I love women because I think they’re wonderful. What I hope is that you might also share that opinion, especially if you are one. That could sound sexist; there’s an implication there that I think women are better than men. That’s not the case at all! I just like them more, personally. (You’re welcome to write all about the greatness of men if you like, but I don’t care to.) Beyond that, though, I use that specific superlative because I like that I can interpret it both as “full of wonders” and “causing one to feel wonder”.

I feel it’s important to clarify that just because I make such a sweeping statement about that half of the human race doesn’t mean I think it’s necessarily true about every individual who happens to have (or appear to have) two X chromosomes. There do exist bitches who are nowhere close to fitting my broad declaration. And by now you may have noticed that I avoid referring to women as a gender and that’s also a conscious decision. I’ve come to think that there are a great many points between completely masculine and completely feminine on the gender spectrum and that any individual may well fit anywhere in that range, regardless of their physical appearance. But I’ll explore that topic more later.

Going back to my argument, I look at something like this video of mostly women dancing and I think there is much remarkable within them. They stir a sense of admiration and awe within me.

http://www.youtube.com/v/nN0AyGVN-eY

It’s not just their grace and physical prowess, though that is impressive. I see many more qualities in that routine that exemplify what I love in women:

• There is physical contact and cooperation aplenty right from the start. These women don’t merely follow a plan; they can meld their bodies together to work as a fluid whole. Each is individual and unique, but all invest themselves into this performance to make it the best they can together.
• They dress up in costume. Pop psychology may claim that wearing a mask indicates a dislike of self or an act of cowardice, but I don’t entirely agree. I feel that taking on a masquerade can indicate a strong sense of identity. These dancers don’t need their faces to be visible because they are confident in who they are and what they are doing so can take on another guise just as confidently.
• They act like peculiar characters. When a person can pretend to be someone or something very different from herself, it shows me a tremendous empathy. That ability to really project oneself into another’s mindset is a valuable asset in many endeavors, not the least of which is communication.
• They are passionate. The range of emotion that these women convey in their movements is as astonishing in its magnitude as it is in its subtlety. I don’t know if I feel that much. There are definitely times when I wish I did. Yet I know from personal experience that this is still just a glimpse of the fires that can burn within women.
• They can be silly! Oh, that is such a difficult thing for me to be. It lifts my heart when I can see someone set aside the seriousness of the world and infuse their actions with happy insouciance. It is an element of childishness that helps make life enjoyable and I envy women that so many can keep it through all their years.
• They are purposefully pretty. There’s a cruel deceit pretending to be on the side of empowering women that claims wanting to look nice is shallow and therefore undesirable. That’s nonsense. Certainly, there are more important things in life than having a pleasant countenance, but it is ingrained in all of us to want an attractive exterior. Just as it can be a valid observation that when a person doesn’t care about their appearance they may not care about themselves, the opposite is also true. Denying the fact that when we think we look good, we feel good, is no more helpful to anyone than denying that a pain can indicate an injury. Of course, that analogy gives me a fine place to point out that hurting yourself in the attempt to look good dismisses the value of your feelings and that is going too far.
• And of course, they are creative. Not only are all but two of these performers women of varying ages, the choreographer is a woman as well. Look at what they can create! Even among my small circle of acquaintances, I never stop being amazed at the artistic capabilities and sensibilities I find in the women that surround me.

That’s just a bit of what I see in that performance, but I’ll stop rather than keep going on about it. And even that video only just touches upon what moves me.

That word creative reminds me that women carry most of the burden of creating life. I am not particularly impressed that women have uteruses, ovaries, and vaginas nor that they can carry a child in their wombs. Those are all lovely but they are mere facts of biology. On the other hand, I am amazed that women can choose to suffer the indignity of having their bodies attacked and distended from within, can voluntarily experience the worst pain imaginable, and then sometimes even choose to repeat the process. And when they choose to undergo such experiences, it’s in order to bring about a new life to love which will, frankly, burden them for a damned long time.

Of course, men can possess most of the qualities above; not every woman possesses them all. And men and women both can contain numerous great characteristics that I haven’t even listed. My point again is never that women are better than men. Sometimes, they’re not even all that different. That last bit is why I don’t believe that women should be given some sort of special pass just because their biology isn’t the same as that of the patriarchal designers of most cultures around them. Every woman, just as every person, should be judged on her individual merits.

No, it is just that these are aspects that I can find in women and I often do find them in tremendous amounts. They can be so great that my breath is taken away and my heart swells and I find them glorious. Yet, and I touched on this in the last post, some women either don’t believe that they possess such worthwhile features or dismiss them as unimportant. And I am astonished by that!

So it is not that I’m trying to reveal some secret reason to appreciate women. It’s not that they possess attributes that can’t be found anywhere else. It’s that we shouldn’t, nor women nor men, dismiss the obviously fantastic traits in womanhood. It does not matter if you find creativity or passion or some other great quality in every single person around you. Its prolificacy does not diminish its value.

Stop ignoring the beauty that so often runs deep in women and perhaps you’ll start to agree with my opinion of them. Really, at that point, it should be no wonder.

I plan to write several installments on this topic (hence the part 1 in the title). I am ambitious, indeed, for a blogger who… you know… doesn’t blog. This topic, though, has worried at my mind for months now. You see, I think I love women and I want to tell you about it.

I don’t mean that I love several women, though I do. I don’t mean that I have sex with several women, and I don’t do that anyway. I mean that I cherish the female sex, I value its members dearly, and I want to do what I can to support and strengthen them. I think everyone should. Women are wonderful. I speak to you.

You are brilliant, strong, talented, artistic, logical, athletic, passionate, careful, carefree, wicked, compassionate, wily, honest, wise, foolish, and beautiful. Yes, wonderful.

With anything that is wonderful, however, there is a danger that people will start taking it for granted. In the case of women, I’ve come to think that they even take themselves for granted. That’s not to say that if you happen to have a uterus you should behave as though you are the greatest thing ever. But you should value yourself. I’m sad to say that many of my female friends don’t seem to realize their own worth.

It’s implicit in the decisions they make about family, career, and relationships:

“I want to travel to Europe but my mother gets so lonely, I should stay and keep her company.”
“I’d love to move to New York and join a dance company there, but I don’t think I’m good enough for that.”
“He doesn’t always remember to think of me, but when he does pay attention to me, he’s really great!”

There’s a school of thought that women are designed to be nurturers and put others before themselves. I’m going to point out here that it’s the year 2010. In the USA, we’ve had suffrage for ninety years, and we just came within inches of having our first female President. Using our genetic or divine programming as an excuse for having some self-destructive tendency is just giving up. Men may be designed to be vicious assholes but that’s not acceptable either. We have intelligence, sentience, conscience, and community. We can choose to overcome any programming that may or may not be present within us. Of course it’s difficult and of course you won’t be able to rise above your weaknesses every time but neither of those are good reasons not to try.

Women should take care of themselves. They are as valuable or more so than the people for whom they traditionally sacrifice their happiness. If you choose to care for someone in ways that disadvantage part of your life because that nurturing fulfills you as much in other ways, that is a fine and conscious choice. But if you sacrifice some of your own happiness for the sake of another person or thing just because you think that you are not as deserving of it, you are only making it so. Choose to be strong and fiercely embrace your joys and you will be deserving of that as well.

But pause a moment. There is a danger here to swing to an extreme that I associate with old-fashioned feminism. Not so long ago, women had so many societal structures stacked against them, that in their fight to realize equality, many pushed too hard and ended up overwhelming others in their struggle. Feminist action has, I believe, occasionally resulted in giving excessive advantage to women over all others. There’s a possibility of infringing on others’ rights to freedom of religion and speech, to squash the liberties of other genders, races, and creeds. That is pushing too much for my taste.

I separate myself from traditional feminists then by thinking of myself as a humanist. I don’t believe everyone is equal but that everyone’s rights are equal and opportunities should be as well. There is no true victory of freedom from oppression if it results in oppressing others in turn. Take hold of your self-worth and hold fast, but do not take away from others. Your own worth is already great.

Despite how far we’ve come, there is a ways yet to go. In your time, many will seek to rob you of some of your measure of your own value. Nobody can ever take away your worth, but stealing your belief in it is just as harmful. Your boss, your friend, your peer, your teacher, your family, your child, your neighborhood, the news, magazines, books, television shows, movies, computer games and many other elements of your surroundings are all laced with a nearly inextricable bias to try to make you think that you are not formidable. Yet, that is what you are. Still, every choice you make cannot help but be influenced by those perfidious persuasions. They are diminishing, yes, but they are still there.

All I ask is that when you make your choices in life,
when you feel that hesitation that pulls you back from what calls to you,
remember that everything telling you that you cannot succeed will be meaningless in the face of your demonstration that you can.

Of course, you can succeed. You’re a woman. You’re wonderful.

I haven’t blogged in months but I’m not going to apologize. I post private notes on facebook and rarely go as much as a day without tweeting something, but I tend to save blogging for when I have something both significant and universal to say. Hello again.

My New Year festivities for the second time in a row were held at Lindy Focus amongst dozens of actual friends and hundreds of potentials. While there, I got into a conversation with a dear friend that encompassed many ideas about relationships. One segment stood out in my memory and went a bit like this:

me: I don’t know what I’m passionate about.
she: Words? Do you even want to be passionate about something?
me: Women want men who are passionate.
she: [patted me consolingly on the arm]

I don’t think I was wrong in my assessment there, but I left out many important bits: that everyone is attracted to passion, that I have experienced many times of passion, and that passion drives me and everyone around me to some degree… just to mention a few. That is to say: the conversation reminded me of one benefit of passion, that it is attractive, but that wasn’t all there is to it. Still, my major concern there was that in a moment of introspection, I couldn’t name something that drives me like that off the top of my head.

She was right, of course. Words are my passion. It’s become such a reflexive response to the questions asked of me, though, that I’ve grown suspicious of it and had to reexamine once again. The thing is, it’s not just prose on virtual paper like this that I mean by ‘words’.

By WORDS, I mean the whole complex layered thing that is the magic of communicating ideas from one mind to another mind or several other minds. Some people can do that by painting or sculpting. Others can do that by leading great lives of purposeful example. Still others can communicate with their movements. I am impressed by them all!

I am not good at creating poetry; I fully realize I’m a hallmark card hack when I try. But in other respects, I think I treat words well in expressing myself. I think can turn a phrase just so and allow you to see it better. I can write it by hand or type it out quickly. I can speak the words as well as I write them, if I take the time to do it with care. I can read my own or those of others and I think my voice can convey as much as I feel. I can even sing to add more layers, though again I can’t write songs to save myself.

The words drive me. They drive me to wake up early and stay up late. I’d rather oversleep from having had too late a conversation than greet the day early because I kept words to myself. Yes, Words are still my passion: their curves, their spaces, their rhythms, their decorations, their meanings and their meanings, their sounds and their absences. Their music.

I’m not sorry for not blogging in a while because if I’d just done it for its own sake, it would have lessened what I had to say. I am sorry that I didn’t have better things to say. I am sorry that I haven’t explored more ways to say them. I’ll be trying to find more of these waves of passion to share with you this year. I may even sing them if anyone can reassure me that my voice is better than bad.

I’ve found you again, passion. And now I’ll share you.

Yes, I realize that social networking is not new. Yes, even the online social networks that are the focus of this article have been around for a few years. Consider this, though: the ability for human beings to communicate clearly with one another, anywhere in the world, without a need for any acquired knowledge outside of one’s own spoken and written language, and practically instantaneously, arose from the telephone. The earliest such clear communication from one place to another removed place, that is documented, happened on March 10th, 1876.

America Online was founded in 1983, over a century later, and was the biggest online social network of its day, back when AOL implied it was an interface for the internet and before the general public realized that was untrue. MySpace came about twenty years after that and really generated a recognition of the capabilities of the online social network, but was loosely regulated and regimented. And on September 26, 2006, facebook.com opened itself up to anyone with a valid email address.

Thus, the social networking scene of today only began a few years ago and is still new in the grand scheme of things. I’ve only been on facebook since 21 August 2007!

* the editorialization above is mine, of course

The social networking technologies I currently use are: facebook, twitter, linkedin, instant messaging, and blogging (henceforth, The Big Five). I still email, occasionally. I basically email for work and to those acquaintances of mine who have not joined one of the social networks. There are two of those people in my circle of contacts. Two.

I first started using the internet with my Apple IIe back when Compuserve competed with AOL for dial-up modem users and the hackers found BBS’s to keep them entertained and scoffed at services that had GUI’s. And nobody who used a computer was considered cool by any stretch of anyone’s imagination. Once I got into university, I discovered these things called unix and VMS and acquired something called an email address. I learned to finger people and carry that shame with me to this day. In these early days, the only way I knew to communicate with someone via computers was to find them on AOL and mail them within that service, or find someone in JHU’s printed mail directory (fingering them to make sure it was the right person — sounds awful, doesn’t it?) and then mailing them there. I probably used pine to do it, too, since I didn’t like elm. What the hell am I talking about?

Back on track, one day while trying to figure out how to use a computer to tackle a physics internship project, I discovered a program on a Sun station called NCSA Mosaic. Some user before me, I think, had set the homepage to WebCrawler. I knew pretty much nothing about what was in front of me, but there was some sort of field where I could type and some sort of button that my cursor could click and thus my life’s productivity began its downhill journey. (for younger readers, this is akin to discovering Google for the first time)

What I discovered then, and subsequently cherished for about a decade, was an unrestricted access to anything that the world wide web of tubes had to offer. If I wanted to find out information about an actor on Friends, I wasn’t limited to what AOL was willing to show me. If I wanted to communicate with someone from my youth in Korea, they didn’t have to be at my university, all I needed to do was track ‘em down with InfoSpace or WhoWhere. My previously restricted access to only my joined services exploded into access to anything broadcasting the http service. And I adored that freedom. I reveled in it like a non-nerd might revel in backpacking across the globe.

Sad to say, from the beginning of my use of the internet, I ran into spam and spoofing. I fell victim to some scams at first, just like most newcomers to internet fraud. By the early 2000′s, I was getting a ratio of something like 1000:1 spam emails to legitimate emails, even using a new email address! When I first discovered MySpace, through a swing dancer friend, I suddenly found a way in which I thought I could communicate with people from all around the world… but only REAL people, not spammers and scammers. That lasted a day or two. The overwhelmingly irritating abundance of abusers on that site made me wish for a service that was similar in robustness but with better security against annoyances. And then came facebook and the other internet technologies I currently use.

The primary reason I use The Big Five in order to communicate with the world at large is that I am, by and large, shielded from garbage feedback. If I don’t want to see junk from an app on facebook or to be friends with someone there, I block it or ignore them, respectively. I choose who I follow on twitter. I choose my connections on LinkedIn. I choose who I instant message and whose IMs I accept. And there are lovely plugins that protect me from spam on this wordpress-powered blog. If a service is more annoying than it is rewarding, I’ll take my time and money elsewhere. BTW, this is also why hulu.com generally kicks youtube’s ass: more reward than junk.

These days, most of my legitimate emails are either internet purchase receipts, or notifications from a service for which I signed up. There are many reasons why I like facebook, but here’s a quick one for anybody who’s not already onboard: how would you like it if all your emails were ones you actually wanted to read? There you go.

And each of The Big Five fulfills a different desire for me:

• facebook is like a great unending party full of my friends. Sometimes they’ll wander off to another corner, other times they’ll run up to me to share a fun meme, and once in a while something crazy will happen involving a sheep or a muppet. When one friend passes out another might wake up. I always share at least one thing in common with each person there. Occasionally there are an abundance of shared interests and discovering them at the party makes us closer friends. We walk by each other and make comments like, “Hey, it was good to see you at such-and-such,” and “Oh, we should totally do this and that,” and “Happy Birthday!”
• twitter is similar but more in the vein of multiple conversations going on simultaneously, all of which revolve around, “So, what are you up to?”. The added benefits here are that you are perfectly welcome just to listen, and to listen to people whose paths you might never cross in real life. I’m enchanted by @feliciaday’s tweets and often laugh out loud at @michaelianblack’s tweets. I may reply to them once in a while in a semi-fan/semi-peer sort of way, but I don’t envision meeting them in real life. On the other hand, I also follow some friends and find this a great insight into their streams of consciousness.
• LinkedIn is my business networking in a social framework. I connect to various acquaintances and collect and give out recommendations in the hope that we’ll all mutually increase each other’s career values. If I came across a business opportunity, I’d immediately look to my LinkedIn connections first to pass it along.
• Instant Messaging / texting is email and telephone’s faster and cooler lovechild. I do realize those aren’t the same things, yet… I suspect they soon will be. This is my preferred method of direct communication when I don’t feel the need for the richer and more dynamic nature of a spoken conversation. It’s like a private conversation that stops and starts by either side’s whims, somewhat regardless of their current situations.
• Finally, Blogging is contemporary journalism. Sometimes, it’s simply a biased reporting of facts, other times (like this), it’s outright editorializing or feature writing. Today’s novice reporters need have no credentials but their own work, and not necessarily any sources but their own experiences. A gullible reader can easily be led astray from the truth, but I suspect that blogs will just train internet users to question more and sift reality from the falsehoods better than they otherwise would.

The current social networks are, obviously by inspection, inherently more limited than the internet at large. But a savvy user can choose their own connections to the existing streams of information and thus acquire a data feed that is much denser with usefulness than a yahoo search and empty of fraudulent African royalty.

What a beautiful world!

I have never stopped being proud of being a US citizen, but that pride is certainly renewed afresh with this auspicious beginning.  I admired the President’s address and applauded many of his points.  It is not required that I agree with all of my President’s statements as that is one of my treasured freedoms.  Yet if I have any qualms, I am far too happy to be a dissenting voice today.

I congratulate and welcome President Barack Obama!