World fantasy con update.

Worst parts: for me coming down with a head cold despite only being fifteen hours’ sleep deprived.

For the con: having the swimming pool flood and curtail much business in the dealers’ room. 

Best part: staying up late at the Weird Tales party on Halloween, laughing my ass off with other clarionites. (it wasn’t what Tempest said, it was the way she said it.) Also: meeting editors (the face behind the “no-thank-you” note) and hearing about all the slush that’s worse than mine. 

My own reading went fairly well, except that I rushed it a little. It was 5000 words, and I knew it would be a tight fit to get it read within a half hour. I read it all, but I sacrificed quality. Thanks to all of you gracious enough to show up, and I promise I’ll give a better reading next time.

I have enjoyed most of Charlaine Harris’ writing. Her Grave Sight series is provocative and intriguing, her Shakespeare novels are solid, competent mysteries, and when I first started reading the Sookie Stackhouse, aka Southern Vampire series, I could not put them down. (I mean that literally—Thanksgiving became rather awkward that year.) She’s one of the few authors that gained my confidence so much that I broke my self-imposed book acquisition restraining order and actually purchased her books in hardback before I’d read them at the library to see if they were any good.

She’s losing my confidence.

Karma points are a real part of any relationship, but some people don’t get the rules. 
 

• If a husband wants to go out with his friends, and the wife stays home with the kids so he can go out, she gets karma points. She gets more if she wanted to go too and it’s a sacrifice, but she still gets them even if she was kind of tired and wanted to go to bed. 
• If you ask a friend to do a favor for you (ie. feed your cat while you’re gone) and she agrees, she gets karma points even if you have to cancel your trip and don’t need the favor after all.
• A husband gets karma points if he agrees to play his wife’s favorite game (Scrabble), and more if he doesn’t like it, but much less if he stops losing consistently and starts pulling in three hundred plus point scores (hello, Jeremy, I’m looking at you.)
• You can get bonus points if it’s a sacrifice. For example, if you agree to pick your friend up at the airport and traffic is horrible and it takes you twice as long to get there.
• You don’t get bonus sacrifice points if the person didn’t want the favor. For example, if you go to pick your friend up from the airport and they hadn’t asked you to do that, because they’d already arranged another ride, you don’t get karma points. You also don’t get bonus points if you get stuck in traffic at that point.
• You get almost as many points for a card or a visit as you do for a gift, unless the gift is flowers for me, because I love flowers.
• You get more bonus points for the gift if it’s unexpected.
• Once the value of your gift increases beyond a certain point, the karma points gained decrease. A dozen roses gets you more points than a single rose, but five dozen roses is too extravagant, and makes the recipient feel beholden. Expensive gifts don’t make the recipient feel nearly as beholden if it’s something the owner has either owned for a while (ie. The nice phone he/she just replaced) or was given from someone else (ie. The Limoges figurine their grandma gave them that you adore but they find in poor taste.)
• Karma points for a gift to a woman decrease if the gift plugs in, and if it is not wrapped, and if it’s something you will use as much or more than she will.

Anyone have anything else to add?

My very first D&D character (before it was AD&D, which means it was back in the stone ages) was an “elf.” Back then the elves didn’t have the NAAEP to fight for their rights, and “elf” was a class as well as a race. If you were an elf, you were a magic user and a fighter in equal proportion. It must have been a good experience, because almost every character I played in every system after that was a variant of the “elf”: I like magic users who whack people with swords.

So when my friends invited me to join their campaign (I don’t remember the system, but I think it was one of the GURPs worlds), I made a magic-wielding samurai.   I only played one game. 

When Jeremy and I were first married, we moved into his dad’s old house and rented it from him. We decided not to buy a house, or even look for one, because we weren’t going to live in Tempe for very long. I wanted to move somewhere else, preferably the Pacific Northwest.  I’d loved Seattle when I lived there, and every visit back just cemented how much I liked it.

Cemented, and didn’t cement. Did I love it because of my good memories? Because of my friends who still lived there? After all, I’d lived there while I attended the University of Washington, and college years are the best years of many people’s lives, including mine. Seattle is a very trendy city, and like most trendy things, it’s extremely overpriced. In Seattle, you can spend half a million dollars for a thousand square foot house, and still live in a crime-ridden neighborhood on a street with potholes.

Okay, so not Seattle, then. Some other city in the Pacific Northwest. How about Bellingham, Washington? It has an airport, it’s near a couple of big cities. He has family there, and we’ve been there and liked it a lot. Sure. We’d move there.

We’ve been married almost eleven years now, and are still in Tempe. We own our second house now. I have many friends here, some I knew as a kid, and some I met as an adult. My brother and his family live here, just a mile from us, and my parents are within walking distance. Jeremy’s parents live just a couple hours’ drive, up in Prescott. We live in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood, with nice families who have kids the same age as my own kids.

But there are things I want, things I want very much, which I cannot have in Tempe. An old house (at least eighty years old) with a basement and an attic. A real autumn. Snow and rain. Trees that don’t have to be babied to get them through every summer. Weather cold enough to grow tulips and raspberries. Crows. Creeks and forests. I’d like to be able to wear jackets more than four days a year. I’d like to not have to drive everywhere. You can get these traits most places in the US, just not here, where Jeremy's job is, where our family is.

My other brother is stationed in San Diego now, but he and his fiancée are going to be moving soon. We sat down in our kitchen and they talked about the “where do you want to live” game. My vote was that they move to Albequerque, because it’s halfway between Tempe and Dallas (where my sister lives) and if I could stop and visit them, it would make the horrible twenty hour drive to Dallas a little more palatable. His fiancée has family there. He pointed out that the altitude is a killer for someone who’s been living at sea level for ten years. Why not Tempe, they say? They want to be near family, and we’re family, and Tempe is a really nice town.

That’s true. Tempe is a great town. It has everything you could want in a city. The streets are in good repair, the schools are good, it has festivals and amenities, decent police and reasonably priced water and garbage service. If it were seven or eight hundred miles north of here, it would be the perfect city. But it’s smack dab in the middle of a hot, hot climate, and I hate the heat. I don’t want my brother and his fiancee to move to Tempe, because I don’t want anything else keeping us here.

In Where the Red Fern Grows, a boy has to catch his first raccoon in order to train his dogs how to follow a scent. Since he can’t hunt them the normal way, he has to use a trick. He drills a quarter-sized hole in a log, and in the bottom of the log, he drops a quarter. The raccoon will see the shiny quarter in the bottom of the hole and grab it. Once it has the coin in its hand, its hand is too big to pull out of the hole, but it won’t let go because it wants that quarter.

My mom grew up “back east” as we say (Delaware) and she’s always talked about how much she misses the trees and the cool weather back home. Like me, when she hears people mention how much they like summer, she looks at them as though they’ve expressed a fondness for tuberculosis. She’s lived here over thirty years now. You can easily spot her house if you look up our neighborhood on Google maps, as it’s completely surrounded by trees. She misses trees.

In winter and spring, I think about the possibility that I, too, might live here the rest of my life, and I think it might not be so bad. I do like the desert. I know how to grow plants in clay-like alkaline soil even when the weather resembles a convection oven. I have roots here, family and friends and a house we’ve already sunk a lot of time and money into. It would be dumb to give this up. Moving elsewhere could make us miserable. Our life in Arizona is shiny and pretty, snug in the bottom of a round hole.

In the autumn, when it’s mid-October and still a hundred degrees out, I remember how it feels to walk under scarlet trees on a crisp day, picking up acorns and buckeyes, and I wonder how many more autumns I’m going to have in my life, and do I want to squander them living somewhere other than where I want to be? It's not even just that I hate the six months of summer every year; Phoenix becomes more and more like Los Angeles every year.  Yes, it’s a huge, exciting metropolis, but we don’t need that. We don’t go to concerts, the ballet, orchestra.  We don’t attend any sporting events. We don’t need swanky nightclubs or expensive restaurants. Yes, it’s sunny three hundred and fifty days of the year, and it’s almost always warm. So? I don’t get cold easily, and my ancestors came from a foggy little island, so I get too much sun.

A friend of mine just moved to Bellingham. She’s kind of a free spirit, so it didn’t surprise me that she moved there. On one hand, I don’t envy the turmoil. Moving house is never much fun, especially when it also involves a scramble for a job. On the other hand, she’s following her dream. Are we wise to not make the same choice, or just not brave enough?

Which dog would be safer around your family: one who was chained up and frequently beaten, or one which was given fresh air and exercise? Which child would be a better citizen, one who was treated as an intelligent and valuable member of society, or one who was reminded daily that he or she was a burden and a waste of oxygen?   You know the answer to these questions. Everyone knows the answers to these questions. So why do we insist on calling prison “rehabilitation?”

You can have rehabilitation, or you can have punishment. Pick one. You can’t have both.  Punishment satisfies our deep-seated need for revenge, but it doesn't benefit us as a society.

I, personally, am in favor of rehabilitation, but I think it will take a long time before it catches on. It took hundreds of years to convince our western, Old Testament governments that, no, daily flogging really wasn’t the best way to maintain discipline.

What if instead of locking prisoners up in giant steel cages, we put them in New Age monasteries, where they farmed organic vegetables, did yoga and meditation, and spent quiet afternoons practicing Tai Chi and composing poetry? It will never work, you say, because that’s the sort of place that people would pay to go to. So, what? What if we let the prisoners work alongside citizens who have paid for the privilege of being there? After all, we’re already paying to send people to prison, and it’s not cheap. If they are required to stay there for a certain term, isn’t the lack of freedom punishment enough?

Imagine two men. One had been locked up for two years in a state far away from his family and friends, given nothing to do, in a place that routinely humiliated not only him, but the people who came to visit him. The other had just spent two years in a New Age monastery, where he got up at four to meditate every day, went to bed at eight at night, and spent the days tending the vegetable plots that fed him and his fellow inmates. They both get out to rejoin society. Wouldn’t you rather be neighbors with the latter one?

Is a guy really going to have a lot of street cred if he spent two years in the can and all he has to show for it is a farmer's tan and a good recipe for tempeh satay?

People talk about cutting costs, and I’m all for it, but when they talk about how expensive it is to run prisons, they never talk about the recidivism rate. We make teachers accountable for how well their students do on tests, why don't we hold sheriffs responsible for how many of their ex-cons go on to commit more crimes?  If a prison turns a criminal into an even better criminal by forcing him to spend time with other criminals and stigmatizing him upon his release into society, has it really benefited society? How are you going to convince convicted criminals to become citizens if you won’t let them vote? If you won’t let them get good jobs? If their records haven’t been wiped clean?

We already know that fear of consequences is a crappy motivator to get young people to fly right. People do stupid things despite the consequences because no one ever believes they will get caught. If harsher punishments were really successful at deterring dumb young kids, there wouldn’t be so many pregnant teens in the bible belt. 

Right now our prisons are cages for dangerous animals. They need to be clinics to turn criminals into kinder, gentler people. You can’t treat people like horrible monsters and expect them to become good citizens. It doesn’t work with children, it doesn’t work with dogs, and it doesn’t work with burglars and car thieves.