Will Someone Please Think of the Children!

Maybe I haven't sufficiently honed my maternal instinct, but I can never get too worked up when people employ argumentum ad juvenis, namely, the rhetorical tactic where someone suggests that an action might just harm "the children" and therefore must be wrong. There are a couple of problems with this argument technique.

First, and less universally, the action the person's trying to stop is often...not actually bad for the children. Take this fine editorial by Institute of American Values VP Elizabeth Marquardt. Marquardt is trying to argue against giving kids three legal parents, and she does so by saying kids who grow up split between several households can be in no better shape than kids from more-or-less amicable divorces, who "must grow up traveling between two worlds, having to make sense on their own of the different values, beliefs and ways of living they find in each home." FOR SHAME. I think the world might be a better place if the only values that were reinforced by all adult figures in a kid's life were those that are universally held. If one parent thinks eating meat is fine and another parent thinks it's cruel, or if one parent thinks responsible premarital sex is beneficial and another thinks it's unhealthy, it's great that kids have to recognize these ambiguities. It will also help them pick out the really important values (don't steal people's stuff) from the less critical ones (always look your best). Or maybe it won't. Whatever. Maybe on balance, kids from three-parent families have a slightly less happy childhood than kids from two-parent families. Which brings me to my second point.

Why the hell do we think it's so important that things are perfect for kids? Seriously. All kids ever grow up to be is adults, and we don't care nearly as much about them. It's not like kids are such freakin' saints; they can be downright cruel and self-absorbed and irritating. They're not any less pure-hearted than adults are. Most adults aren't truly cruel; they just want to get what's best for them and are often too self-centered to realize they're hurting people along the way. As any kid (and, you'd think, any former kid) knows, that's exactly what kids are like. Childhood isn't bliss. It's a shitshow of a social scene and you get totally scared by bizarre things. I don't think it's clear what factors make kids happier eventual adults, but you never hear people arguing about what will make kids better adults, just what's better for them while they're kids.

So why do we care so much about kids, without facing specifically that they're just going to turn into adults like all other adults? I think that the answer is—and steel yourself for the short-lived cheesiness—the kids represent hope. Awwwww. Ok, end cheesiness. I think kids represent false hope, the hope that these people will be totally unlike all the other people in the world and will somehow start a new world order where everything is just Jim Dandy. I'm kind of serious here. I have this feeling that adults are constantly looking for prodigies. They really want to find the one person who changes the world. You're a pretty special group of people, people who read the blog: When you were younger, did an adult ever relate to you as if you were really, really something special? And do you find it just a bit creepy? Like they expected oddly big things from you, things no adult could ever deliver on? I think everyone wants to find that Harry Potter, that kid that with ingenuity and goodness turns everything around.

Or maybe it's just an evolved emotional response. Wish we didn't have to base so much policy on it.

Spoiler Alert: I'm Just Wild About Harry

This post has spoilers. MANY spoilers. So if you're in the middle of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or haven't read it but plan on doing so, leave! Leave now! The blog will still be here when you get back, I promise, and if it's not, that means there's something horrifically wrong with Google, and we all have bigger things to worry about.

So, um, everyone's predictions were right. Sure, some predictions contradicted each other, so they weren't ALL right, but if you took all the most common ones—Snape's on the right side and was in love with Lily, Harry's a horcrux, Neville's the one who becomes a teacher at Hogwarts—you'd more or less have all the answers.

Then again, the answers have never been the REAL draw of these books. The terrific characters and beautiful moments are as terrific and beautiful as ever here. I've always found the Weasley family to be the most emotionally stirring set of relationships in the book...the way Molly cares about her husband and children, the completely good-natured partnership of Fred and George, who are constantly joking but so emotionally close and mature. So when the Weasleys suffered in this book, I cried. I did. I also cried when Molly uttered what I believe to be the first swear word in the series: "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" Bloody brilliant.

When Harry dives into Snape's memories and realizes that he must sacrifice himself, those are also a great few pages. His last mile felt incredibly real...as I imagine facing death would be...as any bizarrely extreme situation is.

There were actually long stretches that were sort of slow. I mean, relative to the rest of Harry Potter, which is to say that I was reading a page a minute instead of a page every 50 seconds.

In any case, the ending was extremely satisfying, if somewhat predictable, and I'm happy. Stories about midnight madness TK.

Almost All Hallows Eve

With 100 pages left in Book 6, The Great Harry Potter Reread is about to come to a close, and The Great Deathly Hallows Read will soon begin. Who knows how we'll look back on this time? I certainly have no particular envy for the newspaper readers who received Great Expectations in installments, but then again, I hated Great Expectations.

As many have undoubtedly heard, some clever schmo uploaded gifs of the entire book on the web, and now spoilers are wildly circulating, as I try to dodge them like a seeker dodges bludgers (Quidditch reference, ho!). I've already happened upon one, which I hope was false—not that I'm so opposed to what was indicated in the spoiler, I just don't like plots spoiled. It was in an RSS feed for one of my favorite blogs, and it was in bold. So maybe there was some context in the non-bold text that made it clear the spoiler was made up, but I didn't stick around in case there were more spoilers.

Not cool, Slog poster. Not cool.

I'm not even reading comments on this very post until I finish Deathly Hallows, because I wouldn't be surprised if some eeeeevil child were technorating all HP posts and commenting with spoilers, just to stroke himself. Bad boy. Go to your room.

But really, I'm not too concerned with the things that will probably be in these spoilers. I'm less concerned with who dies than with the progress of the book itself, how the final battle is framed, what the final comment on human nature is. I'll need to actually read the book to figure all of these things out. And I'm so psyched.

Suddenly This Summer

You can almost convince yourself summer hasn't really started yet until the fourth of July. Then you know you're in the throes of the season and it's about to slip by, just as it does every year. I'd have thought this would stop after, you know, I stopped getting summer vacation. But it's still my favorite season. I'd much rather it be 85 than 45, and it's good to have all of the school-bound friends feeling a little more relaxed.

The summer has started off with Harry Pottering, which is unforseeably terrific. I've read the books already, and I know I enjoyed them, but being on a mission to read—spending a Sunday sitting in the Hungarian Pastry Shop and then Riverside Park, reading a fantasy book, and feeling accomplished afterward—is so ideal.

I got my MacBook, which is treating me awfully well. I've only played with GarageBand enough to record myself singing Wimoweh. It's, well, horrible—at once overly pretty and harsh—but I'm thrilled. I'm harmonizing! With myself! And I can send the file to people! Woo!

And I'm happy with my UUST score. If I want to go to UU school, I'm in pretty good shape...just have to get recommendations from old professors and write the world's most brilliant 250 word statement. Maybe my alma mater will take me back...who knows? They're pretty picky, though.

Oh, I met an attractive guy this weekend. I know that doesn't sound like much (no, I didn't, like, get his number...or even have a one-on-one conversation with him) but so rarely am I at all attracted to someone I just met—nay, so rarely am I attracted to anyone at all—that it was sort of a proof of concept. The dude was gorgeous and authentically charismatic. And I kinda dug him. It's more a testament to my functionality than my maturity (it would be nice to go for someone attainable), but when that's in doubt, it's something.

So, on a completely different topic, I was thinking about consciousness a bit today. I do maintain a confidence in science and philosophy...I think we'll eventually have an idea of what consciousness is, but right now I think we don't quite know what questions to ask, and that's hindering progress in finding out what exactly consciousness is and how it arises from the brain. We've apparently nicely eliminated the possibility that consciousness is located at one place in the brain. You can take out any individual part of the brain and maintain consciousness...I mean, maybe parts will make you pass out, but they won't kill your identity. So I guess that only leaves the possibility that it's emergent from some collection of processes? Some network? Which kind of makes sense. But I think before we figure out how it emerges, we have to get a better subjective idea of what 'it' is.

Therefore, I've been trying to pinpoint my own consciousness. What do I feel I directly experience? It's easier to find stuff I don't directly experience. Inspiration is one of them. When I'm doing a cryptic and think of an answer, it often just 'comes to me.' You all know this. The answer to some problem just comes into your head. So that's something that does not happen in the conscious. So the answer appears in your head...how does it appear? Is it an image? A sound? It's kind of neither, usually, and so it's hard to say what it IS. Even when you have mental images or hear things, the sounds don't need to happen linearly; the image doesn't need to be detailed. In what way are we actually active? What specific actions can you take ownership of? I guess we experience things. Sound does actually register. But certainly the processing of that sound isn't part of the conscious mind, nor is the interpreting of it. I can't think of any specific process that I really feel I—as my conscious mind—do. Although I know I'm here.

OK, I'm too tired for further pontificating. 'Night, all.