Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008

by John Scalzi

  So, what do I do to encourage her to play with the computer more? Not a damned thing. Because, to reiterate: She’s two-and-a-half freakin’ years old. Any parent who would force a two-year-old to stare at a computer when the kid would rather do something else deserves the rough side of a moving chainsaw blade. These days, Athena wants to spend most of her time outside, and what’s not to like about that? So we take her outside and she plays in the yard while Krissy works on the garden, or goes out on the swingset, puts her belly into the seat of the swing, and pretends to be a Powerpuff Girl. She’s having fun, and that’s more important than any concerns I might have that she’s not developing essential computer skills.

  (Of course, having just written that, Athena just wandered into my office and declared that she wanted to play with her computer. So we did, for about an hour. Athena seems particularly interested in the part of her Pooh Preschool software where she gets to paint pictures; what’s especially interesting about this is that the color she wants to paint everything is black. That’s my little goth girl!

  However, my point here isn’t really compromised—she came in and wanted to play with the computer; I didn’t drag her in and make her do it. And when she wanted to stop playing with it, we did, playing another favorite game of hers instead—the one in which she stands on my stomach and then hops, saying “Up! Down!” as she does it. It’s “Hop on Pop”—the live action version.)

  The problem is that parents confuse the means with the ends. Cramming flash cards and French lessons into your kid doesn’t do a thing for them in the long run, except possibly to give them a complex about flash cards and the French in a general sense. The goal shouldn’t be to make your child eat an entire set of encyclopedias by the age of six. The goal should be to encourage your child to be curious—to want to learn about the world, and explore the things that are in it. If you make a child eat a set of encyclopedias, he or she will eventually resent you for it. But if you help them want to read through that same set, your child will always appreciate what you’ve done for them.

  As an example, I present to you: My own mother. My mother, bless her heart, had her ups and downs as a parent, as any parent does. However, she did do one thing absolutely as she should have: Even when it became clear I was (how shall we say this) not like the other kids, she never tried to make a trained monkey out of me, sitting me down and attempting to shovel calculus into my skull at age three. Instead, she made sure that when I did show an interest in something, she would help me take my interest as far as I wanted to take it.

  For example, when I was six and I showed an interest in the concept of centrifugal force, she gave me a cup and some string and let me whirl them around in the living room (it was the stopping that was the hard part). In the days when my mother would sometimes have to choose between paying the electricity bill or a car payment, she’d literally save pennies to buy me those Scholastic books on volcanoes or planets or whatever (I still remember the author: Patricia Lauber). She let me stay up to watch “Cosmos” with Carl Sagan. She always encouraged me to ask “why” and then find out the answer. She pressed, but she didn’t push. In this respect, she was the model parent of a precocious child, and I give her full marks for getting that aspect of my childhood exactly right.

  What my mother had in me, and what I have in my own child, is faith: Faith that the child will, at the right time, in the right fashion, develop into a person of intelligence, curiosity and capability. For one thing, I’m smart, my wife is smart, and we don’t spend all our waking hours sucked into the TV—our habits will rub off on the kid, no matter what. Beyond that, however, faith dictates that we don’t prod Athena onto paths she has absolutely no interest in treading. I think that a lot of the drive to have overachieving children is defensive—the idea of making sure your child is fully armed against all the other kids, whose parents are busy packing their little brains with facts so they can claw their way into the Ivy League over the broken bodies of their classmates.

  While this defensive posture surely communicates to the child that parents want the “best” for their kids, it doesn’t really communicate the idea that the parents feel their kid’s own wishes or desires matter a whole hell of a lot in the grand scheme of things. Intentionally or not, parents send the signal that developing one’s own personality takes a back seat to jumping through the hoops society deems are necessary to succeed. The problem with this is that sooner or later, even the most staid and unimaginative person wants to tell society to go screw itself. Normally this is called a “midlife crisis.” I worry that a lot of today’s kids are going to go through their “midlife crisis” at age 24 and never quite recover. That’s not good for them, and not good for us (and, more selfishly, not good for me, since these kids will be presumably paying for my Social Security).

  I’m not saying I’m doing the parenting thing right while everyone else is doing it wrong (believe me on this one, folks). And I’m not saying that I’m never going to impress on Athena the value of, say, the occasional good grade over doing one’s thing all the time—structure has its uses, many of them good, even if it doesn’t seem like it when one is 15. All I’m saying is that I doubt that I’m ever going to be the kind of parents who worries that his child is not doing the “right” extracurriculars, or is “wasting” her childhood when actually what she’s doing is simply being a kid.

  For the first of these, I doubt Athena will lack enthusiasms. I didn’t, and her mother didn’t—although in both cases, our parents are probably better off not knowing what some of these extracurricular enthusiasms were (and no doubt we will be, too).

  For the second of these, now, really. Being a kid is what childhood is for. Life is long. There’s lots of time to be a grownup later. And I like my kid as a kid. I’m going to miss it—going to miss her—when this time of her life is done. No need to rush things. No need at all.

  I AM

  MARRIED

  I keep hearing how allowing gays to marry threatens marriage. Fine. Someone tell me how my marriage is directly threatened by two men marrying or two women marrying. Does their marriage make my marriage less legal? Does their love somehow compromise the love I feel for my wife, or she for me? Is the direct consequence of their marriage that my marriage and the commitment therein is manifestly lessened, compromised or broken? And if the answer to these questions is “no,” as it is, exactly how is marriage threatened?

  I am part of a normal married couple. My wife and I have been married almost nine years. We have a child. We own a home. We pay our taxes and we live our lives in the midst of friends and family. Every day we tell each other that we love each other before we go to work. Every day we come home (well, she comes home, I work here) and spend our evening together as a family. Our wedding picture hangs over the mantelpiece, where we see it every day. We are immersed in the fact that we are married to each other; it’s unavoidable. But that’s the wrong word to use because we don’t avoid it, and wouldn’t wish to. We embrace it. I don’t think there’s a day that goes by where I don’t have cause to be reminded how much better my life is for being married. This is what being married is.

  If this very-married state of matrimony is not in the slightest bit threatened by two men getting married or two women getting married, how can the “institution” of marriage be threatened? The institution of marriage lies in the union of souls; to discuss marriage in general without acknowledging that it exists because of marriages in particular is a pointless exercise. If no single marriage is directly affected by two men or two women getting married—if I and my neighbors and my family and friends and even my enemies are still well-ensconced in our individual marriages to our spouses—how is the institution of marriage harmed? No harm has come to its constituents, who are the institution.

  Oh, some of those who are married are insulted, or upset, or shocked or saddened or just generally feel less special, burdened with the knowledge that somewhere a man may marry a man and a woman may marry a woman. But tho
se are feelings. The facts of their marriage—the legal and social benefits that accrue—are unchanged for them if two men walk down the aisle, or if two women do the same.

  I’ve been looking at the pictures of the men and women getting married at San Francisco’s City Hall in the last week, and I think it’s interesting that in so many of the pictures, the couples coming out the City Hall imbue their marriage certificates with a significance heterosexual couples hardly ever do. I have a California marriage certificate too, as it happens. I remember reading it, I remember signing it. I know we’ve got it filed away somewhere. These couples won’t file their certificates away. They’re going to hang them above the mantel, pretty much in the same place and in the same manner I have that picture above. These people want to be married with a hunger that you only get from being denied something others have to the point of it being commonplace. I feel like I need to go and find my marriage certificate and give it a good long look: Something so easily provided me, so precious to someone else. I suspect they are treating their certificates in a manner more appropriate.

  On what grounds do I as a married person tell others who want to be married that they are undeserving of the joy and comfort I’ve found in the married state? What right do I have morally to say that I deserve something that they do not? If I believe that every American deserves equal rights, equal protections and equal responsibilities and obligations under the law, how may I with justification deny my fellow citizens this one thing? Why must I be required to denigrate people I know, people I love and people who share my life to sequester away a right of mine that is not threatened by its being shared? Gays and lesbians were at my wedding and celebrated that day with me and my wife and wished us nothing less than all the happiness we could stand for the very length of our lives. On what grounds do I refuse these people of good will the same happiness, the same celebration, the same courtesy?

  I support gay marriage because I support marriage. I support gay marriage because I support equal rights under the law. I support gay marriage because I want to deny those who would wall off people I know and love as second-class citizens. I support gay marriage because I like for people to be happy, and happy with each other. I support gay marriage because I love to go to weddings, and this means more of them. I support gay marriage because my marriage is strengthened rather than lessened by it—in the knowledge that marriage is given to all those who ask for its blessings and obligations, large and small, until death do they part. I support gay marriage because I should. I support gay marriage because I am married.

  I am married. I would not be anything else. I wish nothing less for anyone who wishes the same.

  THE MEANING OF LIFE

  Today’s reader request, from Karl:

  I would like to know what you think about the question, “what is the meaning of life?”

  Is it a good question? Does it have an answer? Do you know it? Is it a stupid question for people that are too anal?

  Oh, goody! I finally get to use my philosophy degree.

  It’s not a stupid question. I’m not one of those people who subscribes to the theory of “there’s no such thing as a stupid question,” because there is, and I submit that in most cases you’re doing a disservice to the person asking the question by not pointing it out. However, this is not one. This does not automatically make it a good question, of course. Like many questions, what makes it good (or not) is the intent behind the question and the willingness to actually consider the response to it. Whether it’s a good question, in other words, depends on you.

  The thing that gets me about the question “What is meaning of life?” is that generally the implication seems to be that there is just one meaning to it. That doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like pointing to a multi-hued striped shirt and asking “what color is that shirt?” You can answer by naming one of the colors of the shirt (thus ignoring the rest) or perhaps use technology to find a chromatic mean to all the colors of the shirt and describe that color through the use of Pantone strips or even angstrom units (which tells only what color the shirt would be if you mashed all the colors together—not the same question). If I were presented with a striped shirt and asked to name its color, I would say “You phrased your question poorly. Try again.”

  “What is the meaning of life?” is to my mind phrased poorly; it implies all life has the same meaning, which would imply, among other things, that you have the same meaning to your life as your cat or a mat of blue-green algae—and no more meaning to your life than either. Both of these propositions may actually be true—but as with describing a striped shirt by naming one color, that’s not all there is to it.

  Also, of course, it implicitly suggests there is meaning to life—which simply may not be the case. “Meaning” is the handmaiden of causality, and while the religiously-minded take comfort in the idea of an agent of universal causation (usually called “God”), as a matter of science, causation is a tricky thing. This is due in no small part to our current limits in understanding the universe. We can get to a near-infinitesimally small fraction of a second before the Big Bang to a point called Planck’s Time, but beyond that point the door is shut; our physical models of the universe fail. Beyond Plank’s Time lies god or randomness or some intriguing combination of the two or something else entirely. But it’s not inconceivable that our universe exists without causation (go see Dr. Hawking for the details), in which case asking for “meaning” for the universe or anything in it (including life) is in the final analysis like asking why chocolate doesn’t breathe avian sonnets. It’s not only a question without an answer, but a question in itself without (heh) meaning.

  But let’s make the assumption that the universe has meaning, or at the very least that meaning can be approached in a Gödelistic sense: Fundamentally incomplete but workable within its own parameters. In that case, “What is the meaning of life” is still the wrong question. I would phrase the question: “What are the meanings of life?” This is an answerable question, because I believe there are several answers. And here are some of them, roughly in order of specification:

  The Meaning of Life is to Observe the Universe. One of the spookier aspects of our universe is that it reacts to being observed; indeed, some of the stronger flavors of the Anthropic Principle suggest the universe requires observation in order to exist (and if the universe needs life to exist, how could it have existed to create life within it? See, there you go again, getting all hung up on causality).

  I’m personally not especially convinced the universe needs life—most versions of the anthropic principle don’t suggest it does, merely that this universe is of a design that supports it—but this is not saying that as long as life’s around, it’s not doing a mitzvah by being observant of its surroundings. Any life will do; most anthropic principles don’t require intelligence, just sense—you don’t have to understand the universe, man, you’ve just got to feel it.

  What end is gained by this observation, if not snapping the universe into place? Sorry, that’s another question entirely.

  The Meaning of Life is to Make More Life. This particular meaning of life is neutral to other aspects of the universe and considers only what’s good for life as opposed to the rest of the universe. The advantage this particular answer has is that it’s manifestly true: Life, by definition, has within it the capacity to make more of itself and also by definition is compelled by instinct to make more of itself (otherwise it doesn’t remain life for long).

  The drawback is that it’s not very satisfying—making more life is fun and all, but at the end of it all you get is more life and none of your existential yearnings fulfilled. Also, you’re still going to die. But, you know. Not every meaning of life is going to be deep. Some are just going to be obvious.

  The Meaning of Life is to Create the Meaning of Life. After all, who says we can’t? Look: When you’re born you have no idea what you’re going to be when you grow up, right? You decide over the course of time what you’re going to
do with yourself. Same thing here, applied on a much larger scale. It’s not inconceivable that life was created without meaning, a senseless agglomeration of amino acids that just happened to fold themselves into self-replication. But that doesn’t mean it can’t get a meaning. Maybe that’s our job in this universe: To figure it out. It doesn’t matter whether we were given the job by some creator, or just looked around and decided the job needed doing.

  The problem here is that there’s no assurance from the universe (or any presumed creator) that we’re giving life the “correct” meaning, or that this meaning won’t turn out to be an ill fit for life—that just as one can hopefully declare one is going to become a ballerina when in fact one is as coordinated and graceful as a drunken tortoise. But, you know, so what. If there’s anything we know about life it is that more often than not there are second chances. If life doesn’t stumble upon a good meaning to its existence the first time around, maybe it will later.

  The other problem with this answer is that unless “life” hits upon a meaning in the next 50 or 60 years, most of you reading this will be dead when it’s all figured out. And then a fat lot of good it will do you. Personally speaking I’m not optimistic about life figuring out the meaning in that time frame: It’s had (on earth at least) more than a billion years to get a clue and it’s still grinding its gears. We like to think humans might be able to crack this nut, but look: We can’t even agree about what the hell The Matrix was really about. I love humanity—it’s my favorite intelligent species!—but let’s just say I’m not holding my breath.