Brown Girl Dreaming, Zelda, and Some Pretty Deep Sh

If someone had taken that book out of my hand said,
You’re too old for this maybe
I’d never have believed that someone who looked like me
could be in the pages of the book
that someone who looked like me had a story. - Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming

I'm going to get to the book eventually but there's a thing I can't stop thinking about and that thing is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You guys I am very late to this party, but party it is. The kind of party I was never invited to because to me parties were just an excuse to have your mom buy soda and chips and do the same thing you did with your friends every other weekend except without the soda and chips. We did not have girls at parties, for example. Oh my goodness no. Or music or disco balls or whatever.

On TV parties seemed to consist of groups of attractive people standing around in small clusters in a living room while music played and people made out in the multitude of bedrooms that are in the house that belong to apparently nobody. That's not the kind of party I'm talking about, either. Breath of the Wild is like the kind of party that lasts several days and outrageous things happen but somehow every one of those strange things was supposed to happen and you can't imagine life in a universe where it did not happen.

I've lost the thread when talking about parties. What Breath of the Wild does is make me feel like a kid again, which is apparently the only goal my entire generation has anymore. Check out the mall sometime and you'll see. Everything is throwbacks to my childhood. It's hard not to be a narcissist when it genuinely feels like the entirety of modern commerce is aimed directly at you.

Look at this hallway, for example. You probably can't read all of the titles, but in one hallway in the movie theater we have a screen showing a Justice League movie, two showing a new Star Wars movie, and a Thor movie. 

Adult me to teenage me walking out of Batman and Robin, sure that another comic movie will never be made and already grieving the disaster that was the Star Wars re-releases with the special 90s era computer graphics shoehorned in: hang in there

I used to collect these pink little wrestler action figures called M.U.S.C.L.E. I had no idea at the time, but apparently they were based on a Japanese Manga. I just thought they were awesome. Like so many awesome things (like hair), they went away as I grew up.

That is until my generation got careers and our own kids and (some of us, not me) ended up with a lot of disposable income.

So those are back. So are Garbage Pail Kids and Terminator 2 action figures and a Funko Pop for every. thing. that. ever. happened. The only thing I'm really missing to make it complete is for someone to sell me something embarrassing I can wear to really show how middle-aged I now am- WHAT IS THAT

OK, does that cup come with green slime in it or instructions on how to make it? What was that Nickelodeon green slime made of, anyway? Of course the internet knows. According to Marc Summers, at least, it's vanilla pudding, applesauce, oatmeal, and green food coloring. I wish I'd looked closer to see if we're dealing with a liquid, a solid, or a plasma here.

I've got more of this, you guys. I take pictures of it every time. Remember how bad Saved by the Bell was? It was so bad. Of course I need a Bayside jacket.

This is another aside. I recently ran into an old friend and my wife was asking about him. The closest thing I could come up with was to compare his group of friends with a group she knew in high school. "Oh," she said. "They aren't popular, but everyone likes them."

She summarized everything wrong with high school, and perhaps humanity in that one sentence. Of course that's what popular means, and yet it did not. Popular has nothing to do with how many people like you, and everything to do with who. It is the hyper elite group of kids who very few like but everyone envies. They're like bitcoin. They were popular because they were popular. In retrospect, such an existence must be terrifying in its fragility. What if everyone suddenly realizes this house of cards is built on a foundation of lies? The Bayside kids were regularly manipulative and terrible, and left a trail of broken spirits and ruined lives in their path on the regular. If Zach Morris were a senator now, we'd be calling for his resignation.

Obviously we don't really like this stuff, because most of it was demonstrably bad and arguably damaging to our very psyches. No. What we want is to feel like kids again because when you were a kid a lot of things were possible that we've since realized were bald lies. Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, basic human kindness, a president who you would actually be excited to meet in real life who would not make comments about your weight before giving you candy. As adults we learn that these things do not, in fact, exist. Like, when you're a kid, who's to say that dragons don't exist somewhere. I mean, dinosaurs are real. The only difference between a pterodactyl and a dragon is the fire thing and the fact that pterodactyls are famously and severely allergic to gold. 

We don't really want to hold Nintendo cartridges or our old TMNT Party Wagons again. We want to believe in dragons again. No amount of plastic stuff made poorly in China with terrible box art will ever make that happen. I'm sorry to break it to you, but I also think I might be saving you a lot of time and money and freeing up some shelf space on which you can put your children's drawings or pickleball trophies or whatever it is you decide to do with your free time now.

What I'm saying is that Breath of the Wild makes me believe in dragons again. When I was a kid the first Legend of Zelda came out and somehow fulfilled every promise made by that gold cartridge. It was chock-full of secrets that we shared with one another during recess, a bunch of indoor kids crouched in the shade so that our pale, pale skin wouldn't burst into flames. I didn't have a Nintendo, so I played at my friend Billy's house, probing around in the world for secret passages and lighting bushes on fire. There's nothing that has captured that feeling until the new one. Oh, and also it has dragons.

This post isn't about video games, though, that's just where I could go with it because I couldn't figure out what to write about and realized what sweatshirt I was wearing.

It's this one.

What it's really about is Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson's memoir of childhood. I realized that my posts have been super political for the last, oh, year or so for no reason that I can really think of. I could definitely go there again here, because Woodson grew up black in The South. All of that stuff is in here, and I don't want to downplay that. I'd be deeply ashamed if she read this post and thought that my main takeaway from her brilliant book was to talk about a video game with a white male protagonist.

Ms. Woodson, I'm delighted and amazed that you are here, and I want to thank you for the many and deep conversations I had about race and inequality with my kids while reading them your book.

We all have the same dream, my grandmother says. To live equal in a country that’s supposed to be the land of the free. She lets out a long breath, deep remembering.

I've talked about the subject a lot on here, and plan on talking about it more. I also think that Brown Girl Dreaming transcends that topic and explores so much more. Woodson writes with astonishing clarity and memory of childhood, which was filled with many wonderful and beautiful moments.

The empty swing set reminds us of this--
that bad won't be bad forever,
and what is good can sometimes last
a long, long time.

The entire book is written in free-form poetry, which may sound exhausting unless you read it out loud. It forces a rhythm that sounds real and authentic. My kids listened intently when I think they could have easily zoned out if instead it were prose, a form which Woodson is also pretty great at. It also reminds me what's fun and scary and traumatic and sad about being a kid. Her brother suffers from lead poisoning, her grandpa rocks with her on the swings and she helps him garden, her uncle brings lavish gifts until one day he goes to prison instead.

Woodson suffers from something like dyslexia. She has a hard time immediately understanding words, instead reading the same stories over and over until she can recite them from memory. Maybe this shapes her ability to write her own verse and poems. One day her teacher calls her a writer, and she realizes it's true. 

It's easier to make up stories
than it is to write them down. When I speak, the words come pouring out of me. The story
wakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair, crosses one leg over the other, says,
Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on.

Here we go, and I want you to hang on tight. The Legend of Zelda's lead designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, said that the inspiration of the game was based on his own explorations as a child in the woods near Kyoto. The dungeons were based on his childhood home, which he thought of as a maze with identical paper doors. Miyamoto wanted to feel like a kid again, so he made something that wasn't an exact replica of his childhood, instead he created what his childhood felt like.

The developers of Breath of the Wild wanted to make something that brought back the feelings the first one did, the kind of thing that led to children again sharing hints on the playground, so the director had the designers come up with a 2d version of the game that mimicked the original. The result wasn't just a nice new coat of paint on the old game, but something entirely new.

When Jacqueline Woodson approaches her childhood, it's with spare freeform poetry. The writing is simple and unadorned, but uses a very advanced technique. You can watch someone who is a master with words put herself in that old place. Using the words she knew as a young girl, she forms them into patterns where every letter is slaved over and every break in the sentence structure designed. Like all incredibly difficult things, it looks effortless. Kind of makes you think there is magic out there still.

The Female of the Species and Is Murder Sometimes Amazing? Discuss.

You can love someone down to their core and they can love you right back just as hard, and if you traded diaries you’d learn things you never suspected. There’s a part of everyone deep down inside of them not meant for you. - Mindy McGinnis, The Female of the Species

I think this is going to be one of those posts that are just a straight up review of the book. I hope you stick with me, because we're definitely going to get into some real stuff here that hopefully applies to you and me and, uh, the entire human race. But here's the deal: I am pretty picky about the books I read and I gave this one 3 stars which is almost as low as it seems to get.

I like books, it turns out, and the ones I don't finish, I don't write about. Take The Goldfinch, for example. I might give it another chance, but I listened to it all of the way to Moab and back and a large portion of that drive was outside of cell service. This meant that I didn't have any other options, since my phone is always full of dumb pictures I took because they might be good Instagram jokes and I always end up streaming music and podcasts. So I was stuck with The Goldfinch and I almost threw my phone out of the window. I have a hardcopy at home that I bought at a thriftstore with the idea that maybe I would give it away as a contest to get more people reading my blog but then I had a thought that what if they don't like my blog? 

There are like two worst case scenarios there. I say let's have a giveaway with good books in it (I thought The Goldfinch was a good book back then haha) and then a bunch of strangers go to my blog and say this is bad and then they put on my Facebook page the words "this is bad," and I feel sadder than Rian Johnson when people send him death threats because he broke Star Wars. The other worst case scenario is that nobody participates at all and then I look like a fool.

I don't want to talk about my problems with The Goldfinch, though, other than it seems like roughly 40% of the words in that book don't matter and do nothing to advance the story in any way whatsoever. Ugh. I hated it. I don't think I'm going to finish it ever. Just seeing it on my nightstand makes me angry. Maybe I'll light it on fire?

Again, though, what I want to talk about is The Female of the Species, by Mindy McGinnis. I am sorry to say that this book is kind of a mess. I mean, three stars is still means that there is more good than bad. It was interesting enough for me to finish it for sure, and the ending almost, almost saved it. But the more I think about it, the more frustrated I get.

The cover is very fun

There are huge swaths of this book that I am totally here for. It's written all in first-person and puts us in the minds of three characters, two of whom are interesting. They are Alex, who is a murderer, Peekay, who is the pastor's kid (PK do you get it? Her real name is Claire), and Jack, who is the smartest kid in school and also the best athlete and also the handsomest. Jack has it really hard.

I get why Jack's there, because it's important to have a male perspective on the dumpster fire of misogyny that is the town and high school where these three teens live. But from what I remember almost the entirety of his chapters are about how his feelings for this girl are different than how he's ever felt for a girl before. This is definitely a real thing I identified with, and is probably not just a guy thing. He gets that he's attracted to women on a physical level and is kind of amazed by how it feels to be into a girl on a deeper level. I just don't think we need to hear him say it one million times. Also he's kind of dumb for being so smart. I guess maybe that's on purpose because even smart guys are hormone monsters? I'm not going to even dispute that point because it's probably right, but it makes for an awful protagonist.

Why am I talking about Jack anyway when you might be stuck on the first part where I said that Alex is a murderer? See, her older sister Anna was horribly tortured and murdered by a man in their town who got off on a technicality who in turn ends up dead after himself being tortured. We learn this in the first chapter, by the way, so it's not a spoiler. Alex isn't a sociopath; perhaps she is too empathetic. But she knows that there is something wrong with her. 

The books didn't help me find a word for myself; my father refused to accept the weight of it. And so I made my own.
I am vengeance.

She and Peekay meet while volunteering at the animal shelter, and in spite of Alex's persistent avoidance of any human intimacy, they become friends. Peekay is going through a breakup and is in a bit of a self-destructive spiral of drinking and dangerous behavior, and Alex's years of quiet analysis of the people around her give her unique perspectives on what's going on. Some terrible things happen and Alex is uniquely capable of dealing with them.

I am a wolf that my sister kept in a cage, until her hand was removed. I have been out, curious as I wake up from a lethargic solitude, self-enforced because I know I don’t belong here. It’s not safe for me to be out, but they rattled my cage. First Claire and then Jack. And now I’m awake, deviating from the paths I created in order to remain stable. I’m out, I’m awake, and afraid I won’t be easily put back.

This is all amazing and fascinating. The two girls' reaction to the testosterone in and out of their school swings between bemusement and anger. A boy tries to pretend-kiss Alex and she reveals her martial arts skills brutally. The school hottie "steals" Peekay's boyfriend and Peekay blames her alone. Alex isn't having it. "She likes boys," she says. "and she can get them. You were hurt by that, but it wasn’t Branley who hurt you. It was Adam."

Alex is deep and self-aware, but acts on instinct, the results of which are sometimes gruesome. "Some might think me too harsh," she thinks. "But some men should be marked. I’m fit for that task." Peekay is a messed-up mix of being raised next to the neighborhood church, but McGinnis avoids the cliche of the overbearing religious parents and makes her mom and dad amazing and loving and understanding. 

If either one of you is ever in a situation you’re not entirely comfortable with—call me. I don’t care what time it is. I don’t care who is there or what is going on. You call me and I will come get you.

Compared to these complex and interesting characters, Jack feels empty and boring. I can't tell if he was inserted to bring romance to the book and maybe attract a larger audience, but I'd have a hard time pointing out any character growth in him. If he was supposed to be a male presence who learned from Alex about how it is being a girl where every boy surrounding her seemed intent on either drawing penises on her locker or sending her pictures of one, I don't think he ever made that step. 

But boys will be boys, our favorite phrase that excuses so many things, while the only thing we have for the opposite gender is women, said with disdain and punctuated with an eye roll.

 Sometimes the "I am vengeance" thing can get played up a little too hard, but there is certainly a satisfaction to seeing the boys and men who manage to parade around the world with no regard for their impact getting comeuppance from a slight, yet very powerful young woman. And thankfully McGinnis didn't just write a book of revenge fantasy. While the local police force seems completely oblivious to almost anything and the ancillary kids seem unable to make some pretty basic connections, there are real emotional consequences.

The byline that interested me in this book was something like, "If Veronica Mars is the Phillip Marlowe of teen girls, Alex is the Dexter." In reality it is both more and less than that. More in the deep exploration of characters, less in the gleeful wallowing in the details of murder. In both cases, I think it's for the better. There's a lot of very good stuff here, I just wish I liked it more.

Similar to Bad Romance, a book I wrote about a while ago, The Female of the Species is very frank about underage sex, drinking, and language, and is aimed at older teens. It would easily get an R rating if it were a movie. And just like the former book, it has ideas that should be read by both teen girls and boys. Unfortunately, I feel like by the time I think a teen is mature enough to handle it, they've probably already been exposed to much of what is in these pages. I don't begrudge either author's choices, since I think the way they frankly handle these situations without being preachy probably means more teens will read it, but if you're aware of a book that handles these topics in a way that's more appropriate for, say, my 11-year old daughter, I'd love to hear about it.

Vaddey Ratner and the Birth of a New Meme

Truth, she believed, lies in what is said as much as in what isn't, in the same way that a melody not only is a sequence of audible notes but encompasses the spaces and pauses in between. When listening to music, you must learns to take in even the atmosphere of an echo. - Vaddey Ratner, Music of the Ghosts

I don't like gambling. I've done it just a few times and have found that the thrill of winning pales in comparison to the deep sickening feeling I get when I watch money that I earned while spending time away from my family and video games disappears for no other reason than the wrong card being given to me at a blackjack table. If I did, though, I would still bet against the United States descending into an authoritarian nightmarescape. Even if I wrote a book about it once.

Depending on which side of the aisle you're on (because American politics is essentially a wedding where you're either related to one or the other (ideally) but could never possibly know both of them) we were either the closest we've ever gotten to dictatorship from 2008 to 2016, or we're on the very brink of it today. What this tells me isn't that this country is careening towards autocracy and it's going to be a coin flip of who is in power when it finally happens, but that the way we talk about our politics has gotten so extreme that every election is now life or death; it's either the end of the world or the sunrise after an endless period of darkness.

Here's what December always brings up for me, and it's one of the few things about social media that I consider genuinely worthwhile; and that is variations on my year in review. Because I am prolific on Facebook and Instagram in a way that I can only assume is an embarrassment to my friends and family, these retrospectives are more or less accurate portrayals of the year I had so far. The fact that I have to face every time is that wow, I had a pretty good year.

This year my wonderful grandpa died, and that sucked, but also I had some time to really think about what an amazing influence he had and continues to have on my life. I've had some fun visits with my grandma since, and seeing aspects of her personality emerge that I hadn't seen before has been kind of a delight. I watched my son sack a ton of quarterbacks while playing flag football, my daughter win first place in a Taekwondo tournament, and my other daughter write an adorable prize-winning poem. I had a great garden, wrote a novel, and got to watch Thor: Ragnarok while holding hands with a pretty girl. Kesha came out with an amazing album. My kidney numbers have held steady and the estimate on their function came back as the highest it has since my diagnosis. We're well on our way to fulfilling the wishlist of this year's refugee family and then some. That's a lot of good stuff.

We lost some cool rock stars, which I tend not to get worked up about in general but had a hard time processing Tom Petty and Chris Cornell, especially. But Roger Ailes and Hugh Hefner died and the world is a slightly nicer place without those Crypt Keepers' musty stank hanging over it. I hope Marilyn Monroe gets to personally push the button to the trapdoor that drops Hugh into hell. May they never rest in eternal torment, amen.

I know that tons of people are dealing with terrible years for various reasons. This year I spent at least a dozen nights in emergency rooms around the county comforting victims of sexual assault who are inevitably still dealing with that fallout, approximately 800,000 kids whose only home is and has ever been the United States are spending their Christmas holiday anxiously awaiting some kind of decision on their future here while they are tossed around like a political hacky sack, and in the midst of what is almost certainly the worst refugee crisis in written history, we are offering escape to the fewest number in over ten years and two presidencies. I won't pretend to extrapolate my good fortune to the whole world, but have to face the fact that while the news articles I read daily suggest that the world is only a dark place and getting darker, somehow pleasant and even inspiring things just keep on happening.

It would be silly to not recognize that I stand to specifically benefit from many of the horrible headlines I read, and I won't pretend that as a white Christian man I am at anything but the least risk of the current administration. When I hurt from reading headlines that lead to more people being hurt, oppressed, harassed, and killed, I can usually hide from it without it intruding specifically into my life on a daily basis. I have not been left stranded at an airport, suddenly without a country to live in, or deported while trying to drop my daughter off at school.

In spite of all this I still feel like the checks and balances put into place at the foundation of this country are holding remarkably well. It's ugly and gross and counter-productive sometimes. The political posturing and metaphorical throwing of bags of dog doo from one backyard to another by neighbors who never speak to each other directly is tiresome. But like a vulnerable community sitting under a massive reservoir, I'm pleased to see that while it doesn't look like much, the dam has worked. The checks and balances I remember my son singing about in elementary school actually exist.

I say all this because I just read my second book by Vaddey Ratner about the Cambodian revolution and subsequent years of mass murder and oppression. I just reread my post about her first book, In the Shadow of the Banyan, and I'll be darned if it wasn't pretty good! I never know right after I write them, but revisiting this one from August I ended up kind of proud of myself. That part is neither here nor there, though. What is here and also there somehow is what I talked about then, which is probably a common theme from these posts. That point is this: there are no guarantees whatsoever that any thriving democratic society will remain that way without a fight.

Here's a bit of what I said then

Instead of saying, "this is just like 1984," when a hypothetical President of The United States questions a judge because of his race, or pushes for torture of political prisoners, or mocks war heroes, or builds the least-educated cabinet in 24 years or fabricates lies whole cloth in order to stir up anger against a certain ethnic group or leads a group of teenage kids in a chant of his name for no reason other than to prop up his pathetic ego when the news makes him sad, say "this is just like the countless other charismatic leaders who slowly eroded the very fabric of a nation that was built to protect us against someone just like him."

That's still a fear I have now, of course. But like I said at the beginning here, I still wouldn't bet on it. Because I'm a curious person and looking things up is a distraction from the many, many responsibilities I have as an adult, I looked up where the term "the fourth estate" in regards to the press came from. It looks like the earliest mention was in 1787 by Edmund Burke. I always thought it meant a fourth branch of the US government, but it goes back way further than that. Early references were in regard to British Parliament. Later it was mentioned in reference to the French Revolution. The other three estates in that context were the clergy (the Lords Spiritual), the nobility (the Lords Temporal), and the commoners (the Commons). Like today, the media has always gotten flack, sometimes rightly so, but I also think that if the dam keeping us safe is the concrete and reinforcements within, the press is the wooden scaffolding that holds it up from the outside.

The reason I was thinking about this was an article critiquing the press from a few days ago. First of all, the writer refers to the debacle as a "humiliation orgy," and honestly I feel like that's kind of redundant because is there any other kind? Second, there's an important thing here that keeps swimming around my brain. To begin with, CNN misreported the dates on an email sent to Donald Trump, Jr. The dates in this case were very important, and could point to severe wrongdoing during the campaign if they were correct. The problem was that they were not. The mistake probably confirmed the suspicions of people who have long thought of CNN as a peddler of yellow journalism.

Which, fine. It looks like it was probably an honest mistake, but for a lot of people who don't like seeing bad headlines about the people they've decided to blindly follow, I'm sure it was a great vindication of what they've been saying all along. The kicker is that the story that CNN blew it so badly was broken by the Washington Post. Right. That liberal rag that exclusively publishes every whim of George Soros as he weaves his secret web of lies while being fed grapes by lizard people and constantly pushing the eggs that will hatch into an army of social justice warriors from his pulsating ovipositor. Like, make up your mind. Is it fake news or it is only fake if you don't like the headline, and the God's honest if you do? If that is the case I submit to you that you are wrong and history will not judge you kindly.

What this tells me is that they system is working. There are so many news sources right now. Some of them are blatant in their bias, others have an editorial staff with clear loyalty but try their best to avoid bias in their news reporting, and some aggressively pursue neutrality to the point of false balance fallacy. But all this noise coalesces like a crowd at a basketball chanting "air ball;" somehow there are enough people in key enough that the overall effect kind of sounds like a chant. In the case of the basketball game it should be a musical chant that results in the utter humiliation of the guy on the court who blew it, and in the press it should be, well, basically the same.

It's hard not to think of this kind of thing while reading Ratner's newest book, Music of the Ghosts. While it tells the story of new characters, it could easily be read as a sequel to In the Shadow of the Banyan. Ratner was a child when she fled Cambodia, and her first-person account of those atrocities was mildly fictionalized in that first book. In Music of the Ghosts, we meet Teera, who also fled Cambodia as a child and returns to Phnom Penh later as a successful adult. At the same time we meet The Old Musician, who was part of the communist revolution that so ravaged the nation. As was common, he fell out of favor with The Organization and spent years in a fictionalized version of one of the country's worst prisons, where he underwent daily torture and betrayed his friends regularly to make it stop.

The two characters: one an innocent victim of the regime and the other a willing participant, eventually meet. Their stories are indicative of the people who have returned to Phnom Penh as ex- soldiers, prisoners, or often both. Teera herself is ambivalent, since it was a young Khmer Rouge soldier who led her out of Cambodia to safety as a child, only to leave her at the border to return to find more people like her to save. The war is still so raw, not even a generation later, and people who were tortured almost to death ride in cabs driven by soldiers who may have participated, both haunted by what they saw and did.

The exploration of a nation in which nearly a quarter of its population was murdered is fascinating, and like in her first book, Ratner does a great job exploring how it occurred, and how families were torn apart regardless of which side they chose. We need to hear these stories, and spread them. There is no substitute for big long books about what happened to help us prevent it from happening again. During the revolution, any skills that were not agrarian were systematically rooted out. In the aftermath, there were no doctors left. The Organization claimed that hard work was the only way to cure ills. Medical students gathered old text books that had somehow survived and taught themselves; often a second-year student would be the only one able to teach the new first-years.

The reason I bet against the worst case scenario is not just because of brave politicians who stand up against the most terrible of human tendencies, even it if means the loss of their job. It's not just because of dogged reporters who verify their sources and break news that is damaging to both parties. It's also because of storytellers like Ratner. Firsthand accounts of what has happened are the best armor against what could happen, but it only works if we know about them. We will never get the nuance and emotion of these experiences from 10 minute videos on Youtube or long Facebook rants. This might be a big surprise at this point but my biggest point of all the points I wanted to make here is this, and go ahead and make a meme of this because it's clever as heck; Books. They're good.

Akata Witch and Nanowrimo Hangover

Lambs think money and material things are the most important thing in the world. You can cheat, lie, steal, kill, be dumb as a rock, but if you can brag about money and having lots of things and your bragging is true, that bypasses everything. Money and material things make you king or queen of the Lamb world. You can do no wrong, you can do anything. - Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch

Hi everybody, I had a great time not writing this blog for two weeks and instead writing a novel that nobody will ever read. I've wanted to be a writer for easily the majority of my life, and while I love my job and am aware every single day of how lucky I am to have it, I've never been able to tamp down that desire to write and be paid for it. It was a little sobering to realize how much fun I was having when I was writing two-to- three thousand words a day on a story that was interesting and satisfying. I looked forward to it every day and now that the first draft is done, I feel a little empty.

To be honest, I don't know if what came of that flurry of activity is good or not. I think I need to give it a month or so before I can return to it with fresh eyes and see if there's anything salvageable enough to do something with, or if I chalk it up to another good practice that I might put up on my website and subsequently never sell a single copy. I bet this is similar to the feeling people get when they run a marathon. Which is to say that they worked on something every day, finished it, realized that while their accomplishment was impressive, it's also something that hundreds of people do every day and that nobody cares, and moved on with their lives.

This all took place in November, which is National Novel Writing Month, so there were events around town one could participate should one have the desire. I went to the library one town over on a Saturday afternoon to work on my opus and there were probably 20 other people there, all slaving away at their own masterpiece. It was fun because there were treats and water and there was something invigorating about being surrounded by other writers, but also I realized that the chances that any of us were going to come away with something publishable were so slim as to essentially be zero. Like being in the middle-to-back of the pack in a marathon, I realized that my accomplishment would be important to me and to the rest of the world it would be the same as if it never happened at all.

And yes, just like the health benefits associated with training and then running for a very long distance, I am probably a better person having participated even if nothing comes of it. But that faint peek at what it would be like to write every day and support myself with said writing made the fact that I probably never will hurt just a teensy bit more. It really sucked and it left me in a bit of a funk and I realized why so much time has passed since I last did this. I'm just not cut out for it. I love to write and it makes me feel good, but the inevitable rejection afterwards kicks my butt in a way that frankly takes years to heal.

So there's that.

In the meantime I did read a few books, including the Marvel book Infinity Gauntlet, which I will not write about today other than to say if the Infinity War movie that it's supposedly based on is anything like that comic story, it's going to be cuckoo bananas because that book is buck wild. For example, in the books Thanos kills every recognizable Marvel character in what is probably the movie equivalent of 4 seconds. The rest of the fight takes place between Thanos and a bunch of crazy immortal gods and the perpetually naked Silver Surfer and some dude named Adam Warlock. Also he's in love with Death, but Death isn't having it, so he makes himself a doppelganger who is literally just a female version of himself (who tears off Iron Man's head). I mean, this is a movie I would love to see but one I know won't exist, so let's move on.

The book I do want to talk about is Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor. I think the pitch I saw on Instagram or whatever was that it was Harry Potter in Nigeria, and I was like heck yes. What it really turned out to be was Harry Potter in Nigeria. Remember the Night Bus in Prisoner of Azkaban? It's the Funky Train in Akata Witch. There's no quidditch (thank heavens), but there is a plain old soccer match where the main character proves herself to the wizarding leopard world. Magic is juju and instead of a wand, you get a juju knife (which chooses you).

In Harry Potter, Rowling explores nativist tendencies by having the bad guys be obsessed with purity of wizarding lineage, with mudblood a kind of slur against your Hermiones and your what-have-yous. In Akata Witch, that exists, too. Sunny is a free agent, which means that her parents don't do magic. Free Agents are looked down upon. Also, because it's Nigeria and there are magic users all over the world, plain old racism is there, too.

If this all sounds like I'm taking Akata Witch down a peg for being derivative, I'm not. Aside from the basic structure it's hung on, it's profoundly original. I freaking loved it. Everything feels fresh and vibrant and mysterious. No word is unnecessary, and the book lacks all of the bloat I associate with Rowling's series. Okorafor draws on traditional Nigerian culture as the backbone and plays with the deep tribalism of the major ethnic groups in that country.   Sunny is an akata, which in the Yoruba culture is the name of a wild cat, as in one not living at home. In her case it's because she was born to Nigerian parents in the United States, but moves to Nigeria when she's nine. She's also albino. We learn that the leopard people revere flaws that normal humans would despise, because those flaws are often linked to their powers. In Sunny's case, she can turn invisible. Two of her friends are born in Nigeria but are from two different ethnic groups, and the other is an American teenager sent to live with family after getting into some trouble in the states. They eventually band together to take down a serial killer who targets young children.

It's stinkin' rad, is what I'm saying.

It doesn't surprise me how many stories take place where someone who is unassuming and finds themselves to be painfully normal or actively despised because of something beyond their control to find out that they are actually special. That's what we all wish would happen to us. Even in those universes, though, the vast majority of the human population really is boring. Most of us will never have a friend take us aside and tell us that we're rich in juju, or could be a jedi, or will get the dubious honor of having to clean up owl poop for the rest of our lives in exchange for never being able to use a ball point pen and paper again.

I don't read a lot of fantasy or sci-fi or speculative fiction, but I get it. Like the sad vampire cult of normies who wish they were more interesting in that one episode of Buffy, some of us pretend to be something we've always dreamed of every few Novembers before returning to the daily calendar of meetings, keeping track of sick leave and vacation, and dutifully putting money away in your 401k so that your kids won't have to pay for your end of life care.

There are more valuable things in life than safety and comfort. Learn. You owe it to yourself.

And listen, you guys, I know in my heart of hearts that there's some poor version of me cranking out books that only do OK who still has to work part-time jobs to make ends meet without affordable health insurance or a steady income. That dude looks at me when I'm out in the wilderness counting birds or finding pikas or looking into eagle nests and says "Man, that's some clean livin' right there." All I'm saying is it's fun to escape every now and then, and Akata Witch is a pretty good way to do that.

I Am Malala and We Have Some Work to Do

I would run to rejoin the children. Especially when it was time for the kite-flying contests- where the boys would skilfully try to cut down their competitors' kite strings. It plunges. It was beautiful, and also a bit melancholy for me to see the pretty kites sputter to the ground.
Maybe it was because I could see a future that would be cut down just like those kites- simply because I was a girl. - Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World

For about ten years I lived in a small town just outside of Logan, UT while I went to college and later got a real job and bought a real house. It's a beautiful area and I often miss it and wish I could have stayed, but such a thing was not in the cards. Nowadays I go back two times a year. We do a ski trip every winter, and I go to an environmental restoration conference on campus.

It's the second one I want to talk about because I'm not quite ready for snow yet (though I desperately want a lot of it, just piles of it, to come eventually--just not yet) and because it's fresh in my head since I just got back. I knew I'd written about this kind of thing in the past, and not-coincidentally I had a very similar reaction last time, too. Yes. This is another Howie's Optimism Club post.

See, I really needed it. Just under a year ago a lot of us had to do some soul-searching about the state of our country. I don't know why it isn't all of us. I'm just shrugging my dang shoulders over here. The simple fact I have to face is that there are people, a huge amount of people, in this country who are so fundamentally different to me as to throw out everything I thought I knew about people. 

This isn't a new insight. I remember as a kid around Halloween that Nick at Night was having a telephone poll where people would call in and say whether they preferred The Addams Family or The Munsters. Did they prefer a frankly revolutionary show about an iconoclastic family that was profoundly bizarre but still loving and supportive and fiercely, fiercely loyal to one another, or would they rather watch another bland sitcom where all the jokes are the same but the people dress like monsters? Reader, The Munsters won that contest. That's when I should have figured this out.

I just saw a picture of a cute little boy dressed up as Ezekial Elliott for Halloween. He was too little to have chosen the costume himself, I think, and I had to wonder why someone would dress up their child to look like a guy who is just about to (finally, I hope) serve a six-game suspension for beating his girlfriend. The reality is that his family are Cowboys fans, and Zeke is playing great football so they love him. They're willing to forgive a man who repeatedly choked, hit, and dragged a woman because he's on their team. Even still it's hard to wrap my head around. A guy's a dillweed regardless of what uniform he's wearing or which political party he represents.

There is so much about the political differences in this country that make a lot of sense to me. It really is a completely different country for different groups of people. I keep reading articles and books by liberal reporters from blue states embedding themselves in Republican strongholds and coming back so amazed that there are people in there. They go to a church and people there are raising money for refugees and they can't believe that they aren't all dressed in camouflage and confederate flags and literally devouring them instead. Wait, these astonished voyagers in enemy territory seem to say, why is there a library here if nobody knows how to read?

That's never been my problem. All my life I've been embedded in one of the most predictably Republican states in the country in the reddest counties in that state. It's not like I've never heard the argument for trickle-down economics, or for government deregulation, or privatizing public land or abortion or traditional marriage or whatever. I see nice families at the park or parades and have no problem sharing a space with someone who disagrees with me about taxes vs. entitlements or how many green cards we should issue every year.

What surprises me is the continued support of someone who has the temperament and professional acumen of a third grader and the xenophobia, racism, and staggering ignorance of the bad guy opposing coach of a sports movie in which black players are finally allowed to participate. I get that some people thought Obama was a cartoonish villain whose whole goal was to institute Sharia law and create a liberal haven in which the only way to get a job was to be gay and undocumented, but a lot of people just hated his policies. I can live with that. If Ted Cruz had won, I'd be angry every day too, I bet. Maybe angrier because he wouldn't be undermining everything he tries to do with tweets and off-the-cuff speeches picking fights with football players and therefore would actually be passing laws.

This new thing I just don't get, though. I mean, I understand it because we've seen and are seeing it over and over all over the world, but each time it feels like a horror movie where the protagonists consistently make the wrong decisions. It's discouraging and depressing and it makes it hard to get up in the morning. Maybe it's narcissistic but I keep going back to my own words and reminding myself that I need to be consistent. Two years ago I was frustrated by doomsday preppers within my community who were predicting the end of the world because we had a Democrat as president. At the time this is what I said:

Each day the great blackjack dealer in the sky says to us, "Place your bets, gentlemen," and we do. Some of us bet on calamity. We burrow into our basements with ammunition and dry food and prophecies of doom and gloom. We hoard our resources and we dare our neighbors who we have previously been told that we are to love as ourselves to even try to come and get them as we polish our guns. In essence, we spend all of our free time soaking up resources and give nothing back. It's us against the world and what has the world ever done for us? 

Those guys I can take or leave. I like the optimists. The ones who bet on the future. I cried three times watching Inside Out. A Pixar movie takes somewhere between four and seven years to make and costs from $175 to $245 million to make. The company employs around 1,200 people. That's a pretty steep bet. Of course, it made almost a billion dollars back and taught kids that their emotions are not their enemies. That growing up has some sad in it but that the sad can actually be pretty important. It said that it's not wrong to be down in the dumps sometimes but overall there are lots of exciting things in the world.

Great people make great things. They invent computers and smart phones. The build massive bridges. They create theme parks, and gorgeous religious buildings. They save and rehabilitate national parks. They spend their lives protecting endangered species, or restoring rivers, or planting trees. There is no bolder bet on the future than planting a tree. People who bet on the future travel to Haiti to help rebuild a broken city. They create vaccines. They paddle around the flooded streets of New Orleans to pull elderly people off of their roofs. They take seven bullets while blocking a gunman at a university. They do this because they don't know if we'll survive as a society, but they sure hope so

So. Against my instincts every time I open a newspaper or read the day's headlines on my phone, I refuse to fall into the same trap. If those things were true last year they still are. I can disagree with the president and shake my head in bemusement every time he stares at the sun during an eclipse or retweets a white supremacy group or tells kids they can have candy on Halloween because they aren't too fat yet and can't tell two blonde reporters apart. I can also feel my heart break for refugees who were approved to come to the United States after a grueling vetting process and then had that approval revoked. I can do all of that and still have hope for the future.

Here's why: when I go to conferences I see professors and grad students and land managers gather together and figure out what we can do to fix the messes that we are in. Even with a president--their boss--who denies climate change and a secretary of the interior who is actively gutting federal agencies of climate change scientists, the actual managers of the land are using the most accurate science available to them to make decisions that are best for their forests. And including climate change in their models. And there are grassroots organizations helping them. Citizen scientists pick up some of the slack from slashed federal budgets; native tribes gather their elders and their scientists to advise on how to restore ecosystems to match historic records; rural land users partner with federal biologists to improve their own land.

People wake up every day and in tiny ways keep on trying to save the world. Are there enough? I don't know. Is it the equivalent of a little kid trying to stop a wave from crashing onto the beach by stretching her arms out really wide? Are the plants I plant for my job vastly outnumbered by the ones being replaced by housing developments and tech companies and highways? Is our annual refugee sponsorship helping one family while thousands more suffer in under-staffed and under-resourced camps all over the world? Probably. I think we can win, but in the words of George Washington in Hamilton, "Not yet."

There's hope in that "yet."

There's also hope in Malala Yousafzai's I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World. Similar to Marjane Satrapi describing the takeover of Muslim fundamentalists in Iran in Persepolis, Malala tells the story of the Swat District in Pakistan as it undergoes a Taliban takeover started by a conservative cleric whose illegal radio show started an internal revolution.

Like with so many stories of people who have watched an ideological fanatic take power, it happens gradually. For Malala, who is 11 when it begins, it all starts with her education. Her father runs a school for girls, and she treasures her education. In a country where it's traditional that girls are married at 12 and education is at best ignored and at worst preached against outright, she recognizes how unique her situation is, and is grateful for a family that values school.

As the Taliban gains converts and supporters, girls' schools are one of their first targets. Why waste money on education when they're just going to be housewives anyway? They pressure the parents of students to pull their girls from school, then threaten them. Then schools start to be bombed or burned. Some are attacked by Taliban fighters, but others are burned by locals after being whipped up in a frenzy after listening to the radio. The Taliban uses natural disasters like earthquakes and floods, telling locals that they are punishments for straying from "true" Islam.

There is fighting in the streets. Machine gun fire, suicide bombers, and IEDs become so commonplace that they start to feel normal. Malala's family can sleep through them. And Malala and her friends are still going to school. Then she starts to speak up. She's interviewed by local news, writes a blog for the BBC under a pseudonym, then is followed by a documentary crew. The Taliban gets driven out of her district, but they fight in secret. People start disappearing, police officers and soldiers are publicly executed. And then one day after school two men board her school bus, ask which one is Malala, and shoot her in the head.

You guys know this part. Miraculously, she lives. Here's a moment that I won't forget. It's right after the Charleston church shooting and we are mourning. Jon Stewart has no jokes. Instead, he introduces Malala Yousafzai. "Her perseverance and determination through that, to continue on, is an incredible inspiration,” he says. “And to be quite honest with you, I don’t think there’s anyone else in the world I would rather talk to tonight than Malala. So that’s what we’re going to do. And sorry about no jokes."

During their interview, she says, "Sometimes we wait for others and think that a Martin Luther [King Jr.] should raise among us, a Nelson Mandela should raise among us and speak up for us. But we never realize that they are normal humans like us, and if we step forward, we can also bring change—just like them." This echoes another Malala quote: "If one man can destroy everything, why can't one girl change it?"

Stewart finishes with this: "I have to tell you that you are a wonderful tonic. I felt somewhat despairing today, but I think your single-mindedness has helped lift a bit of that fog for me, and I really thank you for that, even though it is not your responsibility to do that."

Now. Mr. Rogers could read the Applebees menu and I would cry (mostly because of the sodium content), but I'll be darned if this doesn't get me every time.

You see this quote come up every time something horrible happens, and yeah, it doesn't fix things. It doesn't change laws that might make it more difficult for people with a history of domestic violence to have guns, it doesn't do anything to stop the spread of terrorism--both domestic and otherwise--from taking root in the United States. And it doesn't magically solve racism. But it's still true. It is, as Stewart says, a tonic. There are still helpers. There's no reason it can't be us.

I have a tendency to end these posts with a kind of generic "you can do it, too" stinger, mainly because I have such a hard time coming up with endings. This time, I'll tell you how. Girls' education has massive benefits to the world, including drops in infant mortality, increases in child health and nutrition, and a more informed electorate. Educated women are more likely to stand up for their rights, reducing child marriages and abuse. And they are more likely to raise educated daughters who are even more likely to stand up for themselves and be politically active.

You can support The Malala Fund here. The Malala fund is dedicated to providing a 12-year education to every girl in the world.
The International Rescue Committee helps settle refugees in the United States, three-quarters of whom are women and children. Find out more here.
If you're like me and can rarely help financially, consider volunteering. You can volunteer with the IRC. Also VolunteerMatch and JustServe are great resources pairing volunteers with opportunities. A glance at the JustServe page shows multiple tutoring and mentoring opportunities at schools in my community. I bet they have some in yours, too.


The version of I Am Malala that I read is the "Young Reader Edition" that my daughter's teacher kindly lent me. I didn't know there were two versions, but apparently they are different books. According to at least one blogger, the Young Reader Edition is preferable because it "sounds more like the Malala we hear in her speeches."  You can find a better explanation of the differences at that link. I've decided to stick with this one because it's the one my daughters will probably read and I want to be able to talk with them about it.

Pachinko Isn't Too Long, But This Title Is

But a God that did everything we thought was right and good wouldn't be the creator of the universe. He would be our puppet. He wouldn't be God. There's more to everything than we can know. - Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

Pachinko, by Min Jin Li is a huge book, which sometimes makes me resentful. This is another weird side effect to writing this blog. Long books still just get one blog post. So then I'm thinking I could have read two books in the time it took to read one and get two posts and that means I would earn twice the money that I earn from this blog. Which is still zero dollars.

Obviously it's a bad argument, but it's also true about me that I avoid long books. I do this for the same reason I don't watch movies that last longer than two hours. It's not that my time is so much more valuable than the next guy's. It's because I love the power of editing. Readers of this blog will no doubt go into convulsions of mirth at this statement, but I maintain that one can love something not because they are good at it but precisely because it's something they are terrible at. Nobody watches athletes more intently than unathletic men and nobody likes to watch humans type more than cats.

It's also a bad argument because I read Pachinko in like 3 days. It was fall break and I took a couple of days off to "be with the kids." What this translated to was one day where I was very much engaged and we went to the zoo and then had ice cream and then watched Spider-Man: Homecoming (which is literally about the homecoming dance, because it's not like he's coming home to anything else other than the Marvel Cinematic Universe I guess, but he doesn't know that. That's too meta for me you guys) and then watched the end of one of the most amazing football games I've ever seen. And then the next day I spent the whole day reading Pachinko and swatting my kids away like they were gnats and I was a rhino in a nature documentary. Imagine a rhino reading a book. It's pretty funny to do that.

Most of the time I can imagine easily trimming a good 50-100 pages off of a book this size without it hurting even a tiny bit. Movies are like that, too. Even movies based on books where other people get mad because their favorite scene wasn't in the movie (like never telling us that Rita Skeeter is an unregistered animagus and that's why she was getting all those scoops) usually don't bother me (usually). I think this is because I'm an adult and recognize that different mediums have different strengths and weaknesses. Also I mean her name is literally "Skeeter," like a mosquito. Like, she's a beetle, but you get it.

Anyway, let me tell you what this book is about before I get distracted again. It follows Sunja in the fishing village of Yeongdo, Korea, at the beginning of the pre-World War II Japanese occupation. At 16, Sunja makes a decision that will haunt her for the next 60 years: she is seduced by a wealthy trader twice her age who she assumes will marry her. Instead she finds out that she is pregnant, he has a wife in Japan, and her baby's father is a Yakuza boss. She marries a Christian pastor who sees in her an opportunity to be like the biblical story of Hosea, and moves to Japan.

What follows is a story that spans four generations through the severe prejudice, incarceration, torture, and near-starvation of the war; followed by the severe prejudice and prosperity that eventually replaced it in the 80s. Even fourth- or fifth-generation ethnic Koreans are restricted from citizenship and treated as second-class. They are inherently lazy and violent, according to the predominant culture. A culture obsessed with blood and heredity.

You are very brave, Noa. Much, much braver than me. Living every day in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.

Over those years we meet a massive cast of characters, and something amazing happened to me. Usually when I write these posts, I can never remember anyone's names. I often have already forgotten who was who aside from a handful of standouts. This is especially true when I read books about nationalities whose naming conventions are unfamiliar to me. I have little experience with Korean names, but I could remember almost everyone, even characters who had little impact on the final story. It's a testament to the storytelling here that everyone was so distinct and memorable, I have no problem summoning each character's name.

People are rotten everywhere you go. They’re no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.

Not only that, but I just love them. There are no villains, even when some characters exhibit profound cruelty. The huge timescale of the book puts actions into context that would be 2-dimensional otherwise. It's just a feat. I don't know how else to describe it.

Patriotism is just an idea, so is capitalism or communism. But ideas can make men forget their own interests. And the guys in charge will exploit men who believe in ideas too much.

I can't think of anything I'd trim from Pachinko. I actually wanted more. There are tiny subplots in here about side characters, one I can think of lasts no more than one chapter and is essentially a complete short story, that I would have loved to know more about. The themes here are simultaneously so huge and grandiose and profoundly personal. You know how in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Rick Moranis's character says that the majority of matter is empty space between atoms and that you just need to decrease the space between the atoms to shrink an object and also those kids make friends with an ant and their dad almost eats one of them? Most books are like that. Empty space surrounded by a handful of interesting atoms and a lot of dinking around in between of characters going back and forth trying to decide what to do next without actually furthering the story. 

Pachinko isn't like that. The prose is lean and the majority of the themes aren't said outright by a character thinking profound thoughts, but instead it comes through in dialogue. Or actions where you only realize what it's saying while you're in the shower the next morning (Or night, I guess. I don't know when you shower and frankly I'd like to keep it that way). I'm constantly amazed by the confidence Lee shows in what she decides to tell or not. Huge events happen off-screen and time leaps forward. I think other authors would want to dwell on these things, milk emotion out of them, but by having them happen almost as an aside, we're left to grieve almost like we're catching up with an old friend and having to express sadness that we weren't there with them when it happened.

Sunja-ya, a woman’s life is endless work and suffering. There is suffering and then more suffering. It’s better to expect it, you know. You’re becoming a woman now, so you should be told this. For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life—but no matter what, always expect suffering, and just keep working hard. No one will take care of a poor woman—just ourselves.

It's weird to me when my posts actually become book reviews. But darnit sometimes I just want to say that it's books like Pachinko that makes reading more than a hobby. I've got nothing against model trains or golf... actually yes I do and I used them as examples specifically because I think they add nothing to the human existence. It's fine, though. It's fine because golf means fresh air and (some) exercise and model trains are, uh, cool? What I mean is that they don't add layers of complexity to a world I feel like is constantly more interesting like books do. I don't think anything does.

A Separation and a Bit About Cookbooks

People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment, there were plenty of people who did not marry the person they hoped to marry, much less live the life they hoped to live, other people invented new dreams to replace the old ones, finding fresh reasons for discontent. - Katie Kitamura, A Separation

I like to cook quite a bit and almost never use cookbooks. That sounds like I'm super rad and so in tune with food that I can just make delicious food from a handful of random things in the pantry, but what I mean is that I use Pinterest a lot. As much as I cook, I still have a pretty vague understanding of what's actually going on in there. Aside from having a couple of Alton Brown episodes under my belt, the actual mechanics of cooking are pretty mysterious. That's me when it comes to relationships too, now that I think about it.

Pinterest usually sends me to cooking blogs, and if you've read a cooking blog, it's the opposite of a Howie's Book Club post. There's a bunch of dumb stuff about the blogger's family and hubs and if hubs liked the food (hubs always likes the food because hubs quit his job to help run the blog) with pictures of their kids and dog and stuff, and then at the bottom there's a recipe, which is all I'm there for. Where on the other hand I'm told when people read my posts they skip the part at the end about the book. Anyway, in the post they probably talk about why the food works, and what the different ingredients do, but I prefer to just put the things in a pot and hope it works out.

Magic

Part of why I like the internet is that it doesn't judge me for how dumb I am. There was one time when I was a teenager and home alone and I decided I wanted French toast. I looked through every book in my mom's cookbook drawer and didn't find a single recipe. Part of this is because most of the cookbooks my mom had were church cookbooks. These are collections of favorite recipes from members of the ward and there is something to prove here. Your name is on those meatballs, and you put Lipton French Onion Soup mix in there.

Nobody puts French toast in a cookbook because everyone already knows how to cook French toast. Obviously in the days of food trucks and Pinterest we're discovering entire new frontiers in the science of pain perdu--including and not limited to savory french toast and probably something with pumpkin spice in it--but these were not those days. The days to which I refer are the days when I put an egg in water and then put it in the microwave for 3 minutes because I wanted a hard-boiled egg. A microwave (and a measure of self-confidence) was ruined that day.

There's a whole food truck here devoted to grilled cheese sandwiches, which is delicious but also isn't that just a melt? Like, a grilled cheese sandwich stops being a grilled cheese once you put a single additional ingredient in there. The last one I had was filled with pulled-pork, barbecue sauce, very thin apple slices, and onions. It was amazing. Yeah, it had cheese in there. But we still call that a pulled pork sandwich. It's like calling a kitchen table a Corvette because they both have chairs in them. This actually drives me crazy, now that I think about it. I'm going to need to take a break.

(15 minutes of Contra III: The Alien Wars later)

OK, that game is hard and I made up two new swear words. Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that if I google "how to make a grilled cheese sandwich" there are multiple recipes. This one has 524 reviews and a five star rating. 69 people (nice) have submitted photos of their own grilled cheese sandwiches. It serves 2. It requires 4 slices of white bread, 3 tablespoons of butter, and 2 slices of cheddar cheese.

Wait, what?

Who submitted this?

WHY DID YOU SUBMIT THIS

I have no problem with this. Every time I make hard-boiled eggs (not in the microwave), I STILL look it up. Now if there is an apocalypse, which seems remarkably more possible with every day, I might be in trouble. I am as dependent on the internet for cooking as I am my smartphone for navigation. Daryl Dixon, I am not (Daryl Dixon makes a mean juevos rancheros, look it up!). For now, though, I'm hanging in there.  

Ol' Howie brings it with the Asian fusion though

This is not just cooking, everybody. There are a lot of things that many of us consider common knowledge that can easily be lost after one or two generations. My kids don't know how to use a number 2 pencil to rewind a cassette tape that their off-brand Walkman devoured. They don't know how to tape an edited-for-TV version of Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors from TBS, setting the timer to start and stop at the right time because it's on when you're supposed to be in bed. And they've forgotten how to have any hope for a future in which wildlife will still exist and fresh water, gasoline, and bullets won't be the principal forms of currency. You know, silly stuff.

They can also easily lose things that we parents fail to pass on, but are still pretty vital. It's a pretty easy line to draw: grandma made fresh bread a lot, mom or dad didn't, you think fresh bread only exists at Great Harvest and is created by bread wizards who have in turn enslaved bread elves and it's a harsh existence that is morally conflicting but warm bread is also so good with butter on it. My grandpa grew wonderful watermelons, but that knowledge has apparently left our family for good. Like a permanent death for Freddy Krueger at the hands of the oft-tormented Elm Street kids, watermelons elude me. 

This applies to things like budgeting, too. Or resilience to adversity. Or dependability. The one I'm thinking about specifically here because of the book I read is healthy relationships. There are lots of people on this big blue rapidly warming marble for whom the skill of healthy relationships is like me growing watermelons: they've tried a bunch of times but they've never seen it demonstrated. 

Nobody's parents are perfect, and because families are all together during the worst times, we see each other at their worst. My kids behave much better for their piano teachers, sports coaches, and martial arts instructors than they do for me. I think it's because I've seen them be brats, but they still have a chance to impress the black belts. It's like that with husbands and wives, too. We try not to fight in front of the guests, but our kids are always around (like, always). After a while they're going to see a lot. But there's fighting and then there's fighting.

There's also neglect, and sarcasm, and infidelity. There's all the kinds of abuse: sexual, emotional, physical, financial, religious. There are addictions and mental illnesses. Kids who grow up in situations like that are like a kid who never learned how to make French toast, but the stakes are a lot higher and the solutions much more complex. But not insurmountable. The problem is that if those relationships are all you know, they seem normal to you. You don't think you deserve something better, or you don't really believe that there is something better. Everyone else is faking. You don't even know there is a such thing as French toast, and if there is, what have you done to deserve something so fancy?

In the end, what is a relationship but two people, and between two people there will always be room for surprises and misapprehensions, things that cannot be explained. Perhaps another way of putting it is that between two people, there will always be room for failures of imagination.

In Katie Kitamura's The Separation, we are meeting a woman approaching middle age confronted with the tatters of her marriage. She's been separated for months from her handsome and charming husband, but they haven't told anyone yet. When he disappears on a trip to Greece, she's forced to go looking for him. It sounds like it could be a thriller with a title that has "The Girl" in it. But it's not that kind of book. It's hard to put down and full of mystery and some pretty subtle menace in there, but it's more of an exploration of relationships.

There aren't a lot of characters--the hotel concierge, a jealous clerk, the driver who loves the jealous clerk, the absent Christopher, his parents--and so the narrator can focus on them. Making interpretation of their lives makes her reflect on her own, and kind of the nature of love and loyalty and all of that big time stuff.

As she observed him, she briefly frowned, it was one of the quandaries a woman sometimes faces, not just a woman, but all of us: she entrances one man without effort, a man who is undesired, who follows her around like a dog, however much he is whipped or abused, while all her efforts to attract and then ensnare another man, the truly desired man, come to naught. Charm is not universal, desire is too often unreciprocated, it gathers and pools in the wrong places, slowly becoming toxic.

I really liked it. It's so deliberate. It's hard to describe and I've started and scrapped this post from a lot of different angles. There isn't a ton of things that happen, and the things that do sometimes seem random and meaningless, but in a meaningful way, you know? Not every story is a crackerjack mystery with a convoluted conspiracy. Sometimes things happen without a good reason.

In childhood, words are weightless - I shout I hate you and it means nothing, the same can be said for I love you - but as an adult, those very words are used with greater care, they no longer slip out of the mouth with the same ease. I do is another example, a phrase that in childhood is only the stuff of playacting, a game between children, but then grows freighted with meaning.

The narrator spends more time than usual with her in-laws, without her husband as a buffer. She sees the seeds of some of her marriage's problems there. The thing I keep thinking about is that we often don't even know that we're ignorant when it comes to things like relationships, especially but not limited to the romantic ones. I want to learn how to hard boil an egg, there's instructions there. You figure it out. Maybe it's embarrassing, but it's only embarrassing once and then you've got it figured out. But we look at people reading a book about how to be a better spouse or parent and we think, don't they know? The assumption is that if I'm picking up a cookbook, I know how to boil an egg.

It's funny to look through a book of art history. Thousands of years ago people didn't know that tables got smaller as they got farther away from us. That from our perspective everything converges into a vanishing point on the horizon. They were the best artists in the world but hadn't grasped what is now taught to kindergartners. Perspective requires math, some of which wasn't even discovered and implemented until like the 1400s. We don't expect every artist to completely learn how to do their craft in a vacuum, because we've got thousands of years worth of technical discoveries to lean on.

But often we send out a young married couple into life with nothing other than what they were able to sort of glean by watching their parents, who did the same thing themselves. It's no wonder we lose things. It's actually kind of amazing anything works at all, ever. I don't think it's enough to just try to model healthy relationships. We might not even have them, but if we do, we also need to think about why they work. And when we talk to our kids, we point it out. Even when it's happening right then and it's messy.

There's no shame in looking things up. What if you were taught the wrong way to make a grilled cheese, like the person I knew who thought that you make them in a microwave? You can fix that! Look it up on the internet, ask someone you know who looks like they enjoy good grilled cheese, read a book. Get a few different viewpoints, then pick what works best for you. That's how we learn in every aspect of our lives, but for some reason it's not something we think about how to do when it comes to the real basic stuff. (I'm not talking about grilled cheeses here, I'm talking about relationships.)

Let's say you have a Ramona Quimby-style row in front of your kids and they get sent to bed before they see you make up. That kind of thing sticks with a kid, and it's why that scene resonated with several people who responded to my blog post about it. It takes a couple of minutes to sit with them before they're in a dark room all by themselves filled with the same kinds of doubts and fears we have--maybe even more so--and chat about how mom and dad work through disagreements. Or say you saw a scene in a Disney movie that is unhealthy, even if it's portrayed as healthy ("Sweety, we NEVER kiss someone who is literally unconscious, no matter what the little people are telling us). It's the relationship equivalent of saying, "Hey kid, you know how to make a grilled cheese? No? Let's do this."

S/O if you grew up thinking mac and cheese came from a box