12/3/13: In Which Anxiety and Other Things Keep Me Awake

Do I normally capitalize every word of my post titles? I can never remember. Oh well. 

Lately I've been sleeping very poorly, and also suffering from a seemingly sourceless bout of anxiety. I guess I get this feeling every now and then, like an under-utilization of my skills is creeping up to strangle my brain at night, but it's unfortunately accompanied by a complete inability to focus on anything for very long and an intense displeasure with anything I do manage to get done. The result of all this is that I'm not sleeping and I'm hating myself for not getting anything done while I'm not sleeping. My current pet theory is that this is just the latest manifestation of my seasonal depression, which seems to be rearing its ugly head this year despite regular ingestion of vitamin D, which I'd hoped would help keep it at bay. 

I'm also getting paranoid again. This has been building for a while, but until the last week or so it had been stuff I was used to: feeling like someone is following me, a compulsion to make mental notes of exits and escape routes, developing combat strategies in unnecessary situations, that sort of thing. I've been dealing with those with varying degrees of success for years now. What's new are the delusions. I'm hoping they're just a byproduct of wracking up a bit of a sleep debt, because I'm starting to notice that my reflection is staring at me. Let me explain. 

In my bathroom, if I don't shut the door completely it has a tendency to swing open. If I'm just brushing my teeth or washing my hands or what have you, I don't tend to make sure the door is shut. There is a mirror on the outside of the door. When it's open, that mirror reflects the one over the sink over my shoulder, so I see my own face behind me. Sometimes, that face looks at me when I'm not looking at it. I know it's not real, it's just my mind playing tricks, but I see what I see and it's starting to disturb me more. 

I'm angry with myself. That's probably another part of all the mental nonsense. I'm pissed off that I can't finish anything. That I call myself a writer when I don't feel I deserve that title. That I call myself an actor when I'm afraid to audition. That I should really be in therapy or maybe even medicated but I'm too timid or proud or both to reach out and find help for myself. I have so many supportive people around me, and I feel I don't deserve any of them. I take too much and I give back so little. I hate myself. 

12/2/13: In which I talk about something important for once.

My name is Jesse Vetters, and I am among the vast minority of men who have been falsely accused of sexual assault.

Let me explain. According to RAINN.org, over 237,000 cases of sexual assault happen every year. Only sixty percent of these are reported, and according to the FBI only two percent of those reports have evidence pointing to being unfounded. That amounts to about two thousand, eight hundred, and forty-four people who are falsely accused of sexual assault or rape each year. Out of a population of more than three-hundred million, that's a pretty low number (though not as low as it should be, because rape and sexual assault are atrocious and shouldn't happen at all.

My accusation came from an ex-girlfriend while I was in high school, and it was, in its own way, justified. See, while one girl and I were dating, we did a bit of sexting or whatnot. We were eighteen, incredibly horny, and not having actual sex, so what else were two creative kids going to do? I'm not super proud of some of the things we said, but it was what it was. Flash forward to our entirely unpredictable breakup a whopping three months later when she tells another of my exes (they were friends, it should have been expected) that during one of our little sessions or whatever, I mentioned having sex while holding a knife to her.

Now, context: She was into bondage and hardcore situations, and I was into making her happy. I'd never now and never would have held a real knife to any real person, but I was of the opinion that what is said in a “sexy” instant messaging game isn't exactly meant to be taken as reality. Like, ever. Seriously, I've also written about a menage-a-trois with a centaur. I write fiction.

Aaaanyway. My more-ex-girlfriend, who had her own grudge against me for a mostly-unrelated reason, decided that I was a threat to someone's safety. I've never been entirely sure whose, but I suppose she had her reasons and I don't judge her for them. At the time I was something of a wayward soul, and she wasn't the only one of my friends to think so. Most of them knew I'd never hurt anyone (hopefully all of them knew that) but c'est la vie.

My school, much like most other schools, had what was called the “safe school hotline,” where students could call in and report anything about anyone that they thought was unsafe. It was an anonymous system that could, in theory, do a great deal of good in stopping harmful or dangerous activity without any blowback to whoever reported it. I think having such systems in place is good. That said, it was something of a small community that my family happened to be in pretty tight with. So when the call came down the line that I'd “threatened” to “rape” my ex-girlfriend “with a knife,” my mom got a phone call warning that the police might be at my door to escort me to school in the morning. Needless to say that warning passed on to me with a pretty frantic midnight conversation, and it became somewhat clear (I'll get to that somewhat in a minute) that I wasn't actually a potential rapist. No cops were called or needed, though I did spend a good chunk of the next day talking to various members of the school's faculty, and that was certainly a joy.

Through the course of the next two days, I confronted the more-recent ex about why she would accuse me of threatening her, to which she, rather put off by the whole situation, told me that she didn't, but she did talk about it to the other person involved. That was where shit really hit the fan, because while the safe school hotline was anonymous, high school students are definitely not. When my accuser was confronted about the situation, the story immediately changed from being one of asserting safety to one of outrage that the anonymous system had failed and she'd been outed.

Did I mention I was doing a production of The Crucible at the time? The characters were all mixed up, but we were all there. To protect those involved, I won't say who was who. This was years ago, and I'm over it. I just think the story should be told.

Now, about that somewhat. I mentioned briefly that I spent about two days explaining that I hadn't threatened anyone, trying to keep my life from falling apart. Throughout this ordeal, I had more than a few people notice that I'd been spending a lot of time out of class and around the principals' offices. For those that remember high school, this is never a good thing. Despite my efforts to keep the situation under wraps (I did tell a couple of very close friends that I'd trusted with things like this before) rumors started to fly. Maybe my accuser told others, maybe not, it doesn't matter. What matters is that for about a week – honestly, with most people it only took a week for that to not matter anymore – I was some kind of delinquent and possibly a knife-rapist. I didn't particularly care what most people thought, but a few people I'd thought were my friends turned against me, and that stung.

At the end of the ordeal, I was exonerated and the truth, mostly, came out. It was a long time before I could actually forgive either of the others involved, but eventually I did. I even understand why the call was placed. I guess I'm writing this to mostly say that, yes, sometimes people are falsely accused of various forms of sexual assault. Sometimes it's rape, sometimes it's not. But those incidents, in my experience, don't hold a lot of water. We all make mistakes, and we all say and do things we shouldn't, but when it comes down to it, we falsely accused cannot afford to make a stink about our situations. Not yet. If you are sitting in a jail cell right now for a rape you did not commit, then your story is different than mine by exponential degrees. But if you, like me, suffered no more that a few people not talking to you and a dad who thinks your story would make a good play, then I say to you, tell everyone how little your false accusation affects your life. Tell them that they should, instead, focus on the near-quarter-million people who are assaulted each year in the United States alone. Tell them that by focusing on the falsely accused, they silence the voices of those who have been truly wronged. Tell your stories, right your wrongs, but do not let your voices drown out those that need the platform, too.

Sexual assault should never happen to anyone. Support should be there for everyone.

7/6/13: In which I'm a Feminist on Star Wars: The Old Republic

I recently started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. I was never one for MMORPGs before - I assumed most of them were basically the same as World of Warcraft, which I played a brief and boring free trial of years ago. When SW:ToR went free-to-play, I decided I'd eventually give it a try. Recently I did, and surprisingly kind of fell in love with the game. It's not going to be my favorite ever, but it is a lot of fun. I created a Jedi character because I wanted to be able to hit stuff a whole lot, and I went into the game. Because I liked the aesthetic and I generally prefer it, I made my character a woman, and also an alien. No big deal for me. But apparently that put me in something of a minority.

I named my character Jzosaiea, which has a somewhat feminine and somewhat alien feel to it, since I'd joined a roleplaying server. I wanted to have a character that I could enjoy playing as, in the game and in any roleplay situation that might arise. Oh, and in the spirit of clarification, when I say roleplay I just mean speaking for and as my character. My female character.

All went well the first time I started RPing with someone. I made a friend, played as my character, and had a nice time. What happened after got a bit strange, though. I had never said my real name, never revealed anything about my identity, and yet as soon as the roleplay ended, my new friend - who played a male avatar - began to address me with male pronouns. He assumed that the female avatar he'd been playing with was controlled by a guy like himself. And he wasn't the only one. It felt strange to me that most of the players I interacted with addressed me as a man, despite being able to see my female avatar. It didn't bother me, particularly, because I'm a guy in real life, but I did play with people who weren't. I made it a point to not assume who anyone was. If you played a female, I referred to you as female unless you asked me to do otherwise. Which, I feel, is entirely reasonable.

A few days after I started playing, I got into a lengthy discussion with a pair of other players - both female as far as I knew - about the nature of gender roles and sociology in relation to the game. I wish I'd been able to copy it all down because it was as fun to have as it was insightful, and for the most part it made me feel really good about the game. I was dealing with a better crowd than the people who'd helped shoo me away from World of Warcraft. Then, though, someone started to complain. One of the other players decided he'd had enough of our impromptu 3AM sociological discussion and started making derisive remarks about how we were "in the wrong place for a talk about social issues." And he wouldn't stop with those sorts of remarks. Luckily once we'd wrapped up our talk (one of my conversational partners logged off), he stopped harassing us. But that wasn't good enough. It revealed to me the nature of certain gamers, and I think MMOs attract them more than other genres. They don't want anything to interrupt their game, their microcosm.

Gamers like this guy don't want their games interrupted by anything that alters their worldview. A large part of that worldview is the idea that everything is fine. Most of these guys are straight white men of college age. There's nothing particularly wrong with that. College-aged straight white guys have it pretty good, so why should they care about the issues that other people face? Why, in fact, should they assume anyone but themselves play the game? It's their game - no one else matters. So they build themselves a little world without conflict or strife and they bury themselves in it. In a game without a social aspect, that's acceptable. You can do whatever you want when everyone else is just pixels on a screen. But a lot of those pixels come with real thoughts, feelings, and personalities, and that shouldn't be discounted. Just because something doesn't fit in someone's worldview doesn't mean they get to shut it out. The world thrives on diversity, and there's no reason that the worlds inside our games shouldn't be the same. If you don't want to hear what someone else has to say, these games give you the option of ignoring them.

I guess I don't have more of a point than what I've already written. I just wish people were better.

4/20/13: In Which Language is Actually Discussed

Yesterday I meant to start a discussion about the nature of language as a whole and got sidetracked talking about high school and how I need to get back to studying Japanese. Tangents aside, language is something that has always fascinated me for many reasons. As such, it's going to be a perennial topic on this blog, albeit not using the literal definition of perennial because heaven knows I can't be bothered to stick to any sort of schedule. I want to take today to throw my half-educated ramblings at you on the topic of the use of vowels in linguistics, and the evolution thereof. As a disclaimer, I'm  not an expert on this topic, but I will try to sound like one sometimes.

Any English speaker, native or otherwise, should be fully aware that we use (or abuse) vowels in creative and often silly ways. For example, in that sentence alone, I used every vowel in the written language in almost every way it's normally used! All that's missing is a basic long O, which you almost have in "or" but the r changes things because in English following any vowel with an r changes things. But this is my point! To someone who didn't speak English, hearing that sentence spoken aloud should conjure a bevy of images with the varied sounds it brings out. Ahs, ees, oos, ehs, ihs, aies, ows, everything is just thrown around and smashed up with a hodge-podge of consonant sounds to make meaning. And yet, by our rules, we only have five (and a half, but I'll get to that) vowels! They just combine and get modified to make every possible sound a human mouth can wrap around. Well, almost. A few other language families figured out some glottal clicks and the like that Indo-European languages never got around to, but I'm ignoring those for the purpose of this. So, accepting all of this, what's the point? English is weird, but isn't every other language just as odd-ball?

Well, in my experience, no. To put it bluntly, English is so bastardized that we've essentially oversimplified ourselves into complication. Spanish, for example, was the first second language I ever studied (and that makes sense grammatically so don't challenge me). In the two years I got through, and the subsequent snippets I've been able to pick up,  I haven't seen a lot of evidence that their vowels get a lot more complicated than what a five-year-old picks up in "donde esta la biblioteca?" O will pretty much always be o, i will always go ee, e will always be eh, and a will always say ah. Oh yeah, u and y are in there as well, and their y only makes one sound from what I saw. I think French gets more complicated, but I'll have to run that by a friend or two who actually studied the language - I never really got a good feel for it. I only know they have a lot more combinations, but even those seem to follow more set patterns than English does. Example: "eaux" in French has always turned out to be "oh" when I've seen it, but "ough" in English is either "ooh" or "uf" or "oh" and it doesn't make a lick of sense. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, and if I am please correct me. I'm here to learn as much - if not more - than anyone who might stumble upon this thing.

Shifting away from Romance languages to my other realm of experience for a moment, I'd like to talk briefly about Japanese. Japanese is a freaking fascinating spirally craptacular dangerfest of a language to learn, but it's beautiful in so many ways. It's why, after (holy crap I'm getting older) six years, I keep coming back to it for another go after it kicks my butt. The Japanese alphabets aren't actually alphabets at all, which, if you know much about the language and culture, is nothing new to you. Instead, they have the hiragana, katakana, and kanji, all different sets of symbols with different purposes. I know about eleven kanji and ten of them are numbers. Those are the Chinese-based symbols that represent entire words and can have multiple pronunciations for each character depending on how they're arranged and they blow my mind so I'm leaving them aside for now. The kana are what I'm decent with, and that's the closest the Japanese have to an alphabet*. Each of their symbols in the kana represents a sound (like "ah, ka, chi, toh, ru, he," etc.), and the kana they draw from depends on whether the word they're spelling out is native Japanese or not. For example, "te-re-bi" would be in katakana, because it's derived from the English word "television," but "ya-ki-so-ba" would be hiragana because the name of the noodles is actually Japanese. Now that the little lesson is over, back to the point!

Japanese vowels are always - repeat, ALWAYS - pronounced as they are seen. Even in combination, if they appear in an "aeo" or whatever, you say each one in succession. Granted, a native or fluent speaker will be able to blend them together enough that an amateur like myself will take pause with it, but each sound is distinctly there. Let's use a (somewhat) well-known figure as our example, the head of Disney-associated Studio Ghibli Hayao Miyazaki. Though you'll often hear his name pronounced "Hi-ow" the more proper pronunciation is simply "ha-ya-o". All that's happening is the sounds are being pulled together for convenience, but every a is ah, every o is oh, and no y will ever make a vowel sound on its own (unless someone really fails at romaji, but that's another story).

So... This was a long and winding post, and I do believe I said something about "another story" or "getting to that" a few times and then left those hanging. I'll probably continue to do that for a while. Peace out!

4/19/13: In Which I Contemplate Linguistics

I was lucky enough to attend one of the few public high schools I've ever heard of that offered more than two or three foreign language classes to its students. I don't know how it is anymore, since my youngest sibling has now graduated from the school and my connection to it has almost completely evaporated, but in my time at Greenfield-Central I was lucky enough to dabble in two languages: Spanish for my freshman and sophomore years, and Japanese as a junior and senior.

I was not the best student a teacher could have hoped for. I was lazy and irreverent, and when I did pay attention and know what was going on I tended to play the know-it-all. That's not to say I was the worst kid in class, just that I was a B-student who caused a little more trouble than necessary and who honestly should have been acing it. But to get to the point, I didn't make good use of my time in my high school language classes. As a result, by the time I've graduated college and moved out to NYC, I've effectively forgotten almost every lesson from both languages.

This realization hit me hard today as I was... Well, I'm not entirely sure why it hit me today. I haven't spoken I a Japanese person, I haven't needed to know Spanish, I haven't even really watched an anime in a year or so... I'm not certain where the feeling came from, but I decided that it was time to actually, truly do what I've been meaning to do since my junior year of high school and learn another language for real, no matter how hard it gets. The only trick is that now I don't have easy access to classes and teachers who will help me for free (or at least no additional cost over my tuition). It's all on my and the Internet now, and whatever I can buy and borrow. But that's not meant to be the point of this post...

Or maybe it is. This just became a journal update. I was going to talk about linguistics in general, but that can happen tomorrow, or later tonight if I'm feeling particularly adventurous. For now, I have a poker game to get to.

2/25/13: In which a 2-hour layover has me bored

I'm sitting in the Atlanta airport, the specific name of which I neither remember nor have the inclination of learning, waiting for my flight back to New York. I left Chicago a handful of hours ago after seeing my cousin Anslee perform in a musical that was as enjoyable as it was disjointed, which is to say I had a great time so long as I quieted the questions in the writer-brain. I also got to see Book of Mormon while I was there, and holy crap was that amazing. But that's another story.

Or is it?

I feel like talking shop. So I will! This was a very theatrical weekend for me, between Imitation of Life [Anslee's play at a theatre I will fill in later], Book of Mormon, and watching the Oscars Sunday night. It was fun. In a lot of ways it made me realize how much I've missed the stage, but what I've truly missed is acting in general. Almost all of my creative output has been in writing a new web series with John (the roommate, for anyone not in the know) that I'll officially reveal here once we've officially revealed it everywhere else. I actually have a production meeting for that almost as soon as I walk in the door, so that'll be fun. Anyway, that's all about to change. Next Monday, I audition for A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Cheeky Monkey theatre company and I'm going to be bringing out the big guns for Puck. It's a role I've always wanted, and I'm seriously hoping things fall in my favor this time around.

Aaaand... I don't have a lot more to say about that now. More later. I plan to update this a bit more often. Probably not daily yet, but maybe.

Hopefully.

12/5/12 : In Which I Hate Technology Sometimes

I just spent the last forty-five minutes typing a long post that I really liked on my phone, only to have it erased in an instant just before I tried to publish it. So this is my post today. I am angry. That is all.