The TV episode unfolded, and “super-hot girl” and “cool handsome guy” were playing a game of innuendo and denied interest. I sat there grinning at the verbal tennis, enjoying the episode much more than expected. And then suddenly with a minute left (thank you, reliable sitcom clock!) it became clear there would be sex. And I frowned.

Why? Honestly, the non-sexual part was more interesting. The anticipation, the intrigue, the chance they “might” not be together, was much more pleasant than the actual resolution. The sexual possibilities themselves were rather mundane. "Shipping" was more fun.

The “joy in the journey” optimism hides a devastating secret. Most destinations are overrated. The joy is ONLY in the journey and anticipation. The ‘Shire is better remembered than it is is re-experienced. Do the cynical math, and perhaps imagining idealized couplings and connections, or experiencing the very beginning of such journeys, is better than the destination. ‘Ship me to the moon, but only in twilight.

Even as a Christian, it's somewhat acceptable to admit sexual lust exists in one's heart. (Thanks, Jimmy Carter!). You'll quickly get into this nice pleasant conversation about how everyone has sexual desires, it's just a matter of balance or expression or knowing oneself or something something. Sexual lust is acceptable and detectable.

But...what about our desire for violence, and its cousins vengeance and anger? Do we easily come to grips with our desire to inflict violence on others, whether with our own two hands or through the actions of others? Are we really so innocent if we keep a TV screen between us and the violence? or delegate the vengeance to soldiers overseas after our country is attacked?

And what about the way violence and sex go together? The way that more violent men are seen as sexually desirable, more virile. There's a dissertation somewhere on the complicated relationship between female sexual desires and violence, and I'll just tread lightly to mention that it's complicated, and move on. The way that more calm, peaceful men will follow a violent man, be his assistants and his apologists, hold the victims as he beats them.

I'm being my educational, annoying self as I ask these questions, but I feel that we have to come to grips with the desire for violence within us. We're "civilized" in America, we claim, we have police and soldiers, we don't have to get our hands dirty and bloody anymore. But in our hearts, well, that one guy just elbowed me a little too vigorously on the basketball court, and I want to give him one quick elbow to the face. It's shocking how natural violence feels, how fast impulse can travel from brain to hand, how in some ways man seems made to kill. Robert E. Lee was right: "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it."

Think about it, and let me know if I'm crazy, or if you learned something new about yourself.

In what ways have you seen me change in last five years? Answer via message if necessary. In return I will ask you a personal question unless you ask me not to.

One of the odder things I find about dating is how, in today’s culture, it feels like the man should care second. That it’s the woman who first says “I love you,” who exhibits some type of romantic loonery, who decides that the couple should have “THE TALK” about feelings that ends up in both of them being in a relationship. Then the man responds in kind, and the relationship can unfold. What’s the man supposed to do before the woman does something caring? I suppose the man struggles with important dilemmas like “I kind of like her, but this one cute girl liked my last FB status update, so I don’t know.”

What happens when a man violates this rule, and cares first? In my experience, commitment/strong attachment occurs very quickly, or the woman runs off wailing “Creeper!”, depending on how hot the guy is various factors.

But I suppose the oddest thing about the “Caring Second” game is that often, men are faster to like someone and get attracted than women. So why does American culture seem to somehow expect the woman to make the first emotional step? I’m not sure who is more insulted by this stereotypical expectation, the man or the woman. Hmm.

So I've finished my wildly popular Scientist series, which averaged a scintillating 1.25 comments per entry, and thus, it's time to sum it all up. Why did I write it?

I was at a research conference the day the series came to me, and I couldn't help but think that scientists are poorly understood by the general public. It's easy to see scientist as objective calculators. But there are other emotions that lurk beneath the surface. There's obsession, envy, the desperate struggle to stay objective when there are huge rewards for selling out, the desire for power and to control one's universe, to subjugate nature underneath your feet.

Scientist exist to test the world, but also to see if a structure of logic can cover chaos. There's this compulsive desire to keep testing things until they break, to push things to the limits, all while trying to remain self-controlled and follow standard procedure. I feel the emotional lives of scientists are horribly understudied, the way they put so much of themselves into tasks, the odd contrasts and paradoxes that go into the creation of new human knowledge. And while they try to deny it, there's always whispers of the artist around their work, whispers that the scientist denies but cannot refute, just as artists resist comparisons to scientists.

In the end, I find that science fiction itself does little justice to scientists, let alone news reports and biographies. And thus I wrote my little trilogy, and I found it hugely rewarding. What have your experiences been with scientists?

After the broken machine, there was...spouse?

The scientist was never sure how it happened. There was no discrete event that could be pointed to, no signpost or signifier. One day the scientist rolled out of bed after a sleepless night, and realized that her search was over. There were no red flags and lots of green ones, and finally he saw the checkered flag in the distance, much closer than he expected, beckoning him onward. And so the scientist made it proper in the eyes of God and the law and ma and pa, and the search was over. Not another scientist, not another crazy lover, not another machine, but someone that combined elements of all three in a satisfying blend.

After the spouse, there was...change.

Lots and lots of change, hard-won knowledge. The scientist used to appreciate the story of one-eyed Odin as a scientific analogy, now he saw it as a retelling of romance. When two become one, one loses perspective, loses the vision in one eye. But the other eye sees more than ever before, and the scientist appreciated his sharper vision. He had always struggled with prioritizing, but having a spouse gave him the ability to sort and decide in more rapid fashion. She learned much from this one man, and she kept notes as she learned, and suddenly mankind seemed an open book before her, and she gasped and wondered why men had ever seemed so opaque when they were but glass houses, easily marred with a single word that ever hurt them.

After the change there were...no experiments.

The scientist couldn't people-watch anymore. Because to know one so deeply is to know others better, and he now understood better how people worked who were not scientists. And he, scientist, was Einstein in the late 30's and Rappaccini in the garden, owner of powerful knowledge and considering its applications. And she, scientist, was Pandora with a box of power and Satan sinuously wrapped 'round the tree, now possessing something that was wanted, and able to extract a high price for it. But the scientist gave up their powers when they put on the one ring, or rather, committed those powers to the other wearer of the ring. So the ring stayed on, and so the lab gathered dust except for spousal studies. The days passed on, and the book of love lost another scientist and was the better for it.

The End.

After the crazy, there was...machine.

The scientist staggered toward the machine. She took every precaution, he donned his lab coat like it was a straightjacket, covering every inch of his flesh, protecting himself from any sudden movement of the machine. The experiments began, cautiously, safely...and finished properly. For appropriate stimuli, there were appropriate responses. Bad input was met with bad output, good input was rewarded. There was order, there was rhythm...and the scientist and the machine were one.

After the machine, there was...machine.

The scientist stayed up late (very late) and got up early, bonding ever closer with the machine. It was hard to tell where machine ended and scientist began, her hands constantly roaming along the border as if touch was taste and contact was osmosis. Osmosis? Yes, the scientist was ready to take in all input from the machine. She wore less safety equipment each time. He loosened his lab coat, left his goggles to gather dust. They understood machine, the machine understood them, and on that data they built intelligence and then synergy, pushing each other to ever greater telepathic heights.

After the machine, there were...parts.

The scientist has retraced her steps every day for a year, trying to pinpoint the moment when she broke the machine. He just remembers his final query, spoken to the machine, awaiting the machine to translate his words into action and logic as it always did. Then, the pause...and the machine's e-ink display going blank. The dots, filling the screen: ............................ she hated those dots, the way they signal pause and period, the ending of flow and the beginning of nothing. He had become an optimist, he bitterly reflected, he waited for those dots to become words, and they did.

The machine decomposed him, spit her experiments back at her, exposed the logician as liar and the sage as silly. The machine would not serve a broken human, the machine would only serve a higher machine. And the scientist looked at her hands and felt the blood inside the fingers pounding to get out, exposing her as weak animal rather than the bionic cyborg. He looked back at the machine finally, but the machine had silently collapsed into efficient piles of screws and steel, defying all efforts to be re-assembled, serving as mute testimony that the scientist...was not really a scientist at all. And she wept like Marie Curie when Pierre was crushed by the army horses, and suddenly the Nobel was far, far away...

In an excerpt from a letter to a younger colleague, the bitter scientist reports on the aftermath of the crazy lover:

...The cure is always knowledge, they say. Know more of how she thinks and acts. Know more about why he likes this and smiles at that. Build a database, build an infogram, build structures and create sutures and know, know, know.

But what does all this knowledge do? It is a pretty parlor game, sitting at coffee and rattling off her psychological profile, his sexual preferences and peculiarities. One might confuse this knowledge with actual power. One would be wrong.

They mapped the human genome, you know. They thought to build a tower to the heavens, thought that to know ourselves would be to cure ourselves. They failed, because we are not who we are, we are the the spaces between who we are, the strands and the silk and the connections.

So go on, young scholar, know it all, know exactly why she walks away from you and where you went wrong and what parts logic and illogic went into each choice he made. Your knowledge can do nothing for you. I am off, in search of one that will respond to my mechanics and methods. I seek...machine.

Next: The Scientist and the Machine

In the beginning there was data, and it was good.

A torrent of data, seeing, feeling, hearing data, constant and complex, filling the senses to satisfaction. Finally, the sample size was large enough, the study could be run. The scientist smiled, taking it all in, laughed, then exulted. The lover continued responding, initiating, creating. It was intoxicating, it was fulfilling, and finally the neurons fire and tingle and the information rushes from the senses to the brain and the scientist is delirious with data, enthralled with emotion...

In the middle there was data, and it was noisy.

Noisy data, confusing in its patterns, contradictory in its conclusions, and the scientist rebalanced his spreadsheet, reloaded her computer. Certainly there was logic, certainly this was just a matter of more study, redoubling one's efforts, recalculating one's steps. The scientist must try harder to understand. The scientist was disappointing himself, disappointing her lover, why couldn't this work? Perhaps there was a mistake, there were books to study, there were colleagues to inquire from, the experiment must work, the scientist was so close, the lover was providing so much data, why couldn't he just solve for X...

In the end there was data, and it was X, and the value of X did not exist.

The scientist broke down, sobbing among her papers, looking up at the whiteboard. The whiteboard held the last calculations, performed in the absence of the crazy lover. No data, no memories, no grand theories, just a series of arrows, arrows that should lead from point A to point B, but that instead led in a loop to E, the End, the end of the experiment, the realization that X did not exist, that there was no solution to the mystery and magic, that behind each door was another door to the vast cavern of nothingness....End was reached. X did not exist. The crazy lover was not X, to be known, but EX...the end of X.

In the fantasy book The Black Cauldron, two young men join Prince Gwydion on various quests involving the Black Cauldron, a tool that can generate deathless soldiers of evil. Taran is the naive, lovable one, while Prince Ellidyr is the arrogant, angry, unlikeable one. At the book's conclusion, it is not Taran who saves the day. Instead, the proud, angry Prince Ellidyr gives his life to stop Morgant from using the Black Cauldron. Why? I remember reading the book and being stunned by the ending. I thought Taran would be the hero! Why Elldyr?

Perhaps Ellidyr, in his evil, saw just how evil Morgant could be if he had incredible power. Armed with this knowledge, he knew death was not too much a sacrifice to stop evil. And so he freely gave his life--a life that had itself been rather wasted by Ellidyr's arrogance and pride.

We want our heroes to be clean and neat. We want them to be Taran; blank slates of innocence that suddenly come together to do great things. But perhaps we don't realize that those who have felt and been evil best recognize its horrors. Charles Ramsey, who rescued those women who were kidnapped, was himself arrested for domestic violence about a decade ago. Charles Ramsey said that when he heard Amanda Berry calling for help, he recognized it was a domestic violence situation. He rushed to the house, kicked in the door, and freed her. Is it possible that he recognized what was happening because he knows what domestic abuse looked like?

Make sure to get what I'm saying here. Charles Ramsey did a terrible thing a decade ago. And I've never been too impressed by the "Only people who did X can ever understand other people who did X." But we would be wise not to quickly discard heroes with dirty hands. That dirt may be what caused them to want to be a hero, to know how vigorously one must fight to stop evil wherever it is found. The post-shaming of heroes ignores the realities of human frailties and triumphs.