Unconditional Respect?

So apparently there's a bit of, um, "wisdom" running around in some Christian Marriage Help circles which says that, basically, women need unconditional love, and men need unconditional respect.

Now, I have some problems with the idea of unconditional love. First of all, I don't think love is ever truly unconditional; and second of all, no matter how much we laud it as a goal or ideal, I'm not at all convinced that unconditional love is actually a good thing. At least, not when it comes to human beings.[1] To pick an obvious example, if I love someone who keeps hurting me and and taking advantage of me, pretty soon I'm not going to love them quite so much (and soon after that, I'm not going to love them at all). This is not a failing on my part; it's a good and sensible reaction to unacceptable behavior.

So, no: I don't think that unconditional love (for either the husband or the wife) is a necessary ingredient for a successful marriage.

But the other half of this equation isn't just misguided; it's nonsensical. Unconditional love may be a bad idea, but unconditional respect is essentially a contradiction in terms. Respect is, by its very nature, something that must be earned. If it isn't earned, it isn't respect. It might be courtesy, or perhaps deference, but it can't be respect.

So, you know, at best this advice is misleading. At worst, it's deliberately designed to set up a situation where no matter how egregious the husband's behavior might be, the wife isn't supposed (read: allowed) to call him out for it. I'd like to think that that's a flaw, but I suspect for a lot of people it's a feature.

Generalized relationship advice is always suspect, but this seems pretty horrible even by those standards.


[1] I am aware of the theological assertion that God's love is unconditional. However, unconditional love is a very different proposition for an all-knowing, all-powerful being. Such a being is, by definition, simply not vulnerable. There is nothing limited creatures could do to harm it - ever. I'm not entirely sure that an all-knowing being could even be disappointed in any meaningful way. So God, if He exists, can afford to love unconditionally; for Him, there's no real risk or cost in doing so.

The Great Skylanders LARP

So, Firstborn spent part of this afternoon playing Skylanders: Giants with me. Skylanders, as I've probably explained before, is a rather brilliant little marketing device, in which you collect colorful plastic statues of various characters, then set them on a "magic portal" which plugs into your gaming console in order to have them appear as playable characters in the Skylanders video games.

Firstborn, however, was playing Skylanders in the park - a location notably lacking in such accoutrement as game systems, or even televisions.

We were, basically, LARPing.

The way this works is that I make up a Skylanders: Giants character to play. Firstborn then makes up his own Skylander. And then we battle, which consists mainly of running around the park pretending to use our powers and attacks on each other. More precisely, Firstborn runs around the park. In keeping with the primary goal of taking children to the park ("Exhaust them, not yourself.") I tend to choose characters who ooze, shamble, walk, or are carried by lots and lots of little arachnids who don't move very fast.

Finally, my character dies. This is because Firstborn is a six-year-old boy, which means that he automatically plays in God Mode. So no matter what character I choose, I'm pretty much doomed. Here was the roster from this afternoon:

Round One: I selected Ooze, who's one of the giants - and, as the name suggests, he's a big slimy blob from the Water Element. He attacks by flinging ooze-drops, or by growing a big ol' pseudopod and smashing things with it. Firstborn selected an Undead Element character (not sure if he had a name), who could travel underground and then burst out under his enemies in a shower of flying skulls and sharpened bones; he could also summon twenty little bone dragons, and throw tombstones. (I realized that the Underground Travel attack was going to be a problem the first time he tried to do it in the game, because he signified it by hunching way down, running up to me, and then attempting to position himself directly beneath my crotch before leaping straight up. Which would have made for a very effective attack in real life, if I hadn't gotten out of the way.) The conclusion? He squashed me, I think with a giant tombstone.

Round Two: For our second battle, I elected to be Lightning Guy (Air Element), which basically meant that I called down lightning bolts and occasionally made an expanding circle of lightning bolts all around me. Firstborn elected to be a Tech Element Skylander, who fought using giant wrenches. This allowed me to fling lightning bolts at him while he raced all over the park, until finally I came too close and he got me with a wrench.

Round Three: This time, I decided to try the Undead Element, and became Zomb-Daddy. In addition his brain-gnawing prowess, Zomb-Daddy has the power to throw zombabies at his opponents. It sounded pretty formidable, until Firstborn announced that he was going to be Armor, a Tech Skylander whose armor could only be damaged by lightning. And he had big shields, which he could throw, and an arm-rocket that turned into some sort of disk attack, and... I died. Quickly. Even the lightning-bomb zombabies were no match for him.

Round Four: This time, I went with another Undead Element guy. His name was Duddy. He was covered in bandages, and his other power was that he was completely invulnerable: so if you set him on fire, he's a burning Duddy, and if you squash him he's a flat Duddy, but he never actually dies. Firstborn went with another armored tech guy, this time fielding something that sounded like a small-scale Mecha with a laser cannon. My decision to be unkillable gave us a good fifteen minutes of running around and battling without anybody actually dying, though I imagine there are still bits of mummy bandages scattered around the trees and play equipment from when I was trying to tie Firstborn up with them. (I mentioned this to Firstborn, and he said: "Well, and they're invisible bandages.")

So that was my afternoon. I'm not sure if we decided the fate of the Skylands, but we sure had fun.

Zompires Ahead

I eased my head over the top of the hill, and saw them: zompires.

Different people might call them other things, but we called them zompires. Unless they were particularly weak and damaged specimens, in which case we called them Vambies.

If you saw them in the early stages of the infection, half-blind and off-balance and uncoordinated, you wouldn't think they were much of a threat - and you'd be right. But as the parasite spread, killing and replacing human flesh like some fungous cancer, they grew faster and stronger and much more stable.

Smarter, too.

Fully developed zompires looked like nothing so much as a black-and-white photo of a skinless corpse, the grain of the muscles and the lines of the veins sketched in lighter and darker grays. Here and there they might be missing a limb, where something had rotted off before being completely assimilated, but that was usually just fingers and toes. It wasn't enough to slow them down or throw them off.

Very little threw them off. They didn't have a circulatory system, like we did; no matter where you cut them, they didn't bleed out. Their organs were redundant and distributed; a shot to the heart or head might stun them, but it wouldn't finish them. Even decapitation didn't always do it. You needed something systemic: intense heat, or extreme cold, or truly massive physical damage. They could starve, but not as easily as human beings could; ditto suffocation.

This wasn't a large group; maybe a dozen specimens, but they were all fully developed. That meant that they would react intelligently to whatever we did. It also meant that they had access to their full range of senses, which we didn't completely understand. We knew they could spot us up to about three hundred yards out, but we weren't sure how they did it; and we knew they had some other way of finding people, since they drifted towards us - or anyone else - across much longer distances than that.

Ordinarily, we dealt with zompires from as far away as possible, using rifles. With blood-addicted bandits sniffing our tails, we couldn't afford to make that much noise. And the ground ahead was pretty open; if we tried to circle them, we were pretty much committing ourselves to running. Maybe we'd make it, or maybe we'd end up cornered and overrun; no way to tell in advance.

I eased back down, and went to rejoin the others. "Drive through them," I said. "If we don't find shelter, we're done."

Let me tell you how my day is going...

Why, hello there, Cranky Customer! Why, yes, I'd be glad to try to help you with your problem, even though that particular application belongs to another department and the most likely explanation for your difficulties is User Error. However - and I am abjectly, grovelingly sorry about this - I do need you to take an active part in this process, since I cannot enter your credit card information for you. I shall now apologize repeatedly for not being able to wave my hand and fix it with magic, even though the entire situation is neither my fault nor even my responsibility.

The King of Cups

So we're sitting in the car at Sonic a couple of days ago, and I have ordered corndogs for the boys. In addition to the corn dogs, I have ordered two cups of water. (Firstborn actually asked for a cup of water, but that makes it a safe bet that Secondborn is going to want some, too. So, two cups.)

I hand the first cup back to Firstborn, who takes it. At six years old, he sits in a booster seat, which happens to have a pair of built-in cup-holders, one at each of the front corners. He pries open one of the cup-holders, and puts his cup in it.

"Firstborn," I say, "can you pull out the other cup-holder, and put Secondborn's cup in it?"

So he pries open the second holder, and accepts his brother's cup. Then, with everything in place, he proudly announces: "Ha-ha! I am the King of Cups, with my Cup-Throne!"

He's, um, he's kind of dramatic. I don't know where he gets it from, really. It's very mysterious.

Pics from the Dallas World Aquarium

So, I mentioned earlier that we went to the Dallas World Aquarium back on Sunday, and it was awesome. I didn't take a lot of pictures, because I was exhausted, but here are two that you might enjoy...

New Years Revolutions

Right, so... I don't make New Year's resolutions. It's not that I'm opposed to resolutions in general, you understand, it just seems like trying to fit them to an arbitrary calendar date is counterproductive. I make a mistake, I resolve not to do it again, and then I work on, y'know, not doing it again. The date is tied to when I noticed I was making a mistake, or falling short of the mark, or whatever else needed to be fixed. Strangely, that very seldom coincides with January First.

That said, I do like the idea of setting everything down and starting over. I'm not sure how practical it is - as I get older, it seems that more and more things would just get picked right back up again - but even if the date is arbitrary, it's nice to notice and celebrate another year out of the way. So if you're celebrating the change from one calendar to the next, I hope you're having a fun and safe time of it. And if 2012 was unpleasant in any way, I hope 2013 is better for you.

And if, despite all your better instincts screaming at you to sleep, you're still awake right now... well, I hope you take the hint and go pass out. It's what I plan to do...