After three years of regular weekly training I am no longer an actively training martial artist.

The bare facts for my quitting are unarguably petty and stupid.

I was trying out a Filipino stick fighting class that I was planning on attending in addition to mixed martial arts, and they required a badge be sewn on my pants.

Simple enough, my MMA class is so laid back I figure I could just add it to those pants and nobody would care, and I was probably right. But, just to be safe I emailed the head instructor asking about it, since the exact policy wasn't entirely clear, and no one seemed to know definitively.

I wrote, what I thought was an enthusiastic and deeply respectful email chock full of verbal cow-tows. His immediate response was annoyed and didn't directly answer my question, so I apologized for contacting him.

The resulting disastrous email thread is likely familiar to anyone who uses the Internet and has a temper and/or drinks too much.

One of his replies in particular was so petty and disrespectful that I just couldn't take it.

If it happened under the fluorescent light of the dojo maybe I would have taken it on the chin. But in the light of day, with a clever t-shirt on it just seemed too much.

I have some breathing tricks I use to calm down, and I immediately got up and walked around downtown Hopkins. It was a beautiful day and my adrenaline was pumping from sparring with my deadly word foe. I walked until I my body settled down and reassessed the whole thing.

My options seemed clear, either I was going to just stomach the fact that I would continue to pay $100 a month to an unrepentant asshole, or I'd quit.

I have issues with pride, I often take things the wrong way and get combative. I know this and it is something I try to keep in check. I have a mantra I recite to cooldown that specifically highlights the importance of not being an ass.

So I really didn't want to succumb to that. On the other hand, I just couldn't see myself rolling over for this "instructor" who had so thoroughly destroyed my enthusiasm to train with a few flippant emails.

I'm a student, it isn't my job to be patient. It is my job to ask questions respectfully, which upon rereading, I think I did.

However, this is complicated by the fact that one of the things I honestly enjoyed about martial arts training was how terrible I was at it. It was difficult, I had no aptitude for it, the warm-ups would leave me exhausted and stupid, I would constantly forget basic things and have to be taught them again and again.

Confused why that is fun? Think of a golden retriever's exultant and desperate dog paddle, his head just out of the water.

This latest weight though, felt like it dragged my mouth and nose under the waterline, the only choice left to learn to breathe water or get out of the lake.

In the end, I politely told him to go fuck his own face, and it felt suspiciously awesome.

Whether it was because the vengeful demon in my heart was happily chomping on the steak I had thrown it, or it was the swell of self-respect for having properly addressed a grievous insult like a 19th century Englishman I still don't know.

I strongly suspect the former, but maybe that isn't all bad. If a broken clock can be right twice a day, why not a bloodthirsty rage?

Facts are soft things.

There have been studies done on the reliability of witnesses as well as the propensity for the brain to ignore facts that don't fit its view of the world.

My very first memory was of waking up in an oxygen tent in an unfamiliar room. My father was there, telling me that he had to leave but would be back soon. Terrified at being abandoned, I clearly remembered plotting to pounce on his arm and not let go. To immediately feign sleep. I awoke the next morning still clutching his arm.

Almost 25 years later, my mother corrected me, clarifying that it was definitely her, not my father whom I had clung so desperately to that night.

I hear close friends tell tales, stories I myself have repeated, defining stories of my life, but their versions differ, just enough. Sometimes they tell me stories of me, that I have no recollection of. It isn't that I doubt their memory or veracity, quite the latter, I often trust theirs more faithfully than my own, which then makes me doubt myself, my every memory.

Doing so makes my gut accelerate downward, a falling creeping sensation that if facts and stories and memories are so mercurial, what am I?

I think this is why mystery crime shows have remained popular for much of modern times. The idea that all events and deeds can be definitively reverse engineered from our disturbances of the world seems a comforting tale, even if it often is introduced by the discovery of a dead hooker.

I often find myself lying profusely when dealing with strangers. I don't see it as an act of malicious deceit. I see it as a complex white lie. A mechanism of politeness, wherein I fold up the intricate facts of a matter down into an unobtrusive, unsurprising package, that they can respond to in the same manner as the full truth of the matter. My goal isn't to change the result of their behavior, but to streamline the interaction. Afterall, if all the facts are known only to me, and their usefulness will expire after our transaction, it seems rude to me for me to demand that a stranger accept the more inconvenient truth than an agreed upon simulacrum.

Imagine the world before the scientific method. Where both the velocity required to split a log with an axe and your personal beliefs in how the universe is created and run were on equal footing. Every log and each man is different, intricate knots of both muscle and wood creating a unique outcome, whereas every man's faith and association to God was considered uniform and understood.

Science turned that on its head. Masticating the physical interaction with its jaws full of equations, and spitting out a uniform and knowable process, while at the same time casting a shroud over any fact that existed only in someone's head.

For a bit, there were two tiers of facts, those blessed by the scientific method, and those that weren't, and to be honest, things worked out pretty good. Because of science, I can now microwave frozen pizzas.

But compare that to the things we disagree with today.

Who made a building collapse, where the president was born, whether large scale changes in atmospheric chemicals results in altered climates, the efficacy of a government trying to provide healthcare, the best way to fix our educational system, at what stage a fetus has the same rights as us, how complex life forms came to be, whether to adhere to the letter or spirit of a great document, whether homosexuality is an identity or a fetish, the efficiency of unregulated markets versus attempts to curb ethical violations via regulation, etc...

It really seems like some of those belong in the realm of science. Things we really should be able to put our heads together on, stare at them, and agree upon some truths.

The fact that hasn't happened, and the fact that some established scientific truths have now started unraveling I think hints at a new movement. A counter to the 200 year reign of the Enlightenment's greatest invention.

People have learned that if they simply question any facts in enough numbers, if they refuse to accept the results of the scientific method that they can, essentially "defact" something in a way completely outside the standard method of "suggesting an alternate hypothesis that better fits the data".

Simply by forming a consensus against the consensus, they can erode the truth away. Softening the soil until it can no longer hold the trees rooted in it.

I personally don't like what that movement is doing, I find a certain humility in the scientific method's assumption that even the current hypothesis is around long enough for a better one to arrive. That this new movement is essentially the exact opposite of that irks me greatly. That a fact is a fact when shouted and repeated often enough is as appealing to me as coffee made with ash.

On the other hand, I sometimes thing maybe the last 200 years have just been an aberration, that the rapid advancements of science left us shell-shocked, and unwilling to question the uncomfortable idea of everyone agreeing on something.

What if higher Definition TVs and slightly faster laptops simply lack the necessary awe to fuel a continuation of the scientific consensual truth we have grown so used to. What if the best path to uniting us all was to build a flying mecha that shoots lasers?

This struck me as odd, since that seems to be the sort of thing a doctor would suggest, but from the look of pain on his face I didn't think he was thinking very straight.

"Eat, eat, or it'll all go to waste!", he tells us.

Max and I exchange uncomfortable glances. We are both strangers in his house, and I hope to avoid the awkwardness of explaining our presence here upon his wife and children's return.

Max dutifully reaches for more eggroll, which, given that he's the one who is somewhat responsible for our host's injury makes me feel a bit better.

I discover that half the eggrolls are shrimp, and also delicious, a good stratagem would have been to eat these slowly, letting the big Russian Max eat the remaining pork ones, but my lack of lunch causes my stomach to ditch the plan, and soon enough there are no more porkless eggrolls left.

It doesn't help that Mike, our host, isn't eating any. He is mainly holding his side in pain. We take a break from eating while Max fills a ziplock bag with ice, and I fetch some ibuprofen from a high shelf that Mike cannot comfortably reach for.

"Now when your son asks Mike, you make sure to tell him that it took no less than twenty-seven ninjas to do this to you."

"Stop making me laugh you bastard," he groans doubled over.

Note to self: apparently you can't distract someone from broken ribs with humor.

A few minutes earlier I was alone in my car, trailing Max driving Mike's minivan. We turn down unfamiliar streets, and I am morose. This is the second time I've seen an injury at training, and the second time it has been a friend. It has me shaken, angry and sad. Max has at least 40 pounds on me, and I have at least that many on Mike. Mike knew better, should have gone easier...

Back at the dojo, the instructor is making jokes at the expense of Mike, which pisses me off. It took conjoling just to get Mike to agree to let someone drive him home, and the fact that he eventually requested help taking off his shirt and carrying his bag couldn't have been easy requests to make. If he could have walked it off, he most certainly would have. Levity is all fine and good, as injuries make everyone nervous, but once the guy can't move under his own power it is time to shut the fuck up about it.

In any other situation I would be telling the instructor off, converting my anger into words of eviscerating force, but not here. There is an explicit pecking order we all wear at our waist, and while I don't respect the jar-headed instructor, for some reason I respect the order of belt inside the "dojo". Even if that dojo happens to be a windowless narrow space in a stripmall with 70's wood paneling and stained drywall.

Respect aside, I still feel the frustration of the dog who has abruptly discovered the end of my yellow-striped leash, and swallowing the bile I had intended to spit does not improve my mood.

Others claimed to have heard the "pop" from across the room, I hadn't. I was fully concentrating on the man I was wrestling with, a tall lanky guy a full belt rank above me. He was making pretty good headway on attempting to bend my arm in its opposite direction. I thought I could get out of it if I rolled a certain way, but was unsure... For a single moment I had to decide, "tap and start over" or "go for it". I decided to go for it, yanked my arm free, and was so delighted at having not lost that I had ignored that I had ended up in a position of particular advantage, but it was just as well since my partner had just noticed that someone wasn't getting up off the mat.

As I walked to get my glasses I glanced around, trying to figure out who had been injured. Specifically hoping it wasn't Mike, desperately willing each upright blur to be the short good-natured Vietnamese man who had taught me so much. My heart sank as my glasses defined the truth of the situation. A quick interrogation of his opponent Max told the story.

"I told him to tap, that I had the arm bar, but he thought he could roll out of it. He ended up landing on my elbow and there was a pop."

Far too many of the people present seemed intimately familiar with the injury. "That's at least a month and a half.", "Definitely replied another, if he's lucky".

Many months earlier, Mike is patiently trying to teach me a move in open gym. I am exhausted from the hour of training and am stupid and slow. I have lost count of his attempts to teach me it. My ears redden from the embarrassment of it. I am unaccustomed to being so incompetent. It makes me again wonder why I do it. Why I have continued to attend martial arts for three years, overcoming some amount of dread each and every time I leave my house.

The exact answer still elude me, but for the next few months I know for certain that I have one less reason to go.

In this edition of "Letters to my Son", I advise him on how to be happy.

Or, at minimum, describe the stuff I've tried to do to be happy that is entirely counterproductive.

Before I talk about achieving happiness, I'd like to give some lip service to its apparent opposite, sadness. One thing I've learned relatively recently, is that there isn't anything wrong with a little sadness. Sometimes the melancoly piles up and there really is nothing to be done about it other than to get on with the chore of feeling it until it is gone.

Our current culture seems to treat the concept of being unhappy as a disease to be cured. A state that is seemingly an inescapable well which requires people with degrees or brain altering chemicals to scratch your way out of, and for some people maybe that's true. But in my own case the real issue seemed to be that I was simply unwilling to be sad, too eager to distract myself out of it, a serial sadness procrastinator.

So my first piece of advice to you, is that if you can manage to not be miserable or afraid while feeling nostalgic, remorseful or inconsolably bereaved, then you're halfway there.

Happiness itself is a trickier thing.

When I was young I made many blunders, and by young I mean less old than I am today. At the time I thought it very important that I ought never to repeat these specific blunders, and taken a step further, theorized that the key to happiness was to never make such a colossal dolt out of myself ever again.

And so it was that I always endeavored to remember the most embarrassing of my misteps. At night my brain would constantly prod the soft underbelly of my ego with the barbs of my most embarassing tales, presumably to keep myself motivated to avoid them.

This proved to be a powerful force, as I grew older the incidences of my rash behaviors seemed to lessen. However, I was not measurably happier. I was still tortured at night by the horrors of past, avoidable deeds that I was now powerless to undo. I began to spend my nights analyzing the day ahead, looking for any potential problems that might be puzzled out in advance. The thought being, that if I could solve or avoid any problems altogether, that this would lead to less problems, and a problem free life certainly sounded like the prescription for happiness I sought.

The problem with this entire course of action, is that one of the few things in life that I am sure makes me happy is solving problems. My prethinking of things and meticulous planning, would often lead to the complete lack of a problem to be solved in the first place. Which you would think would make me happy, as avoiding a problem altogether was surely the fastest and surest way to solve it.

As it turns out it didn't. It gave me all the satisfaction one would get by not purchasing a crossword puzzle book.

What's more, is that my strategy of constantly focusing on problems and obsessing about avoiding any potential puzzles seemed to have the nasty side effect of me completely ignoring the things in my life that were going fine. Those things which had nearly zero potential to spawn an unforseen knot in my life were all but invisible to me.

I apologize for subjecting you to the logical journey it took to get me here, I only include to provide a bit of background for the second half of being happy, since if I had come out and said it right away it would have seemed to be something I skimmed off a roadside greeting card, but here goes.

"Remember to remember the good stuff."

Sounds simple enough, I know. But the reason most people don't do it, is it is honestly a boring chore. Recollecting your day and cataloging those bits that made you smile is a non-trivial process in the day and age we live in. Our lives are packed with so many details, events and variables. Our brains intake so much information each day that scouring through that at the end of each day has all the appeal of searching for a retainer in a pizza parlor dumpster.

That's why a lot of people don't do it. They have enough problems in the now that stopping to squint at the recent past is a luxury many simply can't afford.

Now some people, I suspect are simply naturally better at retaining these thoughts, and I envy them for this ability, but at least for myself it must be a conscious effort to do. I often am mean to these people since it seems unlikely they'll remember it anyways.

The important lesson here is that your brain is not infinite. It has limitations, and the way you frame your life for it effects what you'll remember, what you'll become, and in the end, what you are. Your brain will memorize that what you hold to be important. The things you think back on and mull.

In this way the things you focus on in life are the things that you will have to decorate the halls of your mind. It really is up to you if you choose to obsess yourself with social slights and unchangable painful moments or all the lovlier bits.

Personally, I'm shooting for a 40/40 mix, with 20 percent saved for my favorite bits of irrelevant pop culture.

My wife has been kind enough to keep me up to date on the issue of How kids these days are dancing

First off, before I begin, I feel it necessary to come clean about my initial reaction to this new trend of lap dancing. From what I understand, the evolution of it seems to be the girl grinding on the boy while both are standing, to the girl grinding on the boy while the boy is laying down.

Laying supine on a dance floor seems to be stretching the limits of the verb, but what had initially bothered me much more was that it had apparently become possible for a girl to dry hump their boyfriend in public, without any sort of social slights or sentencing of fabric letters.

And indeed, my first ugly opinion was that while sexual freedom and liberation has been the goal of our fairer sex for some time, this seemed to be a bit of a slice off the goal into the rough.

Luckily, battling against inches of hardened driveway ice gave me plenty of time to ruminate on this conclusion, and I eventually identified it as not belonging to me, but belonging to the angry old man I was to become years in the future. Someday I may very well clutch to that opinion as if it were an american flag that had been my comfort blanket, but in the meantime I identified it for what it was, snippy and mean-hearted woman hating.

Blaming the woman for this act which logistically requires a plurality to accomplish is just straight-up unfair. Especially if her peers don't slight her for it. I mean, high schoolers will flay your corneas off if given a chance, so clearly there had to be something else afoot in here. A cultural truth I lacked the perspective to see.

Other people, such as the guy in this video brought out all the old standbys: "Unknowable generation gaps", "Kids like to shock us" or "They don't know how else to dance"

But I don't buy it.

Then I remembered something I learned while in Miami checking out a datacenter. I was talking to the marketing guy assigned to wine and dine me while down there, and conversation turned to our children, and he mentioned he had a 15 year old daughter, and he mentioned something very interesting, and seemingly completely at odds with the thrust of the "each generation of kids do more perverted stuff" explanation.

The way he painted dances (which he chaperoned) was that the kids mostly clung to the sides, sitting, texting one another. Barely dancing at all.

This thought saddened me at the time. Not because I was ever a fan of dances, in fact, I most likely chose video games or roleplaying games over them more than once. In fact at the time I might have been somewhat bitter towards "those kids" who gleefully attended every dance, especially the boys who were well-groomed enough to warrant female attention.

But on a macro scale, teenagers are at the height of their passion for each other. Their brains bursting with chemicals encouraging them to mindlessly rut at any chance. To have that force tamed by the safety of exchanging naught packets of information with each other seems like a conquering of something greater. The taming of a piece of humanity that ten years ago I would claim could never be caged.

It was then that my opinion of this new "dance fad" changed completely. Since now I thought I understood who the couple on the floor were dry humping for. Surrounded by dimly lit faces staring down into screens barely a square inch, these brave kids did what had to be done to get the attention of their despondent classmates. An act that would force them all to look up, thumbs stilled, and take in a site of mock coitus that was sure to redirect some amount of blood to their nethers.

The dancing pair are not perverts, but rather perpendicular heroes. The woman not one of ill-repute, but a torch standing alight, the same passed down for millennia from each harvest dance. The yearly expression of our lust for life, and the desperation we share to find another to share that with.

If getting to second base on the gym floor is what it takes to blow some fresh air of the dying embers of the vis vitae of humankind, I say to you crazy kids, hump on!

That said, you're still completely wrong about Twilight.

My immediate thought was "oh boy, I guess we're in for another war". Although then I had to remember that all the justification for preemptive war is to *stop* people from getting nuclear weapons, so if they already have them... The whole thing is just confounding.

I wanted to blame this on the media somehow, or our culture of sound bite politics, but I'm honestly baffled by who would benefit from spreading this misunderstanding.

I understand that spreading the meme that "Iran is dangerous and might obtain The Bomb if we don't act fast" is useful to some people's agendas, but that they've already gotten there... Bald manipulation of the public I understand, but this result, almost seems like showing off.

"Fooling the public into supporting a war based on false pretenses was way too easy"
"Agreed. This time, let's first make them believe the exact opposite of the reason we'll give to goto war, and then try to get them to support it!"
"You're on!"

In my lifetime, I've gone through the following political realizations:

• 1st through 8th grade I was blindly rooting for the political team my parents did
• 9th grade I thought communism was the awesomest
• 10th grade through college I grew to understand and the arguments and beliefs that many Republicans held, and why they held them. I still disagreed with many of their conclusions, but understood how and why they arrived at them.
• In 2002 I began wondering why the Republican president was acting like a lunatic instead of a conservative.
• By 2004 I no longer understood the logic behind voters supporting the so called "Republicans", but I at least understood the emotions behind it, and I definitely understood the rather base motivations of the politicians themselves.
• By the end of 2009 I wondered what, exactly supporting Democrats was, in theory, supposed to accomplish. Although the fact that things stopped getting more bat-shit crazy was nice.
• And now, here we are, amongst a populace seemingly criminally ill-informed about a country in between two other countries we're occupying.

I now imagine 71% of Americans as one of those wax-Neanderthal at the science museum. Me looking up at them from behind the velvet divider, wondering how much alike we are, how they managed to survive on a day to day basis. Except of course the tables are reversed, and homo-doesn't-believe-stupid-shit-for-no-reason is apparently the one on the road to extinction.

Later on we heard that, of course, they had received several, several copies of that book because it was very popular. I felt kinda sheepish.

So when I had a child, I steeled myself to receive at least three to four copies of the book. Imagine my surprise when we got *none*.

In any case, to my great shame we had to actually *purchase* Goodnight Moon from amazon, which I figured was something only single parents with no living family would have to resort to.

I'm glad we did, my son loves the book very much and can already recite some portions of it unbidden, so I'm glad we did. But the whole situation made me wonder about this sort of economic phenomenon.

How could it be that years ago that you could receive any number of "Goodnight Moon" books, and this year you receive none?

Clearly this is some sort of new and undiscovered economic phenomenon which should be named after my dog.

Essentially, I imagine other people did exactly what I did, or heard from other people about how many copies of "Goodnight Moon" people received, and this essentially formed a feedback loop that prevented anyone from even considering purchasing that book as a gift afterwards.

I tried thinking of other examples, and the best I could come up with is Netflix gift subscription. Five to eight years ago these "three months or one year of free Netflix" was a common gift to give to introduce people to the service and to get to try it out, but these days it would be a ridiculous gift to give since the odds of someone already being a user are very high.

I'm sure there is a proper name for this phenomenon, when a commonly gifted product becomes so ubiquitous and popular that people essentially stop buying it, and until I do a proper Wikipedia search and find it, I declare it "The Moya Effect".

Honorary Economics Phd please!

My friend Jason who doesn't have a blog pointed me towards this blog post by a fantasy author whom I respect greatly, saying that he thought the tone and subject matter reminded him of mine. I am flattered, and the author equally shamed by the comparison. In any case, it is an amusing read.

Finally, I leave you with the ultimate CAPTCHA which can discern if you, yourself are a robot.

That way I'd be forced to address the moral quandary of whether I'd allow my son to play with one to engage in one to one combat with actual ants.

In my youth I was unkind to ants. The classic example is taking magnifying glasses to them of course, but I found the Minnesota sun never seemed to have sufficient results, , it would just make them scurry faster. Not to mention, killing one ant seemed strategically useless, I was more one trying to block their entrance, or flood their whole colony, etc. Large scale attacks that might take out the entire organism.

Of course at the time I didn't realize that the ant system was likely a full 4-5 feet deep, with the queen all the way at the bottom.

It isn't hard to imagine a remote control ant allowing a sort of "Ants and Dungeons" type game where you guide your ant down the main sand chute, attempting to navigate yourself all the way to the queen's chamber, ruthlessly dispatching of the soldiers and drones who foolishly try to stop you with mandibles made of non-metal.

However, it seems clear that this is a different type of "killing" ants than stomping on them or funneling bleach into one of their sub-entrances. It seems more personal, and a bit horrific.

Luckily for me, the technology doesn't exist yet, so I don't have to address whether such a thing might be harmful to my son' emotional development quite yet. The down side being the technology doesn't exist yet, so I can't have one and try it for myself...

So the Supreme Court recently ruled that the free speech provisions of the First Amendment apply to political ads purchased by corporations.

Personally, I don't think they went far enough. Free speech isn't the only clause of the First Amendment which has excluded corporations for so long, what about free exercise of religion?

According to my research 100% of corporations are functional atheists. Not a single one of them are circumcised, baptized, confirmed or otherwise indoctrinated into a single major religion. How else can you explain such a statistic other than the fact that there is a widespread movement to deny corporate participation in religion?

You may say it is because corporations are undying autonomous machines of perpetuating greed, who worship their stock price above all else. However, who are we to say that they aren't that way *because* they have been denied the chance to participate in religion?

After all, if the Supreme Court thinks that corporations have an innate yearning to express themselves, doesn't it stand to reason that they also desire to become better than they are, that they desperately wish for a way to overcome their own innate flaws and vices?

Also, if no corporations have accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, it follows that there are no corporations in heaven. Which means that heaven currently resembles one big long Marxist bread line. What is the point of heaven if everyone there is equal regardless of station, work ethic or amount of inherited wealth received?

So not only do we owe it to free the corporations from their godless and pointless existences, we owe it to Jesus, who is surely up in heaven right now fighting a harried counter-insurgency against the Marxist state heaven has become since we have failed to spread Christianity to a single one of the siege engines of capitalism.

So there are some strong legal and theological arguments to be had for doing this, but the strongest of all seems to be that of equality.

Free Speech for corporations is just a single step, until corporations can freely be accepted by all religions, have the right to marry, adopt children and serve in our armed forces, they are destined to be forever branded "second class" citizens, which in this day and age is simply unconscionable.