creativity. It’s a great day for science.

It’s also a great day to watch alpinekat’s Large Hadron rap. Enjoy!

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The Verdict Is In!

2010-03-26T19:55:53Z

So I declared war on Easter yesterday. Kind of. A little bit.

Maybe I just entered into battle with it.

No? A foray?

Okay, fine. So all I did was object to an office Easter egg hunt. The point is? I smote the hell out of that Easter egg hunt. We’re now having a Spring Break celebration instead.

I’d like to think I actually forced creativity into the process and improved it, as it is now a week-long egg-stravaganza. Curiously, it now includes homages to the Taco Bell chihuahua, the AFLAC duck, and the GEICO creepy money pile. None of which are mascots for the company that I work for.

It’s nice to know that that in the absence of a Christian god our party planning committee reverts immediately to corporate mascots. I’d make a comment about how that’s ironic in light of certain commandments laid down in Exodus, but I guess I should quit while I’m ahead.

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Update: Removed Intense Debate From Comment Section

2010-03-26T10:10:12Z

Good morning!

I got a couple emails yesterday about people having trouble leaving comments. Additionally, I could see that there were approved comments that weren’t showing. I’m not sure where the disconnect was, but I have disabled Intense Debate (for now, at least) and everything seems to be working well again.

Please note that comments on Watching the Wheels are moderated. If you have never commented here before, I will have to approve your comment before it shows up. I try to do this fairly quickly to encourage discussion and discourse. Not that my blog typically has much, but I do encourage it.

Please feel free to try to tell me that I killed the Easter bunny again.

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Is No Place Un-Sacred?

2010-03-25T20:55:14Z

Unless you work for a company that identifies itself as a “Christian” company, you don’t have religion shoved down your throat at the office.

Right???

Okay, so I’m not really sure why I thought this was the case. I’m always shocked the first time one of my idealist assumptions is proved wrong. How could this happen to me? In a place where I felt safe and secure? Should I call the ACLU? Are my rights being infringed on?

I don’t know how else to put this. So I’m just going to say it.

They’re having an Easter egg hunt in my office.

Yes, that’s right. An Easter egg hunt. In my office.

I’m sure what with all the shoving-down-of-throats and putting the ACLU on speed dial you all thought it was something serious, like losing my job because of my blog. (Actually, that one does keep me up at night.) But then, you know me. I <3 hyperbole.

(I wonder if I could work “I <3 hyperbole” into every post? I think it would take away from said hyperbole though.)

Okay, so fine. An Easter egg hunt isn’t really all that big a deal. I might even get free chocolate out of it. Who doesn’t like free chocolate?

But seriously. Is it alright? Even if the world doesn’t explode, is it right to pressure people into celebrating a holiday that they would prefer to quietly mock, thank you very much? It’s one thing if you work for, say, Chick-fil-A. You know what you’re getting into there. But what about a run-of-the-mill company that has a “holiday party” instead of a Christmas party and employs Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, non-theists, and FSM only knows what else?

When the slight is accompanied by chocolate or a paid holiday (say… Good Friday perhaps?) we don’t really complain much. Or at least I’m assuming we don’t because I can sure as hell tell you that people just looked at me like I was crazy when I said I would be offended if asked to participate in an Easter egg hunt.

But should we be more assertive about these things? Aside from looking at me like I was crazy, the people that I brought my concerns to were also honestly and absolutely baffled. They had no idea why someone might be offended by an in-office Easter egg hunt. The concept was completely foreign to them!

Which of course honestly and absolutely baffled me. Despite the Peeps, the plastic grass, and the pagan traditions that stretch back much farther than Zombie Jesus does, Easter is – without exception – a Christian holiday.

By remaining silent we also send a silent message of acceptance.

I’m not advocating rudeness. I’m not going to launch a boycott. I simply asked my co-workers to consider a point of view that they obviously hadn’t. I am sure they didn’t mean to be discourteous. Perhaps in the future they will be more considerate of the diversity around them.

Of course, I’m also bound to get hate email from co-workers who just wanted the candy. :-/

So what are your thoughts? What would you have done if you were me? Is an Easter egg hunt in a secular workplace crossing the line? Or am I making mountains out of molehills?

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Do Open Marriages Work, Part II: Open Harder

2010-03-24T23:31:31Z

I suspect there’s not many in the online poly or poly-friendly community yesterday that didn’t read the debacle of an “article” posted by CNN from Oprah.com author Karen Salmansohn. If you didn’t, I’ll include a link in the Further Reading section at the end of my post.

The basic gist? Salmansohn was propositioned to participate in an open marriage. She decided it wasn’t for her.

In the normal world, this would not be the stuff headlines are made of. Unfortunately, when PR gets passed off as journalism, the lines blur. Salmansohn’s goal in writing the piece was singular: it was not to share her story or to educate her reader. It was to sell her book.

She mentions “research” that she has done to arrive at her conclusion, but most of the article deals with either (a) her own personal experience, or (b) her book content. She does reference one statistic on the success rate of open marriages:

“It was surprisingly difficult to find statistics on whether open marriages work. Ironically, open marriage isn’t something we talk about all that openly. Some research suggests that open marriage has a 92 percent failure rate. Steve Brody, Ph.D., a psychologist in Cambria, California, explains that less than 1 percent of married people are in open marriages.”

You’ve really got to be careful when you toss things like that out. Mostly because it makes people like me immediately log in to see exactly what academic research is available.

Running a quick Academic Search Complete query on “open marriages” turns up four peer-reviewed articles, two of which are relevant to the question at hand. (One of the others was on therapist values as relevant to providing therapy, and the other on evolution of family units.)

Rubin and Adams published “Outcomes of Open Marriages” in 1986 in The Journal of Sex Research. They found no difference in the stability of open marriages to traditional ones. Which brings up an important point: saying open marriage doesn’t work implies that “traditional” marriage does.

The National Vital Statistics Report from July 29, 2009 tells us that the divorce rate in America in 2008 was about 49%:

Number of marriages: 2,162,000
Marriage rate: 7.1 per 1,000 total population
Divorce rate: 3.5 per 1,000 population (44 reporting States and D.C.)

Clearly government-sanctioned marriage in the United States isn’t faring that well either.

Knapp published “An Exploratory Study of 17 Open Marriages” earlier in 1976, also in The Journal of Sex Research. It was not, by the author’s own admission, scientifically rigorous. Rather it was a tentative exploration into an area that otherwise was rather dark, research-wise. One of the interesting things about the Knapp study was that many of the couples would be defined as polyamorous in today’s terminology instead of simply “open”. Which is another strike against Salmansohn: she assumes all open marriages are created equal, and are equally created solely about meeting the sexual needs of one or both partners in the relationship (and implies that that partner is typically the male).

I will go ahead and get this out of the way: like Salmansohn, I am single. Not married. Never have been. It is completely acceptable for me to discuss marriage with you from an objective, scientific point of view. It is completely acceptable for me to comment on my view of most of the open relationships that I have observed (which for the most part appear to be going quite well – a few are struggling as any “normal” couple does from time to time) – as long as I am doing so informally. It is not acceptable for me to take the limited sample set of relationships that I have been exposed to as a valid sample of all such relationships. It is also not acceptable for me to take my personal viewpoint – which is not even anchored in participating in a marriage – and pass that off as relevant to anyone except myself. As I alluded in my last blog post, our diversity is what makes us beautiful.

We don’t all need to take the same road to happiness. We just need to get there, and we need to keep the roads open for others.

When we develop moral arguments against lifestyles we do not understand or find personally appealing, we judge. We categorize in black-and-white terms what is good and what is bad. It’s not uncommon for humans to fear what they don’t appreciate.

I am not here to force my idea of what works for me in a relationship on you. I just ask that you respect my ability to figure that out for myself, thank you very much.

As a writer and a journalist, Ms. Salmansohn’s article was disappointing. Because of her personal bias, she already knew the story that she wanted to write before she started writing. You can’t write the headline before you research the story. And you can’t research the story from your own life. There’s a reason that journalists don’t insert themselves into stories.

There is a story here, and I think it’s one that needs attention. But it needs objective attention, not rash value judgements based off of a failed relationship.

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