*a break from atheism today, as i write raw (no caps, apostrophes, minimal edits, etc. etc.) about my recent heartbreak.
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i shouldnt be looking at her facebook. her recent pics, her recent wall posts. that shit will make the hole in my stomach augment till im more space than skin. its only been five days since we broke up and for the most part im doing okay. there are good hours and bad ones, the former i attribute mostly to my being super busy. but its when im sitting in class or laying in bed or walking down the street all alone that the thought of her begins to consume me. to eat me alive. her face, her body, her voice, her smile--combined they shred all vestiges of hope i'd previously clung to, till the only thing i can think about is that im gonna die and everything will be over and in the end its all futile and meaningless and unspeakably miserable. when we were together, she kept my thoughts from plunging to that place. she was like an entertainer, there to make me smile, to laugh, distract me from the overwhelming horrificness the fact of human life embodies. but now shes gone. now shes "gone"--another abc living in the same city as me--and once again ive morphed into a 23-year-old, asian woody allen character, obsessed with, terrified of the Hole.
what i really want to do is call her. no, scratch that. what i really want is to exercise telekenesis and make her call me. im the relationship loser; i cant stoop any lower to make first contact. i gave it everything i had the night we broke up. i said i want to stay with you, that im so madly in love with you its a joke, that its a crime against humanity if you dont stay in my life. all that followed by, "so, what do you think?" and still she said no, that she doesnt love me and that she doesnt want to be with me. ouch. the hole. that fucking hole unrequited love leaves in the heart is interminable. inversely, my pride has shot through to the stars. so ill be caught in pious garb praying to jesus before i make first contact.
but will she reach out to me? is it even a good idea if she does? imagine she texts me or calls me and says she wants to get back together. would i take her back? probably. then thats not the best question to ask. the better question: would it be best to take her back? after the way she treated me--as the ultimate afterthought--why would i do it? all this followed by an a question even more poignant: why am i even dwelling on the hypothetically impossible? im shaking my head right now. shes not gonna call. shes not gonna text. shes not gonna write to me on facebook and say any of the things i want her to say. shes gonna--she is already moving on and if i have any respect for myself i'll do the same. but i dont want to. not yet. theres still something positive to be derived from camping out in the past--some twisted sense of hope, of happiness from the brief set of memories--that its worth waiting out in the cold, because maybe, just maybe i'll get the invite in, where warmth, love, real happiness reside. what a load of shit.
And God said: "A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed." -Deuteronomy 22:13-21 from the Bible And the atheist said: "To say that atheism requires faith is as dim-witted as saying that disbelief in pixies or leprechauns takes faith. Even if Einstein himself told me there was an elf on my shoulder, I would still ask for proof and I wouldn't be wrong to ask. -Geoff Mather
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I'll be the first to admit it: I'm not a proud atheist. I'm an atheist by default only, ever since Reason went ahead and carried out the ruthless extermination of all my faith-related inklings. It's an important distinction--proud versus default--because it means I'm not always happy, fulfilled, shits-and-giggles jolly about my non-belief. Truth be told, being an atheist can be a horrible thing, and any non-believer who claims differently is no better than the religious nut basking in the poisonous pool of delusion. That's my one complaint about the non-belief camp: so many of us try converting theists with the promise of greener pastures waiting the moment these non-thinkers switch to Team Reason. When really, all we're doing is selling our own brand of propaganda, ironically wielding the same weapon theists exact on the world when they say with complete and utter conviction, "Yes. There really was a talking snake in the Garden of Eden." Delusion, ladies and gentlemen. The most dangerous weapon on the planet. So I'm gonna say it like it should be said, exactly how it is. No deluding, no deceiving. No masquerading or airbrushing. No bullshit in all the billion forms bullshit comes in. Being an atheist is no better than being religious. Ain't that the truth. There's no more happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction, all that shit in rejecting theism. Often it's worse because when you admit to there being no god, you're forced to hold up the mirror of decay right up to your face. If you really look at it straight without closing your eyes, without imagining or fancying something else, you'll see it clearly: the wrinkles in every crevice of your face that are already starting to belabor you; the black reaper forever shadowing, stalking you from just behind; the incredible futility of life, the almost mocking indifference of the universe; and finally, the pall of non-existence, of fuck-me-in-the-ass death that's as inevitable as taxes or wet socks in Taiwan.
NOW, having said that (Curb reference, anyone?), you should totally become an atheist. Well, I guess I mean it and I don't. On the one hand, you get to think for yourself. On the other hand, you have to think for yourself. What a freedom. What a burden. It's beautiful and at the same time looks like Steve Buscemi's asshole. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that if we atheists are committed to outing the truth, then this whole "selling" business needs to stop. Because truth is self-evident. It doesn't require pitching or selling or marketing strategies, so whether it's the team at Coca Cola or a team of koala bears, the difference is immaterial so long as the product at hand is authentically true. So enough with the "atheists are happier" and "atheists have better-quality lives" bullshit you keep parading. Stop with the delusions. You're not fulfilled, I'm not fulfilled, Jay-Z isn't fulfilled, even Siddhartha wasn't fulfilled because fulfillment, like god, is imaginary. It's not real. If you want to convert the world to atheism (something I desperately want to do), don't do it with "happy ever after" stories. Stop with the selling. Stop deluding yourself. Just suck it up, grow a pair and be happy being miserable.
And the atheist said: "We must questoin the story logic of having an all-knowing and all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes." -Gene Roddenberry And God said: "No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the Lord." (For the Lord thy God is not only a jealous God, but gay, too.) -Deuteronomy 23:1
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It's been a LONG minute since I wrote a blog post, for various reasons, but I tend to think the bulk of attribution probably forks off into what seems to be 1) an implacable genetic surplus of indolence, and 2) an even more implacable fear of self-indulgence. I'll give the former only these two lines: indolence is rectifiable simply by getting up off your ass, though one has to concede it's not always the easiest thing to do, and in my indolent oasis a nice quotable struck me clean from thin air: "At times it feels like the hardest thing in the world to do is put on a pair of pants." Ain't that the truth. Well, I've finally decided to slip mine on, one leg at a time like everyone else, and voila: I've showed up tonight ready, hungry, tunnel-visioned bent on making some moves, inciting some real thinking from the cozy but dangerous abode of complacent dormancy.
That leaves to be addressed the latter problem, my fear of self-indulging. This seems to be a thematic undercurrent in my blogging/writing continuum as far back as I can remember, and it's probably safe to say that this insecurity is entirely justified: there's no way around it, blogging is self-indulgent. Well, shit. I don't like to be self-indulgent, at least as it appears to the external world. So, what to do? I could take a long vacation as I've done, or hang up the blogging boots completely and be done with it. But then I think about a couple things, namely the subject matter I've been writing about since Antipriety's inception, my militant atheism and the mind-fucking absurdity of religion, and then I think about said relevant news overwhelming the world at present, like the one about the two men visiting Saudi Arabia who got deported the other day, on the grounds of being too good-looking, and therefore too likely of being too irresistible to women at a Saudi festival. Or like the news in Bangladesh, where fanatic Muslims (what's the opposite of an oxymoron, by the way? Are there any two words in the universe more incapable of being separated than "fanatic Muslim"?) are calling for the execution of atheist bloggers. Those are just recent current affairs pieces. How about the daily ubiquitous mentions of His Obvious Man-Madeness, God Almighty? I swear the more militant I become in my atheism, the more my intolerance toward religion swells, the more exponentially proportioned mentions of God I see. Sorry, folks, but I mean this strictly as a pun when I say, He really is fucking everywhere. The never-ending exhausting litany of God mentions starts off as follows:
-Rockets v. Lakers: James Harden, before OT starts, walking toward the scorer's table, all the while shooting either index finger toward the sky multiple times in an obvious invocation to God. (Who, by the way, didn't help J-Hard in this game. The Bearded One shot just 8-25. For crying out loud, give the fucking ball to J-Lin!)
-Macklemore's "Starting Over" song: If there's anything I hate more than false modesty, it's pretentiously false and specious humility. Consider the following lyrics: I wanna tell her I relapsed but I can't/ I just shake her hand and tell her congrats/ Get back to my car and I think I'm trippin', yeah/ 'Cause God wrote "Otherside", that pen was in my hand/ I'm just a flawed man, man, I fucked up...
Mack's right about one thing: he definitely done fucked up. Am I the only one who sees the gaping hole in the rapper's pathetic, ostensible servitude? I refuse to believe it, except that on some level I do. There are two things in this universe I rarely, if ever, give: the first is souvenirs, and the second, the notorious benefit of the doubt. I'm unwilling and unwont with the latter just for the sheer, simple fact that in the 21st century, so far defined by instantaneous access to information unbound, probably some 80-plus percent of human beings still falls knees-first in the face of superstition sloppily disguised as an invisible dude in the sky whose care for trivialities extends as far as your bedroom, your Sunday activities (or lack thereof since it's supposed to be Rest Day), and last but not least of all, your hairdo (Leviticus 19:27: "Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.").
So back to Macklemore: can anyone really take the bolded line as humble writing? "'Cause God wrote 'Otherside', that pen was in my hand."No fucking way! Just the opposite. Think about what he's really saying. Of six-plus billion people on planet Earth God decided to make Ben Haggerty, stage name Macklemore, the conduit from which to showcase His Holy rap skills. The thinly-veiled, unbridled arrogance! And the same goes for anyone shouting out God as the sole reason to why he or she is so awesome at a particular craft: God chose me. Not you. ME. M-E, ME. You fuckin' loser.
-The gay marriage debate, and Piers Morgan v. Michael Reagan on CNN: One thing is certain. Morality has never moved forward BECAUSE of religion. (That is, at least the three predominant monotheistic ones.) Again, just the opposite. Every moral victory humanity has achieved, it has achieved DESPITE religion. God has historically been the biggest, loudest, most obnoxious naysayer to positive change the cosmos have ever seen. He reminds me of naive couples (I'm including myself in this one) saying to each other, "Let's not ever change, okay? Let's stay exactly as we are forever." Which, of course, beyond being bullshit, is literally impossible, except if you become a corpse, and even then your body can't resist braving physical change. Sameness's half-life endures for only so long; change seems to be the lone constant in the universe, unless you count my impassioned desire to forego underwear. But that's what religion tries with all its might and political lobby connects to do. God through man through interpretation through further interpretation said such and such 2,000 years ago, and that's it. We follow blindly. No questioning, no analyzing; just imbecilic adherence to commands made before Hawking, before Darwin, before medicine, when everyone and his/her momma owned a fucking goat.
Such is the case with gay marriage. Again, quoting from what's quickly becoming my favorite Bible book for its raucously entertaining narrative, Leviticus 20:13: "If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads." And so millenia later we come to the gay marriage debate. Yes, it's true that in 40 years everyone opposed to its ratification, specifically the diehard picketers, are going to look like neanderthals. But hindsight is 20/20, and for sure with the blind leading the blind at all times of the hour, future verisimilitudes mean, for right now, jack fucking shit.
Case in point: both Michael Reagan and Piers Morgan on the latter's CNN daily show. The pair, both faith-affirming Catholics, duked it out a couple weeks ago, Morgan for gay marriage, and Reagan (son of president Reagan) against. Hearing both idiots was maddening, to put it mildly, and in a nutshell here's how it went down (I'll be paraphrasing): MR: Gay marriage is a slippery slope. PM: Why? MR: First it's gays who can get married. Then before you know it, there will be polygamy, then incest, then bestiality, etc. etc. It's a slippery slope, to say the least. PM: So you're against the redefinition of marriage. MR: That's correct. PM: But marriage has been redefined before. In the 1960s it was illegal in 16 states for blacks to marry whites. But marriage has since been redefined.
A good point by Morgan. So now put yourself in Reagan's position for a second. How would you respond to Morgan's rebuttal? Remember, you're a fervent Catholic, son to a former bigotted president; you've got enormous connects and a infinitesimal worldview. What do you say? Whatever it is, doesn't matter. Reagan's answer is incalculably worse; it's got to be the single saddest thing to happen to humanity since the picture below:
The following is verbatim: Morgan: Marriage got redefined by the Supreme Court to allow black people to marry white people. What is your answer to that? Reagan: Those are laws that were made by man. Man is sinful, as you know. You're Catholic and I'm Catholic. I believe marriage was defined and blessed by God. Two different things. Man is the sinner, Christ just died for our sins and rose again last Sunday for our sins. The fact of the matter: man will always sin and make mistakes. I'm glad the Catholic church has taken a stand and is at least in this--in this day and age of the world in turmoil, they are taking a stand for righteousness...
Nothing more needs to be said.
And a few more to add to the list:
1) #PrayForBoston: What good is your prayer going to do for the parents who lost their 8-year-old?
2) Ray Lewis.
3) And I write this one reluctantly, dejectedly... Jeremy Lin.
4) The precarious and clinically insane Middle East.
And last but certainly not least of all...
5) Obama, half-black, which means half-marred in the intractable, bloody history of slavery, in which whites gave Christianity to blacks exactly as they've given drugs to the destitute... this same man is a proud believer in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.
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I'm tempted to believe the non-belief closet is chockablock with fear-ridden atheists, agnostics, secularists and the like. But the movement toward a superstitious-free world (see "knocking on wood") is still in a state of inertia, so the encouragement to come out is virtually nil. All the matter. God is popping up every which way you look, and if you haven't noticed by now, I'm sick of it. I'm beginning to reach my personal threshold of tolerance. The list of God sightings and hearings is forever growing, and the pessimist in me thinks that at this point in time it's achieved immortality. Now, I like to be right as much as the next person, but seriously, I'd like to be proven wrong just once. A la Holden Caulfield, "And I really mean it too." Just the one time will suffice.
Any non-believers still hiding in the closet?
And God said: "If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads." -Leviticus 20:13 from the Bible And the atheist said: "In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." -Friedrich Nietzsche
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The other day one of those Christian recruiters approached me outside my school, and of course I was jubilant. (For whatever reason I get some sick, sadistic pleasure hearing Christians say dumb shit.) Sure enough within the first thirty seconds of our talking the guy spewed the bullshit. I asked him why God is so spiteful and jealous in the Old Testament, and that being the case, how could you possibly worship someone who acts like such an immature asshole all the time. His answer was so beautifully stupid it's only right to grant it its own paragraphical autonomy: "He's jealous because he loves us. You know when you have a girlfriend or a wife and sometimes you get jealous if she flirts with another guy or something like that? It's because you love her and you want her all to yourself. It's only natural. And it's the same way with God. He loves us so much and He wants us for Himself as well. So He often gets angry or jealous because of that." Fucking amazing. I gave the guy the "you're not actually buying what you just said" look, and though his face didn't carve or contort into unmistakable culpability, I did see a flash of uncertainty pan across the lines of his face, and that was good enough for me. Pretty sure later when we parted ways he was thinking to himself, "What the fuck was I saying? 'He loves us so much and wants us all to Himself'? What does that even mean?" Unless, of course, the exact opposite is true; unless he sauntered away merrily and thought, "What a great response. And so true too. God doesn't want to share. So sue Him. I think I'm gonna have a sandwich tonight..."
Appallingly moronic as the guy's reasoning was, still it did more than just make my day in terms of entertainment. Unbeknownst to the Christian recruiter, his boyfriend/girlfriend-God analogy revealed buried roots to a concept I've been suffering over for a couple years now: Monogamy. Of course his own attempt at logic missed the mark completely, but in doing so he paved the way for me to arrive at the following hypothesis, that in society's creating one God and one God only (the shift from poly- to monotheism), it brought the reins of "exclusive love" into the forefront of human relationships, and thus monogamy was either established as the societal norm, or was further reinforced to be as such. Let's take a look at the first three of the 10 Commandments (King James Version): 1) Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 2) Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing... for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God. 3) Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. I have to ask this again: religious folks, is this really the God you worship? He sounds like Chris Brown lecturing Rihanna when they first started going out. Which brings me to my next point. Don't the above commandments have much in common with the unspoken rules of romantic relationships? Chris Brown's first three Commandments: 1) I will be your only lover, you got that, bitch?
2) Don't even think about another guy, or even think about thinking about another guy. Or I'll fuck you the fuck up. 3) You will refer to me only as CB, baby, or daddy. What do you think? Could the poly- to monotheistic belief shift transform the scope of intimate relationships for the next 2,000+ years to come? Next post will actually delve into my own opinions about monogamy. Stay tuned. S.DOT OUT!
And God said: "But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves: For thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God."
-Exodus 34:13-14 from the Bible
And the atheist said: "If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."
-Isaac Asimov
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Preface: If you came here for the unicorns, sorry but there won't be any mention of them in this post. I just thought it juxtaposed "death" nicely and so I put it in the title. BUT, never one to disappoint intentionally, I've gone through the effort to find a picture of this happy unicorn below.
Happiest unicorn ever.
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It’s no secret I’ve turned to the dark side (see: "Atheism"). But it happened just very recently, and very gradually at that. A years-in-the-making kind of deal. In 2008 I identified as an existentialist/absurdist; this was when, for the very first time in my life, I audibly entertained the notion that life is intrinsically meaningless and without purpose. It hit me like that Mayweather shot to Ortiz; that shit came out of nowhere, and the enormity of such a notion pretty much knocked me out cold. I think that’s inevitable when you’ve been reared since the womb to believe in things like God, higher purpose, and the it’s-all-gonna-be-okay affirmation: “Everything happens for a reason.” All are, of course, human attempts to cope with the uncopeable. That’s essentially the definition of absurdism, the school of thought I owe so much to, all praise to Albert Camus, philosopher and author of The Stranger. The absurd, per Wikipedia, “refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any.” Is that beautiful or is that beautiful?
For the longest time, I thought God was a white dude in the sky, monitoring and judging us all. But, now newly equipped with my absurdist beliefs, I had no choice but to ascribe God an upgraded, better meaning. I won’t go into it too much, but in 2008 moms introduced me to the Conversations with God books, and instantaneously they heaved my mind high to the revolutionary teachings of New Age spirituality. God was no longer a He; God was now a thing I couldn’t quite describe or define, for doing so would limit the immeasurable scope of such perfection and immaculation (whatever that means). Long story short, though I’d officially removed the clamps of Christianity from my beliefs, I was still clinging tightly to the idea of a God; He, or It, just came by way of another vehicle now. (All that being said, I still recommend Conversations with God to everyone; it’s an amazing book with plenty of application in the year 2013, and world peace would probably prevail if everyone owned a copy.)
Then Jerry Seinfeld/Larry David and Woody Allen came along. The former pair nihilistic misanthropes, the latter, a steroided, upgraded megaphone to the tenets of absurdism. I dove deeper, deeper into the darkness. “Everything happens for a reason” became “Things happen... and what's the deal with meat skewers? Can you believe these things?” (Reference to the hilarious video below.) But still I wasn’t able or ready to give up on my updated version of God as the undefinable, that sort of eternal--for lack of a better word--STUFF, residing with, around, about us all. I was, in my own way, still coping with the uncopeable.
Then the landmark moment. My man Richard Dawkins showed up in late 2012 and shut the fucking gym down. Even now I’m shaking my head, awed by the one-in-a-billion fortuitous chance of my coming across his book. I’d torrented a bundle of ebooks at random, maybe 150 or 200 in all. As I was perusing the list, trying to decide which to read first, I saw it sticking out like a rogue boner: The God Delusion. I’d never heard of Dawkins before, but the sheer boldness of his book's title did enough to pique my interest, and as they say, the rest is history.Delusion taught me more about evolution than all my high school science classes combined; I learned that socially, we’ve been programmed to grant unwarranted respect to religion and its respective beliefs, and that needs to change ASAP; and I realized just how blind and brainwashed you have to be to maintain religious beliefs in the 21st "Age of Information" century. But most importantly, most monumentally,Delusion finally gave me the courage to drop God completely from my mind’s steeple. I stood over the cliff, arm outstretched, the Omniscient One suspending pathetically in my clutch and eyeing me for pity like a droopy-eyed dog; the fascist I am, I looked the poor bastard straight in the eyes and LET GO.
I can say it now, 99.99 percent positively: There is no God, whether it be invisible white dude or invisible we-are-all-one spirit. There is no meaning to life. There is no heaven. There is no soul, just a brain liking the idea of one. There probably is the world of the relative (where we reside) and the world of the absolute, but the latter can be felt only in death, and by definition one can’t feel anything in death, so for all intents and purposes there really is no such thing as the world of the absolute. YOWZA! If you think that's a bleak, depressing prospect, well, you’re absolutely right is the problem.
I don't say any of the above with pretension or condescension, like I'm better than the twenty billion percent of the world still clutching to its respective ideas about God. Promise. I'm just consistently time and again blown away by the universe and all its mysteries for whatever reason, and so existential matters pretty much consume every thought I have not related to Jeremy Lin or humpin some hunnies. Finding the truth and getting it across time/space matters to me, and what I've figured out and gotten down to a science is that the old, universal adage that TRUTH HURTS is no bullshit. In fact, it's probably an understatement, best compensated for by Ernest Hemingway, who gave his own grimmer version of the adage, saying "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." Jesus fucking Christ. Anyone who says it like that... is it any wonder the man took a shotgun to the face? Outlook on life that irreparably stark, can you blame him?
Of course, I'm being partly facetious. Sure, I don't condemn Hemingway's decision to call it quits, and sure my life outlook reads similarly to his, but please don't think there's any "reading between the lines" to do right now, like I'm trying or even thinking of trying to emulate Hemingway's grand exit. (Although that would technically be honoring the saying that "good writers borrow; great writers steal" [from other writers]). No, I will not be submitting an app to join the NRA just so I can get mines and go out with an emphatic bang. Nor will I hang myself like Madoff's kid or stomach a mouthful of arsenic a la Madame Bovary. Fuckkk thattt. Just the opposite. Knowing death is a finality, I'm doing everything humanly possible to stay as cowardly as possible, such that any potential run-ins with Her Lowness (death) can be avoided. As Woody Allen humorously said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying."
I'm obsessed with it. Death is a finality. Isn't that fucking insane? It's literally the last thing. T-H-E Last Thing. It's the incomparable behemoth of be-all-end-alls. Salvation is nothing but specks of dirt and ash. When the priest says, "He's with God now," that's just the best way he knows of saying "The end."
I'm sorely and sordidly tempted to just stop right here, but then this might be the most depressing blog post in the history of depressing blog posts. (Actually that's more my being facetious. If I've done my writing job properly then you're not depressed, but somewhat entertained.) Plus, there's a voice telling me that I gotta come with the uplifting denouement; that baiting you into the snow, just to drown not only you but your entire family and all your ancestors and all your ancestors' puppies and kittens in the avalanche of grim death, is generally unacceptable; that I gotta at least come with the shovel and try to dig you up.
But then another voice is telling me, fuck it. What's the point? You're just gonna die anyway.
And God said: "Whoever utters the name of the Lord must be put to death. The whole community must stone him, whether alien or native. If he utters the name, he must be put to death."
-Leviticus 24:16 from the Bible
And the atheist said: "Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." -Isaac Asimov
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The following are two grammatical errors people make every single day. Simple mistakes that require simple fixes.
1) Go J Lin!
What's wrong with the emboldened? It's missing a comma between "Go" and "J Lin!"
Rule: Every single time you call out someone or something directly, you must put a comma before the addressee, no exceptions.
Incorrect: Hey Steven.
Correct: Hey, Steven.
Incorrect: What's good homie?
Correct: What's good, homie?
That doesn't mean, however, that any time you're writing someone's name, you use a comma. Consider the following examples:
Correct: His wife's name is Brenda.
Correct: To Jamie: ...
Correct: Dear Brian: ...
2) The "you and I" fallacy.
Consider the following:
He's taking you and I out tomorrow.
"I" is not correct in this sentence. It should be "you and me." But why is this? Throughout our schooling, teachers always told us that it's "you and I," or "Tim and I," or "them and I," etc. THEY WERE WRONG. Sometimes it is "you and I," sometimes it's not. Knowing when to use which requires being able to recognize the difference between subjects and objects, but that's boring to most people so I won't actually go there. Instead I'll show you a great shortcut that works every time, so you know when to use which.
The shortcut works like this. Remove both pronouns from the sentence, one at a time, and say the new sentence aloud. This will invariably lead you to the correct pronoun.
He's taking you and I out tomorrow.
"You" in this sentence checks out, so that's fine. Now we go to "I":
He's taking you and I out tomorrow.
Now you see the problem? You know instinctively "He's taking I out" doesn't make any sense; that it should me "He's taking me out." Thus, you know "me" is the proper pronoun to use in the sentence, "He's taking you and me out tomorrow."
Another example:
Him and I are going to the movies.
>Him is going to the movies.
>I am going to the movies.
"Him" is obviously wrong. It should be "He is going to the movies." Meanwhile, "I" is correct. So the new sentence will read like this:
He and I are going to the movies.
Last example:
She will pick her and I up.
>She will pick her up.
>She will pick I up.
"Her" is okay, but "I" isn't. It should be "me," and the sentence should read:
She will pick her and me up.
Don't sleep on proper grammar usage. If you don't know the rules to the game, how do you expect to kill it?
And God said: "If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity." -Deuteronomy 25: 11-12 from the Bible And the atheist said: "Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends." -Woody Allen
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Disclaimer: There's prolly no way around my coming off like the white oppressor in this post, traveling to a foreign land, telling the brown man what it means to be "civilized" like the quoted word is an absolute. But let's face it. The US dominates the hoop world like--piggybacking off the above analogy--the slavemaster dominated the slave. The US being the slavemaster (blacks in this case, ironically but rightly so) and smaller countries like Taiwan being the slave. That's why there's only one Jeremy Lin in the world. That's why I'm writing this post, not to flaunt basketball superiority by virtue of my being American, but to get the point across that if these smaller countries want to up their stock, they gotta change their games 180.
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I absolutely hate hate hate HATE to say it, but I gotta come clean: most everything I wrote in "Hooping while Asian" has to be taken back. The intractable verdict, after assessing and evaluating six weeks' worth of evidence in the laboratories of both outdoor and indoor courts in Taiwan: Asians can't hoop! We just can't, and it's so sad and I've immense trouble in admitting it. But it's the truth, and most of my (two) readers will know by now that truth is right there at the top of my value priorities; that it must be uncovered, admitted and demonstrated by any means. The b-ball style of play here is night-and-day from what we've come to take for granted in the US. Wherever you go in Taiwan, you'll see half-court 3-on-3 pickup games, never any other number. But that's fine. The problem isn't in the immutable 3-on-3; it's in the phrasing "half-court," which by itself is misleading. It's more like "paint" 3-on-3 pickup, meaning 95 percent of the action is taking place within 15 feet of the basket. Why this is, I don't know. But it seems to have been written in the genetic codes of every hooper here. The ball is always always checked at the free-throw line, or just above. Shots are thrown up (and for the most part, I mean literally thrown up) at a respective distance. A player who waits at the perimeter wing for a skip pass is rare as the sighting of UFOs, or a rational Christian. Invariably, this "paint" play is problematic for multiple reasons: 1) Spacing. They develop ABOMINABLE spacing habits. It's easier to get around on wheels through Times Square than it is to drive through the clusterfuck paint traffic in a 3-on-3 game here.
2) No reason to develop a perimeter game. Because all the action takes place pre-arc, hoopers here rarely get the chance to work on their outside games. They don't get reps practicing the abovementioned spacing; or L/V cutting; or catching the ball at the wing, pivoting/reverse-pivoting into a triple threat; or finally, shooting from the outside. Essentially they don't get to simulate real game situations, where play is inevitably pushed out farther from the hoop. This would prove, predictably, to be a torrential disaster come pick-up 5-on-5, except my Taiwanese kin have found a loophole to conceal the ugly wound of perimeter inability. That is...
3) No such thing as man-to-man. When finally Taiwanese hoopers decide to play 5-on-5, they do so with an inalterable footnote attached to the game: we play zone at all times, no exceptions. This is without doubt the most frustrating part of playing here. I know you might be able to get me with the cultural relativism on this one, except that you can't. And here's why. Not only do they abandon real game simulation in 3-on-3, but they eliminate that opportunity completely in actual, real games. Which means there's zero chance to develop individually in playing against a pick-up zone. Forever and always it's pass, swing pass, stand in the same spot, shoot. Rinse, lather and repeat.
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I don't think the preference to play zone is unique to Taiwan; when I studied in the Dominican Republic, they played the same exact way. My guess is that everyone conforms his/her play to fit the FIBA standards, which encourage and promote zone defensive sets.
But here's where I'm confused. It's obvious that everyone here worships the NBA. They've got blown-up Kobe and Bron-Bron billboards in the heart of downtown. On ESPN, NBA highlight segments last forever, while the SBL (Taiwan's pro b-ball league) gets the bastard-child treatment. A good majority of the pick-up hoopers I play against wear NBA jerseys while playing. (This upset my own expectations: hoopers here ain't repping J-Lin like I thought they would be.) And thus, the logical question arises: if they worship the NBA as fervently as they do here, why don't the hoopers here go for imitating the American style of play? Why stay adamant in their 2-3 zones? In 3-on-3, why not extend the action out to the arc? Why the errant dribbling? Why the herky-jerky movements? Why the 90 mph passes coming at your face from three feet away?
I don't get it. I just don't get it.
The other week I saw a male coach teaching his girls how to cut to the hoop; they weren't angling inward from the free-throw line extended; no, they were angling in from the short corner, which gives them very little space to use the backboard for their layups. What was more appalling, the coach was throwing them lead passes a foot from the basket, which meant they couldn't even lay the ball up on the side they were cutting on; they had to take an extra dribble and lay it up on the other side. You think I'm done but of course, there's more: after these girls took their dribble from left side to right side, they turned to their right shoulder and used their right, inward hand to lay the ball up, which sat just below their neck. What this means, gentlemen (I don't imagine any ladies to be reading this post), is that ten times out of ten, they will get blocked.
Needless to say, it starts with the teaching.
Maybe it really is time for me to get my "white colonizer" on and show these primitive peoples the way of the civilized.
