i’m not sure where i absorbed the idea, but i’ve grown up believing that all serious relationships require a significant amount of work by both parties to sustain themselves. this belief is most commonly applied to marriages on the rocks, where it is determined that one or both parties has gotten lazy and isn’t doing their particular part to keep the relationships interesting, or fresh, or stable.  it seemed to make sense.

when i was 5 my parents divorced, and it was easy to resent them for their seeming refusal to work it out.  they were content to argue until one left in a huff, or post passive aggressive notes around the house instead of talking through their problems.  if it were me, i thought, i would approach things more directly and try to work them out without being so reactive or malevolent. the problem wasn’t rooted in their incompatibility–they were just lazy.

and this has stuck with me into adulthood.  it pervaded my only serious relationship.  i felt like, after the fun honeymoony part of the relationship was over, i was often the only one putting in effort for maintenance work.  i was the one scheduling time to spend together when we both got too busy.  i was the one who took our problems to work with me and continued to ponder them throughout the day, instead of walking out of the house and putting such things out of my mind.  i was the one willing to stay up and talk through something even when i was miserable and tired.

in hindsight, this attitude makes little sense when you consider the rest of my outlook on life.  i’ve never been of the “hard work and self punishment solve all problems” ultra protestant mindset.  i’ve always prided myself on trying to see through the bullshit and pick out what’s really important.  so why did i buy into the idea that an unhappy relationship would become a happy relationship if i just put more effort into it?  it didn’t fail because of apathy or lack of trying. it failed we grew apart and maybe weren’t compatible to begin with.  most relationships fail. the default is failure.  it takes something exceptional for a relationship to last forever, and such success shouldn’t be viewed as the default expectation.

the idea that relationships–and marriages especially–will stay happy and healthy indefinitely if enough effort is directed at them–is flawed.  it sets us all up to continue investing in a bad circumstance.  it encourages staying with an incompatible or even abusive partner.  while any interaction–from dealing with family members to buying groceries–take a requisite amount of effort to be functional, a lack of effort is not the cause of most failing relationships.  people grow apart, and they change, and they get tired of one another.  the belief that we’re supposed to put an infinite amount of “work” into a failing relationship before we can truly and blamelessly call it over is silly.

so i’m abandoning it.  i’m putting hard caps on the amount of “work” my interpersonal relationships can demand of me.   i will not punish myself for being “lazy” when “lazy” is anything but endless, directionless effort.  it’s not going to make me happy.

What with all the hoopla recently over yet another state making strides toward civil equality, we have heard great celebration from gay activists that the victory for marriage equality in Vermont was achieved through the legislative process. The same happened in Maine, in contrast to how things have played out in Iowa, where the state Supreme Court discovered marriage equality in the Iowa constitution, striking down a law restricting marriage to be between a man and a woman.

While each of these victories is cause for celebration for the LGBT community, and for progressives everywhere, what has me dancing in my chair (like that creepy lady in the car commercial) is how this victory for equality was achieved and how it impacts the bullshit cliché in the subject line above.

Conservatives love to trot this one out, and it sets my teeth on edge, mostly because in my conservative days it made so much sense to me, and I hate to be reminded of the decade of my life I spent being wrong (and a bigot). Without further ado, let us explore why I really hate the phrase “legislate from the bench.”

First, any time someone uses this phrase around you, you should see it as a mark of aggressive ignorance. Like all Republican talking points, it has the benefit of making the speaker sound educated while disguising the truth. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the United States’ founding documents (read: anyone who stayed awake for any length of time during the 8th grade) knows what “legislate” means. Unfortunately, “people who were awake in junior high” and “Republicans” are mutually exclusive groups (see Fig. 1)

Fig. 1, Republicans are dumb

To legislate is a transitive verb meaning “to cover, affect, or create by making or enacting laws.” And putting it simply (sorry to bore those of you who fit in the right-hand portion of the Venn diagram at right), only Congress can make laws. To further belabor my point, the executive branch of our government enforces those laws, and the judicial branch explains them. Most salient to this discussion is the power of the judicial branch to strike down laws by a process of judicial review, a power first given binding authority by the Marshall court in Marbury v. Madison in 1803.

Someone saying that justices are “legislating from the bench,” aside from the statement being  a worn, vapid talking point designed to make the speaker sound intelligent and reasonably informed in the absence of both credentials, further betrays a fundamental understanding of both the legislative and judicial functions. The statement cannot be backed up by facts, because none will support it. At best, it is a hasty metaphor requiring a great deal of hand-waving that doesn’t stand up to careful scrutiny.

Second, the statement is inescapably ideological. And by that, I mean that it is a political and social—not a constitutional—complaint. It is not, as Republicans often pretend, an argument for strict constructionism. It is simply a phrase shouted, loudly, by Republican pundits who need shorthand verbiage for feigning the role of the constitutional scholar. It is then parroted by people who mistakenly believe that they are social conservatives because they further believe that saying so excuses them from examining social injustice.

This mindset favors the legislative branch over the judicial, which is understandable to a point. The legislative branch is, prima facie, the most democratic of the U.S. government’s three branches. In fact, many countries privilege the legislative branch above the others based on this perception. However, the framers understood that having hundreds of dictators in Congress would be as bad or worse than having a single dictator on a throne. Thus, the separation of powers, yada yada yada. The judicial branch is a safeguard against tyranny by majority. It assures that there will be a check on the power of any majority formed in Congress, and by extension it protects the rights of minorities from the prejudices of the majority. This is another reason that people who think they are social conservatives hate it: it prevents them from foisting their religious views on everyone else (at least, it protects us from living beneath Mosaic law—so while you don’t have to attend Sunday worship with the Baptists, you can’t go buy beer during the same time slot, least not in Missouri).

Third, this statement is a relic of dirt-old American anti-intellectualism. Now, I’m not suggesting that they should, but in general, people outside the legal professions do not read supreme court opinions. They’re long, boring, and complicated, and they reference a sprawling web of interconnected cases, decisions, laws, and terms that most people do not encounter in any other setting. Also, they’re of necessity written in legalese, a dialect for which most Americans harbor an innate distrust. The most damning of all is the very nature of these opinions. Nuanced reasoning does not fit into talking points or onto bumber stickers. There is no “elevator pitch” possible. When you also consider that the most important decisions can challenge us to reconsider contemporary views on a subject, it is no wonder that the thought of nine old lawyers having the power to pick up a law and discard it, or “discover” things in the Constitution that nobody else has managed to notice, frightens people.

Those frightened people mentioned in the above paragraph should take solace in knowing that their crazy, potsmoking neighbors are not members of the Supreme Court. No, the justices have long, accomplished careers, and they make informed decisions. Also, they can’t just pick up a law and discard it. In most cases, the problem law has to cause a problem first, then somebody has to bring it to a lower court, and the case goes through a very long, expensive process before the Supreme Court hears it. So a new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can’t just decide that people should be able to marry their pets and bully the other justices into voting on it. At the very least, they are not crazy legislators more concerned with seeking re-election than with preserving freedom.  Which brings me to my final point.

The only legitimate complaint I understand about this absurd phrase, “legislating from the bench,” is that Supreme Court justices are not answerable to the people, at least not directly. They can make whatever decisions they like, and their positions are theirs as long as they want to keep them. Well… not in Iowa, the state Republicans point at and shout “legislation from the bench!” True, the people do not select the justices, but they do get to decide if they want to keep them after the first year.

So, in conclusion, Republicans, stop saying it. It doesn’t mean what you think it means, and even if it did, it wouldn’t accurately describe what you like to scare your base into thinking.

I’m a latecomer to the culture wars, due in very large part to my indentured servitude as a social conservative. But now that I’ve jumped into the fray “for realz,” I’m making up for all of that time I spent not being pissed off about the ignorant and rhetorically reprehensible bile being spewed by socially conservative political groups. I don’t really recommend that you watch this video, but I’ve posted it here so that you can if you think you can stomache being lied to—both explicitly and implicitly—in a melodramatic playing-the-victim style as devoid of color as it is of any truth.

My favorite part? Where they talk about how “the Homosexual” (the capital is strongly implied, because remember, gay people are all one homogeneous collective) is more likely to do all sorts of awful things, like abuse drugs and alcohol and even view suicide “…as a solution.”

Let’s break that down, shall we? These reactionary agents who foster an environment wherein an LBGT person is maligned, hated, bullied, and othered in every conceivable way now point to the very suffering they have deliberately inflicted and dare to use it as evidence of the weakness of “the Homosexual.” This is compelling evidence to anyone who is paying attention that these people are nutjobs. Slavishness to their agenda has blinded them to even simple rhetoric. For example, note that you are not allowed to comment on their video, or even rate it. Perhaps this is because videos of this type consistently get low ratings and outraged comments in Web 2.0 communities such as YouTube.

That is not to say that YouTube as a community should be any kind of standard for the civil and rational discussion of emotionally-charged ideas. The reality is quite the opposite. But what this does show us is that the Religious Right (ha! It would seem that two can play the “you’re all a homogeneous collective” game!) is as incapable of real rhetoric as they are of rational thought. Rather than explain their views logically, they cast them into self-aggrandizing, play-the-victim webisodes like this, where we are told what is right and what is wrong, and there can be no arguing. Why would these people think that YouTube–a community where users are encouraged to respond in text comments and video responses–would be an arena in which this piece of drivel is well-received? Even if the content of this video were politically neutral, publishing it with these restrictions would irritate the user, who is used to being able to respond. When the content is bloated with bigotry, it is simply maddening.

Also, they’re a bona fide hate group. (Thanks to Good As You for the link.)

It’s inexorable. And until we figure out how to become more like turtles, we’re going to keep aging. I’m fine with that, as long as I don’t have to age. It’s not because I belong to a youth-obsessed subculture where 30 = death/no-longer-pretty, but rather because it means that, professionally, I won’t be the whiz kid anymore.

Not that the being old = not being pretty isn’t a little scary, but at least, as a man, society will apply adjectives to me like “seasoned,” “rugged,” or “mature.” When I get really old I might even score “venerable.” Whereas if I were a woman I might get “hag” or “crone.” Thank goodness for antiquated double-standards, eh?

No, the scary thing about aging is slowly realizing that you don’t keep up on new trends without really trying. Just in the past two months, I went from having 200 text messages per month, that I didn’t use, to shelling out the dough for an unlimited plan because I was exceeding my limit by several hundred messages. Silly me, I thought people called one another.

I was so wrong, and this was proven when I met a few new friends just a couple of years younger than me. In those circles, a voice plan is superfluous. You don’t ever really talk to someone–you’re probably somewhere loud where you can’t hear, or someplace quiet where it’s rude to talk on the phone. Also consider that it’s easier to project an air of self-confidence in text than through voice communication. There’s time to think about what you’re saying, and the technology is unreliable enough that you can pretend you didn’t get a given message when it’s convenient to do so.

That’s just one example. February’s issue of Intercom cites a Department of Labor statistic estimating the the top 10 jobs of 2010 will not have existed in 2004. 

The same article says that New Zealand high school students have been allowed to use text messaging language on national standardized tests since 2006. I hear things like that and immediately become the Tazmanian Devil of rage that is my father after pressing 1 for English.

I’m only 23, and I read tech blogs and keep up with industry buzz, because I have to. It seems that intuition about usability and what should be effective communication faded around the time I added letters after my name.

If you want more hand-wringing nightmares about growing competition  from those who live on the bleeding edge, read Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. Provided you can stay awake, it’ll scare the crap out of you.

I know that I speak for all humanity when I say, “What the FUCK was up with Aretha Franklin’s hat?” It’s like that scene from Clueless where Cher finishes her speech in debate class and, when Mr. Hall asks for input from the class, Amber speaks up, but nobody in the history of people watching that movie can remember what she says beyond “Hello!?” because everyone in the audience is too busy asking–aloud–”What the hell is she wearing?!”

The answer is a red sailor suit with a dollar sign on the hat.

That was only slightly less ridiculous than the bow that late night comedians accused Aretha of stealing off of a Lexus or a Christmas tree to wear on her head.

Gentle reader, this is the day I have longed for since we started looking around for who would be the new president.

No, don’t be ridiculous. I’m not some crazy fashion critic just waiting for a respected diva to slip up so I could wag my finger at her. Far from it. The experience is what I was after, the experience of watching a bunch of late-night shows whose most-recycled bit of material was a silly hat instead of infuriating political bullshit at which I must either laugh or cry.

Do we dare hope that Obama will be this wonderful a leader? That there will be no chubby White House interns fellating our executives; that senseless wars will stop draining our resources; that the only thing comedians can count on to make us laugh about this administration is the soulful anthem with which it was introduced?

I don’t think we dare hope for that this early. But, oh what a world that would be.

I work for a university. And because of that, I have many, many perks to my job. For instance, if I wanted to earn another degree, I could easily afford to do so because my tuition would be discounted by 75%, and if I had children, their tuition would be steeply discounted as well. I also have pretty good job security, a nice salary, excellent benefits, and very little stress that’s directly work-related.

That said, there are times I really hate working for a public institution.

For one thing, the job security perk turns around and bites me pretty fast. It’s pretty clearly understood that you don’t get fired from the university–after your inital probation period, anyway–unless you do something seriously wrong or illegal, and preferably both. For instance, showing up 3 hours late and drunk with a busload of dead hookers would at least get you an immediate suspension. But you can’t be fired for just being bad at your job.

Yesterday, I got an internal email from a lady who wanted me to change a couple cells in an Excel spreadsheet for her. To be fair, I had originally created the spreadsheet, but she was asking for minuscule changes because she just wanted it a certain way.

So, I did make her changes, but I shot her back an email saying, “Just fyi, you can make these changes easily yourself in Excel. :)” The smiley face was supposed to soften the blow, I suppose. I didn’t really expect a response, because if I had received such a slap in the face, I would’ve been steamed and not trusted myself to reply.

This woman, though, is not that smart.

I did try to make those changes myself this morning it wouldnt let me in.

May as well have had “lol” there at the end.

It “wouldn’t let [her] in.” Now, maybe this is an argument of semantics, but I had simply emailed her a spreadsheet. I hadn’t buried it under layers of Shiboleth–I’d just zipped it up with some other files and emailed it to her. I was just delivering what I thought was a finished product.

Yet somehow that mystified her.

Well, I tried to call her and talk with her about the onerous task I had put in front of her–that of opening and editing a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, she must have wandered from her desk, because I got her voicemail. Or, rather, I should say I tried to. Instead of getting a voicemail greeting and a beep, the way everyone’s voicemail is supposed to work, I got a recording of her slowly shouting her first and last name. Then silence. Never did arrive at the beep. Never could leave a message.

This woman works for our telephone department.

Eventually, I ScreenToastered her a quick how-to on unzipping things in Windows, and hoped that might help. For all I know, though, she’s still fruitlessly double-clicking the hyperlink.

What really compounds this problem is the budget crunch. Every state has one, and we’re pretty fucking low on the list of the state’s financial priorities. We just got a memo from our university president telling us of the things we’d be cutting back on: travel, “employee recognition events,” “position reclassifications,” refreshments at university meetings, etc. The only one of those that represents a significant expense is the “position reclassifications,” which is our organization’s way of saying “promotions.” The others are essentially birthday cakes and doughnuts.

So, essentially, we’re powering through the financial crisis by laying off the sweets and denying someone a raise when he or she has earned it. Solid plan.

I have an idea. Let’s just get rid of people who are bad at their jobs. Or maybe force them to accept lower wages. I know for a fact that “it wouldnt let me in” lady makes more money than I do–she’s been here forever. How many birthday cakes would it save us if she started earning a salary commensurate with her skillset?

i would like to talk about the worst teacher i have ever had, and how she ruined my interest in math, my faith in service organizations, and whatever lingering threat of respect i had for southern accents.

we’ll just call her W.

W taught advanced mathematics on the accelerated, AP track at my high school.  i was lucky enough to have her for sophomore Algebra II/Trigonometry. and she was awful.

W did not respect you unless you shared her interest in and passion for mathematics.  within weeks of our first class, she had picked out the people she believed could hack it in her class, and the people who could not (for example, ME).  these notions stayed with her for the rest of the year.

W blamed you for not understanding her lectures, even if YOU encompassed 4/5 of the class.  most instructors respect you more if you come in after class and ask for help: W seized on it and used it to further her belief that i was unteachable.  and let me state right now that i’m not. i did fine in algebra I.  i did great in geometry.  i LOVE math, i love numbers, and i love word problems. W made math seem like an endless series of failures.

W tested us over all of the homework, but insisted on the senseless rule of only discussing 3 of the problems from last night’s homework in class.  one particularly passionate but inept student (who she liked, because even dumb passion is better than knowing cynicism) liked to waste this arbitrary limit by asking about the easier problems. this left the rest of us lost when it came time to take the test.

W did not believe in grade curves.  this became a problem on the first major exam.  out of a class of 24, two people finished it in the allotted time. that’s two.  out of 24.  1/12.  W berated us for not studying hard enough, claiming that we would have finished it if we actually knew the material.  my classmate J liked to equate this to “calling you a terrible baker because your 45-minute brownies tasted like shit after 22 minutes in the oven”. 

W’s terrible math class knocked me off the AP math track (partly because i didn’t do well enough, and partly because i did not want to have her teaching me again in senior year).    my next two years of math consisted of much time wasted in boring lectures about material i already knew.

W also happened to be one of three teachers on the National Honor Society committee at our school.  when it came time to apply in junior year,  i had a complete application.  it had community service, a respectable GPA, good attendance, and even a few drops of leadership.   and i did not get in. friends with equivalent applications  breezed in, a couple even became officers in NHS.  not me though.  i have no doubts that W’s notions about my character were what kept me out of NHS.

i know what you’re thinking: honor societies are stupid! they mean nothing! and i would say YOU’RE stupid. when you’re applying to college, and trying to get scholarships, those kinds of things translate directly into real-world money.   i imagine at least a few thousand dollars would be shaved off of my giant bag of student loan debt if W wasn’t a vindictive bitch.

i’ve had some argue to me that instructors that play favorites and don’t respect you if you don’t have innate abilities are common in college and that she was just preparing us for the future.  i say: FUCK YOU.  W was not a college professor who elected to teach only the very interested or very capable.  she gave up the right to decide who was worth teaching and who wasn’t when she chose to teach at a public high school.   it sickens me that, to be on the accelerated math track, i had to endure this woman.  i spent the rest of high school and the beginning of college assuming i was terrible at math. now i know that i wasn’t–i’m great at math.  this woman was just awful enough that she not only failed at teaching me, she managed to convince me that it was an inherent flaw on my part and not her abundant incompetence.

i’ve had plenty of inept teachers who failed to challenge or interest me in their lectures, but W was the only one who actively discouraged me from learning.  trying harder in her class didn’t make a damn bit of difference.  we still couldn’t finish her tests, she still had no sympathy for us.  i tried to reach out to her and get some extra help, and she resented me because of it.  i went through the rest of high school and 4 years of college and still have yet to encounter an instructor as arrogant, self-deluding, and discouraging as W.  if 1/12 of your class fails their first exam, it’s their problem. but if 11/12 of your class fails their first exam? yeah..that’s YOUR problem.  YOU are the  failure. and i want you to know that, W.

I just had a discussion with a coworker who said she felt like the work she does is valueless. Now, she didn’t mean that the work she does is substandard, or that she can’t present the materials she produces with confidence in their accuracy or quality. She works diligently and competently to produce quality technical documents–her work is very high quality.

Her concern is more philosophical than that. At the end of the day, what’s the real, cosmic value in knowing that the tacit information of how to create X with Y software has been added to Z organization’s archives? Even if it actually gets used, and it’s such an excellent artifact of technical communication that the document’s end-user is virtually unaware of the document itself, what about that is actually valuable?

Well, in the end, nothing. Even if the organization profits from her work, and she is rewarded materially and professionally for her quality product, the work itself is of questionable value, philosophically speaking. But this is not really the focus of my discussion here; rather, it leads up to it.

Even if we jump to the hurried conclusion that the exercise of completing her work to the best of her considerable ability is, in the grand scheme of things, valueless, it merely serves as a jumping-off point for my larger question: does that matter?

Maybe as an aspiring pessimist, I’ve frontloaded my life with disappointment, and that’s why I’m not plagued by these types of questions. To clarify, let me offer you a real-world example. I’m a technical writer, just like my aforementioned coworker. I’ve produced gobs of training curriculum, Web-based training, procedural guides, job aids, and technical how-to articles for my organization’s KnowledgeBase; but it would be a generous estimate to say that 15% of my work has actually been used by the intended audience. I know this, but I don’t have the latitude within my organization to change it and thus make my work more targeted and valuable.

But that doesn’t really worry me. I comfort myself knowing that I have a good job and that I produce quality work, regardless of whether it gets used. Now, that won’t be enough to content me forever–eventually, I’d like to move into technical editing and/or project or team management, where I won’t judged by my own accomplishments, but rather by the accomplishments of the personnel I will manage or the project I’ll be helming.

But even then, I don’t think that what you could refer to as “my work” would be valuable on any grand scale. If my IT department benefits from my work, and productivity soars, and business processes become more efficient, etc., which is near enough the definition of success in my field, this isn’t really that big an accomplishment. It’s just something to put on a résumé.

Somehow, that fails to depress me. And I’m not sure why it depresses my coworker. She has a good job and a rich family life. I guess the reason it is so curious to me is because it makes me wonder if I should be depressed about my own life, which is so much smaller. Among my many assets are a master’s degree, a good job, a mountain of student loan debt, several close friends, and a dog. Note that the approval of my parents didn’t make the cut.

I’m 23 years old, have no romantic prospects, and am far too exhausted by attempting to acquire them to pursue further ventures in that vein. So… when you put it all on paper like that, it’s pretty depressing. But, I wouldn’t call my life depressing, just joyless. I don’t look at every day as if I’m trying to latch onto a few piddling strands of happiness to keep from falling into a Nietzschean abyss. I simply… don’t have a lot of positives in my life. But the negatives don’t really outweigh them either, so…

Could it be that the real problem is that this doesn’t depress me? Am I so disillusioned that I even depression has lost its sting?

So, 2008.

Shittiest. Year. Ever.

i hate small, locally-owned bookstores.

there i said it.

often, i will see a small store spring up near where i live, or i’ll be walking through a big city and happen upon a neat looking place.  i will go inside, and here is what happens:

first, the person behind the counter demands my purse or backpack. or, rather, they yell at me for not willfully handing it over to them because i didn’t notice the sign.  i HATE this. you man a store, not a rehab clinic. if you want me to shop in your store, you won’t treat me like a criminal the second i walk in.  if you’re hell-bent on enforcing this silly rule, especially when your store is the size of my apartment and you can see everything i’m doing, i won’t be shopping with you.

second, the prices are higher. i know, i know, their supply chain sucks and they can’t afford to be as cheap as big stores. you know what? i don’t care. i’m only there because i want it faster than amazon can deliver it, but with the price i see, it usually makes sense to spend the gas to go to barnes and noble. because it’s really that much more expensive.

third, the selection is crap! the go-to excuse for places like this, and used places especially, is that you can find hard-to-find and out-of-print stuff that places like B&N would never stock.  most used bookstores i go to don’t live up to this at all. they’re usually stocked with old, outdated textbooks, 30 copies of Cujo, 30 copies of The Pelican Brief, and a big room full of various harlequin romance type books, because some old lady in the neighborhood died last week, and you got her whole fucking collection. you know where you can find out of print books, a lot more efficiently? eBay! yes. fucking eBay.  not sitting on some dirty stepstool, crawling through the poorly sorted sci-fi section of your local used bookstore.

but what about the EXPERIENCE, you’ll say. wouldn’t you rather go into a nice cozy bookstore and talk with a well-read person behind the counter about what sort of books he knows you’ll like? no, that’s horseshit. there’s some icy twentysomething behind the counter, who will likely make a point of ignoring me  until i demand his attention, at which point he will act irritated while i check out or ask my question, because i’m disturbing him. it’s not cozy, either. it’s cramped. when i can’t get to the door because a 12 year old japanese kid reading manga on the floor is enough to obstruct my path, your store is not laid out well.   if i want to leave without buying anything, counter-douche takes his sweet time getting the bag i was forced to surrender at the door and maybe makes some jackass comment. 

when i get my bag back, i leave, and probably go to barnes and noble, or go home and order the book i wanted from amazon.

“buy local” is the new “buy american”–your neighbors attempting to shame you into buying the same product with an inferior experience at an inflated price so they can see a bigger cut.  well, sorry. the internet has made many of these places redundant.  i have almost never had the fantastic local indy bookstore experience some people claim to be willing to spend extra on.  the ones that provide a real service will survive. the ones that make me uncomfortable can fail tomorrow. there’s nothing inherent about independent bookstores that makes them deserve my patronage, and when i know i can go to barnes and noble and flip through a book for an hour without being disturbed, instead of yelled at for taking a magazine off the rack, it makes the choice very easy.