F&FFF: Who's a Pretty Dog Then?

For Feline and Furball (with Feathers) Friday:

Pepper and Cayenne - which one is prettier? It's hard to say. Partly it;s a matter of personal preference. Some people prefer long-haired dogs, some short-haired. But still, there are probably conventional standards of beauty for dogs. Does one of my dogs measure up better than the other?

The dogs themselves don;t care, of course, although they certainly compete for attention, especially Cayenne with here "aren't I cute? Pet me!" antics. And it's hardly one of the Great Questions of Our time.

The question arises because yesterday Pepper was professionally groomed for the first time in the year we've had her. The groomer had nothing but good things to say about her behavior, which surprised and pleased me. She is, after all, the standoffish one of the two dogs.

Of course she came away from her wash and brush-out with silky, fluffy fur. We think she looks terrific, and for the first time I noticed substle variations of beige and tan in her markings.

On the other hand, Cayenne can be pretty darn cute! And she's the one who gets most of the attention at the dog park. Is it the bandannas? Or the fact that she approaches people for attention, as Pepper does not?

All in all, I think Pepper is probably prettier, and Cayenne is considerably cuter. How's that for a diplomatic answer?

Karen

Update: shortly after posting this entry, I took the dogs with me to Fort Lowell where I took pictures for the Round Robin entry I'll be posting a few hours after this update (i.e., sometime Saturday morning). From there we went to the dog park, where Pepper was almost immediately attacked by another dog, twice, with no obvious provocation. The other dog's owner claims that it never attacks other dogs, but "these things happen." I found no blood on Pepper, but the other owner saw blood in her dog's mouth, which means that Pepper was in fact injured, although you can;t tell through the fur. She's now all muddy and matted, scarely more than 24 hours after a rather expensive grooming, and I hurt my finger trying to pull the other dog off her. Lovely. Pepper is not acting particularly hurt, but I'll have to bathe her, and use Betadine with the shampoo to help prevent infection.

Weekend Assignment #259: Mentors

Hi folks! I should probably use a guest professor this week, but instead I'm going with a new topic idea of my own:

Weekend Assignment #259: The term "mentoring" has become a buzzword in recent yearsm but the concept of a mentor goes back centuries, and the word itself all the way back to Greek mythology, where Mentor was a friend of Odysseus. Have you ever had a mentor? How did you benefit from the relationship? And if you didn't have one, would you have wanted one?

Extra Credit: Have you ever been a mentor to someone else?

Harry's mentor Dumbledore, as played by Richard Harris.

I thought of this last night because I was rereading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's [Philosopher's] Stone. Although Harry's mentor, Dumbledore, is a presence right from the beginning of the first book, the two characters don;t actually converse until hundreds of pages later. Dumbledore, of course, comes from a long line of fantasy mentors, from Merlin to Gandalf to my own character Fayubi. Those particular characters fall under the archetype I like to call the "Tricky Old Man," a combination of Jung's Trickster and Wise Old Man. Mentor characters can also be female, although I don't see them as often. Madeleine L'Engle's Mrs Whatsit is sort of a mentor to Meg and Charles Wallace. Maximiliana Van Horne in L'Engle's A House Like a Lotus is explicitly a mentor to Polly O'Keefe, but a flawed one whose drunken betrayal of Polly drives the plot of the book.

Real life, of course, is a bit different. I've never been on the Hero's Journey, never met a wizard, never been sent overseas by a rich friend many years my senior. But I have latched onto a number of people as mentors over the years, at least to some minor degree. There were high school English teachers that I looked up to and appreciated for more than what they taught in class. There was the young woman across the street who claimed to be a writer and sometimes served me tea when I was in high school. There were the writers-in-residence at Clarion, particularly Harlan Ellison, with whom I had corresponded and whom I had met a few times by then.

But the main mentor I had when I was younger was a young English teacher from an entirely different school district when I first met her in early 1974. She was 23 years old. I was 16 going on 17. I had just published a Star Trek fanzine called 2-5YM, which inspired "d" to contact me. We got together and talked about Star Trek and lots of other things, sometimes sitting in her car for hours, just chatting. She had realized that teaching was not for her, so she went back to school to become a librarian instead. When I was in college the first time she ran a small one-room library at the University, and I hung out there after class.

d didn't teach me about writing or accounting or anything like that. Mostly she taught me how to be an adult while expanding my literary horizons a bit. I first read the 60 original Sherlock Holmes stories because of her. She taught me how to check whether the dish you are washing is clean, and advocated squash for pie instead of pumpkin, although I still disagree with her on the latter. She told me about Japan, where she wanted to live, and advised me about the Star Trek group and its members. She made me an afghan blanket, and was co-Maid of Honor at my wedding. And I think I still have some E. E. Cummings books I should really return to her. She was also an Episcopalian, a denomination I sought out many years later, in part because of her.

I haven't seen d in about 20 years, since she visited Tucson shortly after we moved here. Noe has she sought me out in the years since. I found her online a few years ago, and could write to her care of her current workplace, assuming she's still there. Would she welcome the contact? I don't know. But I hope she is well and happy.

As for being a mentor myself, I have occasionally had pretensions to this, particularly in online relationships with younger writers. But that's more of a mutual support and advice thing than true mentoring, I think. It might be different if my novels were published an in the stores, but they're not, and won't be anytime soon. Eventually - this Karen swears! - but not soon.

How about you? Have you had or been a mentor? Tell us about it in a blog entry, and please remember to link back to this entry so people can read what others have to say on the subject. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll post a roundup of your responses a week from now. Meanwhile:

For Weekend Assignment #258: It's A Small Web (After All), I basically asked how sociable you get in your social media. Here are excerpts from the small pool of responses:

Julie said...

For me, it depends on the situation. On places like Twitter and FriendFeed, I'm following (and am followed by) people from all around the world. Just yesterday I exchanged "tweets" with someone in the UK about the Manchester United match that was going on at the time. I'm more careful on Facebook, where I tend to follow and "friend" real-life friends and professional contacts, though I've made a few exceptions.

Florinda said...

I hesitate to say that my offline friends are the only "real" ones, though. My connections with some of the folks I've gotten to know online are just as "real" to me. I've met a few of them in person, but the fact that I'm unlikely to physically cross paths with most of them doesn't diminish those relationships. I enjoy meeting new people online and getting better acquainted with the ones I've already met via blogging and Twitter, which for the moment are meeting my social-media-interaction needs pretty well.

Mike said...

I certainly don't have a wide net of online friends. I don't belong to many online groups. I have this one here, and Carly's photo shoot as my only online groups. That's fine with me. If I had too many, I'd have trouble keeping track of everything I'm supposed to be doing. I have enough trouble getting to every one's posts the way it is now.

That's it for now! I look forward to hearing about your mentors and mentoring. And yes, as always, I'm still soliciting topics for these Weekend Assignments. Please email me your suggestions. Thanks!

Karen

Stuck

In theory, the local office of a well-known charity was to make a decision earlier this week about hiring its new staff accountant, who would do billing and act as liaison to their regional accounting operation. I interviewed for the job a few weeks ago. To date the recruiter who got me the interview has not given me a word of feedback - not in response to the interview itself or my call to her afterward, and not in response to the phone message I left on Monday this week.

It's nice to feel valued and wanted and appreciated. At the moment, as far as the recruiters are concerned, I'm none of the above. But I do think I'm entitled to a returned phone call, even if it's to say, "You didn't get it," or "They haven't made a decision yet."

It's likely at this point that I didn't get it. Drat. I'm back to being without so much as a nibble on a job, as stuck in place as the old soccer ball that someone jammed into a tree at the dog park a couple weeks ago. I'm still plugging away at my Auditing seminar and that's going well, unlike the Financial Accounting and Reporting one that I dropped a couple of times and will ultimately need to tackle again. But it will be a while before I even register to take the CPA exam. And even once I pass all four parts of it, I still won't be certified as a CPA, because for all my experience I've never gotten a piece of paper signed by a CPA I worked under for a year or more. I could have gotten one at First Magnus had I known. Ah, well. So actually becoming a CPA will have to wait until I'm employed again. Whenever that will be.

I recently got a letter from the Arizona Department of Economic Security, dated March 5, about a change in my unemployment compensation due to the economic stimulus bill passing. According to the letter, my benefit will go up $25 in Federal dollars as of the end of February. I checked, though, and as of last week I was still getting the same $240 as before. But I read the letter more closely today, and it says it will take several weeks to get the system updated to include the money. It will then be paid retroactively. Thanks, President Obama! I really do appreciate it.

One additional worry, though. The DES web page that tracks how much unemployment I have left is showing me just a few weeks away from it being all gone, 26 weeks from when I got the ball rolling after my last temp job (aside for the tax service debacle) ended. According to another page, it gets automatically extended if the state unemployment rate is over 6%, which it is. But I worry whether I read it correctly, and whether it will really kick in. I need to face up to researching it further.

Meanwhile the tax refunds have come in, and today is the day Pepper gets her first professional grooming since we got her. Cayenne, meanwhile, will get her nails trimmed. So I have something to look forward to, sort of.

Karen

EMPS: A Page for March

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #29: Winter Meets Spring, Carly gives us the alternative assignment of designing a calendar page for March. Mine is fairly individual, the sort of thing I might put on a custom calendar rather than one for the general public. See, for me, March is a month of birthdays...

Let's see. My birthday is on the tenth. John's birthday is the 22nd. My brother Steve's is on the 25th. My best friend from college is the 22nd again, my online friend Becky just had hers, and Sara's, I'm pretty sure, is the 21st. Another college friend, Ed, just had his birthday a day or two ago. One of the Whovians, Heather, has hers today. Florinda's birthday is this month, but I've forgotten the details, and there's probably at least one other former March baby I'm forgetting entirely. I've always wondered whether a tradition for June weddings contributes to a glut of March birthdays.

(Setting up this photo: the only thing I bought for this shot was a slice of carrot cake from Safeway. I cloned out the carrot decoration in the icing. The card was a late-arrival for my birthday last week that I just opened tonight. The box and toy dog were from John's birthday present to me last year, representing a promise to buy a dog. Result: Pepper! The candles turned up in a drawer of the china hutch.)

Still, I don't suppose this statistical anomaly is shared by the rest of the calendar-buying population, so here's an alternative page for March, illustrating everyone's favorite silly March holiday. Personally, I don't like St. Patrick's Day even a little bit. I dislike the emphasis on drinking that's a big part of the celebration, or people pretending to be part of a particular ethnic group for a day without honoring that group's non-trivial contributions to the culture, or the pressure to conform to the day's dress code of green shirts or blouses or dresses. I only own one green shirt and I'm pretty sure it doesn't fit. I wore orange today, not to make a statement but because it was at the top of the pile of clean laundry.

(This hat was worn by a parishioner tonight at the St. Patrick's Day supper at St. Michael's. I showed up for a few minutes to take photos, but didn't stay for the food. Too bad, because I really do like corned beef and cabbage a lot. )

Let's finish tonight's entry with a few sunset shots, because I took them today and they're not like my usual ones. This one was taken while driving toward the sunset, bound for the dog park. I got a really late start tonight; it's been a while since the sun's been this low in the sky during the drive over.

And here's a dog park sunset shot. What makes this a little unusual is that I managed to frame one of the Tucson Mountains in the shot. Unfortunately, the chimney of a house across the street on Country Club Road was directly in front of the mountain. So I cloned it out.

Karen

EMPS: Roses in Waiting

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #29: Winter Meets Spring, Carly gives us the option of either looking for signs of the upcoming change of seasons, or else, for places like Tucson that have less pronounced seasons, to design a calendar page for March. As is usual for me, I stubbornly refuse to let Tucson's lack of winter weather stop me from posting a seasonal entry. I'll do the March calendar thing, too - later.

New growth on a tree in the dog park.

I took all of these photos in Reid Park after sunset tonight. Dusk has kept the camera from managing sharp images, but I kind of like the effect of that.

It's a rosebud! No, wait, it's not.

When the dogs and I left the dog park this evening I led them on leashes to the Rose Test Garden in Reid Park to see how the roses are coming along. Mostly, I can't tell that there are any flowers present or imminent. I thought for a moment that the red thing on this bush at the garden fence was a rosebud, but up close it looks more like a crabapple or a mini-pomegranate. I don't know what it actually is. Rose hips? What are rose hips?

They're blurry, but the only for-sure roses I saw.

Here's another plant at the fence line. This one provided the only actual roses I saw for sure.

A tree, or maybe a bush, in bloom. But what kind of flowers?

I have occasionally heard of "rose trees" out here. I don't know if a rose plant as such can be a tree. If so, is that what this is?

The Test Rose Garden at dusk.

Inside the garden, which was locked, the roses of rose bushes are starting to show signs of color, if not necessarily buds or flowers.

Be sure to check Ellipsis each week for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot. And I'll be back tonight with Part Two of my entry for this week.

Karen

I Wanna Banter Like Zoe

I love banter, but I'm out of practice.

Back when I was in college the first time, before I met John, I had a sort-of boyfriend who was a world class banterer. I had to work hard to keep up with him, and although I got better with practice, I was never really up to Bob's standard. Then came John, and we were somewhat more evenly matched on the banter meter. But that became family banter. It's easy to banter with a loved one, because we know each other's personal history and cultural references. And we don't do as much of it as we once did, methinks.

When I was at First Magnus, I made an effort to make my boss laugh every day, and to write amusing emails in conducting business with the folks in HR. But that wasn't banter. That was quips. It wasn't really interactive. And it's been over a year and a half since First Magnus closed its doors. I haven't really had anyone to quip to, much less banter with, in any job since then. Nor do dog park conversations lend themselves to bantering. If I try it, people just look at me strangely.

These days I get in a little banter with John, and a little bit with my friend Kevin on Sundays. Kevin has a gift for absurdity, so we have little runs of nonsense conversation, such as Kevin's claim this morning that Pepper's recent escape into the front yard was so she could help plan the rise of our new canine overlords. And that was fun, but it wasn't world class banter.

But over the last several days I read Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi. I did so admiringly and more than a little enviously, because it's full of galactic-class banter.

Zoe Boudin-Perry, the protagonist of Zoe's Tale, is a 17-year-old smart aleck, but that's just a small part of who and what she is. In fact, the book centers on who and what she is, and how she learns to use her unique identity to save a planet. A little backstory here: her stepdad, John Perry, is the protagonist of the first and third books in the Old Man's War series, a resourceful and ethical man who accomplishes amazing things because he's just that clever. He's like the Doctor or Don Diego de la Vega, the smartest and wittiest man in the room, who can out-strategize his adversaries and improvise his way out of almost anything. I love that kind of character. Zoe, whose story takes place concurrently with The Last Colony, is sort of the female, teenage equivalent of John Perry, but with teenage concerns as well as planetary ones, and an unsettling but crucial relationship with an entire race of aliens.

And all through the book, Zoe and her loved ones banter. She banters with her best friend and her boyfriend and her best friend's boyfriend, with her dad and her dad's assistant, and even with alien generals. It's awesome stuff, and I couldn't resist reading out passages of it to John. Now the book's over and I'm annoyed, because I wasn't through enjoying it.

But I tell you what I'm going to do about it. Inspired by Zoe, I'm going to brush up on my bantering skills. So watch out.

Karen

Religion As a Cost-Benefit Calculation

Here's a thought I had tonight. I'm not sure it really goes anywhere or is useful in any way, but here goes:

The claim is often made that human beings act entirely in their own self-interest; that is, they do everything because they expect to benefit in some way, even if that benefit is just to feel virtuous. I've always found this to be an overly cynical way of looking at human behavior, but it's hard to argue your way out of that basic proposition. We do things expecting to benefit from our actions.

Conversely, though, we also avoid things out of self-interest. "It hurts" might be our secret excuse for putting off dentistry. "It's too much trouble" is our way of letting inertia have its way. "What if they don't like me?" might keep you from auditioning or speaking up. And so on. That's the crux of cost-benefit analysis in everyday life. If the attraction of the expected benefit is greater than the avoidance generated by expected negative consequences, we will probably do whatever it is. If not, then not.

Let's apply this idea first to a simple behavior before moving on to a more problematic one. Let's say some annoying blogger (to name no names!) keeps mentioning certain games on Facebook. If a reader of that blog isn't even on Facebook and thinks Facebook is too much trouble, a waste of time, etc., chances are that reader will never try the game, even if it sounds vaguely interesting. But if the reader is on Facebook already, and the reader expects to enjoy the game, he or she may well try it. The expected benefit (having fun) outweigh the expected cost (dealing with Facebook and learning the game).

Having tried the game, the reader has another calculation to make. Is the game actually fun? Are there new costs to balance against the fun? Well, yes. In the case of the games I'm thinking of, it is difficult to progress (and thus have fun) without soliciting friends (or strangers, or both) as allies in the game. Is it worth the effort? Some will still find the benefit outweighs the cost, but others will not. And there are further calculations beyond that.

It's the same thing with eating, or going to the gym, or even going to work. Is it worth preparing a proper meal, or is a bowl of cereal nearly as great a benefit for less cost? Is the benefit the body and mind will derive from working out greater than the benefit of relaxing in front of the tv instead? Is the job worth the daily slog, knowing that good jobs are scarce and there are bills to be paid?

Okay, now here's the tricky part. I've been thinking tonight about how easy it is to persuade some people to become avid gamers, and wondering how this whole cost-benefit mechanism applies to religion in general, and going to church specifically. If the person is a confirmed atheist - that is, utterly convinced that there is no God - then it would be extremely difficult to provide that person with sufficient expected benefit for that person to attend church. The primary benefit others perceive would not apply. The social component, in which the person expects to enjoy being around other people in a group activity, is outweighed by considerations of possible hypocrisy and supporting what one does not believe in. Really, the only scenarios I can think of in which an atheist would go to a traditional church involve either the benefit of a non-religious activity - e.g. receiving a bag of groceries in a time of need, or being involved in providing services to others in need - or an unusual degree of expected cost of not going, such as when the spouse nags the person into it, or the politician is aware that atheism would not go down well with many of his constituents.

That's one extreme. At the other extreme, the True Believer believes that the expected benefit, namely eternal life, etc., outweighs any possible cost. But what if the person believes the expected benefit can be derived without the cost? Maybe it's enough to believe a certain way, without the trouble of going to church. Or what if the promised benefit doesn't seem real and immediate, compared with the cost? Heaven is a pie-in-the-sky, long-term consideration, like losing weight. Sometimes you'd just rather have the pie on the plate. Instant gratification is a powerful thing. Result: if the immense but distant (or vaguely believed) expected benefit of going to church is outweighed by the feeling that "it's too much trouble" or "maybe next week," then even the believer may not show up on Sunday.

So what if you're a pastor, a vestry member, a church webmaster, or someone else with an interest in bringing more people into the church? The obvious thing to do is to try to influence the potential churchgoer's cost-benefit analysis. Either the expected benefit needs to be as strong as possible, or the expected cost needs to be as light as possible, or both. Here are some possibilities:

• Convince others that the cost of not attending church is too great to be viable. This is the nuclear option, the idea that skipping church is a mortal sin. Hey, it worked for Catholics for many years.
• Convince others that there is an immediate, observable benefit from attending church. Make it fun, or inspiring. Give us magnificent or hip music, a great sermon, coffee and doughnuts. Market the church as the "cool church," and yourself as the "fighting young priest who can talk to the young."
• Make it easy to go, so the burden is light. Offer day care and Sunday school so there's no babysitter issue. Have services at a variety of convenient times. Have plenty of free parking. And maybe, just maybe, ask very little of churchgoers in the way of living out their faith. Don't ask them to feed the hungry or visit the prisoners, or to love their enemies. Skip over anything that might require critical thought or an unselfish attitude. Yeah, that'll get 'em.

As I say, I'm not sure any of this is useful. For what it's worth, I enjoy going to St. Michael's. The service fits with my beliefs and sensibilities, the music is interesting and sometimes challenging, I like the people, I enjoy serving as an acolyte, and it's fun to sit with friends at coffee hour afterward. And the cost of not going, for me, is not that it's a mortal sin or anything, but that I'd let down Kevin, who depends on me for a ride, and Proscovia, who depends on me to carry a torch or a crucifix, and occasionally to read from the Old Testament.

But how do I take this insight and try to convince people who don't know Kevin and Proscovia and the rest that the benefit of attending St. Michael's outweighs the inertia of "it's too much trouble" or "what if they don't like me?" Well, aside from assuring folks that of course we'll like you, I have no idea. I only know that about 12 years ago, I overcame my own inertia in the expectation of possible benefit in attending that church on Wilmot, the one with the sign. And for a dozen years, the benefit has far outweighed the cost.



Karen