Letterhack

Updated from original post dated March 8, 2003…

Every now and then, I write letters of comment to various places.  (I used to have a long list of where I had written to and which had been published.  Gave that up long ago.)  This week, I managed to have two of them published:

Regarding this article in The Stranger about a school shooting several years ago, I wrote a letter which got printed, titled “Yanked by the Nose.”  (You’ll find it 2/3 of the way down this page.)

Regarding a letter in the “Dear Glenn” advice column in the Seattle Gay News, I sent in a letter about people joining organizations in order to meet people, which he printed.  The column doesn’t seem to be online regularly, so here’s what I wrote (it was slightly edited in the printed form):

Glenn,

Reading Ivan’s letter in the Feb 28 column, I was struck by something which might be worthy of repeating/running a column on/etc.

Ivan spoke of having joined several local groups in the past in search of relationships and/or friends.  We’re often told this by friends: “You need to go out and join a group to meet someone.”  There’s definite truth in that, but it often seems to get misinterpreted.

First, anyone who is joining a club or doing volunteering or things like that in order to find a boyfriend is bound to get disappointed.  With few exceptions, hooking people up in longterm monogamous relationships isn’t the mission of these groups.  They are usually social groups or fundraising groups; you might well expect to meet people (some of whom might have potential for dating), but being upset that you don’t end up in a relationship from the groups is problematic.

Second, these things take time.  I can’t speak for Ivan, of course, but I’ve seen people who join a group, come to a couple events, don’t get what their misset expectations wanted, and then drop out, all in a couple weeks.  Or I’ve seen people decide to take up sports activities: they take a couple short lessons, aren’t instantly experts, aren’t being continually asked to dance or winning races or whatever, and they stop coming, before they’ve really had a chance to meet people and grow into the new activity.  We’ve been led to demand immediate gratification, and to “change the channel” when we don’t get it.

Third, you get out of these groups what you put into them.  This is especially true with the social groups me mentioned (many of which in the gay community are aligned along sports of sexual fetish lines).  If you’re in a running club, you’ve got to go running to meet the people who run, to hang out with them, and to get to know them.  If you join a leather club, you’ve got to have an interest in leather and some of the associated sex activities, you have to go to their group functions, and you have to dive in there and meet people.  You don’t have to step up to a board position right off the bat, but you can bet there are tasks you could volunteer to help with.  If you aren’t being active in the group, the group won’t be active around you.

Thanks for doing your great columns, Glenn.

At least one person (Hi, Tom) knew that it was me who had written the letter, despite it only being signed in the paper with my first name.

What Were They Thinking?: Glonous Cultual Chcosticks

I don’t know what company makes these wooden chopsticks, but you can find them all over the country.  This wrapper came from Las Vegas, and I’ve seen the same one in Seattle.  There’s a stereotype about really bad foreign translations, but this really takes the cake.  Or the mu shu, anyway.

Here is what the text says, in case you can’t make it out from the image:

Welcome to Chinese Restaurant
please try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticks
the traditional and typical of Chinese glonous history.
and cultual.

BAMBOO CHOPSTLCKS
PRODUCT OF CHINA

Tuk under thurnb
and held firmly

Learn how to use your chopsticks
Add second chcostick
hold it as you hold
a pencil

Hold tirst chopstick
in originai position
move the second one
up and down
Now you can pick
up anything :

PRODUCTOF
CHINA

Bad Song Poetry

Okay, I’ve never really been one who enjoys reading poetry, but I do enjoy certain poetic forms when done well (haiku, especially), and by extension, I despise it when something is done really poorly.  Song lyrics, of course, are a small subset of poetry, and in most cases, the poetic nature of them tends to just wash on by.  But not always.

One of the few country-western songs that just drives me around the bend is Tim McGraw’s “Don’t Take the Girl” (which I heard on the radio this morning, and thus was made worthy of bitching about here), because of a line break in the second verse.  There is a term called “enjambment”, dealing with breaking phrases between lines.  When done well, this can add extra depth to a poem.  When done poorly, you get horrors like this:

He kissed her lips in
Front of the picture show

>shudder< No value is added here, and because of how song lyrics can expand and contract the length and placement of the syllables to go with the music, the “in” could easily have been shifted to the next line and not broken the prepositional phrase.

What makes this song more notable, though, is that the third verse does superb enjambment, where the second line of these three works syntactically with both the line before and the line after:

I’ll gladly take her place
If you’ll let me
Make this my last request

For the record, the other two country songs that I utterly despise — but for thematic reasons rather than poetic ones — are Colin Raye’s “That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It” (the “It’s okay to lie to your wife” song) and Reba McEntire’s “She Thinks His Name is John” (which tells us that casual sex, just once, will give you AIDS and you will die).  Play those and I change the channel; I merely bitch with the Tim McGraw song.