Classified

Twilight Sparkle is only obliquely connected to this post.

"I don't like being labeled."

What do we really mean when we say that? I can think of three major motivations for expressing that sentiment, or some variation of it: concern about possible misclassification, conflation of group membership with self-identity, or general wariness of labels.

Whatever our stance on classifying people, just about everyone dislikes being misidentified. Of course, strangers or casual acquaintances often have no way of knowing certain things about us. For example, people often assume I am gay because I have a male partner when I am, in fact, bisexual (the phenomenon of bisexual erasure may also affect this in some instances, but I am referring to people with no access to any information about my sexuality other than my present relationship).

Conflating group membership and self-identity is similar, but more subtle. Group membership often matches self-identity, and many people consider them one and the same. If there is a discrepency between them, we might feel as though we have been misclassified, even if that is not the case. For example, I am a citizen and resident of the United States, which makes me a member of a group called 'Americans'. However, I did not grow up in the USA, and do not identify strongly with the culture thereof. I do not really think of myself as an 'American', even though I am one by most relevant definitions.

Some people just do not like labels in general, even accurate ones that harmonize their their senses of self. I suspect there are many psychological reasons for this. People who grow up enduring social torment as outsiders--'weirdos', 'nerds', etc.--might reject any kind of label. Some argue that labeling is a kind of objectification, a way to reduce people to stereotypes. I do not really think we need an example here, but for the sake of symmetry, I match all of the common criteria for the label 'brony'.

The nature of the human cognitive process inclines us to classify everything, including people. That does not make it good or bad in itself, just nearly inevitable--at least given our present level of technological sophistication. We almost certainly all do it, whether we realize it or not. The biggest (and perhaps only) problem with a sentiment like "I don't like being labeled" is that it sets standards for other people that we ourselves probably cannot meet.

I think of labeling not as reducing someone to stereotypes, but linking someone to concepts that are helpful in thinking or communicating about them. These include physical descriptors, location (both in cyberspace and meatspace), interests, cultural/subcultural identification, connection to other acquaintances, and so on. Maybe I only see it that way because I rarely feel uncomfortable with being labeled myself (with the exception of misclassification, which I am working on).

Or maybe I am overthinking this, just a little.

Tempest in Russell's Teapot

As detailed in Nothing Unreal Exists and Faith and Farce, I take my skepticism very seriously. So seriously that I cannot quite bring myself to subscribe to atheism, no matter how appealing I find it.

Nevertheless, most of my friends are atheists, agnostics, humanists, or freethinkers of some variety, and I like to consider myself an 'atheist ally'. Religion (or lack thereof) is a private matter, and I oppose its involvement in any public sphere, especially education.

Vitarka mudra - the gesture of discussion

However, I seem to have trouble talking to atheists (especially New Atheists) about atheism, even though I often get 'read' as an atheist myself. Maybe I am doing something wrong, but somehow those conversations have a way of ending with an atheist insisting that all religion is harmful to humanity and we must do away with them if we are to advance.

I practice Chan (Zen) and Discordianism, but see no reason those religions must contradict with science. I accept materialism as an ideal baseline for discussing consensus reality (although I suspect an information-based paradigm will supplant it within my lifetime). I do not proselytize or expect others to understand why I meditate and Partake of No Hotdog Buns. I do expect tolerance to be answered with tolerance.

I suggested this to an acquaintance, who replied that he saw no reason to tolerate a delusional worldview, and that religious people have already given up on logic by discarding reality for faith. Questions of civility aside, this stance is not particularly constructive. It shuts down discourse and alienates believing allies.

As I see it, discourse of any kind requires some degree of faith in a shared reality. We assume that our senses convey independently verifiable information (not always true). We assume that other people interpret our words the same way we do (often not true). We assume all manner of things that the nature of our very cognition render impossible to prove or disprove (for now).

There is nothing wrong with any of that, but I think it worthwhile to be aware of the assumptions we make. Where we draw the line between 'rational' and 'delusional' assumptions is culturally determined, and sometimes rather arbitrary. It serves no one to assume that someone who professes a different set of beliefs must be incapable of coming to an agreement on basic definitions for the sake of discourse.

To me, a person who believes that a teapot might orbit the Sun between the Earth and Mars, acknowledges the empirical shortcomings of this claim, and willingly entertains other points of view is far more rational than someone who will not stray from his own paradigm--whether spiritualistic, transcendental, materialistic, or informational.

Some Other Time

I had a vivid and detailed dream last night, the kind that remains plausible even after you wake. With some effort, I recalled a good deal of the dialog word-for-word, and even the names. It went like this:

I stroll through Baltimore City on a balmy afternoon, holding 'Zilla's hand. His gait is strange, but swifter than you would expect a four-year-old to walk. He talks about dinosaurs and robots, and what he wants to eat. I feel more than hear a burst of static as my collective tries to talk to me--but I should have signal downtown.

I look around and realize that we have strayed into the edges of a massive protest. Someone has set up an impromptu stage a few blocks away. 'Zilla squeals with delight and takes off, slapping the control modules at his waist. Suddenly he is no longer toddling, but running faster than a grown man.

"'Zilla! Get back here!" I give chase, but he is small and weaves effortlessly through the mass of humanity gathering on the street. Traffic grinds to a half, blocked off by tractor-trailers and charter buses whose stone-faced drivers hold pro-union signs beneath their cigarettes. I lose sight of the boy, and climb up onto the loading dock of a nearby building to find him. I spot his purple jacket near the stage.

A bus pulls up alongside the dock much too fast as I jump down from it, and I narrowly avoid being squashed, activating my reflex enhancer as I probably should have done when 'Zilla first got loose. I dart through the crowd, dodging bodies and barricades, ignoring hateful glances. The boy is trying to climb onto the stage, but I snatch him up and put him on my shoulders.

Sirens approach as the protesters finally get their antique amplification system working. A petite redhead takes the microphone and exhorts her fellows to remain calm, that they are sending a message, not starting a war. The crowd seems ambivalent. I run as fast as I can, but the police are closing in.

I head for a sleek(?!) SUV near the edge of the police perimeter. One foot goes on the front bumper, the next on the hood, a hop over the windshield and onto the roof without losing stride. I leap from the back of the SUV and over the perimeter, pulling 'Zilla off of my shoulders in mid-air and holding him to my chest like an awkwardly shaped football. The hang-time seems eternal, and when the ground hits me it hits harder than I expect. Warnings chime in my head, but the pain is fleeting. I roll clear of the startled police, stagger to my feet, and keep running.

There is a greenspace half a block from us, and law enforcement seems more concerned with containing the crowd than chasing us. I put 'Zilla down once we reach the gates of the park, abstractly aware that my left leg is damaged. We sit down on a park bench beside a middle-aged woman with ribbons and feathers braided into graying hair. She offers us some food in a soft, unfocused voice. 'Zilla happily accepts an apple from her and climbs onto my lap.

"Such a cute little boy!" the woman coos. "I hope you didn't have any trouble downtown, with the action today."

"We just missed the police," I reply, rubbing my leg absently.

"I'm terribly sorry, dear." She pats my hand. It feels a bit intrusive. "At least you made it to a peace zone. You know why we have these actions, right?"

I almost sigh. "You oppose automization and cyberization."

"It's dehumanizing," she says, shaking her head. "It taints everything. Imagine if you took your son to the hospital and they tried to put machines in him!"

Before I can protest that I am not his father or think to shush him, 'Zilla pulls up his shirt, exposing the baselayer that keeps his implants from chafing. Two ports on the suit expose the control modules. "I already got machines!" he cries. "I can't walk without them. Now I'm like Godzilla!" By way of demonstration, he hops off my lap and lumbers around on the bike trail, exaggerating his gait and saying "boom" with every step.

The woman turns from him to me with an expression of dawning horror. I thank her for the food and, taking 'Zilla's hand, leave as quickly as I dare make my leg move. He waves at her over his shoulder with the half-eaten apple.

Once we exit the jamming zone, I contact the collective, recalling the ones who had gone looking for us when I went off the grid. We arrive back at the shop shortly before sunset. Only two members of the collective are there, one cooking upstairs and the other tidying up the storefront. 'Zilla pulls free from my hand and sprints the last block. I let him.

Amelia steps outside, holding the boy to her with one arm and operating an archaic tablet with her free hand. She is half a head taller than me and dressed in a dark red unitard. "I need to look at that leg," she says. We send 'Zilla upstairs to help with dinner and, locking up the store, go into the back room.

It serves as both a workshop and an operatory, though not legally in the latter case. She makes me sit down and strips the street clothes from me. "These are pointless, you know," she says, tossing my t-shirt aside, "the unitard regulates temperature far better."

"Not everybody feels as comfortable you do in skin-tight metafabrics," I grumble. My jeans go flying, too.

I can feel her accessing my logs from my time off the grid--like the 'static' and the damage notification, it is not mapped onto any existing sense, but has an emulated neural pathway all its own.

She rolls her eyes and pushes me back into the reclined exam chair, finding and unzipping the invisible front seam of my unitard as she went. She runs deft fingers over my exposed skin; my scars look all the paler against the rich brown of her hands.

"I thought you were running a diagnostic on my leg," I say, propping myself up.

She laughs, a single 'hah'. "I already ran that diagnostic. It was just the same old wound again. You really ought to have the whole thing replaced."

"I'm fine," I insist. She picks up my left leg and rotates the injured ankle. Pain shoots through it momentarily, before the regulator blocks it off again. She is tapped into my feed, but does not flinch with me.

"Pain is either signal or noise, baby," she says, "nothing special about it unless you make it special. You can have all the pain you need, and a leg that doesn't give out every time you do something stupid."

"Maybe some other time," I concede. She massages my leg as we wait for the rest of the collective to return home. We say nothing more to each other, either vocally or electronically, comfortable in the quietude of our intimacy.

An Afternoon with Death

Like many geeks, I am terrible at platitudes and socializing in general. As such, I have a difficult time at mixed gatherings even when I know everyone involved. For me, going to a rural Pennsylvanian Catholic memorial service full of strangers is the social equivalent of diving into shark-infested waters wearing Lady Gaga's meat dress.

Okay, not exactly.

Yesterday, I attended the wake of a woman whom I did not know--my partner's great-grandmother. I accept this as a part of being in a long-term relationship with someone who has drifted away from/avoided his extended family.

I went along to provide emotional support, but it did not work out that way. Instead, I shadowed my partner and tried not to intrude on the grief of people I only distantly recognized from his grandfather's funeral a year ago. Some of them had never met me at all. The introductions went like this:

Mother-in-law: This is Zeph, my son's friend.

Distant relative: Nice to meet you, Jeff.

They treated me kindly, but the awkwardness never went away. I come from a world utterly alien to people who have lived their entire lives in a small town where one finds out about the death through the newspaper rather than social media. 'My condolences' sounded as stilted and out of place among them as my slim-fit suit and Windsor knot looked.

I kept my head bowed and my mouth shut during the prayer service. The Catholic liturgy was graceful, except for occasional wedged-in creeds. It read like poetry with interpretations written in between the stanzas.

Afterwards, a lector (I think?) encouraged mourners to talk about the deceased. No one seemed to know what to say. The exercise had an incongruously modern flavor to it, a certain awareness that the service was really for the living and not the dead.

My partner amazed everyone by using his smartphone to locate a restaurant that met their disparate criteria. They talked about bygone family activities, snapshots from a childhood my partner rarely discussed. I listened and nodded when it seemed appropriate.

Following dinner, my partner and his brother decided to visit their grandfather's grave. We stood on the hillside in the dying light, hands shoved deep in pockets, shoulders hunched. The brothers, both lapsed Catholics with their own grudges against Church and maybe God, talked about the headstone.

In Taiwan, we would have burned incense--even if none of the mourners were religious--without worrying about whether we did it for the living or the dead. Chinese culture juggles the spiritual and the material, the secular and the religious, with an effortless grace that I often wish would export better. Alas, I had nothing to offer them but my silence.

Leave-taking involved many exhortations for us to visit, though I doubt if anyone really expects it. They wanted to make me feel welcome, and I appreciated that, but they knew that I was not--and probably never would be--'one of them'. What they may not know yet is that my partner is not, either, and perhaps never was.

True Colors

Rober Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder

"'When I was a child,' Porphyre said, 'I was white.'"

This line from William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive, spoken by a dark-skinned character, stuck with me long after I had forgotten the plot-significant dialog surrounding it. In the context of the book, his quip underlined the disposability of appearance, and even identity, in the technologically advanced reality of the Sprawl.

It left an impression on me for slightly different reasons. I am the product of an ethnic Chinese mother and an Irish American father. I understood this from an early age, but, lacking exposure to the Western side of my heritage, I never connected with it. I identified primarily with the culture of the land in which I grew up (Taiwan) and of my primary caretaker (my Chinese grandmother).

As such, it confused me when other children picked on my appearance and told me to 'go back to America' long before I had ever set foot on American soil. It did not matter that I was born and bred in Taiwan, or spoke better Chinese than they. Adults in the village complained that my 'American blood' made me wild and rebellious, though I spent my spare time reading and playing alone.

It was enough that I looked different.

Some days, I would have given much to magically stop being a half-breed. I found my long, protruding nose ridiculous. I wanted to dye my hair so that I would not stand out, gleaming dark brown in a sea of black. I hated my large eyes, which so many Chinese people find attractive.

When I moved to the States, I thought I would finally 'fit in'. As far as skin color went, I did blend in with the dizzying ethnic diversity of Montgomery County, Maryland. Thanks to my father's foresight, I did not speak English with any discernable Chinese accent. I looked and sounded like an American kid, but knew virtually nothing about the culture that had produced my peers.

I did not yet understand then the full extent of my otherness, nor the preternatural ability teenagers possess for sniffing it out. Suffice to say that I did not have a pleasant adolescence--in that respect, at least, I was no anomaly.

These experiences have inclined me to think of skin color as a largely arbitrary trait. I realize that some people prefer to celebrate it, and I do not begrudge them that, but I do not grok it myself. I like my half-bred self just fine now, but I maintain that there is nothing wrong with wanting to change one's skin color--no more than it is wrong to want to change the color of one's hair, or eyes.

Alan Cumming in X2

A lot of people look askance at the idea of cosmetic surgery that alters someone's apparent ethnicity. It makes people uncomfortable. Phrases like 'co-opting identities' tend to crop up.

Do I co-opt the identity of white people by the sheer accident of my birth? What about a Chinese child raised by a white family? Or anyone whose cultural background does not match the majority of those who look like him?

I hope that one day, changing one's skin color will become as simple and commonplace as changing hair or eye color. It might help break this habit we have of sorting ourselves by appearance. If not, at least it will make that sorting a bit more voluntary.

Besides, I find blue skin very attractive.

Beards, Beer, and Bacon

I went to MAGFest this past weekend with my partner. We were both sick (apologies to anyone who contracted MAGflu from us), but had a blast nevertheless. MAGFest was distinct from most other conventions I have attended in recent memory in several ways: it was one of the smallest, most focused (in subject matter, i.e. gaming), and most heavily male-dominated (probably due to above-mentioned subject matter).

Me and River, in kilts.

You can observe all kinds of interesting phenomena at a con with a higher sex ratio than the People's Republic of China. Among other things, I found the sheer amount of facial hair startling.

I do not have much of an opinion about beards in and of themselves. Even if I did, I would stay clean-shaven, as my facial hair looks pretty tragic when allowed to grow out.

However, the popularity of beards seems to coincide with a new cult of masculinity, a reaction against the 'metrosexuality' of the 1990s. Perhaps every generation finds its own arbitrary standards of manliness, but really, how did we wind up with beards, beer, and bacon?

These standards of masculinity (short hair, preferring the color blue, interest in sports) or femininity (shaved legs, preferring the color pink, interest in...whatever adult women are 'supposed' to like--cooking?) are typically enforced by peers in a process sometimes called 'gender policing'.

As an effeminate guy, I have come to regard with vague distrust any fashion that gets too closely tied to societal expectations about gender. In fairness, I have not yet heard anyone level a charge of sissiness at a man for lack of facial hair. This frankly surprises me, given that a beard (as a male secondary sex characteristic) seems more intuitively masculine than, say, pants. Maybe it has something to do with the company I keep.

At the last Dragon*Con, someone heckled me for wearing a UtiliKilt, referring to it as a skirt in a jeering manner. Before I could give the repartee I learned from Eddie Izzard, the rest of the room shouted him down with a roar of "It's a kilt!"

On the one hand, I felt very encouraged by the intent of my defenders--they found that man's gender policing unacceptable and told him as much. However, the way in which they chose to respond suggested that A) they did not consider a kilt a type of skirt (in what way is it not a skirt?), and B) they did consider a charge of skirt-wearing for a man to be an insult.

I prefer to question the underlying assumptions: what is wrong with a man wearing a skirt? Why do you consider bacon a manlier food than tempeh? How does my interest in this particular band have anything to do with my sexual orientation? It tends to bring the gender police up short, because they expect either anger or submission, not discourse. Better yet, it might make someone think.

E-Primed

Every Winter Solstice, I undertake a project for the coming year. These year-long projects generally take the form of a change in personal habit, practice, or belief, preferably in a way that impacts my everyday life. After a year, I decide whether I want to keep the change brought about by the project.

As my personal project for 2011, I chose to speak and write without using the verb 'to be'. Some call this English Prime (E-Prime), and attribute to it any number of positive qualities, to the point of advocating its use over standard English.

The benefits of E-Prime do not always seem immediately apparent. Some linguists consider E-Prime less biased and more efficient, as it discourages definitive statements (e.g. "This language is bad.") in favor of descriptive ones (e.g. "This language lacks flexibility").

Not a linguist myself, I chose this project primarily as a challenge. As well, I wanted to test the practicality of using E-Prime on a day-to-day basis. Given that I live in a society heavily addicted to using 'to be', however, I left myself some leeway. I allowed myself to use the forbidden verb when referring to it as a noun (as I did in the preceding sentence), quoting someone else, and when working on fiction that predated the inception of the E-Prime project.

So, how did it go?

Switching over to E-Prime in writing came very easily. Perhaps, as a novelist, the need to plan sentences and paragraphs gave me an edge in restructuring written expression on the fly. Whatever the case, I never experienced any difficulty writing in E-Prime--unless you count forgetting to not write in E-Prime when working on my novels!

Speaking E-Prime posed a far greater challenge. It took me weeks to train myself out of saying various forms of 'to be', and even after the first month, I often cut myself off when I realized I could not complete the sentence without using 'to be'. Conversing with more than two people at once, especially while under the influence of alcohol, led to a large number of infractions. Contractions became the bane of my existence, since many of them 'disguise' the use of 'to be'.

E-Prime has certainly helped me gain a greater awareness of what I (and people around me) say and mean. I find myself using a greater variety of verbs now, and speaking more descriptively--if sometimes awkwardly. I also noticed some other, unexpected benefits, such a decreased incidence of triggering out-group hostility. For example, I received far fewer defensive responses to saying "I do not eat meat", compared to "I am a vegetarian" (the previous post addressed this phenomenon in greater detail).

However, I have also found that E-Prime eliminates many useful and elegant constructions, especially in terms of metaphors. While technically accurate, "I compare the world to a stage" just does not sound as poetic as "all the world's a stage". Also, sometimes a definitive statement, far from judgmental or vague, simply makes sense. "This pen is blue" gains little by conversion into E-Prime: "this pen has a blue color".

As the Solstice approaches, I have no trouble coming to the conclusion that 2011's project must end. Through my experiences, I have developed vast respect for E-Prime and what it can teach us, but also severe doubts about its utility as a living language. While I hope the lessons I have learned about language and communication will stick, I look forward fondly to the end of my 'to be' prohibition.

Meat in the Middle

Stir-fried vegetarian 'beef' and green peppers over brown rice.

I became a vegetarian several years ago for a variety of reasons that could probably fill an entire post but pretty much amount to 'orneriness'. In any case, I do not use my dietary choices as a brickbat, nor judge others who do not share my views, nor try to convert them (except jokingly, with close friends).

Still, a not insignificant percentage of people get defensive or skeptical when they learn of my dietary preference. By 'defensive' I mean reacting as though I had accused meat-eaters of immorality, and by 'skeptical' I mean insisting that a vegetarian diet cannot supply adequate nutrition, despite sound evidence to the contrary.

In turn, I find myself reflexively throwing scientific research and dietary arithmetic around to justify my choice. This works about as well as you might expect, and accomplishes nothing except firmly convincing the other person that I (and probably all vegetarians) look down on meat-eaters. Lately, I have grown more conscious of this phenomenon and try to refrain from engaging such individuals.

Of course we have a desire see our own choices and preferences--even the largely arbitrary ones--as Correct. In some of us the need to validate this desire runs stronger than others. Perhaps those people would get equally defensive/skeptical about my preference of colors, or movies, or music, if different from their own.

Interestingly, I have found that I trigger the defensive/skeptical reaction less frequently when I say "I do not eat meat". This discovery came as a side effect of my 2011 yearly 'project', in which I undertook to eliminate the verb 'to be' from my vocabulary as much as possible. Doing so meant I could not declare "I am a vegetarian", and so I started expressing my dietary preference differently.

Why would insecure or excessively passionate meat-eaters find "I do not eat meat" less offensive? I would have imagined a negative statement about meat more likely draw more objections than a positive statement about vegetables. No. Instead, most people respond by asking me why.

I usually reply that my motivation stems in part from my practice of Buddhism, but that, for the most part, I simply do not like the taste of meat (though, as implied above, my vegetarianism has a far more convoluted history). They usually accept this without complaint.

So what makes this exchange more acceptable than "I am a vegetarian"? Perhaps the participation of the other party forges a sense of cooperation with me? Or the avoidance of identifying as a member of a group side-steps the in-group/out-group reflex? Or maybe the word 'vegetarian' itself has negative connotations in the American imagination, conjuring visions of PETA and the Counterculture?

Whatever the case, I have learned that creativity in language use comes with an unexpected bonus. Who knows what other psychological minefields I can circumvent by expressing things in unconventional ways!

Beginning of the End

On the second day of Naval Academy Summer Seminar, they woke us at 0530, lined us up in the passageway, and told us to run five miles in half an hour. I made it in under the time limit, winded and nauseous, but triumphant.

My limbs felt like noodles as I struggled to keep up with the squad on the way back to the dorms. A squadmate, the only one who finished ahead of me, threw my arm over his shoulder and helped me along.

He had platinum blond hair, buzzed very short, and ice blue eyes. Though almost two inches shorter than me--no mean feat--he probably outweighed me half again in pure, rippling muscle. I could not decide whether I envied him or wanted him.

It turned out he lived near the beach, and would run down to the water each morning, swim across a cove (in all seasons, no less), do a ton of push-up on the beach, then run home.

To me, his accomplishments seemed godlike. Sure, I played varsity soccer, but it mattered more to me that our quiz bowl team made it to the nationals. I jogged three to five miles every morning, and visited the weight room every other day, but it did little to improve my whip-thin physique.

The rest of the squad had already written me off as a nerd--even our midshipman squad leader vocally disdained my "book smarts"--but they shunned him for reasons entirely mysterious to me. Perhaps he just seemed too well-prepared, too gung-ho, and too unconcerned about their opinions.

The next day, during personal time before lights-out, he confided his motivation for joining the Navy. He needed structure and regulation in his life to compensate for something he lacked.

He looked right at me, no emotion in his perfect Aryan eyes, and said, "I can be very cruel."

I stopped envying him, but wanted him more than ever. Maybe the others avoided him because they could sense his sociopathy, or something. What did it say about me that I liked him?

When he asked me why I wanted to join, I could not summon any of the high-minded drivel about duty and service and 'being a part of something bigger than myself' that we all write in our admissions essays.

"I want to be like my dad," I blurted.

He actually smiled then, a strange, thin smile. "You can do that without joining the Navy."

"He's a Marine, actually, a Mustang," I conceded. "Said he would rather have a daughter in a whorehouse than a son in the Naval Academy. Guess this counts as rebellion for me."

"You can do that without joining the Navy, too," he pointed out.

It did not occur to me to turn that around on him--to say that he could find structure and purpose and whatever in all sorts of places. It did not occur to me because his words had triggered a revelation of sorts.

Until then, I had embraced the naval service as my destiny. If not the Academy, then NROTC, or enlistment. The very thought of civilian life seemed ridiculous and untenable. I did not consider the litany of reasons I might not belong in the military, and, more problematically, I refused to consider why I really wanted to serve at all.

Later that night, I lay in my bunk, waiting and dreading as cries of "goodnight" traveled down the passageway. I joined in when our turn came. When the last, distant "goodnight" sounded, I thought for a moment the next part might not come.

Then someone outside shouted, in a sing-song voice, "Goodnight, Jane Fonda!"

"Goodnight, Commie bitch!" my fellows roared, without me.

Pony Up

A few months after I came to the States, my school library held a special book-selling event (though they probably called it something more educational sounding).  I wandered between short, child-friendly shelves, clutching a twenty-dollar bill--the largest denomination of American currency I had ever held.

I do not know how many books I flipped through with growing dismay at the vapid stories aimed at my age group.  Then, I stumbled across what passed for a 'sci-fi' section in the impromptu YA bookstore.  I had never seen Star Wars, but I walked out of the library that day with a book from the Young Jedi Knight series.

Sitting in home room, I found myself captivated by the adventures of Anakin Solo (you know, Han and Leia's youngest son).  Somehow, though I had not believed it possible, this made me an even more appealing target to the kids who specialized in chucking things at me from the back of the room.

By the time I got home, I had learned to hide the book.  I even made it a cover out of paper grocery bags (which might explain why I can never remember its title).  My parents did not ask--they probably never even noticed at all.

With age came confidence and the knack for befriending others who had similar interests--or who at least would not judge me by mine.  The very idea of feeling shame over belonging to this or that fandom became laughable.

Until recently.

Within the last year, I fell in love with two children's shows--Star Wars: The Clone Wars and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  Both target pre-teen audiences but have sizeable adult followings.  Both feature excellent writing, animation, voice talent, and titles containing colons.

While I have sung the praises of The Clone Wars to anyone who will listen, and the Captain Rex ball cap hardly ever leaves my head (see profile photo), I only discuss My Little Pony with other bronies.  In fact, I hesitate to even mention the show to any but my closest friends.  For shame.

I still have secrets, and would like to think that I keep them for good reasons.  Shame does not qualify as a 'good reason'.  The time has come to pony up and revisit the lesson I should have learned as a teen: if someone genuinely thinks less of me for my taste in entertainment, we probably would not get along too well anyway.

So, in conclusion...brohoof!