Daily Viking #1
I’m going to draw a viking every day for… a while, I guess. Here’s the first.
He killed me with a sword. How weird is that?
So, there was this article from Slate circulating yesterday: Nerd Violence, by Daniel Engber. It’s stupid. It’s an infuriatingly stupid and pointless article. Engber claims that sword-related violence is some kind of trend, and that nerds are to blame. That those who use swords to commit violence are nerds, and that nerds who commit violence prefer swords.
He provides no evidence to support those claims, mind you. Really, his article can be summed up as follows: “Here are a handful of links to sword-attack stories from the past several years (one dating back to 1979), assembled in one place to make them look newsworthy. Nerds like stuff with swords, so let’s use it as an excuse to beat up on nerds. Also, sword attacks are weird.”
(And yet, on this final point, Engber failed to make the great “Serenity” reference that I made in the title for this post. Then again, I suppose quoting sci-fi would have gotten in the way of his thesis, re: NEEEEERRRRDDDDSS.)
Anyway, leaving aside his reliance on trite disparaging stereotypes of “nerds,” what really irks me about the article is Engber’s sheer laziness in blaming this ill-defined group for sword violence. Of the sword-wielding killers, he writes that ”the mere fact of their armament suggests membership in a geeky and aggressive subculture.” Yet when it comes time to identify that subculture, he leaps right from the keyword “sword” to “sword & sorcery” and therefore “nerd” without recourse to anything resembling logic or evidence.
If Engber had looked just a little closer at his examples, he might have noticed a different pattern. He cites somewhere between 15 and 20 specific cases of sword-based violence. A cursory glance at each article reveals that almost every incident involved a weapon described as a “samurai sword” or katana. That’s not quite “the weapon of dueling gentlemen and swashbuckling adventurers, of knights in armor and the horse lords of Rohan.” (Those would be rapiers and broadswords, respectively.)
Like I said, Engber gives us no reason to believe this trend is real. But even if it were, what he describes isn’t a trend of wannabe paladins, Jedi, or Errol Flynns (Errols Flynn?). It’s a trend of wanna-be ninjas.
And yet, though he goes out of his way to reference “Star Wars,” “Lord of the Rings,” and Dungeons & Dragons, he leaves out any reference whatsoever to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Kill Bill,” martial arts, or other factors that might actually contribute to katana collector culture. Could it be that these latter factors are a little too mainstream to support the profile of the fantasy-obsessed, socially-inept psychopath dork Engber is constructing? (Never mind that “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” are themselves hardly niche interests anymore.)
Collectible swords (katanas or otherwise) are valued as art objects and physical reminders of history and literature. Enthusiasts in such artifacts might all be considered “nerds” by some definition of the word, but that’s not the definition Engber is using.
As for those who actually put these swords to use, look: when someone snaps and wants to commit a violence, they’ll use what’s available and effective. Lots of things can be used to cut or bludgeon or stab. Furthermore, a nerd who is so inclined can fire a gun as easily as anybody. Calling the sword the nerd’s “primary means of self-defense” is cutesy, but inaccurate.
Whatever. Obviously, this garbage article was just a combination of 1) trying to entertain readers with links to weird stories and 2) pushing buttons to stir controversy and draw eyeballs. I wouldn’t have bothered with it, but I figured it’s as good as anything for getting back into the habit of writing.
The Goals
READ MORE, WRITE MORE, DRAW MORE.
And by gum, I’m going to do it.
Seizures
I was up late at my computer the night of 23 October. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor surrounded by EMTs, in pain and very confused.
I had suffered a seizure. On top of that, somewhere between my chair and the floor, I had managed to fracture my spine.
I ended up in the hospital for a few days with three different medical teams keeping tabs on me: Neurology for the seizure, Neurosurgery for my broken back, and Infectious Disease to check me for tuberculosis infection.
The TB risk was incredibly small, but since I work with the stuff and I showed up at the ER with a cough and a questionable chest X-ray (turns out I had aspirated during my seizure), they decided to play it safe. There was some talk of doing a lumbar puncture, but since I had no symptoms of bacterial meningitis (apart from the seizure) I dodged that bullet. A PPD and three sputum cultures all came back negative, so no TB for me!
Meanwhile, there was still no telling what had actually triggered the seizure. An MRI showed no brain tumors or other structural abnormalities, and an EEG demonstrated fairly normal brain activity. With nothing to go on and no prior history of seizures, the neurologists decided not to start me on anti-seizure medication just yet. Hopefully this episode was just a fluke.
As for my back, though the compression fracture had robbed my sixth thoracic vertebra of at least half an inch of height, a CT scan thankfully found no great risk of damage to my spinal cord. I just had to avoid BLT (bending, lifting, or twisting) and keep the pain under control. It took some time to reach a point where I could sit upright and still be able to breathe, but the promise of a hot shower can be a powerful motivator.
And that was that. I was sent home that Wednesday night with a back brace, a prescription for oxycodone, and the hope that this seizure would be a one-time-only deal. I wouldn’t be that lucky, however. Two weeks later, the night of 9 November, I had another seizure. At least I was in bed this time, and my spine seemed to make it through without suffering much more damage. I didn’t have to stay at the hospital, but they did start me on anti-seizure medication.
I don’t remember anything before, during, or after either seizure; I completely blacked out. Judging by Sara’s reaction (she, having witnessed both seizures), I’m the more fortunate for it. It’s scary enough knowing I was helpless and in pain without needing to have seen it. Even after my awareness started to return, it was several minutes before I could correctly answer questions about how old I was or what city I lived in. (I apparently didn’t have any difficulty identifying Sara as my wife, though, so at least I have that going for me.)
This whole ordeal has been a powerful reminder of just how precious our capacity for thought and reason is. I was lucky enough to actually see some of the images of my brain from my MRI. That bit of tissue filling my skull is me. I am what I do. There is no ghost pulling the strings; my neurons and glia are on their own. Dualism, the idea that I have a soul separate from and superior to my body, is a profoundly failed hypothesis, completely discredited by all of contemporary psychology and neuroscience. My brain is not the joystick by which some psychic homunculus controls my muscles and guts. It is not some spiritual antenna channeling instructions from a ghostly counterpart in the ethereal plane. My brain itself is that which does the doing.
My brain is flawed, that much I already knew. It is prone to mistakes, it occasionally falls victim to illusions and prejudices. My brain is also fragile; any injury to it that doesn’t kill me outright could leave me a changed man. I am fallible, I am mortal, as anyone is. But on top of that, I apparently have some sort of seizure disorder. I’m malfunctioning, and that’s scary.
Since my brain is physical, I can mitigate the seizures with medicine. A regular dose of levetiracetam—taken orally, absorbed into my bloodstream, and shuttled to my brain—will discourage my neurons from engaging in the kind of rapid-fire synchronized freak-out that has twice already left me blacked out and flailing uncontrollably. Of course, the administration of that compound also leaves me more susceptible to depression as a side effect. Hopefully as we learn more about what triggered the seizures, we can adjust the treatment to optimize the benefits while minimizing the drawbacks.
This is all terrifying and humbling and fascinating at the same time.
A Happy Marriage, A Secular Ceremony
Sara and I celebrated the 2nd anniversary of our marriage (and the 6th anniversary of our first kiss) this weekend. We got to enjoy a little pilgrimage up to Hanover for the occasion. (Pictured above… aren’t we precious?)
I wrote the following shortly after our wedding, and thought it would be worthwhile to revisit. For posterity, if nothing else.
Sara and I were married the afternoon of October 11, 2008, in Rollins Chapel at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Our close friend Benjamin Cox served as officiant.
I’d be lying if I said the day went perfectly. But it was still one of the best days of my life. Family has always been incredibly important to me, especially so since my realization to atheism. I’m so glad my family was there for us, and I can’t remember ever feeling closer to them than I did that day. And I’m so proud to be able to include Sara among them.
Naturally, being atheists, Sara and I weren’t interested in a religious ceremony. However, we both have a great affinity for ceremony and tradition. We definitely wanted something more personal than simply bringing witnesses before a Justice of the Peace. Furthermore, we wanted a ceremony that reflected the value we both place upon family.
So, with Ben’s help, we wrote our own ceremony, and I think we came up with a damn fine one. I’d like to share it with you, so even if you couldn’t be at the wedding, you might at least get a sense of what the ceremony was like. (For a real sense of what it was like at our wedding, pretend you’ve been waiting over an hour for the bride to show up before beginning the ceremony. :-P)
And if you’re planning your own atheist wedding, congratulations, and I hope that maybe this helps as an example.
Sketch Dump: Heads, Mostly
Let’s see what’s new in the old sketchbook, shall we?
Most of my practicing the past week or two has focused on heads and faces.
Discussing Monte Cristo
I finished reading “The Count of Monte Cristo” last week; for the month prior, I had had a hard time putting it down.
At the end of our copy, the publishers provide a short list of discussion questions as a Reading Group Guide, the last of which is as follows:
- The Count of Monte Cristo is unquestionably one of the most entertaining and timeless novels ever written and is also often described as one of the greatest. Do you agree?
Now, I could make some clever remark about an “unquestionable” opinion being phrased as a discussion “question.” But at this moment, I am inclined simply to say: yes, I agree.
