Did you call your congressperson today?

Today is the day the Department of Peace bill is being reintroduced to congress. Please see my post here if you need information on what the Department of Peace is, how to get involved, how to find out who your congressperson is, or how to find contact information on your congressperson.

If you cannot call today, please be sure to call them tomorrow. If you've already called them today, please schedule a follow-up call for next week. Please do all you can to get your representatives involved in this initiative.

Thank you!
-Peregrine

"And Oh Canada to you too!"

I always forget how much I genuinely like being in Canada, between visits. With the exception of Quebec, which I used to detest being forced to drive through on my way to Ottawa, I really adore Canada. British Columbia, Toronto, Calgary, Thunder Bay, Ottawa, London - every one of them inspires me to pack up and move up there. On our latest jaunt up North to retrieve my mother from her stay at a relative's, I again noticed that once you cross the border, there is nothing but mature trees, and moose, if the signs are to be believed, for over an hour. The colours are starting to change and although we were a bit early for leaf peeping, this year promises to have a lovely display of Fall foliage.

10 minutes after you cross back to this state, you hit a small almost-ghost town. It has one gas station, the yard of which is littered with relics of dead automobiles. An engine sits at the far side of the parking lot, quietly decaying into a rusty oblivion. It's sat in that exact same spot as long as I've been alive. There's a small diner in the town, a typical greasy spoon with the grill right behind the counter. I haven't stopped there since I was a small child, because everything is cooked on the same grill, and that makes everything on their meager menu out of bounds for my digestion. The diner has the same curtains it had when I was a child. I noticed that as we drove by.

The friend who chauffered my northward trek hasn't been that far north since she was a child either. We're going to have to head up there again sometime very soon, before it's too cold to enjoy. Sometime when there aren't anxious relatives on either side of the journey.

I'll return you to your regularly scheduled babbling tomorrow.
-Peregrine

Comment on comments

I logged in during lunch and saw that my page suddenly and briefly became very popular. 125 hits in an hour. Welcome my little friends the spam spiders. After deleting some spam comments, I finally caved and turned on word verification.

The site is back to normal, and nicely quiet. I have a mental image of little Stargate SG1 Replicator spiders running through the internet, trolling my blog, and going SPLAT against the word verification.

I am easily amused.
-Peregrine

After midnight, we're gonna let it all hang out..

Some people say I'm a decent writer. They're wrong. I'm not even a good writer. I took all the classes in high school and college, blazed through them at the top of my class, wrote papers so stunning the professors assured me I had a future in writing. I learned well, but what I learned is that I would hate being a writer. The papers I churned out meant nothing to me. They were meticulously arranged bits of verbage strung together along a writers' formulae in the manner I thought would assure me the best grade. They worked spectacularly, for what they were, but in the end, they failed completely. The words on the page had no meaning outside a dictionary. The stories they told were controlled, concise, and completely devoid of any warmth or personality. Creative Writing - what an oxymoron. It took me years of internet slumming to beat myself out of what I'd been taught.

I'm not a writer, although I write almost constantly. I don't aim to be a good writer; I hope to be a good storyteller.

I can tell stories well. I can even write them down in a manner that accurately transcribes the story in my head into words other people can use to imagine the original image. When presented with an entire story to tell, I become obsessive until I've gotten it written down. The problem is, I'm never done with them. I'm constantly editing or changing points of the plot to bend the story to my will. I like a happy ending, you see, but so few happy endings show up unforced. Mostly they're mediocre endings. Someday, I'll finish one to my satisfaction. That's the lie I tell myself when staring at a file folder chock full of works-in-progress.

The trouble comes when I'm not presented with an entire story or plot for one; when I'm confronted with a single image or scene that would make an awesome story, if I could only figure out how it begins and ends. I have no patience. I want to write out the scene, and not bother with the plot building up to it. I can't see that part of the story in my head, so it comes out as a flat, two dimensional placeholder. I can't write if I'm not inspired, and I'm never inspired by the boring transitional pieces. Sometimes, with the stories, I'll cheat and write them as screenplays if I don't have enough images to make it a proper story. Sometimes, I don't have enough for even that. I'll have one image, one scene, burning holes in my mind and clamoring for attention. If I'm feeling particularly masochistic, I'll write them up as a text file and save it, knowing full well that it will sit in the folder until I've forgotten everything about it. That story will stagnate - out of mind, out of sight, until I grow curious about the text file and reopen it, subsequently cursing myself because I will lack the memory of any vestigal plot threads it ever might have had.

That's where I am tonight. I have an image in my head, and it's leaving me twisting in the wind. It wants to become a plague story. There's maybe enough there to turn it into a short story, if I can think of a beginning. I have the crux, I have the crisis, I have the resolution, and I even have an ending, albeit not a happy one. I don't have a beginning.

I'll be up all night, mentally gnawing at this. Although sometime the image imps throw me a bone.. in writing this blurb out, I thought of the first two lines of the story, where it should begin. How, rather. Where is relative.

Sometimes, the night - she smiles.
-Peregrine

Peter S. Beagle needs our help.

I was reading Neil Gaiman's online journal today, skimming back through some entries, and came across a notice about Peter S. Beagle getting screwed by his publisher and the manufacturer of The Last Unicorn DVD.

You can find out more about what's going on here. While I don't agree with the outraged tone of that letter, or some of the claims they're making (such as whether PSB should be compensated for Peter Jackson's work just because PSB made an animated movie based on the same books) - I agree with what they're outraged about. The gist of it is: the author and screenwriter of a movie is getting absolutely no compensation for his work from the company producing it on DVD.

I buy books, movies, cd's, and go to see in-theater movies, because I believe in supporting the people who spend months or years of their lives creating something that entertains me. To say I'm a bibliophile and a media slave would be putting it lightly - almost all my spare cash gets dumped into my book and media collection. I'm also a firm believer of spreading the addiction joy - if I like a book, movie, or cd, I'll buy it for other people and give it to them if I think they might also like it. Hell, I buy stuff I utterly loathe if I think someone else might like it. (*cough* Like this.)

I was so excited when The Last Unicorn was released on DVD. It had been a VHS movie long ago, and out of print for almost 20 years. Getting my hands on a copy, or even a copy of a copy, wasn't easy the first time I did it, and I paid through the nose for my battered, second-hand VHS copy. The DVD came out, and I rushed out and bought it, and pimped it to all my friends, most of whom also went out and bought it.

To find out that absolutely none of that money went back to the author, who is also the screenplay writer, has me in a frothing, rabid fury. I didn't buy the DVD to own a copy of the movie - I bought it because it's the only way I have to support the person who wrote it and the people who animated it, and the other bigazillion people who had anything to do with creating it or getting it back on the market. If I simply wanted a copy of the movie, well, the moment it was released on DVD, it was probably available for download somewhere.

I do download an awful lot, but at least 96% of what I download is a) something I already own but wanted in a different format (ie, have it on tape, wanted it on mp3), b) something I end up buying, c) something the studio has taunted me with for over two years and not released in a format I can spend money on. I highly approve of official sites that let me preview music or movies before I buy them, and am much more likely to purchase said media from a site that allows me that option. There is occasionally something I download that I choose not to buy, but it isn't something I keep or pass on to others. I guess you could say I'm an ethical pirate, but I don't consider myself a pirate at all, because if I download something and like it, I go out and buy it. If I don't like it, I delete it - and if I'd gone and purchased the hardcopy and didn't like it, I'd return it and get store credit with which to buy something else. I could just pirate, and save myself a fat wad of cash every year, but that wouldn't support the people who make my entertainment possible. "Piracy takes bread out of the artists' mouths!" is the RIAA's rallying cry, to which I've always been able to shrug and say, "Yeah, well I do my bit."

Now I find out that my bit isn't going where I thought it was, the person responsible for one of the best modern fables out there is seeing none of it because the production company isn't paying him. That makes me very, very bitter. Had I known that before I bought the DVD, I would not have purchased it. Now all I can hope is that there's a big freaking breach of contract lawsuit and the company pays up, and my money goes where I intended it to go in the first place.

Please note that I'm not saying people should go jump on the wagon and rally money for a lawyer for this case - there isn't enough information, and there are plenty of lawyers out there who would love to take this case on contingency if it's a breach of contract case. I wanted to make people aware of the misrouting of funds from the DVD so they are better informed if they choose to purchase it, and to make others aware that there's now a better way to buy the books if you want to ensure the money goes to the author. The other very nice thing about Beagle's new publisher is that they claim here that none of their titles will ever go out of print. That alone would be enough to make me order from them. The money going directly to the author I'm trying to support is, however, the main reason.

I am so very rabidly angry about this. I can't do much, I wish I could do more.
-Peregrine

Ugly Americans.

My mother's family lives in Canada. Her last living sibling lost that status last week, and my family was informed on Friday that the funeral would be Wednesday. I don't think it occurred to them that this would make it hellish, logistically, for those of us who weren't in Canada. This logistic nightmare necessitated some last minute scrambling to ensure my mother could attend the funeral, and resulted in a friend and I driving my mother 8 hours northward and across a border, on Saturday morning. My friend and I stayed overnight and returned to the States on Sunday. (No, I won't be attending the funeral. I didn't really know the aunt in question, so I don't need the closure.)

Before we returned, we stopped at Swiss Chalet for sustenance. We'd just been served when another lady breezed in and was seated at the booth across the aisle from us. She started things off by announcing to the waitress, "I'll have a Coke or Pepsi, thank you and Oh Canada."

My friend and I stopped chewing and looked at each other. Was this some new, secret Canadian solidarity code? If so, why hadn't I been informed? We assume it's a fluke, or perhaps we misheard, and resume eating.

The lady in question hailed another passing waitress and commented that Canada was so nice! and "Oh Canada to you!" My friend and I look at one another again and bite back laughter. I'm starting to speculate wildly on just why this person is exclaming "Oh Canada" so often. I make an internal bet that the lady is American, on her first trip to Canada, and is either a complete tit or thinks that ejaculating "Oh Canada" in her sentences will get her some sort of s00p3r s33kr1t Canadian discount. Hey, it works like that in other countries - in Thailand, if you even tried to speak Thai, the prices for things went way down immediately, so maybe she thought she was speaking Canadian, eh?

She told the waitress she was just going to drink her pop and go, and my friend and I breathe a sigh of relief. The waitress said to not bother about the bill, the pop would be on the house. The lady immediately started a diatribe, "OH no! I insist on paying for my drink! I pay for what I get, unlike our president, who goes to hotels and steals all their mints and bathrobes! President Bush does that all the time. He goes to Belgium and takes chocolates without paying for them. I don't want to be an ugly American like him, so I'll pay for my drink." She then proceded to go on a lengthy, condescending diatribe on how nice Canada was, and how they were so lucky not to have any large industries or commercialism or shopping districts, how they were lucky not to be so "built up", like America was. How lucky Canadians were to not have a president, especially not a thief like ours. She really liked the country, and Oh Canada! "And please tell the manager just how nice I think this quaint little restaurant is. And Oh Canada to you too!"

I'd long since stopped eating. Either from fear of launching food through my nose with a snort of spontaneous laughter, or the nausea I felt rising through my gorge - take your pick. Eventually the Crazy American Lady leaves, and my friend and I immediately order sangrias to wash the taste of the stupid out of our mouths. We commisserate with the waitress. We leave, stopping at Tim Horton's for coffee.

How To Not Be An Ugly American
A) Try to know something about the country you're visiting. Small facts, such as what the head of their government is called, or what large chain restaurants you might find there.

B) Keep your mouth shut. Don't compare the country you're in to the United States, nobody cares or wants to hear it. Don't talk American politics, unless someone else initiates the conversation - it makes you look boorish.

C) Be polite. Especially to the people who have the ways and means to pollute your food with something vile.

D) Pay with local currency, don't just assume that your American greenbacks will be accepted or that the store has the ability to do currency exchange. If, by some fluke, you can't pay with local currency and have no credit card, ask what the exchange rate is. Don't just assume a $1 bill will cover $1.25CND plus tip. When in doubt of the exchange rate, ask. Or look it up.

E) Realize that the small area of town you're staying in is hardly indicative of the country's industry standards. Especially when you're not downtown.

Someday, somehow, I'm going to work that lady into a skit.
Oh, Canada to you.
-Peregrine

Times I wish there was a camera crew videotaping my life..

There are people protesting homosexuality outside my building today. Since I doubt they have a permit for peaceful protest, the police will probably arrive soon with an order to disperse. I wish our windows opened. We're on the 41st floor, overlooking the protestors. I'd print out protest posters, protesting the protestors, and drop it on them.

Target Corporation owns the building my office is in. Apparently Target stores have done something these weak minded freaks think promotes a homosexual lifestyle in children. Unless Target suddenly started selling Billy dolls, I somehow doubt the threat to children's latent sexual preference is as urgent as the protesters seem to think.

Upon entry to my building, I was accosted by a - I kid you not - woman in Barbie-pink capris and matching pink 3" heels, wearing a white midriff-baring t-shirt reading "Proud to be a STRAIT GRRL!" Her bleached hair was ratted up en bouffant, and she was wearing far too much makeup. I almost laughed. She looked like a parody of a bad drag queen, but I doubt that occurred to her. She pointed a pink-laquered nail at me and shouted, "How do YOU feel about gays??" To which I solemnly responded, "Very carefully, m'am. I hear they bite. My condolences on your spelling." and kept walking. She paused a moment and called after me, "What does that mean??" I just kept walking.

A beautiful John Waters moment, lost forever! I need to find a way to incorporate that into a story somewhere.

Lady, whoever you are, I'm proud you're a STRAIT GRRL too, cuz you sure as heck would be a blight on the name of heterosexual females everywhere, otherwise.
-Peregrine

My Department of Peace viewpoint.

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm part of the campaign for a Department of Peace. I threat.. said I might expound upon my viewpoint today, so now I shall.

Why I think we need a Department of Peace
There are so many reasons.. the biggest one, in my opinion, is because children aren't learning enough from their parents anymore. In a society where both parents frequently work 9-5 jobs, and children are encouraged to have after-school activities, family time and family interaction has dwindled to the point where children cannot learn by example - the example isn't there often enough to reinforce the values the parents would like them to learn. The parents expect their children will learn these skills via schooling or via their peers - and the children don't, because there's no infrastructure in place to /teach/ the children those values. They're not taught non-violent conflict resolution - and that can be as simple as, "Hey, if he/she bugs you, why don't you talk to them instead of giving as good as you get?" Part of the problem is that when there is conflict at school, frequently the parents don't learn about it until it's erupted into violence and their child has received injury or punishment. By then, it's too late - the child has learned a violent resolution to their conflict. Parents aren't asking how their child is doing in school socially, and more importantly aren't listening and watching to see the signals of a child who's stressed out from being picked on. In a worst case scenario, they see this and blow it off, figuring it's all a part of growing up and their child will work through it on their own.

"On their own" - how sad is that? These are children. It's the job of every adult around them to teach them, either by instruction or by example, and both of those are sadly lacking. So the children grow up learning how to violently resolve their problems, and even receiving admiration from other children if they're particularly good or imaginitive in their violence, and build on that. Some of them grow out of it, but the number of the ones who don't is increasing every year. They grow up and have children of their own, and in not learning non-violence, have no way to teach it to their children, so the cycle grows.

I'm fairly military about parenting - if you have kids, it is your responsibility to BE A PARENT, and that means a lot more than feeding and clothing the child. One of the biggest problems is that parents don't know how to teach their children, and if the parents are relying on schooling, then the schools should be teaching social skills, coping skills, conflict resolution skills, much more than they are so that children will grow up with the foundations of learning with which to teach /their/ children. To do that, there have to be programs created and tested and put in place - and it all boils down to "the potential teachers need to be taught, first." That's one thing the Department of Peace is looking at doing.

Same topic, different use: non-violent conflict resolution for prisoners. Right now, a person who is jailed does their time, perhaps learns a vocational trade or perhaps gets some education, pays their dues to society and is released. If they were jailed for a violent crime, their return rate is huge - chances are very good that person will end up back in jail due to more violence. There's nothing in place to teach them nonviolence except negative reinforcement - ie, punishment for what they've done. Inmates learn how to not get caught, instead of learning how to avoid the situations that landed them in prison in the first place.

While I'm on the topic of prisoners, jails, etc - I think there should be better solutions for crimes than jail time. I'm all about learning action = consequence, but right now, frankly, the consequences don't fit the crime. There are people in jail for crimes they didn't commit, because the consequences of losing a jury trial were so harsh that they plea-bargained down to something that would get them out of jail soonest. If your car slides on ice, and you hit another car and kill someone - it's vehicular manslaughter, even if it's a total accident, and you go to jail - it's judged by the same means it would be if you were deliberately being an inattentive driver, and the consequence is the same. What purpose does that serve? What good does putting that person in jail do? Comfort the surviving family? Please. I'd rather see better systems in place to handle crimes, instead of straight prison time. In my opinion, straight prison time doesn't do a lot of good and does do far too much harm. It removes people from society and makes reintegration with society so much harder.

Two years ago, I had the opportunity to be part of an alternate-consequence action, and the resolution has done more to heal an absolutely awful situation than jail time would have. My extended family lives on a private Native American reservation. The roads through the res are private, and barred from commercial traffic. A truck driver who'd been on the road for over 38 hours straight, took a shortcut because he was falling behind on his route from having to stop and rest. He fell asleep at the wheel. His truck barreled into the van my cousin, his wife, and their two infant children were in, completely crushing in the entirety of the passenger side of my cousin's van. The accident ruptured the fuel line, and the sparks from the metal on metal contact ignited the van. By the time the truck driver was out of his cab, the van was entirely ignited and he couldn't get close enough to it to see if anyone was alive inside. There was no chance of any of my family members surviving that accident. Horror is waiting for a coroner's report and praying that your family died in the initial collision and not in the fire.

The truck driver was liable, but since the accident happened on tribal lands, our clan council got to decide what to do about it. We could've put the driver in jail for the rest of his life and probably had the decision cheered and approved by the public. We didn't do that. We sat down and discussed the situation, and my family came to the decision that putting that man in jail wouldn't help - it wouldn't make this awful moment hurt any less, it wouldn't bring my cousin and his family back, it wouldn't prevent things like this happening in the future. We filed a lawsuit against the trucking company, for making their drivers work illegal hours, and settled out of court for an amount large enough to keep the res functional for years to come. The money was nice, but we did it so the incident would go on their record and they'd be watched more closely so they didn't abuse other drivers this way. We asked the driver to voluntarily relinquish his commercial driving license for good, asked him to be part of the state's driver education program, and asked him to set up a trust fund in my cousin's family's name. The driver agreed to everything. This was not a bad or evil man - he was at least as ripped up about the accident as my family, and he still is, years after. IIRC, he did serve a small amount of jail time while his lawyers and ours hashed this out, I think a couple weeks.

That trust fund is allowing two teenagers from the res to go to college this year, an opportunity they wouldn't otherwise have had even through the Native American scholastic benefit. It paid for a spina bifida operation on a newborn for parents who have no insurance and don't qualify for aid of any kind because they live on a res. The truck driver continues to pay into it, and has taken it upon himself to promote the trust fund and get others involved in it as well. Good things are being done, in my cousin's family's name, and that is helping our family cope with the loss. It's helping us heal, it's helping the driver heal, without any lingering anger, bitterness, or malice. The driver is paying his debt to our family in a much more productive way than jail time ever would have served to do.

Does a criminal have a debt to victims, to society? Yes, definitely. I'm personally for finding more productive means for them to pay that debt. All incarceration does is remove someone from society - and in some cases, that's the best possible solution - however, in many cases, all it does is create a schism and disassociate the inmate from society without providing any means for them to reintegrate. I wish I had a solution to this problem, but I don't. I helped form a solution to the problem my family faced, but not every crime is personal, and I am just one person. Also, I am only familiar with the means my family and myself have used, which worked in our situation but may not work in another. I'd rather have a larger, recognised body of government dedicated to the task of finding better solutions.

As a side benefit to the Department of Peace, I firmly believe that in creating a program of non-violence, it will teach tolerance. It will offer people the means to learn less belligerent means of communication. That, while starting out on a personal level, will eventually become a standard for our government because the people who make decisions will have learned a better method of conflict resolution.

Here's where I should say something emphatic like "The time is now!", but I'll spare you. I believe we need a Department of Peace. I believe we've needed one for a very long time, and I'm very thankful that Rep. Kucinich and Marianne Williamson chose to organize and spearhead this effort. I am campaigning for it now, because I believe the effects of the Department of Peace will be extremely far reaching and long term - it will be years before we see substantial, definitive results and the longer we wait to begin this program, the longer it will be before those results are achieved. I want to see results in my lifetime. I want to see results before I have children of my own.

Will the Department of Peace make all the ills of society magically vanish and teach everyone to love their neighbor and turn the other cheek? No, and it isn't meant to do that. It offers hope - and I believe that right now it offers the /best/ hope - for a widespread change in the violence in our society, in our world. I want that hope. I want that change. There's a gangsta phrase popular right now: "Don't start nothing, won't be nothing." - and the phrase suits exactly. I'm glad the Department of Peace initiative has been started.

I want it to be.
-Peregrine