A Difference of Experience.
In 2006, in early May, I was arrested for drunk driving. When I used to drink, I drove drunk a great deal. I believed I was “good at it”. And, compared to merely occasional drinkers, maybe I was. After all, I never had an accident and I frequently drove with blood alcohol levels that were dangerously high. The day I was arrested, my BAC was 0.19%. More on that later.
I have to say, my experience being arrested for drunk driving wasn’t terrible, as such things go. I had had two bottles of wine and some bourbon. I don’t know how much. Over the course of several hours. I hadn’t been intending to go anywhere that evening, but my then-girlfriend called me and asked me to come over. So I hopped in my car and off I went. That’s not to place any blame on her: it was 100% my decision and my error. If I had told her I couldn’t come over because I was drunk, there’d have been hell to pay, but she would have told me not to come over.
I made it almost all the way to her home, about 20 miles away. I had taken the highway exit near her home, about half a mile away, when the lights came on behind me. I quickly lit a cigarette to try to hide the smell. The cop, already in my window, said, “That won’t help.” Someone had called about my car weaving. The officer asked if I’d been drinking, and I said I’d had three drinks. He asked me out of the vehicle and told me to stand on one foot. I said, “I doubt I could do that if I hadn’t been drinking.”
I couldn’t. He told me, “I’m going to take you into custody for driving while intoxicated tonight.” I said, “That sounds about right.” The officer made an obvious point of sizing me up, and asking me if I was ok, and calm. I said I was. He told me to hold my hands out, and he cuffed me in front, rather than behind my back. Then he led me to the car, and asked me, “Are you ok? Not going to try anything on me?” I said something like, “Certainly not, sir.” He said, “I’m going to have you sit up front. I’ve got my dog in the back.” Indeed he did. A huge and frightening German Shepherd.
He emptied my pockets. Then he asked me, “Do you have any cash, your bail is going to be about $300.” I said I didn’t. He said, “I’ll drive you through an ATM so you can get some cash.” It occurred to me then, as now, that perhaps he was intimating at a bribe, but on the balance of things, I think not. I got the cash, and he tucked it into my wallet. Then, he took me to jail where I was processed. About two hours later, I was brought into a small room. I asked if I needed a lawyer, and the person there (a different officer) said, “You can have one if you want, but it’s late and they probably won’t get here until morning. If you want to wait…”
I didn’t. I was guilty and I knew it. I took the breathalyzer, more than two hours after I was arrested. A few hours after that I was given my things back and released on my own. My car was towed and I was informed I would not be allowed to pick it up for 24 hours. Overall, this was a reasonably pleasant experience as miserable experiences go. I paid several fines and fees. I attended a victim’s impact panel and 12 or 16 alcohol counseling sessions over the next six months. I didn’t quit drinking for almost two more years.
Does anyone believe that my experience would have been the same if I were black, or latino? Does anyone believe that I would have had the option to be cuffed in front, sit in front, be driven to an ATM? Have a pleasant conversation with the officer? Even have been given the opportunity to converse with the officer? Obviously, I don’t know anything about that particular cop. But I doubt that my experience is typical for non-white offenders.
Here’s what I think: Some cops are racist assholes, but lots of cops are simply scared shitless every time they put on the uniform and fire up the lights. They’re told their job is dangerous. And it certainly involves a lot of difficult and dangerous situations, though the numbers I’ve seen suggest it isn’t among the most dangerous careers. I generally respect the cops I’ve encountered, and appreciate that they do difficult work, and take risks. And that fear drives many to act rashly.
When that rashness and fear are combined with institutionalized racism, entrenched poverty, and societal fears about the supposed dangers presented by “threatening” black men, it makes for a cocktail that ends in death for many, many innocent people. And many people who may not be innocent, but still didn’t deserve to die. And the people that suffer the gravest consequences of that systemic and specific violence are disproportionately young black men.
While I truly wish we would see consequences meted upon the individual perpetrators of police violence, I don’t believe the systemic problem can be solved that way. We need to change our culture that confines generations of people of color in poverty. We need to demilitarize the police. We need to address the gun culture which makes police fear that every time they approach a suspect they’ll be faced with a deadly weapon.
But most of all. First and most of all, we need to listen to the voices of those within the communities so often beset by this violence and brutality. We need to recognize the truth of their experience. We need to accept that it will mean that we look very closely at ourselves and how we are complicit in the culture of dismissal, and degradation; in the perpetuation of a culture that devalues black lives. And we need to follow those who have been fighting this fight their whole lives, rather than trying to lead now that we’ve finally arrived on well-tread ground.
Settling into Long-Term Sobriety.
For the longest time, really up until about four years sober, I liked to think of myself as remaining in early sobriety. That felt important. By feeling like I was early in my sober life, I guarded it very carefully. I learned as much as I could about being sober and staying sober. I did the things that I knew I would have to do to maintain my defenses against alcohol. I worked very hard, and learned from everyone I could to develop my tools.
I learned how to avoid trouble by steering myself clear of tempting situations. I learned how to guard myself emotionally and set boundaries. I learned, crucially, to not be afraid of offending or insulting people if I needed to leave a situation. Going along to get along is a fabulously dangerous behavior for newly sober drunks, and I’ve seen it derail and kill people.
These days, I’m much more comfortable feeling like I’m establishing myself as a long-term sober person. I’ve been blogging about my recovery now for seven years. Which means I’m approaching eight years of continuous sobriety. And through adhering to the basic principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, I’ve managed to make my life a conscious, deliberate process of living.
It’s been hard work, but well rewarded. And I see that echoed over and again in the fellows and friends I have in the program of AA. Little is more rewarding than seeing new and bewildered people, in terrible pain, gradually rise from the sloughs and establish themselves into a life of sobriety and purpose. I see it constantly. And it thrills me every time I do.
Today, I have good grasp of my tools. When I go out with friends and they drink, sometimes I look briefly at that glass and wonder how it would feel to pick one up. But it doesn’t tempt me. I don’t crave. And I know how to keep my addiction at bay today. By accepting it, and myself, for the truths of what we are. By surrendering to the immutable conditions in which I persist. I am an alcoholic. I will always be an alcoholic. And being an alcoholic is not a terrible thing.
In fact, for some of us, being alcoholics is wonderful and strange and enlightening. I have learned things about myself, and about others, and about connections and communities that I think I could not have learned any other way. I have come to understand what is meant by a “grateful alcoholic”.
I am grateful to have come into remission from my alcoholism. I am grateful that I am no longer welded to the bottle, sick and miserable and useless. I am grateful that I am capable of participating in society. But that’s not all it means to be a grateful alcoholic. I am grateful to be an alcoholic. Because, through my sickness and recovery, I have learned how to live in a way that I think very few people have the opportunity to learn.
Recovering from the depths of alcoholic desolation, and the work that must be done on one’s self to initiate and maintain that recovery, is a kind of emergence that is, even for those among us who are not believers in deities, spiritual. I have no other word for it. It’s not magic. It’s not supernatural. It’s simply a kind of spiritual nourishment. Something good for the mysterious places in the human heart.
Now, in long-term sobriety – or at least medium term – I am capable of accessing the resources I built, the energy I invested, the efforts I stockpiled to confront and surmount new challenges. These resources I might not have had if I had never been forced to confront my addiction.
I’m fond of saying that wealth is built through labor. And the same is true, I think, of spiritual wealth. I have invested years of hard labor in my heart and spirit and mind. I have had to, because I had incurred deep debts through my addiction. But I have paid my debts, or most of them, anyway. And I am now able to collect the dividends of all that work.
That is no excuse to stop working. It is all too easy to squander amassed fortunes – of any type. But I have settled into a life of steady but slow progress. And that’s a good life. I have a good life. And I think it’s a better one than I’d have had if I had not been an alcoholic. And so I’m grateful. I am in remission from a generally terminal illness, which could (and often does) relapse. And yet I’m grateful. Because today, I’m sober. And sane. And happy. Because I’m useful.
Home from Bermuda!
For the second year in a row, I spent Thanksgiving in Bermuda with BB. Four days of balmy weather and sunny skies and tooling around on a little death machine. Friday, having rented the little scooter less than three hours earlier, I took a turn badly and down we went. I took the brunt of the fall. Luckily BB landed sort of mostly on top of me. She scraped her hand and both knees. I tore up my left knee, and earned some kind of deep scratch on my right shin. Scraped an elbow.
The luckiest part for me was that though my chin hit the ground pretty hard, my reasonably thick winter beard meant that I only suffered a bruise, and didn’t leave my face on the tarmac. A few scratches to my nose and some bruising hidden by my beard. I managed to elbow myself in the ribs, which has resulted in dull pain whenever I breathe deeply. I figure it’ll all heal soon enough.
But the things we saw were still amazing! Bermuda is glorious, and late November is a great time to go. We saw the Crystal Caves:
And a lovely spot called “Blue Hole”:
And we took the ferry from Hamilton to the Dockyards:
And explored the most glorious beachy nature yard:
And finally, of course, my knee, below the fold, for those of you not good with blood.
Deep Sadness.
I will not condemn rage. I will not condemn lashing out in the face of an implacable process that protects the powerful and degrades the vulnerable. I will not condemn generations of grief and injustice when it is given voice in flames and shattered glass.
I simply cannot understand. Certainly, I can diagram and dissect and intellectualize the social issues of race and burden and justice and systemic abrogation of society’s responsibilities. But I have never been a man upon whose shoulders that burden landed. I cannot understand.
I am deeply sad. I am bewildered. I once thought I knew the answers to these questions. I now think I don’t even understand the questions. I know that today I am more fearful for the future of my nieces and and my nephew, young persons of color who will navigate a world I cannot imagine will treat them justly.
I miss St. Louis. I love St. Louis. But it is a city with injustice woven into the bedsheets it slumbers on. It is a city, like so many others in this nation, where the lives and experiences of white and black citizens, and more recently latino and middle eastern, do not resemble one another. And it is very clear who has privilege and access and who does not.
Leading up to last night’s announcement of the grand jury decision, there was a great deal of hope that Officer Wilson would be charged with murder, or at least a crime. I shared it. And I felt heartsick at my hope. Because we should not have to hope for justice. We should not have to see justice as a lottery.
I do not pretend to know what happened that day in Ferguson. I know only that all of us live under a system of justice that we cannot trust. Imagine if there were equality before the law. Imagine if a grand jury returning no indictment meant that we could believe that that meant there was no crime. Imagine if we could trust the machine of law to produce justice.
I am deeply sad. Because I do not believe in this process. I do not believe that we know the truth of August 9th, and I now believe we never will. Because our system is not designed to identify the truth and mete out justice. It is designed to protect an established order. And it has functioned as designed, it seems, in this case.
There will be no trial. And the privileged will sleep knowing that those among them who abuse it will rarely be held accountable, while those without will be harassed and incarcerated and debased. So no. I will not condemn this rage. I have neither standing, nor inclination.
But I will hope. However grimly I must hope, I will hope. For justice. One day. For all who’ve earned it.
Run Run Run Run.
I ran the Philadelphia half marathon yesterday with BB, and we set our new personal record. A little less than two hours and fifteen minutes. Not shabby for 13.1 miles, on a course which had a couple of pretty decent hills. And for having a strain in my lower abs or groin (not sure which, and fervently hoping it’s not a hernia). It was fine for the majority of the race – letting me know it was there but not painful. But it informed me in no uncertain terms afterwards that I should only have gone 11 miles or so. Oh well. It still doesn’t hurt. It’s just… there, and makes certain lunge-like movements difficult.
So I’m shutting down the running for at least a week or two and we’ll see how things progress. Two days of work and then a much needed five day vacation to Bermuda. Ahhhh….
A Happy Faux-Academic.
So, three great pieces of news this week, relating to my pretend academic pursuits. First, I got stellar reviews back for another paper, including one reviewer who recommended that the paper be published “as is” with no revision. I have never had so fine a review. Reviewer three, as usual, was jacked up on imitation mescaline, but I think I was able to fend off the criticisms and respond where there was a thread of valuable criticism in a weft of garbage. I feel confident that it will be accepted post-revision. This is at a fine journal that’s read by a lot of cardiothoracic surgeons and cardiac anesthesiologists. I’ll be very proud to publish there, even my own silly little simulation work.
The second piece of wonderful news was that one of my interns from my grant last year got into medical school. She worked hard despite adversity (illness and college and another job), never complained, and did a fine job. I wrote her a letter of recommendation, and she was co-first author (with the other intern) of the paper that resulted from the project. She stopped by my desk yesterday to tell me that she’d been accepted and that she believes it was in no small part due to the letter and the paper. Whether that’s true or not, it is very gratifying to me to help a young person succeed. I’m pleased she’ll be moving on and feel hopeful that she’ll make a strong contribution to society as a medical doctor.
And finally, yesterday as well, it looks like VFU is going to offer me an Adjunct Professor position in their department of critical care and anesthesia. I told this to an MD in my division, who said, “You’ve done so much great work and publishing around pediatrics, why don’t we get you one there?” So between one and the other, I ought to be able to put a very nice title on my CV, get a small additional honorarium from time to time for my research, and get to participate in faculty activities at MECMC and VFU. All of which makes me a very happy pretend academic.
It’s a good week in Dr. 24hoursville. My sister’s plane lands in 90 minutes, BB gets here in a few hours, and Sunday, I’m gonna Run. Like. Hell. I’m excited to do another half marathon and thrilled to be supported by people who love me and whom I love. Life looks pretty damned good today. Remind me of that next time I’m complaining.
Actual Math.
Yay! I get to do some real math. I totally feel like a real engineer and a real scientist this morning. I have a huge amount of work to do over the next few days on my little research policy paper. It was, as I wrote, well reviewed. But one of the reviewers complained that my simulated data was normally distributed, and that I should instead use lognormal data. But that mucks up my statistics.
Normal data is great. Most stuff is normal in the real world, and it’s easy to hypothesis test it. Two samples of data. Are the means the same, or not? Easy peasy. Lognormal data isn’t so easy, because the same tests don’t work. For testing normal data, you can use either the Z test or Student’s t test. But for lognormal data, I’m not aware of any standard test, and certainly nothing that’s already built for me.
So I did what any lost engineer would do. I went to Prof. Google (after asking on twitter to crickets). And I found this:
Which is exactly what I need[1]. So now, I get to redo all my data, implement the above in Excel, and rerun all my tests. Should be glorious. As long as my result holds under the new distribution. We shall see.
But this is how science is done. Assertion, rebuttal, research, revision, response. And it’s exciting to do it.
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[1] Abdollahnezhad K, Babanezhad M, Jafari AA, Inference on Difference of Means of two Log-Normal Distributions A Generalized Approach, Journal of Statistical and Econometric Methods, vol.1, no.2, 2012, 125-131
General Thoughts on Disagreement.
As I’ve had a bit more to think about the storm over Rosetta Lead Scientist Matt Taylor’s shirt, I think about what I would want to happen if I were in that working environment. As I wrote before, I don’t have a problem with the shirt, and I don’t have a problem with a person who would own such a shirt, though I might not want to walk proudly next to them while they wear it. I do have a problem with thinking it’s appropriate to wear that shirt to work, for a wide variety of reasons; I think it represents more than just, “wacky dude wears wacky shirt to office”.
The reason I’m reluctant to let it go right now, given his (I believe sincere) apology, is that he also made those troublesome sexually charged comments. Which makes we wonder – two ill-advised female-specific sexualizations in the workplace on the same day – if this wasn’t a pattern that has more of a history that we know.
Now, I also want to make it clear: none of this is really any of my business. I don’t know the man. I don’t work in his institution or even his country. There is always far, far more going on that I could possibly know. So I can’t say for certain what his history is, or how his language affects those around him, or if he’s a problem or not in his workplace. Which is why I want to talk, not about what I think ESA should do, or what Matt Taylor should do, but about what I should do, and what I’d want in my own environment. That’s how this is relevant to me. No one, not ESA, not Taylor, involved owes me anything at all.
But if this had happened in my workplace, I’d want to know that something was being done to communicate that this was irresponsible, and could have consequences. That, as I wrote before, sexualized language and imagery in the workplace is generally inappropriate. And I’d want someone to find out if there were a history. Talk to the people around him. Is there more? If there isn’t already one, establish a policy. One which has standards and accountability.
This is a little more than I wrote in my last post on the topic. And I think that the reason for that is some writing by a friend of mine who had a different perspective than I did regarding how severe the circumstances were. I maintain that I don’t know how severe they were, but I can at least endorse the idea that someone in the local environs with authority should go about finding out, and setting boundaries.
And that’s the real point of this post, today. Not what I think should happen there. But how I think people need to examine disagreements. The shirt issue has led to as much online vitriol and viciousness as I’ve ever seen. I’ve been personally called terrible things for what I wrote, and that’s miniscule compared to what women speaking out have encountered.
When people have different perspectives from me, my first instinct is often defensive, and being defensive often involves making offensive maneuvers in order to protect myself. I see that happen on all sides of every debate, especially online. In this case, as is the case a lot recently, it seems as though a number of women raised objections about this sartorial blunder, and then were immediately subjected to brutal vilification.
Any chance at questioning and honorable debate descended instead into broadsides of viciousness, sarcasm, and hatred. And there’s no comparison, that I can see. Most of the time, I can see equivalences between disparate groups, but here, there doesn’t seem to be much of one. A group of people, led by strong female voices, strongly questioned the appropriateness of Taylor’s clothing and speech. They were deluged with hate-speech for it.
Why is it so threatening to listen to someone with whom we disagree? As a younger man, I was very, very conservative. I am not now. The reason I am not is that a good friend, and my dear sisters, spent the better part of a decade and a half listening to me, debating me, and convincing me to listen to them. As a result, I’ve changed in ways that I think are for the better.
As I listened, and as my friend and my sisters listened to me, and as we talked to each other – not always in the most pleasant of tones, no – we all changed. We all learned. I am the one who has made the greatest excursion in my political and social positions, but all of us are different from what we once were. And I’d wager all would agree that the experience has been largely positive, if occasionally vexing.
The one thing I see in common between the two groups in this case is that neither group seems much willing to listen to positions contrary to their own. We believe that we know that the other thinks already. We believe it is toxic, and therefore must be defeated rather than understood. Let me be clear, I think there’s a right and a wrong here, and it ought to be very clear where I stand about that. But I also think it’s extremely valuable to listen to people we think are wrong.
Even when we think they are horribly, dangerously wrong. We can learn why. We can learn how. We can convince some. And from time to time, despite our most fervently held beliefs, we may occasionally discover that we were the ones who were wrong. Someone, somewhere, has a compelling argument for every side of every disagreement, almost. It’s worth finding that person, if only to sharpen my knife on their whetstone.
We shout at each other. And that’s ok. Some things need shouting about. But not as many as we do. I find it depressing how many people, and yes, here I’m talking specifically about my community, academia online, are utterly dismissive of anything that challenges their political or social perch. We pride ourselves, in academia, of being open to ideas and tolerant of radical thinking. But we routinely reject – without consideration, and contemptuously – ideas which conflict in any way with our own in the political and social realm. It’s unbecoming, frankly.
There is a right and a wrong here, and those who respond to expressions of discomfort with hate speech and threats are indisputably wrong. But we can only manage our own part in it. And within that frothy tide of hate, I am willing to look for a person with a reasonable, but contrary, perspective. Because I can learn from that person.
My Stupid Ego.
Wow. Yesterday evening, a couple of major traffic-movers on twitter tweeted my blog post about “That Shirt”, and I ended up getting thousands and thousands of hits. Far more than anything this blog has ever seen before. It was exciting. I watched my stats move and kept up with my twitter stream, and was very excited about all these people reading my writing.
I started to have stupid fantasies of being asked to write books and stuff. It is very gratifying to have people read my writing. It was especially gratifying to have people tweeting that it was good and right and appropriate and essentially agreeing with me. There was almost no negative blowback. And on twitter, everything gets negative blowback.
But a careful examination of my stats shows that the interest in the piece relevant to the issue of the day had almost no translation into people going on and reading other things I wrote. People were interesting in the topic. I happened to write something of general interest to the topic. Almost no one ended up reading anything else.
But the truth is, that’s just as well. Ego is not good for me. I suffer from extremes of ego, swinging between thinking I’m the very best or the very worst of whatever. I have been, these last several years, attempting to navigate a path in the center, a more measured tone, and a more gentle treatment of myself. When centered, I am far from harm. Excesses of ego, high or low, lead to disruption, to feelings of worthlessness or invulnerability. Either of those is probably three steps closer to a drink than I ever want to be.
It was nice that a whole lot of people thought I wrote something valuable on a topic of relevance this November. Now, I have a simulation to write and a paper to revise. I’m not special. And as much as I sometimes want to be special, being special isn’t good for me. The reason I write here is to try to connect, and I’m glad I did that on this occasion. Maybe someone who needs it will discover that I write about alcoholism, and I’ll be able to help them. That would be nice.
That Shirt.
A senior scientist on the Rosetta/Philae mission (a stunning success, brilliant and audacious, thrilling!) decided to show up for work on perhaps the most important day of the mission, the most important day in spaceflight since Curiosity landed on Mars, wearing a crappy bowling shirt covered in cartoonish images of half-naked women. He further compounded this stupid decision by referring to the Rosetta mission with “She’s sexy, but I never said she was easy.”
I’m not going to condemn a man for owning an awful shirt with half-naked women on it. That’s his own business, and I couldn’t care less. But it shows a staggering lack of judgement, and callousness to what others might infer, to wear this shirt to work. At all. When grownups go to work, they should dress appropriately for work. And unless you work at a bowling alley/strip club, that shirt is almost certainly not appropriate. It is really not appropriate when you’re going to be on a worldwide live-stream meant to be dedicated to inspirational science and engineering.
Casually throwing around sexually charged language and imagery in a workplace that is not about sex is simply not appropriate behavior. For anyone. And yes, for some men this means losing a tiny measure of freedom. We lose the freedom to be horn-dog dipshits in the workplace, because we need the workplace to be a comfortable place for everyone. (And, while it seems far less common to me, yes, women are also not allowed to be horn-dog dipshits in the workplace.)
When people (near-universally young men) start complaining about these losses of freedom I have to sigh and shake my head. We all give up things to make society better. We give up our right to take things by force. We give up our right to drive on the wrong side of the road. I give up about 40% of my income. And yes, I think we have to give up our right to be sexist assholes. And this guy should not have worn the shirt, or spoken that way, because it’s juvenile, and sexist, and unprofessional.
However, I am also concerned by the calls I see for him to be fired. Unless he has a history of behaving this way in defiance of request and directive to change, then what he deserves is a reprimand, a dress code, and to hear from people he respects that this is unprofessional and undignified. The leap from “He wore an offensive shirt” to “he must be fired” is an escalation I can’t justify with the information I have.
Men: for thousands of years we’ve had essentially carte blanche to be dicks at work. It is not changing. It has changed. Be a professional. Dress like it. Speak like it. Accept remonstration after screwing up. Change. It’s ok to be briefly wistful for the tiny little “freedoms” lost. And then suit up, show up, and do your job with your brain and your hands, not your dick.
Infactorium 