Rhinocrisy

I’ve never believed in the expression “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” John Audubon was in his middle age before he became a naturalist and started work on Birds of North America. And it doesn’t even hold true for actual dogs. So I’m confident that it doesn’t apply to me, either. Even if I’m talking about adjusting something I learned at the age of eight months.

I was walking early. I’ve always been annoyingly precocious, and I started toddling around before my body was ready for it. My bones weren’t strong enough to support my weight yet, and the result was that I developed severe bow-leggedness. My mum used to call me “the McDonald’s Arch”, because I would wander around in a pair of yellow pajamas (which I presumably held up with one hand because I had no ass to do the job for me). I had to be fitted with a set of corrective orthopedic braces.^*

All of this is to say, I still have a slight bow-leg, and all my limbs have always hyperextended slightly at their full extension.

Lately I’ve been obsessing about my posture^†. I’ve slouched my whole life.^‡ As a habitual sloucher, I’ve gotten used to bending a certain way, too. I bend at the lower three lumbar vertebrae to do everything, including touching my toes, etc. Observation of other people indicates that this is definitely not the norm - most people bend at the hips. So I’m usually not in the habit of supporting my weight with my lower back, meaning those muscles are weaker.

This in turn affects the way I stand. Because I bow my back out all the time in order to slouch, I usually stand with my knees locked, flexed backwards. I can do this without using any muscles at all, exploiting my deformity and the strength of leg tendon to support me. I think this has left my knees weaker, as well.

I’m working on correcting these things, which mostly involves paying attention to how I walk, making sure I bend my knees instead of keeping them locked, and not standing with my legs flexed or my lower back bowed. This is really bizarre. It seems strange to be almost at the end of my third decade of life and still be working on fundamentals. Makes you pine for the opportunity to converse with your younger self and correct all these things. “Self,” I would say, “you really ought to stop slouching now. Otherwise, when you go insane in your mid-twenties, you’ll have a much harder time of it. It’s better to go insane about worthwhile things, self, like developing a crushing need to paint schizophrenic landscapes on the asphalt in traffic intersections, rather than boring things like walking. It’s unfortunate that you don’t realize how much there is to learn and grow, so you waste your life playing. Believe me, you’ll find it much more fulfilling to be able to play, with all you’ve learned, in your adulthood than it ever could be at your age.”

“Also, don’t spend so much time posting crap on Usenet in your teens,” I would add. “There’s this thing you’ve never heard of called Google Cache that will haunt you for the rest of your life.”

“(Scream of terror),” I would reply, trying to punch myself ineffectually.

“Cut that out, self,” I would say, deflecting my strikes off-handedly. “I’ve learned kung-fu in the interim.”

I suppose this is why people have kids.

^* Which were apparently very painful as they readjusted my bones; I would wake up nights screaming and crying.

^‡ Being tall is inconvenient in many ways. For example, eating is much more difficult for tall people. The journey from the plate to your mouth can begin to feel like a transatlantic shipping route if you don’t lean over. And greater height means more splatter if you accidentally drop a bit of food. These sorts of pressures add up and subtly encourage you to correct your height towards the median, usually by slouching or self-mutilation.

I feel like practically everyone I meet in the educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class, white-or-hoping-to-be-white America where I live is “agnostic” about god. They don’t make strong statements one way or the other. There might be a god, they say. There might not.

Happily, such wishy-washiness seems to fade under the glare of a theocracy. In Mexico, where the Roman church continues to have power that approaches that of the semi-elected government, you don’t hear half-way statements. You’re either with god or you’re against him.

A few notes from Chiapas:
- I had a Spanish teacher who, after I said I was an atheist, broke into a big smile and said how great it was to hear that, as he was too. He said it was scary to admit in a city like San Cristobal de las Casas, a very religious town.
- A flyer, in English, arguing for the existence of god, hanging at the Spanish school.
- On the stone exterior of the city cathedral, the spraypainted words, “Ni amor ni dios,” or “Neither love nor god.”

It could be that principled stands against the superstitious version of god are gaining traction. Current Amazon bestsellers (subject to change!) include, at No. 10, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and at No. 5, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. And then at no. 2 is Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death by Gary Renard (about something he calls quantum forgiveness), which may be related in some mysterious way to No. 1, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward.

Note: I admire religious traditions for their maintenance of cultural values and arts over the centuries. I just have no interest in the superstitious notion of omniscient creators and such.