A central question in Into Darkness is whether Starfleet can continue to exist as a fundamentally pacifist organization. The opening scene shows Kirk acting out one answer: pacifist, [...]]]> I just returned from the midnight showing of Into Darkness, the newest in the Star Trek reboot, so if you don’t want spoilers, don’t read on.

A central question in Into Darkness is whether Starfleet can continue to exist as a fundamentally pacifist organization. The opening scene shows Kirk acting out one answer: pacifist, yes; non-interventionist, no, not without significant avoidable loss of life. This version of the Star Trek universe allows characters to grapple with the same moral paradox that the Prime Directive has always inspired: is it moral to allow other civilizations, other beings, to die rather than intervene in their development?

Different episodes and writers and captains have handled this question differently, and this Kirk proved he was willing to intervene and allow a burgeoning civilization to become aware of advanced technology to protect his crew. (Spock was, expectedly, horrified by Kirk’s disrespect for the central tenet of Starfleet). So when can a technologically advanced society intervene in a growing one, when can they do so to prevent harm, when can they cause harm or allow harm to be caused in service of another, higher goal?

Another version of this questions comes in for the second two-thirds of the movie: how far in advance can a pacifist organization intervene to avoid harm before it becomes non-pacifist to do so? The Admiral who seeks to pick a war with the Klingons sees himself as preemptively striking to avoid more Starfleet casualties and within the morality of the movie, he is wrong to do so. There is a bright line for the people of Starfleet, and that is at ending life. When Spock uses Khan’s crew to demoralize and destroy him and the ship he had commandeered, he preserves their lives. When Spock freezes the alien race’s volcano, it is to preserve life.

In the mostly theoretical discussions of whether the United Nations should have a standing army, currently a question for high school debates and shrill alarmist think tanks, this question of whether a fundamentally pacifist organization is best served by containing within itself a military component. The UN Blue Hats, as they are all too often mockingly called by those who overestimate and also fear their power, are peacekeepers by charter, not war-fighters or even conflict-enders. What would it mean for them to exist as a separate, well-armed, military force?

The United Nations is not a perfect cypher for Starfleet. Starfleet has a primarily scientific mission, while the United Nations covers everything from development to political guidance to food distribution to peacekeeping. Starfleet uses military hierarchy, training, and ranks, while the United Nations is more like a government and government bureaucracy. And Starfleet certainly has better funding than the United Nations.

Given these, the parallels are still instructive. Both are pacifist, both bring warring peoples together and create a template of shared values, both are working to advance society. So while it may feel more efficient for the United Nations to contain within itself a standing army, while that could lead to a decrease in scandals and regularization of training, it would so undermine the United Nation’s moral authority as to be destructive in the long-run.

Peacekeeping is not war-fighting or conflict-ending, but is designed to hold true to that bright line in the moral universe of Into Darkness: the preservation of life.

Inspirational Quote:

“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”–Winston Churchill

I’m always on [...]]]> I’m a geek. I was in a book about it before I could vote, and it’s been part of my identity since long before that. I’m not always out as a geek, because sometimes it’s not relevant to a given conversation or sometimes I would impede my ability to get things done.

I’m always on the lookout for other geeks to geek out with. I found a good group recently through a local comic book convention, and since we were all “Nerdy and Proud” there was no coming out process. Honestly, I was wearing full theatrical make-up and 2 of the group were wearing large Time Lord costumes; there was nothing to be coy about.

Because there’s a price to being coy. Wearing my professional mask tied too tightly could lead me to suffer the fate of characters in this Silverstein poem, which I fittingly first discovered as part of a merlin photoset (photo set original source and source for me).

“Masks”
She had blue skin.
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by –
And never knew.

A comic convention is one big nerd courtship ritual. More than any other subculture of which I am a part, it’s clear in fandom circles that courtship isn’t about dating–it’s sometimes about having someone to spend time with who obsesses in the same way I do.

While over 10% of the staff of my work attended this particular convention, my workplace is not focused on promoting nerdy, fandom, or other (delightful) forms of geekery. It’s a leading anti-human trafficking nonprofit. When I want to figure out if someone I think I might be able to geek out with is also a nerd, I need to engage in subtle nerd courthsip.

There are subtle ways to get other geek’s attention. T-shirts are one kind of nerd courtship mating call (here’s more on tribal shibboleths and t-shirts); verbal ticks from tv shows are another (“Frack! I thought that game was going to be shiny, but the representation of women is wigging me out.”); office nesting habits can be another (a co-worker of mine has covered an entire wall with Star Wars paraphernalia in his workspace).

The goal of all of these friend of Dorothy-esque overtures is to get people around me to reveal their inner nerd. Neal Stephenson in his wonderful Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing describes this moment as putting our Vulan ears on, after having a professional and visibly reserved waiter drop everything to ask about what Lucy Lawless is like in person (Mundanes = non-nerds):

Both this waiter, and the elevator sword people, are displaying a trait that is epitomized, for better or worse, by the cruel Mundane stereotype of SF fans wearing rubber Vulcan ears. In a sense, all of us—all SF fans—are forever carrying those rubber ears around, concealed in the pockets of our business suits, military uniforms, waiter’s jackets, or doctor’s smocks. No one knows they’re there. But when we find ourselves around like-minded persons, even if they happen to be total strangers, we absent-mindedly reach into our pockets, pull out the ears, and slap them on.

It’s all part of my process to building a community of my own on the East Coast. Today I stepped back into my first home community at the 2013 Peninsula Spring Fair. It was a place where a lot of people know me, and I know a lot of people. It’s a place I grew up and feel unbelievably safe. It takes work and time and connection to build a place like that, but the first step is being able to be myself.

And so I look for people to geek out with, because when I am most myself, I am a geek.

Inspirational Quote:

The Doctor: Big finish. Two more minutes, then we’re off. The Eye of Orion’s restful. If you like restful. I could never really get the hang of restful. What do you think, dear? Huh? Where should we take the kids this time? Amy: Look at you pair. It’s always you and her isn’t it? Long after the rest of us have gone. A boy and his box off to see the universe. The Doctor: Well you say that as if it’s a bad thing. But honestly it’s the best thing there is.

–The Doctor’s Wife, by Neil Gaiman

I wore the clothes I boarded my plane from DC in, having dressed for hiking [...]]]> This weekend I spent 3 of my 24 hours in Seattle hiking with two friends (one of whom I’m married to). I Googled “Seattle Nature” and found Rattlesnake Ridge, which looked far enough away to feel like an adventure.

I wore the clothes I boarded my plane from DC in, having dressed for hiking in the dark of the morning. The walk started out slow and low and easy, with soaring trees and a clear path like I enjoyed in Muir Woods back home:

But the foliage got lighter and furrier, closer to truffala trees than Tolkien’s whispering forests.

As I’d hoped, there was evidence of great geological upsets–a single massive igneous boulder, born of lava and borne by a glacier until it retreated, leaving it to make friends with the moss and the encroaching trees.

The fauna was inspiring too–the banana slugs so sun-deprived they turned black (some were black and yellow, and forever in my mind will be Seattle Steelers Slugs).

When I was so tired and travel weary I reached out my hand behind my hip, in the universal sign for “hold my hand” and Matthew held my fingers and I created things to take photos of to find time to breath, we came upon this. The tops of very tall trees at our feet. We were closer to our destination than my aches had murmured we were.

When we reached the summit, it was clear of foliage and flora. It was a weather-beaten hump, cracked with the slow expanding force of ice and trickling water. Over the edge came to us a view out into the valley, over the lake, to the distant mountains and the nearly perfectly flat tops of thousands of growing trees. The wind pushed us towards the edge and the drop, but we kept back, scooting as close as our warring pride and fear would let us.

Our emotions and the ice-rock contest were not the only battles being waged on Rattlesnake Ridge. The wind and the mist teased and slipped around each other, mist wafting around the demarcated edge and wind shooing it back again, then mist rising in a rough billow and the wind whistling and whirling it into its own half of the world.

With all the talking the wind and water were doing, there wasn’t much for us people up there to say. We mostly looked out over the cliff, across into the blue sky arcing above and the tree-furred earth below.

We never did figure out what made the mists rise so thickly from particular vents in the forrest, leaving others clear and clean. The entire drive up, it looked like collections of farmsteads with warming fires, but so many in so many places which we did not expect to be so occupied lead us to suppose some other, more meteorological, cause for their rising clouds.

But even in so much beauty, some of us were meant for posing. Perhaps because of it, I wanted to make sure I had an image of how I felt, of what I look like in my own head. When I wear my clothes to work, I feel like I’m cosplaying a professional. The Jessica in my head has waist-length braids, jeans, hiking boots, and a t-shirt she can climb trees in.

Days like that one fill me up with the experiences and thoughts and memories that ensure I stay bigger on the inside. 

Inspirational Quote:

“From way up here,
There time is short
A life is just a day
Must be some better way
To use the time that runs
Among the distant suns”
–Pete Seeger

If you see a phrase that uses the passive voice, or, heaven save you, you’re about to use the passive voice to obfuscate, add the phrase “by zombies” to the end and reconsider.

President [...]]]> I have a new way of making bad writing more entertaining and keeping my own writing from being bad*.

If you see a phrase that uses the passive voice, or, heaven save you, you’re about to use the passive voice to obfuscate, add the phrase “by zombies” to the end and reconsider.

President Reagan’s 1987 State of the Union address, after Iran-Contra:

“And certainly it was not wrong to try to secure freedom for our citizens held in barbaric captivity. But we did not achieve what we wished, and serious mistakes were made in trying to do so.”

Improved by this technique:

“And certainly it was not wrong to try to secure freedom for our citizens held by zombies in barbaric captivity. But we did not achieve what we wished, and serious mistakes were made by zombies in trying to do so.”

Example from an article I was reading today:

“No longer deemed an exotic, esoteric or mystical activity, meditation has become a mainstream activity.”

Improved by this technique:

“No longer deemed an exotic, esoteric or mystical activity by zombies, meditation has become a mainstream activity.”

Because apparently some people are confused about this, the passive voice is when a writer hides the subject of a verb. She might do this for mendacious reasons as in the first example, or because her vision of good writing is clouded by cliche and fear of specificity, in the second.

Sometimes I use the passive voice when I’m writing to protect someone else–”The plane tickets to DC were not bought on time” or “The DNS SPF record was incorrectly modified”–but that’s a cowardly use of language, and though polite and to a certain extent kind, it is not good writing.

I am afraid of becoming a bad writer, of writing text that kills language. Toni Morrison’s calls of that kind of “statist language” in her 1993 Nobel Lecture sticks in my mind when I begin to write poorly:

[A] dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

For my New Year’s resolution this year, I committed to writing at least 300 words every day. And I’ve done it, every day except for one, when I was awake for 36 hours flying from Beirut to Amman to Istanbul to Washington DC. But if I only count days as periods of time which end with me sleeping in a bed, and not on the surprisingly comfortable benches in the Amman airport, I’ve kept my resolution so far.

I write every day, for hours, at work and sometimes I write well. But I realized when I was visiting family in California before the New Year that I was not getting better at the kind of enlivening language I believe Dr Morrison would want to constrain and combat and perhaps conquer that writing which “actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential.”

So I write on my own, for myself and some of my friends. Because I’m afraid of being a bad writer.

Afraid enough to insert random zombies into my proof-reading habits.

*ht to the tumblr followers who put @johnsonr‘s tweet from last fall on my radar.

Inspirational Quote:

“She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise.”–Dr. Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture

I’ve heard other hiring managers say that they can tell if an applicant is a [...]]]> We just opened up applications for our Summer 2013 fellowship and it got me thinking about what questions I found useful when I was applying for the 15+ jobs, internships and volunteer positions* I’ve had in the past 9 years.

I’ve heard other hiring managers say that they can tell if an applicant is a good fit within the first sentence of the cover letter and the first 30 seconds of an interview. I’ve also heard them say they can make their hiring decisions based on the last 5 minutes of the interview, when an applicant is asking her or his questions. These two statements run against each other, but let’s focus on the last 30 seconds, since fantastic resources exist for prepping for usual internship interview questions.

These are the 7 questions which I wish applicants for the fellowship for which I’m the hiring manager would ask:

1. What is the best project you’ve seen an intern complete?
2. How are conflicts resolved on your team?
3. What is the approval process for new ideas?
4. What are last term’s interns doing now?
5. What skills do you expect me to have coming in?
6. What skills could I expect to leave with?
7. What project do you think I would spend my most time on?

Hopefully most of these questions will be answered as part of the interviewer’s introduction of the internship, so you would only have to ask 2-3 of them. I think it would be a bit tiresome to work through all 7 in one interview, but if I left an internship interview not knowing what skills I could leave the internship with (stronger writing, HTML, campaign planning, fundraising, technical knowledge of the issue area and knowledge of how our policy team works are some of the ones I try to ensure my fellows get), I would be worried.

Have any great questions you like to ask? Please share them in the comments.

*Here are the first 15 jobs, internships, and volunteer positions which came to mind, all of which required some kind of interview. This is not a comprehensive list:

1. Babysitter, self-employed,
2. Intern, Electronic Frontier Foundation,
3. Interning Developer, Stanford University
4. Volunteer escort, Planned Parenthood of Western PA
5. Intern, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco district office,
6. Greeter, Revolution Cycles,
7. Web Content Management Intern, World Organization for Human Rights USA,
8. Posner Intern, Carnegie Mellon University,
9. English composition tutor, Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar campus,
10. Social media consultant, self-employed,
11. New Media Fellow, Polaris Project,
12. Communication manager, CareerImp,
13. Student employee, Carnegie Mellon University Career and Professional Development Center,
14. Intern, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University,
15. Online Outreach Specialist, Polaris Project,

These don’t include the grants I received or made it to the interview stage for, including Carnegie Mellon’s undergraduate research award, 5th year Scholarship and IMPAQT student ambassadors to Qatar program, Humanity in Action’s summer fellows program (Interviewed), and the State Department’s Fulbright award (Recommended Applicant). It also doesn’t include things I auditioned for, or positions I won through elections, though elections are a form of job interview.

Inspirational Quote:

“My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather.”–Terri Guillemets

It’s worth [...]]]> If you haven’t listened to oral arguments in the Prop 8 or DOMA Supreme Court cases, you must. The issue of standing is important, particularly to Californians but to anyone from any state which doesn’t enforce all of its laws. They are also wonderfully funny in places. They are also profoundly clear sighted:

It’s worth saying that the caption for the above video when I found it on Tumblr was “One minute. That’s all it takes for a Supreme Court Judge to destroy your argument against gay marriage.” And here are the artist’s sketches of the face she made at his response.

But maybe while right now your Facebook feed looks something like this:

All of our Facebook statuses are belong to freedom.

And maybe you find the rows and rows and rows of equal signs and Rothko paintings and Mario simulations and Christian statements of support and other Christian statements of support and parellel flower arrangements and Constitutional graphics and Dalek shrieks and Lady Justice/Lady Liberty slash and Yoda’s face and Carry On memes and Wonder Woman pics and grouchy cat stares and Star Trek Badges and Corgie puppies all declaring a commitment to marriage equality thrilling.

Maybe it made you feel like this?

But maybe, during any other given week, you don’t connect with the gay rights movement very much. If you live in a liberal state, or in a liberal city, or a liberal family, or you’re straight or pass as straight, it is not a part of your daily life.

That’s where fiction comes in. Fantasy allows us to sensitive ourselves to things we don’t come into daily contact with. I know a lot more about heraldry than I do about road sign design, though I have seen more road signs in my real life than I have ever seen knight’s shields because I have spend hours and hours and hours of my life living within a world where whether someone’s lion is rampant or passant makes a big difference.

Living in fictional worlds, even if only during my commute or during-dinner reading, is a chance to sensitize myself to experiences I might not have. Fantasy can be an escape, but it is also a journey inwards. And those inner learnings sometimes have real-world consequences.

There are significant debates about whether writing or reading slash fiction can, cannot, or sometime does qualify as engaging in a social justice work. I think that engaging opening and honestly with characters who push my boundaries or shore up my bulwarks against an often unequal and unfree world, visiting upon me a more accepting and enlightened world is the work of social justice.

I’ve seen this work play out in this week’s Supreme Court marriage equality cases, particularly in the signs people carry. To me, more than being funny and shareable and quirky, these signs tell the story that our culture’s bearers–fiction and its writers–are informing how people access the conversation about political and social rights for all people.

More simply: I think it’s harder to disagree with marriage equality when you know gay people, and knowing fictional gay people is better than knowing none at all. And for the slash shippers? I think it’s harder to disagree with marriage equality when you wish Dumbledore and Grindelwald had had just one good honeymoon.

Without further ado, my two favorite fandom pro-marriage equality signs of the week:

This is a direct quote from the show. I josh you not. Another actor on the show refused to be left out.

And it’s not just slash shippers who used fictional characters as their voices:

PS: Fandoms being politically active on QUILTBAG* rights isn’t new–here’s my anti-Prop 8 Supernatural shirt, originally designed I believe during that campaign (you can buy other fandom’s shirts against Prop 8 here at Fandoms for Fck H8):

*Queer, Intersex, Lesbian, Tran*, Bisexual, Asexual, Gay. I’m trying this out, though I still can’t say it outloud with a straight (hah!) face. LGBTQPIA just takes a long time to say, is all I’m saying.

ht to tumblr, my Facebook feed, and this post.

Inspirational Quote:

“No, really, because if the couple — I can just assure you, if both the woman and the man are over the age of 55, there are not a lot of children coming out of that marriage. (Laughter.)”–Justice Kagan

Enjoy!