I also gather that the commercials were a heady blend of awkward sexist proclamations and uncomfortable stereotype abuse aimed at the ball-scratchers and knuckle-draggers among us. I can’t verify that, as I didn’t bother to pursue viewing them. At least, until this guy started lampooning them on Twitter. Which caused me to then have the unpleasant experience of seeing this piece of shit:

I am almost at a loss to meaningfully parse this. But not entirely.

Good-looking rich kid is inexplicably without a date for prom. Wealthy father lets him borrow boring German “performance” sedan as conveyance. Somehow, driving along in the deadly-silent cabin at (probably) 50 MPH or less inspires in the young buck the courage to morph into an arrogant dickbag, whereupon he parks in a spot not meant for him and then rape-kisses some apparently-important female figure. The rape-kiss stops time and draws the attention of all, though ostensibly not because it was forcible and uninvited, but because a rich, white male had the moxie to take what was denied to him. Interlude of alpha-dogging. Outro of primal howl, reinforced by hip soundtrack and lame display of horsepower, which apparently does something for the rape-kissed female, despite her having no knowledge of daddy’s sports car outside.

In case it isn’t abundantly clear, none of the demographics represented here are benefiting from a thoughtful analysis of this commercial. I get that it’s designed to play on subliminal processes, but for fuck’s sake. Audi, in attempting to harness the raging testosterone in a crowd of millions, manages to smear women, men, the wealthy, teenagers, Germany, executive sedans, car culture, prom night, sexual identity, and themselves. Instead of celebrating any of these positions and raising them to an ideal that might suggest refinement, professionalism, performance, intelligence, self-esteem, or progress, they’ve instead gone out of their way to underline that above all else, male domination is the key to a life well lived.

Yes! Accept your father’s success as your birthright! Yes! Tame that wild suburban roadway! Yes! Wrestle that beast of a car with more safety measures than a space shuttle! Yes! Take the pliant, unwilling female with your aggressive sexual advances! Yes! Celebrate your ability to withstand unnecessary physical abuse!

Maybe junior didn’t have a date because daddy only taught him to behave like a fucking animal to get his way? Or maybe Audi is intending to appear superior as a German company by suggesting that all American males suffer from some form of impotence easily rectified by foreign enhancement? Maybe it’s actually really clever! Probably.

Yeah, I get it. Super Bowl commercials operate on the same intellectual level as, say, cold oatmeal. I’m expecting a lot here, I guess. I’m probably “taking it too seriously.” But, really, any other approach would have served the point. Some people want to drive fast cars that look cool. (I am among those.) Show a fast car looking cool. End of concept. No need to go out of your way to show a member of the most privileged class of people forcibly pulling rank through aggression, sexual or otherwise. Rich, white males already have everything! Why do we need to show them it’s okay to keep taking more, especially sexually?

C’mon, Audi. C’mon, whoever greenlit this mess. C’mon, ad agency, whose name I am too disgusted to unearth. You can do better.

ETA: Yes, I referred to Audi as “The Rapist’s Getaway Vehicle” on Twitter. I’d do it again, too.

As a joke, I say, “Maybe I should read something that makes me angry.”
Leah says, “Mitt Romney said today that people without insurance can just go to emergency rooms for medical care. They don’t just sit in their apartment and die.”
Me: (blank stare) “What?”
L: “Yeah.”
Me: “That doesn’t make any sense. Of course I can go there.”
L: “I know.”
Me: “That fucking…fuck.”

Then she told me that 60 Minutes was the source. Oh, you don’t believe me. Here:

I have to say, I have no idea what the fuck that means. It’s out-of-context, but since it’s 60 Minutes, I have confidence that it’s only so out-of-context. And since the last couple of weeks have been filled with soundbites from Mittens about his baffling concept of American economics, I believe he meant to say it, too.

I can’t quite make out if Mittly is suggesting that people who can’t afford health insurance should go to the hospital and not pay the resultant bills, but it almost seems that way. There is this implicit subtext of, “C’mon, we’ve all ignored those collection calls, eh?” But that can’t be right, can it? A man with wealth certainly hates to see his money go away, but what a public shame niggling debt must be.

Maybe he thinks, for some reason, that since hospitals are required to care for the uninsured, those services must be free. Again, I can’t imagine why he would think that. Surely, as a policy maker — indeed, one who has signed medically-relevant bills into law — he should know that this isn’t the case. He must know that hospitals are not (often) charities, they do not offer pay-what-you-can billing, and that their services are expensive, thereby necessitating the very insurance coverage he is apparently discussing. Right? He has to know.

Let’s even assume that what he’s saying is that someone who cannot afford health insurance, which is a regularly-billed service, should of course put their health first and go to the hospital in the case of an emergency and simply pay the bills when the come in later. Mittzo, we’ve just suggested that these folks cannot afford a regularly-billed service. That was where we started.

I guess we could try the outlandish theory that he’s actually a deeply-devoted (though well-disguised) humanist, and is preaching care for the people over the economics of the people. Perhaps this is Mittzy’s softer side. “Please, poor people, do not simply let yourselves die! We couldn’t live with ourselves if you die! Be a dear and see about that wound or lifelong illness, won’t you?” That would be cute. Almost…Christian.

Except he isn’t saying any of that. Mitt Romney has no fucking clue what it means to make enough money to be disqualified from federal and state aid plans, but not enough to pay for private insurance and food. He has never lived a day without premium insurance in his life. He has certainly never sat at his kitchen table, bleeding profusely, wondering if the injury is bad enough to take a 40% bite out of next month’s pay or a 200-point drop in his credit score when the hospital charges off the unpaid bill. Guess what? I have.

As a matter of fact, I held a towel to my face while my mother drove to the pharmacy with the last $25 for the month to buy enough bandages to keep my face from falling off. I had a 3-inch-wide gash in my cheek you could almost see my teeth through. The sight of it scared my brother so badly, he hid behind the couch. When my mom returned, she had me hold my face together while she taped the gap closed. Every morning for three weeks, I had bandages painfully reapplied before school. Try telling an 11-year-old not to laugh or smile lest he reopen a massive facial wound. And we were the lucky ones. $20 worth of bandages and several thousand dollars worth of luck kept my face from getting infected.

A recently-single mother, my mom was caught in the trap of going back to get her degree so that she could afford to be a single mother someday, so she had neither a job nor insurance. (You might be surprised to learn that this didn’t work out as expected. Who knew?) We lived off of social security payments made possible by my father’s death. We were exactly where the vast majority of people in the U.S. are: money comes in, sometimes it’s just enough, but mostly not. We wanted the things people with more money had, because this is AMERICA GOD-DAMN IT, but we wanted to keep our apartment, too, because we are human. We needed to pay the bills to maintain a certain quality of life, but improving our lot was out of the question.

I can’t stress enough: I was lucky. My initial injury was not life-threatening. We were not so poor that we were doing this in the dark because our electricity was turned off. My mother had a car to go to the store. There was a store open. I had eaten dinner that night, played video games, and later, got hurt playing in our large basement. Best of all, the bandages worked. I have a pretty bitchin’ scar now, but that’s it.

I am not telling you this as some kind of bullshit libertarian do-it-yourself triumph. Had we gone to the emergency room (like we did a couple years later when I broke my ankle — those collection calls we did get), we would have owed hundreds of dollars just for walking in the door, but the risk would have been vastly reduced. We would’ve scraped by the next month. Probably. Then again, it could’ve been the thing that became our undoing. Our tipping point. The event that so many families experience on the road to bankruptcy or worse; the event of which Mitt Romney has only the faintest impression. It is an idea to him, and an abstract one at that.

This notion of “I have money, why shouldn’t everyone have their own money?” is poisonous, and moreover, it’s hateful. It’s sinister in its implication that the mooching poor have only themselves to blame. For everything. His specific use of “apartment” lays bare his contempt for all but the wealthy. “Only those people live in apartments. How droll.”

This is the kind of reality Mitt Romney can’t understand. In a strict sense, he’s right. It makes more sense to bite the bullet and take care of yourself. But at what cost? The current insurance industry paradigm is a joke — it’s a money-making machine. It is essentially flawless in its ability to take money and return no service whatsoever. And that mechanism is what we rely on for our best scenario when we ask ourselves if we need to go to the doctor. It’s terrible.

Not half as terrible as the stinging rebuke lower-middle class families suffer every time Mittany speaks, but terrible enough. I guess what I’m trying to say is: Fuck you, Mitt.

Later, in the course of thinking about our weakened responses, it occurred to me that the national conversation actually features rape apologists.

Let me repeat that, on blast:

The national conversation features rape apologists.

Akin, Ryan, Santorum, Fischer, Huckabee, Barnes, their doctor sources, and every single person nodding along in agreement are rape apologists. (Sources: Here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Of course, anyone who has ever said, “She had it coming,” or “Well, what was she wearing?” or “She shouldn’t have gone out alone” are also rape apologists.

Let me explain. When you suggest that we should outlaw abortion because raped women are unlikely to get pregnant, congratulations! We’re no longer talking about abortion. In effect, what you have said is not only is it permissible to rape someone because there are no tangible consequences, but that abortion is a lowlier crime. When you suggest that good people have come out of rapes, you are giving the benefit of the doubt to motherfucking rapists. Rapists! When you say that God himself has given unto a woman a gift in the form of a rapist’s baby, you are saying that a rapist is no worse than Santa Claus. He has given you a gift! Be humble, woman, for the abhorrent scum of the Earth has seen fit to bless you above all others! When you introduce doubt that the aggressor is the one to blame, you become a rape apologist.

(Just a quick question: Does that then mean that rapists are actually superior to their victims by virtue of the fact that they choose unto whom they bestow gifts?)

Last I checked, rapists of all stripes are the lowest form of humanity. Far lower, in my estimation, than the perfectly reasonable people who have abortions. When you abort a fetus, particularly as early as is practically possible, you are terminating a mass of cells with extraordinarily limited consciousness. That is factually the case, Bible or no. When you rape a someone (nevermind a child), you are inflicting a brand of suffering so essential and so embraced by the larger culture, that the fully-formed consciousness of that person is never quite the same. In a small way, every rapist has permanently damaged a life, which must go on living despite it.

And even at that, abortion can be a terrible trauma. In this, Solomon makes the point that it’s not as simple as just aborting the rapist’s child. That, too, can feel like a violation and a loss of control. In case you don’t make a point to read it:

Any delay in detection reduces women’s options, especially outside major urban centers, but many women struggle with the speed of the decision; they are still recovering from being raped when they are called on to make up their minds about an abortion. The decision of whether or not to carry through with such a pregnancy is nearly always an ordeal that can lead, no matter which choice is ultimately made, to depression, anxiety, insomnia, and P.T.S.D. Rape is a permanent damage; it leaves not scars, but open wounds. As one woman I saw said, “You can abort the child, but not the experience.”

We are approaching unprecedented levels of regression here, folks. I like to believe that culture endlessly revises toward more profound civilization, toward higher intelligence and better understanding. (This is somewhat faulty, anyway — history suggests that humans behave in large, looping patterns. Our stuff gets better, but we just find new ways to do horrible things to one another.) I was born in the 1980s, so I hang on to a desperate hope that since the 60s, we’ve been rocketing toward broader liberties and more refined social equality. That people who can dismiss the severity of rape out of hand, as though it were a minor car accident in which everyone carried insurance, is horrifying. It just cannot be. It is a length to which my fragile liberalism cannot go. And yet, it is. At best, some of our elected officials do not understand the severity of rape. At worst, they believe that rape is a gift from God.

There’s a lot going on here. First of all, the types of people saying these mind-numbing things — actually mind-numbing; these ideas are so atrocious, you pause for lack of context — couldn’t be less at risk of rape if they tried. Barring outlier Barnes, who may just be drafting for popular opinion, these are old white dudes whose best days of fucking are behind them. I’m certain that each of them has had to choke down some essential part of what makes them whole and the frustration leaks out around the edges of their papier-mâché dogma. They have to believe this stuff because the alternative involves a painful road of self-analysis. (No, Daddy didn’t love you the way you wanted to be loved. Better prop up your viewpoint with God and act the part of a smug prick the rest of your days.)

Second, they, for some reason, are unable to actually imagine what a home life could possibly be like for a raped woman forced to keep her attacker’s child. Listen, willing fucking parents resent their kids. Good parents, even. There are times when parents realize just how much they gave up in pursuit of family-building and resent their offspring. That’s natural. Parents are still people. Imagine, then, how much worse it would be for a mother whose child is the offspring of a rapist. Many times, victims of sexual assault blame themselves even without the help of idiot talking heads. Imagine waking up and seeing a child you hate yourself for resenting, a child who has done nothing to you, but represents, perhaps in some cases, the sum-total of the worst event of your life. The hurt you’d have to endure day in and day out in spite of yourself, only to have some sick fuck who got elected to public office tell you that you need to put your faith in the Bible. The Bible is right and you are nothing but a simple, unwashed sinner, who needs to repent and give yourself to God and your money to the church.

Worse, they can’t imagine what the child will have to endure. Children are actually very smart. The human brain is hardwired to pick up on little cues, especially from the people charged with the protection of that brain. Children need the acceptance of their parents to develop normally. Finding out your father is a rapist and your mother had to endure countless days of psychological torture over the creation of you is likely to put a dent in your emotional development. Speaking strictly as a layman, of course. Just my gut feeling. (Actually, it isn’t just my feeling. Seriously, read this.)

I’m not saying that mothers who keep their rapist’s baby can’t find a way to move on and develop a healthy relationship and build a strong family. People can be extremely strong and are often endowed with a spirit that refuses to concede to anything. Knowing that rape happens, and that children come from rape, I sincerely hope that it’s true in some cases. I’d like to think that rape doesn’t always cascade down through the generations. But I believe that for the most part, the situation is very dire, indeed.

Let me get to the point(s):

1. Do not ever blame the victim. Period. That’s all.
2. All rape is legitimate, and all of it is unacceptable.
3. The primary thing rape victims need is choice — feeling as though they do, in fact, have control over their lives can go a long way toward helping to reduce the hurt of violation.
4. Realize that every half-formed comment, every “mistake,” every “misquote,” which supports the banning of abortion and mentions rape is nothing short of rape apology.
5. Do not use the Bible to suggest that women who have abortions are worse than rapists.

I just… This can’t really be happening. I shouldn’t have to explain this to anyone.

Referring back to my cube-dwelling days, using the 180 Day Scenario: Even if clients provided all the necessary materials on Day 1, it might take ten more days to get it set up. While one production team is waiting on the setup, other work comes in, creating a tangled knot of in-progress…stuff. As the mess gets bigger, people start to panic, drink more coffee, work longer hours, and forget to eat, all in an attempt to keep up. Prioritization becomes an abstract concept last practiced by the ancient Mayans. And that’s when mistakes get made. That’s why, on Day 178, we’re staring at the screen wondering if that trade name is spelled correctly. And that’s why on Day 181, when the email deliverable actually lands in the hands of the client, expected data is missing from page fifteen. Usually data that’s needed for a meeting about an hour from receipt of the email.

The service provider’s responsibility loop is unlike the client’s in that it’s reactionary; professionals wait for input, react to it, output a product, and then wait for the response. If the response is bad and it’s the professional’s fault, it’s time to mash the panic button before the ship sinks. Even if there is no danger of the ship sinking, that’s what happens.

So, here are some points about how to provide a service worthy of praise.

Be Responsive

From initial contact to final product, non-response is non-optional. Part of the reason Inbox Zero is so difficult to attain is that really good professionals are carrying on conversations, and that means a lot of emails. Clients are constantly afraid that their project is getting lost in the shuffle, so a simple note goes a long way. It’s a way of refreshing the connection, even if that particular client isn’t on your schedule for that day.

Above all, answer all the questions asked, even if they seem obvious to you. Missing a question means you don’t have the answer or don’t think the answer is important. It is. We see this all the time in the big box retail environment; hot tempers can be cooled when the customer knows they’re being heard, usually by the manager.

Have a Contract and Enforce It

During your early, terrifying, broke days of business ownership, a contract is the thing that keeps you from getting taken behind the financial woodshed and bludgeoned to death. As your business grows, a contract is actually part of the dialogue between you and your client. It should contain all the clarifying bits (avoiding the legalese, if you can) and provide the outline and schedule of the project. It does protect both of you, but it also is a handy reference.

If you don’t have a contract, you’re not taking your business seriously enough. It shows that you don’t trust yourself to write one, you don’t trust your clients to understand and sign one, and that you have instead invested this trust in the capricious nature of the universe. Things do not work out through sheer willpower. They work out because you can rely on certain things being true to the best of your knowledge and can thus move forward with confidence.

Similarly, it does you no good to have a contract if you don’t enforce it. Your clients won’t honor it, even if they’re legally obligated, and you’ll eventually get a reputation for having a meaningless contract. It’s there for a reason and that reason is that everyone can feel safe within its confines. Stay within them or modify it and have everyone re-sign. It is actually more important than catering to passing moods and whims.

Be Intuitive

While it’s true that you’ll never learn how to read minds, you can get pretty good at reading intentions. You will probably never see a project the way your client sees it, and even if your work is imbued with passion and heart, it probably doesn’t approach the essential gut feeling your client has about something. You feel that way about the product, and making these products is your life, but you could be dealing directly with something that is this person’s entire life. Treat it that way.

If you feel like your client is panicking, find a way to assure them. Usually this just requires confirmation of progress. If your client is feeling lost, help them out. Suggest next steps, a direction, point them toward some resources. You’ve chosen to work directly with people as the head of your business and that means you should get good at reading them and understanding both what they’re saying and what they think they’re saying.

Use Your Real Personality

This is more about business building than interacting with a specific client, but the point remains that you should be who you are, not some imagined business version of yourself. This way, you can relate to the person that your client is by being the person that you are, instead of treating them as a number. You’re not a faceless company, so there is an expectation that there will be no gap between the person typing the emails and the person solving the problems, creative or otherwise.

The second a client perceives a division, you’re on dangerous ground. If you’re typically surly (heh…) but you act all sunshine and puppy dogs and exclamation points, you will probably slip up at some point. When you do, your client will be offended, thinking that you are angry or annoyed with them. You cannot have this. Lead with who you really are and be consistent. If they like your personality and your style, you’re going to have a far more developed relationship and that could lead to referrals or more direct work.

Be Grateful

Chances are, you’re doing the work you want to do. People are finding their way to you and giving you money to do your thing and do it well. Remember that. Even when you’re 35 projects deep and struggling to keep up. Each of those clients began their project on good faith, probably specifically because you make the rules for your business. If you’re warm and grateful (but still not groveling), you’ll inspire good will. We all want to work with people who are psyched to do their jobs.

Accept Criticism

More than anything else, getting a creative writing degree taught me how to watch some of my most valued work get shredded because it didn’t translate outside my head. The same is true with your client. It doesn’t really matter the service. Your drawing on a wealth of expertise and experience does not guarantee results with every single person. Feedback on a specific piece often contributes to your understanding of the whole process.

There is usually an element of giving the client what they want. If you think a particular design element or sentence works, but your client doesn’t, it may be that you will have to remove it. If you explain why, using references, and they then agree, you’ve both learned something about the process. If you go through a couple of rounds of back and forth, your client is telling you that they are making the choice to include something you wouldn’t include. They like it, they’ve paid for it, fucking give it to them already.

Do Your Best Work

This might seem obvious, but every time you set out to work with someone, make sure you’re doing your best work. Even if that client hired you at your lower price point, they deserve the same attention to detail as any other. If they paid less, they’re expecting fewer services, not lower quality. If you phone it in for anyone because you think you can coast, you might as well change fields. You can never coast. Especially in creative services. You’re developing an artform that takes practice and every new client is a chance to solve a new problem. Never get to the point where you’re saying, “I’ll just get it done.”

This can be hard. Which is fitting, because running a business is hard. And so is being a professional. You’ve worked hard to this point, so why would you hang it up on this latest project? Deliver on what your portfolio suggests you are able to do. Every time.

Manage Expectations

This is part of being intuitive, but there’s more to it than that. If you sense someone is irritated or confused, it may already be too late. Often, a project gets off-track because you let it get off track. This is easily solved by referring to your contract, but in other cases, showing the process can help, too. The client can learn a little bit about what, exactly, you’re doing during all that time you aren’t answering emails, and adjust their expectations of how the process works. It should seem effortless to them because you’re that good, but it doesn’t hurt to let them learn alongside you.

The same way a client shouldn’t continue on assuming it will work out, you shouldn’t ignore when things are going awry. Be clear about what you expect them to do and when. The reminder will more often help the client feel more at ease than it will frustrate them. If they grow concerned about limitations, it might be time to restructure the contract so they get everything they need and you get paid.

There are loads of shady, terrible people out there, pawning sub-par service off on unsuspecting clients. The difference between them and you is that they are scam artists who are careless. If you make a mistake, own up to it and do it quickly. Get to working on fixing the problem as soon as you can, relative to your contract’s terms. Most clients will be understanding if you show them that you’re working your hardest to rectify the situation.

It’s tough work being a self-employed creative, but your clients came to you specifically for that kind of service. Provide it to them.

I’m still going to talk about those things, but this post is about the professional-client relationship. You might love your designer/web developer/illustrator/writer, but chances are, you’re not in love with them. (I mean, I’m in love with my web designer/developer, but that’s different.)

During my cubicle-dwelling days, I experienced many incidents like this: In order to begin a project, we wait for terms from the client. At the outset, the deadline is 180 days away. There are roughly 180 days worth of work, but with a good setup and efficient work, it can be made to take less. The terms of the contract specify 180 days of work, which will ensure a final project of the highest quality. On Day 98, the client returns the terms and somewhat angrily suggests that we had better uphold our end of the bargain and have a deliverable to them on Day 180.

This usually meant doing whatever work could be done without all the terms or working 12-15 hour days to make up the difference. Because we were a mid-sized company working with Fortune 500 clients, there was little choice. This is the stuff small business owners are made of.

So, armed with a collection of desirable skills, entrepreneurs the world over set up shop and offer their services on their terms, which are vastly improved from the corporate terms they had been laboring under previously. And then they attract clients, all of whom exist on a spectrum from BEST CLIENT EVAR!! to Clients from Hell.

I’m not afraid to tell you that I am in the former camp. Or I would be, if I was rich. I could afford to contract with everyone! I do my best to make it easy on the folks who work with me. And so, I present to you a list of things you can do to stop driving your self-employed service provider crazy.

Read Your Contract/Honor Your Agreement

When you ‘sign on’ with someone, you are making a legal agreement. Smart professionals have spent time developing a contract with which they are comfortable, mostly through trial and error. And bad clients. The terms might feel unnecessary, but remember, there is positively no way you are buying this thing or service more often than these folks are selling this thing or service. It can’t be. They do it hundreds of times a year. They know better than you.

If you don’t like the terms, which you can only know by reading your contract thoroughly, ask for an explanation. Or an adjustment. You’re not really owed either, but you certainly shouldn’t go signing anything you’re uncomfortable with assuming it will work out. Plan for that contract to be upheld to the letter. Especially since it protects you, too; that is legally binding in the unlikely event your service provider lets you down.

Be Clear

Your written communication skills should be stellar. It’s likely that you will be communicating via email, so polish up your grammar a bit to avoid confusion. The internet seems to believe that Einstein (or Richard Feynman) once said, “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” If you don’t understand your vision for your project, there is no way to explain it well to another person. Write properly, in as few messages as possible, and re-read your missive before you send it.

Related to this, if your project involves files you send to your professional, make sure they are in the format requested, named appropriately, with like files grouped together. If you upload 35 files with no naming scheme and no organization, don’t be surprised when your project is delayed.

Avoid Scope Creep

Once you sign, stick to it. Stick to the terms, the payment schedule, the production schedule, everything. Anything you do to cause the project to land outside of these terms is called scope creep. Whether it’s delaying the completion date (which erodes schedule reliability for the rest of your professional’s projects), or sneaking in terms because you didn’t think about them earlier (which devalues their work), you are acting unprofessionally. In strict terms, you could very well be ruining someone’s career. If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider what professionalism means to you. It doesn’t mean that the customer is always right — it means that the agreed-upon terms are being upheld.

Pay on Time (Seen as: Fuck you, pay me.)

Even when you take an hourly job with The Man, somewhere in that crush of paperwork you submit with your tax information is a contract stating when you will be paid. Imagine for a second your utter dismay when that money doesn’t hit your account when you’re expecting it. By and large, self-employed folks have no expectation of a payday, and use their contracts and schedules as the backbone of their household budget. Your project might be covering rent or student loans.

Your contracted professional is not being greedy when they ask for the payment you agreed you would pay them. If something you have done has delayed the project, that is your fault, not theirs. They still need that money when they said they needed it. You purchased their time and attention, and by taking two extra weeks to get back to them about something, you are extending that time.

You’re also dragging it out if you don’t have the money to pay when the bill comes due. If you can’t afford the project through the timeframe, don’t pay the deposit. We’ve all done it — with medical bills, credit cards, whatever. Unforeseen events make payment impossible. Which is why, before you begin a request, especially with freelancers or self-employed creatives, you should have the money set aside.

Don’t Operate Out of Fear

If you’re doing a lot of hand-wringing during your initial contact call or your inquiry message is fraught with ‘I’m afraid that…’ or you spend ANY amount of time highlighting a bad experience in the past, you are not ready to contract anyone to do anything. I wouldn’t even get my fucking hair cut if I was ambivalent about it. You’ve either decided to get this thing or you haven’t; don’t put the pressure on the person who is about to do all the work. It’s not their fault you’re taking a risk — they’ve already taken the leap and so can only have so much sympathy for you.

If you’re asking for just one more revision or to try a new color or to see the shape of something as a something something, just stop. If you’re afraid you won’t like it (or afraid of anything, really), you’re already way behind. Which leads me to…

Trust Your Professional

Do you know why you went searching for an illustrator? It’s because you can’t draw your way out of a wet paper bag. Why did you contract a photographer? Because when you go to Best Buy, the price tags on the cameras scare you. (You aren’t even aware that the lenses are the expensive part.) And so, it stands to reason that you need to trust them. You might think you know what you want, but you can’t back that up with anything except comparisons. You might like the way something else looks, but you have zero concept of what went into making it. And even if you did, you likely failed to note that creatives loathe copycat work. It doesn’t help you and it sure as hell doesn’t help them.

The urge to micromanage is almost always built on fear. You’re afraid they aren’t hearing you, or aren’t talented enough to bring your ideas to life. You can see it so clearly in your head! Why can’t they just see what you’re trying to say! And why…didn’t you think of all this before you contracted them based on their style, portfolio, testimonials, word-of-mouth praise, and years in the industry. If your idea is so clear and you’re such a genius, why is it that you started doubting them the minute the contract was signed?

Many times, the restrictions are technical. Some things can’t be done. If your professional says this and cites specific reasons, it’s likely that they’re right. A good professional either has experience with the limitation or the common sense to Google the problem and try to figure it out. No matter how much you long for it, you can’t jam a vertical picture into a horizontal space.

Know Your Limits

If you’ve read the contract, paid on time, been clear, and trusted them with your vision and they aren’t holding up their end of the bargain, it’s time to re-think the relationship. Part of being a good client is being honest with yourself. That means if you’ve given them all the room built into the contract and they still aren’t coming anywhere close and don’t seem to be hearing you, the smart thing to do is move on before you build up any more ill will. You’re better off firing them before you have to make your next payment or before they do any more work with which you’ll be dissatisfied.

Sometimes people just don’t mesh. Even though there’s a lot of high emotion and excitement built into the process, it’s best to part on good terms. If you’ve received the services for which you’ve paid (since many contracts are written in stages with a related pay schedule), there is usually time to staunch the bleeding, as it were. If you haven’t been clear or given them a chance to rectify specific issues, you’re jumping the gun. But if you’re holding on because you hope it will work out in the end, you’re just storing up anger unnecessarily, which can sour you on the experience of buying a similar product or service in the future. Even if five of your best friends recommend someone, it won’t matter if your final product isn’t what you wanted it to be. You may still need that thing — go find someone who can deliver it.

Remember: They’re Human, Too

Despite all this, someone who is really good at their job can account for your eccentricities and respond to you in a way that deepens your relationship and makes you feel good about the money you’re spending. After all, if you wanted a faceless, money-driven corporation to take your money, there is no shortage of them. But self-employed folks have exactly the same number of bad days as you do. They make mistakes. And they usually either know the best way to recover from them or have a pile of options to present to you. This thing your working on is undeniably important to you — it could be a tattoo! — but most professionals are working on four or more Most Important Things Ever and are doing their damndest to make them all special. Cut them a little slack. Not more than the contract calls for, of course, but some.

Optional: Pay Extra

Want to make someone’s day? Overpay your invoice, if you can. A few dollars goes a long way. Many, many hours of contract work is unbillable and thus unpaid. Including the hours spent tracking down payments. Kick in a few extra bucks, if you have it. Or, if you’re developing a product offering, offer it free to them. They may not have a use for it, but they just poured their heart and soul into your heart and soul, so they may be interested in it.

Most of you are probably not Clients from Hell. But I bet you could do better. If you’re a good client, chances are you’re a good professional and those relationships are key to your reputation.

Don’t get too excited, service providers. You’re getting yours on Monday.

(As a disclaimer: I fully recognize that most people are just being nice or looking out for us, in their way. I rant on, regardless! That is what you guys pay me for, right?)

Apparently, it is the stock belief of monogamous folks that once polyamorously-identified people get engaged to one another, it’s time to drop the act, as it were. People have asked us if were going to “give up the open thing,” and “be committed to one another.” As if we were only looking for secondary partners out of fear that our relationship wouldn’t actually last.

Look, I know lots of people just don’t get the poly thing, and some of those that do just don’t like it. That’s more or less cool with me. Except that when we answer that, no, we’ll still consider ourselves polyamorous, you can just see the distrust seep in. Everyone everywhere has heard of poly married couples that didn’t work out when hearts were broken out of jealousy. But everyone everywhere also knows monogamous couples that didn’t work out when hearts were broken out of jealousy. There is zero difference. The odds of being hurt are exactly the same. (As Brené Brown points out, we can only experience as much joy as we experience vulnerability. It’s never actually as easy as it seems.)

And, just to clarify, considering ourselves polyamorous is about leaving our hearts open. And that’s about it. Neither of us are actively seeking secondary partners, but we’re also not interested in declaring for all to hear that we will never have sex with another person for the rest of our lives. Maybe we won’t. That would be fine. But the pretense is unnecessary for us and might well short-circuit an otherwise rich experience.

The other question we’ve heard, in various forms, involves our expected timeline for having a child. Since Leah is a woman, it’s evidently assumed that she will rear a child. (Required reading on this point: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/07/09/an-invisible-option-in-the-aftermath-of-slaughters-why-women-cant-have-it-all/ and http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/laurie-penny-women-having-it-all-is-a-middleclass-myth-7923457.html.)

As you’ve read, there will be no biological children. Neither of us has any interest in inflicting our terrible genetic code on the next generation, and even if we did, the world is jam-packed with people, including several million orphans. It’s not for us. While we might adopt in the future, we really don’t feel like it’s required. It’s not a litmus test of our future marriage. And more to the point, none of the people we know are allowed to talk to us like it is.

It’s not a shame. It’s not unfortunate. If you’re looking at a person’s choices and taking away an emptiness or a lack, that tends to say more about you than it does that person, provided he/she isn’t a violent criminal.

So, then. Getting engaged means that I get to have this fantastic woman as my wife. It doesn’t mean we won’t have secondary partners if that occurs to us, and it doesn’t mean we’re going to have kids. (It also doesn’t mean we’re doing to have a wedding. Suck it, haters! …not one person has been opposed to us skipping the wedding part. How weird is that?)

What is it about convention that the folks who pursue it are only comfortable when EVERYONE does? I suspect it’s a matter of double-checking your work, if you will. Your decisions are supported by the majority and so they must be right. I understand that a great deal of comfort comes from knowing that you’re doing what’s expected of you. But if you’re not hurting anyone, isn’t there a greater degree of comfort to be found by just being who you are?

I should think that among my readers, this isn’t a revelation. Most of you are probably thinking that, yes, it’s preferable to be yourself, but it’s not always so easy. Which is true enough. The pressures of traditionalists explain most mental health issues and all civil rights campaigns. And frankly, the things I’m complaining about can be boiled down to fucking nuance at this point. We’re a middle-class, white, hetero couple. We have nothing to complain about, comparatively.

Except that the day we stop pushing back against the faulty expectations of others is the day the status quo wins without argument. Incremental change is best. Dan Savage says that most people don’t know they’re okay with gays/trans folks until they realize someone close to them is gay or trans. It’s true about any non-traditional arrangement. You’re a good person doing something other than what’s strictly expected of you. People can just keep their preferences to themselves.

Even if they mean well.

(P.S.: http://prospect.org/article/whats-chief-purpose-marriage)

At this point in U.S. history, we’re sick of the ubiquitous advertisements and omnipresence of the Fortune 500. We have to learn how to avoid buying things from companies that own the whole fucking planet. During your next shopping trip, I defy you to get through the whole thing without buying a product touched by Proctor & Gamble, Monsanto, or GE. It’s tough, man.

Fortunately, it isn’t hard to support lean startups who are taking their good idea and attempting to build on it. As seen here, all it takes is a good idea executed well and with a lethal dose of personality. (Well, plus vision.) You should be looking for things like this. And, further, you should be looking to create things like this. “Niche” is not a bad word. Find yours and go after it.

The “lean start-up” term, as it was originally coined, is often reserved for the tech crowd. These are folks whose great idea involved programming something and pushing out updates as quickly as possible based on user feedback. Which is awesome. It makes much of our online interactions possible now. (Ahem, Twitter.) Even Google started this way. They continue to be a cautionary tale the larger they get, but it’s proof that the mechanic works.

The key to any venture is sustainability. If you live with dollar signs in your eyes, your venture is doomed to become mean-spirited and anti-human. What we do should NOT BE FOCUSED ON PROFIT. Profit is fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong with making money. The trouble is when we make money for the sake of making more money. No one needs shit like this. If you have that much money, you have lost sight of what the fuck you were doing in the first place. What we do should enhance lives, including our own. It should make something more fun or easier to implement while trending toward being better in the future. It should not enable us to buy BILLION-DOLLAR YACHTS.

Given all that, I’m still opposed to IPOs. I really think companies should be either privately or semi-privately held. I’m not against VC funding, especially when it involves investors who are spreading their wealth around to create wealth for a bunch of people and not just themselves. The idea of a lean startup is that you shouldn’t need a pile of money to get started. You need talent, personality, and vision. If you have those things, you should be able to make your own damn money. (A little targeted marketing does’t hurt, either. Not massive, misleading ads that devalue human interaction, though. Ideally, the campaigns wouldn’t oversell the usefulness of the product itself, but as Sasha Pasulka points out, a budget for finding users is pretty important.)

I’m also opposed to growing a business for the sake of flipping it to a bigger company. I know this is how the tech world works, by and large, but there’s just something so stomach-turning about it. In the case of companies like The Huffington Post, among others, it’s also disingenuous. Why create a user base of people who aren’t that fond of TimeWarner and their ilk only to turn the keys over when the payoff amount gets high enough? I know some serial entrepreneurs can’t stand being locked into one company for the rest of their lives, but I guess I just prefer it when the underdog remains the underdog. Undersell and over-deliver, always and forever. The Fortune 500 have enough valuable IP, don’t sell them yours. It’s why you started your company in the first place.

Which is why I’m so fond of things like webcomics (ahem, Diesel Sweeties), Topatoco, and Ramen Music. Ramen Music is a fantastically stylish magazine-style mixtape service, whereby artists submit tracks directly and, if accepted, paid directly. It’s a non-exclusive, one-shot contract for a single, which then is produced in an attractive and user-friendly digital format. Along with Bandcamp, it threatens to reinvent how we digest and discover music. I emailed Sudara Williams, founder of Ramen, and made him answer some questions he was not entirely comfortable answering. Lucky for me, he’s a super nice, very smart dude:

1. What is the most vital part of your business, both financially and personally?

Providing a sustainable and simple option for recording musicians to reach an audience.

Financially, it’s pretty complicated these days to make money as a recording artist. With Ramen, artists are essentially freelancers, selling us non-exclusive rights to a song for a set amount of money. Keeping things simple, open and transparent is paramount. No royalties. No exclusive agreements. No reports or fees or complicated contracts — just one lump sum payment for publishing their song. We made a commitment that we always pay the majority of our revenues directly out to artists (a minimum of 50%, currently it is around 75%).

From the personal perspective: I am a recording musician. After self-producing my first record, I found that most of the traditional options available to artists are fairly unattractive and difficult to obtain, even if you did want them. Although there’s some awesome services around these days like Spotify, they are primarily awesome for listeners. So, my personal drive was to create a “good example” of a sustainable small music business. Something that I would want to be a part of.

2. In your view, what do others get wrong when attempting to build a business like yours?

With online music, a major pitfall is buying into the fear of “piracy” that has been stoked by the industry. Instead of businesses innovating around “what would be best for our listeners” much effort is spent being protective, creating artificial scarcity, building defenses. This is the wrong direction and alienates a smart online audience.

With small businesses in general, I’m far from the expert! I have the feeling a lot of small businesses fail due to lack of patience or ability to hold on. Unless you have a ton of cash, the first few years can just be about surviving. In my case, having another stream of revenue (programming) helps a bit with that. That leaves the psychological challenges of building something from nothing, dealing with difficulties encountered vs. high expectations, etc.

My big challenge right now is to separate myself personally from the business. I tend to worry, be impatient, have very high expectations and standards. I’m understanding that I must give the business some time and some breathing room and not be too impatient. Starting a small business, you spend a lot of time in first and second gear, and that’s perfectly normal.

3. Do you have specific goals for the future of your business?

I have very specific goals. My biggest right now is to grow our subscriber base to the point where we can pay our artists what I consider a fair sum per track. Currently Ramen is pretty tiny so we pay more like a stipend vs. a living wage. My goal is for Ramen is to pay artists about $1500-2500 per track — something that competes with what one would earn when commissioned or licensing commercially.

If that can be accomplished, my next goals are to continue innovating our format (provide a richer experience to the listeners) and to expand our offerings in order to publish more music and pay more artists.

4. Imagine that the vast majority of businesses were smaller enterprises run directly by the owners, as opposed to giant companies which are publicly held. Do you think this is preferable in terms of avoiding future economic crises? Would it solve any other issues?

I’m not qualified to say too much on these topics! In a variety of cases, I personally prefer smaller businesses. I like walking into my local coffee shop to buy coffee beans. I like talking to the owner about the new roast he’s working on and where the beans come from. These kinds of interactions enrich my life, much more so than a pure financial transaction.

I’ve worked for larger businesses and don’t click with large hierarchal structures and the problems they can create for both customers and employees. It appears to be very difficult to have a large business which treats people like….people. I don’t think this is an inherent failing of big business, rather an inherent difficulty for humans which is amplified the larger and more abstract/complex an organization becomes.

For the vast majority of businesses to be smaller enterprises, I believe western civilization would have accept that many goods and services would skyrocket in price or simply be much less available or consistent. Our culture values cheap and ubiquitous access to goods, so I’m not sure that a majority would be happy with a move in this direction. So, in some way I’d argue large corporations have simply responded well to the increasing material demands of our civilization.

Hopefully the next step is to figure out how to keep offering these kinds of goods and services while ensuring good working conditions, fair pay, sustainable production, and making them available to more than just the relatively wealthy. Perhaps this could be best done with small businesses. Or perhaps this is not possible on any scale and we need to adjust our expectations as a materialistic society. I wouldn’t claim to know!

5. What do you see as the advantages to running a small venture?

1. Being in charge of when and where I work.
2. Being flexible with what type of task I am working on today, follow my motivation.
3. Being able to quickly change direction and respond to feedback.
4. Being in direct personal contact with everyone involved, hearing their ideas & their dreams.
5. Being able to build exactly what I think should exist! (Even though it’s always far from perfect, and always changes along the way .)

6. Any other thoughts on the nature of business ownership?

Balance! In my opinion, this is a big challenge, perhaps the biggest.

There is a misconception that working hard translates into working all the time. There’s always this temptation that there’s something more you can do — right now — and it will make the difference. More often than not, that’s just not true and seems to be a recipe for burning out.

It seems to me like a lot of business owners or self-employed people have trouble stepping back. Knowing when to stop working. Knowing when to take time off. Putting down the computer. Putting away the worries. Getting out of the office. Spending time with family and friends.

Starting a business, there’s this uncertainty, this ideal you are trying to reach, this place you are trying to get to — and of course you are not yet there. I think enjoying that journey with all it’s ups and downs is pretty important.

In addition to helping Leah run her business, I’m casting about to create a business of my own, with her support. Much of the studio’s work comes from helping artists and others create businesses for themselves. She lives that dream and wants others to live it, too. She gave me The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau to read, which compiles stories of folks who accidentally started their businesses either because they couldn’t work for the man any more or because the man couldn’t afford to pay them anymore. It’s getting all the right neurons firing in my lazy monkey brain.

I have a couple of ideas so far, but nothing has quite clicked yet. I have experience in customer service, research and business analysis, EXCELLENT written and verbal communication (as you’ve probably noticed…), and I also really quite enjoy packing things up to be shipped out. I have almost no fine motor skills that might be handy for soldering and construction, no visual artistic ability aside from photography, and you would be hard pressed to find a less appropriate candidate for engineering, software or otherwise. I suppose I could do some selling, but none of that cold-calling crap. I don’t want to make something which requires me to convince people they need it.

Still, there must be some business I can start which will allow me to maximize my particular blend of talents. That way, I can be part of my own solution and not just a sidelined internetly journalist.

You might have noticed a small, niggling economic crisis ongoing in these United States. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and unfortunately for you red-white-blue-types, your votes aren’t going to stop it.

It is GENERALLY accepted that sub-prime loans and their imaginary-money derivatives are to blame for the current state of things. For those of you unfamiliar, the phenomenon was thus: banks sought to make a fortune by offering mortgages to folks who couldn’t afford them. Those people neglected to read the fine print, fraught as it was with bank-favorable terms, which doubly fucked them when they inevitably fell behind on their payments. Financial institutions began selling off the bad loans as repackaged securities — a kind of junk bond gamble that was sure to pay off once people got back on their feet. Except every person on Planet Earth apparently had a vested interest in this working out, including major corporations, whose boards are as incestuous as they are ineffective. So, when the imaginary money pyramid didn’t pan out for some reason(????), people with a lot of money panicked, pressed the red button on their own falling profits to save face at [blue-chip company here], laid off the people who were behind on their mortgages, and pitched us into recession.

You’re right to think that everyone had a role in this. It’s best to live within your means, which, for the vast majority of Americans, involves giving up that whole American Dream business. Because middle-class people are dependent on their upper-class employers to pay them a fair wage in order that they should be able to afford to buy a house and raise a family, a scaling-down of the Dream is often necessary. After all, why should you, Common Laborer, own a house, when the CEO of your company could have three houses, each with crystal-encrusted toilets? Why should you, Common Laborer, expect that the four-year degree you acquired (elitism!) would mean you could ever live comfortably when the policy makers and VPs you rely on refuse to suffer a pay cut when they do a bad job?

Often, the solution is to throw the public a bone by letting those ever-so-trustworthy boards hold back or watching Congress generously freeze pay for a couple of years. (That last link is good news for some of you moderate/fair Republicans out there. Read carefully.) But the damage is done. The rich get richer, in part because they control all of the mechanisms for wealth creation and are able to lobby to limit reforms that might offer a more comfortable life to the lower classes.

What gets me is that the system works like this: Company A makes a product, ostensibly for as many people to buy as possible, thus returning a profit. This is, essentially, where traditional capitalism stops. Of 100% of the cost of an item, 70% represents the cost to create the item, including paying laborers and buying materials, and 30% represents profit beyond all costs. Money in the bank. (I assure you 30% is a very low profit margin for any given consumer good.)

But since the advent of shareholding, and later, blatant profiteering, that 30% isn’t enough. For shareholders — who are often wealthy enough to live at several times the comfort level of the average family in the first place — to make a satisfying profit and trend toward greater wealth, costs must be lowered. More pressure is put on costs to achieve profit growth — not profit, mind you. Profit growth. That is, every single year, a company must not only achieve a profit, but that profit margin must somehow grow. If you’re wondering how this is possible, it isn’t.

So, Company A, seeking to increase profit, moves manufacturing to the next cheapest country, switches to cheaper materials, lobbies for the halting of minimum wage increases, and cuts benefit packages for employees, all while splashing out on marketing and PR redirection. And, generally speaking, the further you get away from actually producing a product within a company, the more you make. Which makes sense, since, you know, customers absolutely ever interact with the physical output of a given CEO. When what you do doesn’t result in a product, you ought to make less. Because you don’t actually do anything but talk. If companies spent their lobbying/marketing budgets on investing in the people that make their company go, much of this tension would cease. Everything in the current system trends toward abstraction (or obfuscation, if you prefer). This is what makes top-down economics completely insane and bottom-up class warfare completely acceptable.

Labor unions make a point of this in negotiations, though the problem with modern labor unions is that they are essentially posturing organizations trying to punish executives by demanding more. What they want is executive compensation reform and an even playing field. What they get is production delays for an inferior product, harming the customer and the organization and achieving virtually zero long-term solutions.

Worse than that, companies don’t even have to make a good, solid product anymore. They just have to have a marketing/PR campaign take off and watch the units fly. Creating a good product which is backed by the originating company is purely the domain of very small business now. Major public companies are not nearly nimble enough with all those executives and shareholders. They don’t have the luxury of taking risks and making brave mistakes that might otherwise lead to incredible breakthroughs.

When shareholding first came about, the idea was that one could offer one’s financial assistance to a growing company in exchange for a small degree of control within that company. But so few shareholders do this now, and as I said before, those boards are so incestuous, it’s a wonder they accomplish anything. All major companies have (wealthy) board members from other major companies. Does that make any sense to you? It’s not knowledge-sharing, it’s admission to the country club.

And all of that comes before the stock market itself. Thanks to the whims of day traders and speculators, even if Company A manages to achieve profit growth sustainably (a miracle, since it is impossible over a long enough timeline), market hysteria can wipe out the value of a company for no apparent reason. Even worse, commodity trading makes it so the cost of producing a product plus profit, like, say, gasoline, nowhere near resembles the market price. Commodity pricing uses this formula: cost of production + profit x future speculation, where future speculation = amount which any number of traders can feasibly profit over the longest period of time.

401ks are built to help people leverage stock ownership into a viable retirement strategy. Let’s say you own shares of 4 companies (not a realistic modern example). You work your whole life, opting to ‘save’ some money by buying stock in these companies, increasing your ownership and say in them until you are able to even shape company policy and push the company in the right direction. Then, one day, all four companies post a modest drop in profit of 3%. (Again, not likely, but possible.) This represents a drop in profit growth, not actual profit. (Sidenote: when earnings come out, it is always year-over-year, or quarter-over-quarter. What that means is: in real terms, profit didn’t decline very much at all, but the amount of dollar bills getting added above costs fell a little since the last time that number was released. Expecting it to climb every single time is completely fucking stupid.) The market reacts via sell-off. The day traders and speculators all ditch their stocks and bang! that money you invested is gone. There is nothing you can do to recover it, it wasn’t your fault, and it isn’t because the companies necessarily did a bad job producing their product. It’s just because the 3% didn’t have a plus sign in front of it. Don’t even get me started on complaints about the +3% not being enough. The market will sell off if they get 3% when they were looking for 5%! There is virtually nothing that separates this from gambling, except that the people who are in charge of these systems don’t call it gambling.

And there’s no helping you if the larger economic scene is nervous, like it has been since…THE DAWN OF GOD-DAMN TIME. The truth is, we have learned virtually nothing from Black Tuesday; it’s just that the federal government — here called FTC and FDIC, among others — have put rules in place to keep you from ending up on the street. But just barely.

Stop speculating. Stop gambling. Stop profiteering for the sake of it. Wealth creation is great, but only if it enables EVERYONE to buy the products their own company makes.

Or, hell, let’s settle for enabling everyone to live comfortably. Guess that probably makes me a communist.

To wit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/az-abortion-bills-arizona-gestational-age_n_1415715.html

Because, c’mon. For the love of fuck, what the hell is happening out there?

Sorry, Arizona. You lose.

ETA: And there you have it.

Well, you’d think so. But there’s all this static. Religious dogma. Jingoism. Ignorance. Misinformation. Misdirection. Resentment. Revenge. It’s a mess. Living a moral life is like rowing a tinfoil canoe through a river of landmines.

If you think about it, you’ll likely discover that everything leads back to the so-called ‘golden rule’ — that is, treat others as you’d like to be treated. This doesn’t mean be perfect or pious or self-righteous; it means behave as you expect others to behave. If you think our military should be blowing people up, maybe don’t act surprised when other people think they should blow you up. It’s a simple transaction.

Similarly, it makes no sense to limit someone else’s happiness because you buy into a given doctrine. Let me be clear, by way of example [too-soon callback alert!]: it is no one’s right to tell gay individuals they cannot be married. When you vote to deny a given group of people protection according to the law, you are causing suffering, often only for a belief that is not universal. It is your right to disagree with it and believe that this group of people is going to your concept of hell, but that’s about it. Civil rights should not be limited on the grounds of belief alone. Religious convictions do not constitute public policy. You can tell this because the law has allowed for the practice and holding of any number of religious convictions. It works both ways. Fairness is an element of morality.

We all make mistakes, but mistakes notwithstanding, the more negative energy you put into the world, the more attention you draw to yourself from negative sources. It’s not strictly karma, but come on. If you’re a rotten bastard, you’ll eventually be surrounded by rotten bastards and rotten things will happen to you. It’s only a matter of time.

Bodhipaksa, a self-proclaimed skeptical Buddist, offers this about resentment, which is directly related to your treatment of others. We all hold grudges, especially when we feel that we’re justified in doing so. Which is fine; hold grudges if you want them to also be held against you. That’s a choice you make. You know about right and wrong and still choose wrong. That’s human nature. But, at the end of the day, you should be trying as hard as you can to choose right.

One thing that I think helps is to live not as one book would have you live, but hundreds. Instead of taking your code of conduct from an anachronism that has proven to be dangerous in almost any context, it makes sense to read hundreds and hundreds of volumes, of all kinds, to develop a texture of experience. Get different viewpoints and play them off of one another. Comparison shopping for the mind, I guess.

One of the key aims of successful art is to re-contextualize truth so that we might reflect on it. So, if you’re reading hundreds of books where characters are making questionable moral judgements, you start to get an idea of how we as people interact. It’s not going to give you all the answers, but combined with our personal experience, you can develop a pretty serious moral code. Do the right thing not because a singular book tells you that a singular being wants you to do the right thing, but because it’s the right thing to do.