Nihilists Have More Fun

Doing anything with a day job is crazy difficult. I have so much respect for people who manage to accomplish anything in addition to keeping their rent or mortgage paid!  But busy season is done and I'm gonna blog again dagnabbit!

Shoutout to KXOL Mega 96.3 Los Angeles, the perpetual soundtrack of my car!  I grew up on radio, a very different type of radio than this station: primarily conservative talkshows and Evangelical sermons, although I do remember a time when I was younger and K-Earth 101 occupied a larger amount of my parents' listening time. I've never really gotten into TV or podcasts, but good old zero-effort, zero-decision-making radio stations are my thing. Mega 96.3 has a wonderful group of people hosting and deejaying their station who are full of positive and inspiring things to say, and there have been several times on my way to work in the morning when I've found myself thinking how refreshing it is to hear people who don't agree on everything still having a good time together. Disagreements on religious perspectives come up for instance, and nobody sounds angry! This morning, the hosts started talking about why fewer people are going to church these days and then patched in the...

 "Don't say gay" laws--Do they matter?  When I was in early elementary school, we didn't have a curriculum that mentioned sexual orientation, but I still learned about gay people in school. From jokes and insults, I learned that they were no good. If teachers aren't allowed to make simple statements about everyone being valuable and beautiful, that informal education is still going to be there, making sure children who are different from the majority know they are inferior. If a child has some inkling at an early age that they might like someone they're "not supposed" to like or want to dress a way they're "not supposed" to dress, barring teachers from saying a few positive words about LGBT people isn't going to make those feelings disappear. It only ensures that the voices telling these kids to hate themselves meet less opposition. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/06/13/chapter-3-the-coming-out-experience/ (See also ...

I took these photos (really badly) a few years ago when my sister was getting rid of some of their old textbooks and found this book we both used for our science class in... I think it was 4th grade. This blog could be a lot more interesting I bet if I gave it a more specific theme like, "Surviving (name of my school)" and then all the posts would be about the weird quirks of having all your education up until age 18 take place within the same conservative Christian bubble. I could get a lot of posts just out of the textbooks we had. And then there would be all the material on the weird incorporation of politics into our classes and the swapping of stories about having seen demons and the awkward uncertainty about whether most holidays were really okay given their pagan elements and the banning of Harry Potter  and Pokemon  and the mixed messages about how you should try to go to a really good college but at the same time maybe you should just go to the college of worship our...

Actually, as you can probably tell, I don't hate nihilists. That just seemed like a good click-bait title for a post about internalized prejudice. You've surely heard of the topic of internalized prejudices before, probably in the context of racism or sexism. As you've heard, just because you belong to a certain group of people is no guarantee that you will see that group positively. If you grow up in a society that portrays people with your skin color or your chromosomes (etc.) in a negative light, to some extent you're going to think that your group and you yourself are no good, just as you were taught. You might for instance feel with great certainty that, while it's acceptable and barely noticeable for other people to express their culture, their attractions, their beliefs, their gender, if you were to express yours, it would be too political, confrontational, or abrasive.  I know I have this sort of internalized disdain for my own beliefs, but it's so stron...

SPOILER ALERT - PLOT POINTS DISCUSSED  It's that special season that only comes one time each year: Tax Season! And what better way to celebrate the bureaucracy this April 15th than by hitting the theaters for a movie? Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most fun I've had to date watching a bickering couple get audited. In fact, despite the majority of the story taking place in a laundromat and an IRS building, it's more fun than some flicks set in more alluring locations. The Daniels do not disappoint when it comes to wackiness, and that's saying something when you're talking about using a story concept that's become overdone as quickly as the multiverse concept has. The way they poke fun at this sci-fi trope while simultaneously telling a powerful story about having to live in many worlds at once is beautiful! They combine the side-splittingly ridiculous with the deeply relatable in a fashion that leaves you thinkin...

Dear Mom and Dad, I want to tell you more about what I think and why I’ve changed my mind on so many things—I want to tell you because of course, just like anyone, I like to feel understood, and I’d like there to be more of an understanding between us so we can be closer as a family as well. I don’t like that nowadays I avoid talking with you about a lot of the things that are most important to me and do little more than nod and smile when you bring up the things that are most important to you. The reason I haven’t talked to you about any of this more extensively than by sending you that one brief text message, just detailed enough to say that I had changed my mind about religious things and didn’t want you to worry about me, is that I’m afraid that having to think about any of this makes you sad, and it’s been easier to let everyone act like nothing has really changed than to make you think about the specifics of things that make you sad. Most importantly, I don’t want you to think I’...

In many ways I never liked politics. Certain discussions on how nations should be administered could be interesting, but as a whole the field was so ugly, so reminiscent of a poorly-made and outdated website: gray and unaesthetic, broken, inefficient, frustrating. What was worse, it always seemed to be usurping the place of supposedly nobler and more important subjects, like religion. According to the voices that shaped my understanding of life, the love of Jesus was the thing that would change the world. We were to “seek first the kingdom” and “all these things” would fall into place as we did. Politics, I knew, didn’t change hearts; changed hearts added up to cultural movements, which in turn led to political change, and the way to change hearts was to love the people around you, be real with them, listen to them, and be there for them. But despite this understanding, I often saw political allegiances clawing their way up to the level of religious importance and even supplanting what...

I suppose it's mostly accurate to say that a good number of the conservative Christians I know are Trump supporters. I say it's only mostly accurate though because in the particular community of people I know, supporting Donald Trump for president wasn't a popular position originally. The people I grew up around are thoroughly socially and economically conservative—socially because they believe that many of the moral codes recorded in the Bible ought to be followed fairly literally, and economically because they mistrust liberal economics as being emotionally driven and unsustainable in the long run (although the sources of this mistrust themselves seem complicated enough to merit a speculative post of their own). To people who are this conservative, Trump was clearly not a desirable candidate when he first joined the 2016 race since his past didn't prove him to be a true conservative. For some of my family members, Dr. Ben Carson was the obvious best choice: He had a h...