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Monday, July 3, 2017

Jung Yun's Shelter and Why My Facebook is Weird

One of his clearest memories of Mae dates back to grade school, when she stood in the hallway outside his room for over and hour, staring at herself in a full-length mirror. She was wearing a new mink coat, a plush gray one streaked with black and white--the kind that actresses on television wore when their characters were supposed to be rich. Mae kept turning from side to side, swinging the coat to make the fur brush against her legs, which were purple with bruises. He hated her then--he hates her still--for teaching him that everyone had a price. Jung Yun, Shelter
Have you ever been in a group of your friends talking about whatever it is that's going on in your lives or your bad opinions or jokes or whatever and you see someone you kind of know leaning towards you and listening in? Like it's kind of flattering but also kind of creepy but it mostly makes you very self-conscious. You start realizing how banal every conversation you have is. You think you're being profound and hilarious, but all of that is based on the shared experience you have with the people with whom you're talking.

The reason you know this is because when you're alone and bored and listen to a table full of friends talk about their lives it's almost universally horrible and makes you feel like the bad guys in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark when the eponymous lost ark gets opened. I can't be that awful, you say to yourself as your eyeballs recede into your bloody face before you turn to dust and blow away into the wind like so many delusions of your own importance.

Most of us have 5-10 social media friends who we interact with regularly, which may actually reflect your closest friend group but probably has more to do with the handful of us who check it every day and have similar opinions about the kind of stuff people talk about on social media--but who we've maybe never met or have met only briefly decades ago. It's kind of easy to assume that we're just talking among ourselves and nobody even cares. Maybe they don't. I kind of doubt it, though, because of how much I quietly soak up about people I barely know based on their own Facebook activity.

I don't do this on purpose. I'm just curious sometimes. If someone "likes" a marriage and family therapist, I don't dive into their lives and search for evidence of anything going on, but maybe I just log it back there in my head. Maybe it's your friend who you are supporting in her new business, it's not any of my business. But it kind of sticks in there, you know? Not even in a gossipy way but in a way that says, I hope she's OK. I know a lot of stuff about people who I barely know just because it's so easy to be out there about your life and you forget that there are hundreds of people who quietly watch what's going on without any context.

So then I think about my end of that. If you follow me on Instagram and read my blog, then my Facebook probably makes some sense. If the only interaction you have with me is that we worked together for one season in the field seven years ago, or we went to high school together and didn't even actually hang out, then my feed is probably... really weird? I went through it just now and it's basically divided into thirds: one third is jokes (most of them kind of bad in retrospect), one third is family stuff, bird pictures, and food I made, and one third is about domestic violence and rape.

If you don't know me well, that last one must make you shake your head. If it were me reading it, I'd be speculating too. What did this guy go through? That would be my first impression. I would assume, if I were you, that there is abuse in my history. That seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion. But there isn't. I haven't been personally affected by domestic violence or sexual assault. It wasn't even on my radar until a few years ago. The closest I got to even thinking about it was when I was trading in my ancient flip phone for my first (and only, so far) smartphone and I was asked if I wanted to donate it to battered women and part of me thought about keeping it as a toy for my kids instead.

One question that comes up every time I'm at the shelter or on a hospital call is "why did you start volunteering?" For a lot of people they do it because they need to in order to get college credits. Or it's an internship for a career in social work. When I'm asked, I rarely have the same answer. Looking back, I'm not even sure how it happened myself. The rough timeline is that I got a job in which I work four ten hour shifts and have Fridays off and on my day off I would stay in bed until 11 staring at my phone and then feeling guilty about it so I started googling volunteer opportunities.

For whatever reason I started with the domestic violence shelter and once it stuck in my head, it was the only thing I wanted to do. The other stuff sounded great--mentoring kids who are struggling in school, food bank, etc.--but I couldn't shake a memory of walking into the grocery store in my old city where a couple of college girls were asking for donations to the shelter there. A white-haired man in his 60s with his wife walked past, and when he was addressed, he scoffed at her and said, "No thanks. I won't contribute to organizations that tear up families."

That guy stuck in my head. I thought about him when I was told that I'd have to wait a couple of months before training started. And when I went to training for four hours a night, three nights a week after working a 10-hour shift, I couldn't shake it. I lived in a society where men, distinguished looking men who looked like grandpas and bishops and stake presidents, believed that a woman should stay with an abusive husband because apparently living with an abuser is better for her and her children than living as a single mother.

I remembered a time when I was on my mission in Mexico, where we ate once a week at the house of a woman who was being physically and emotionally abused. We asked her why she stayed, and she said that her bishop told her that if she divorced her husband, he would take away her temple recommend, which she considered her most prized possession. I remembered a friend telling me about her first marriage. That she told her bishop she'd rather go to hell than spend another day with her husband.

Even then, I was just looking for something to do. It was during that training we listened to the recording of a tiny girl calling 911 while her stepfather beats her mother in front of her and her baby sister that I started feeling like an activist. It's awful. You should listen to it. You should also read up on the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study done by Kaiser Permanente between 1995 and 1997. Over 9,500 people participated in a questionnaire in which they were asked a series of questions about their lives before the age of 18 and then compared them with multiple questions about behavior and disease.
Persons who had experienced four or more categories of childhood exposure, compared to those who had experienced none, had 4- to 12-fold increased health risks for alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide attempt; a 2- to 4-fold increase in smoking, poor self-rated health, ≥50 sexual intercourse partners, and sexually transmitted disease; and a 1.4- to 1.6-fold increase in physical inactivity and severe obesity. The number of categories of adverse childhood exposures showed a graded relationship to the presence of adult diseases including ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, skeletal fractures, and liver disease. The seven categories of adverse childhood experiences were strongly interrelated and persons with multiple categories of childhood exposure were likely to have multiple health risk factors later in life.
There's plenty of evidence showing that infants under the age of one who are exposed to violence against a parent show long-term effects, even if they didn't have the cognitive ability to understand what is happening. A Michigan State University study even showed that unborn children show symptoms of trauma when their mothers are abused. "The study of 182 mothers ages 18-34 found a surprisingly strong relationship between a mother’s prenatal abuse by a male partner and postnatal trauma symptoms in her child."

In Utah, one third of the homicides are related to domestic violence. And occurrences are higher than the national average. "147 Utah children were directly exposed to an intimate partner-related homicide from 2003-2008 and 78% of these children were under six years of age."
Part of the reason so many children are victims of lethal domestic violence in Utah, Oxborrow said, is because the state has a high birth rate to begin with, and many mothers fear they will lose custody of their children if they report domestic violence because they have exposed their children to a dangerous environment.
Also, the wage gap in Utah between women and men is bigger than in many other states, she said, and women are often afraid they won't be able to survive financially if they lose their household's main income, provided by their abusers.
"It's just a really bad combination of factors," Oxborrow said. "People are staying in really dangerous relationships for a long time." - Source
I say all of this because the main character, Kyung, of Jung Yun's Shelter is insufferable. It's almost impossible to relate to him. I'm unaware of a single reasonable or laudable decision that he makes in this book that he isn't cajoled into by his saintly wife Gillian. Often someone asks him why he's behaving the way he is, and his inner dialogue is a perfect description that if he only spoke out loud, it would open up lines of communication and healing. Instead, when he opens his mouth, he consistently says something awful and cutting.

It's the housing crisis and Kyung, a South Korean immigrant, is upside-down on his house. He has a tenure-track professor job, but the ballooning house payment is a constant source of stress. Then his mom shows up to his house, brutally beaten, and he immediately assumes it's his father, because for much of Kyung's young life, his father beat his mother often and mercilessly. He soon finds out that the situation is much worse: both of his parents and their housekeeper were victims of a cruel home invasion.

The emotional fallout in the aftermath would test the most emotionally healthy of us. Kyung is not healthy. And what many consider the book's biggest fault ends up being, to me, it's greatest strength. People who have experienced trauma, especially at a young age, and especially especially the kind of relentless and steady trauma that takes place over years and years like domestic violence does, develop survival skills. Some of these survival skills are not good social skills.

This pops up at the domestic violence shelter sometimes. Humans tend to want victims to act like some kind of caricature so that we can feel good about helping them. Humble, but strong. Grateful for our help. Lovable. In reality they are coping with extreme things in the best way they know how. Sometimes these survival skills take the forms of hoarding, manipulation, theft, or wild mood swings. Sometimes they are lazy or don't want to leave their room. Or they take drugs. Sometimes they threaten and push away the people who are trying to help them.

As any school teacher will tell you, kids with tough homes are hard to love, even if they need the love the very most. From that angle, Kyung is sympathetic because he isn't sympathetic. He's selfish and almost incapable of understanding anyone else's emotions. As we learn more about his life and his childhood, we want to love him, but he's so consistently unlovable. It's almost fascinating. The fact that he's been as productive and useful so far is basically amazing, but the standards required to thrive in modern society are so high, and the margin of error so low.

Kyung is talking to his boss, who is bragging about his twins' amazing accomplishments:
As he feels Craig's grip loosen, he squeezes harder, realizing that the answer was right there in front of him the entire time. The twins turned out well, not because of anything that Craig or his wife did but because of the kind of people they are. Good, decent people who always put the needs of their children ahead of their own. It was never more complicated that love, one generation raising a better version of the next.
"I never really had a chance, did I?"
Craig squints at him. "A chance of what?"
"Nothing," he says. "I was just thinking out loud."
As a society we're getting better at helping victims. Clients who complete their goals and stick with the commitments required of them from the shelter and post-shelter care have a remarkable success rate. That only covers the people who are reaching out for help, though. And we know that to be a small percentage. The rest are coping the best they can without any professional help. And from the outside it often looks like normal life unless something comes along that pushes too hard for too long.

Understanding what someone is going through isn't the same as not holding them accountable. Given Kyung's history, we're not surprised by his behavior, but it doesn't excuse it either. He hurts people, and it's not their fault that his dad hit his mom. It's not a victim's fault that their abuser was abused as a child as well. Sometimes people end up at domestic violence shelters because they've burned every other bridge available to them with the aforementioned behavior. Ultimately, I'd say that's a good thing. It's a better place for them to be than, say, a sister's house or a friend's. They have policies that protect other people, they have government programs, they have professional training and counseling services. They can hold victims accountable on their path to independence in ways family members are uncomfortable or incapable of doing.

If you're in a position where you're asked for help, make sure you reach out to a professional as well. It's not selfish to consider your own health and especially that of your children if you decide to take this on. Get your friend or family member plugged into services, many of them free, that will help them in ways that just a bed to sleep in and a safe place to stay can not. The Hotline is a good place to start. This isn't something you can do on your own.

Kyung's story ultimately ends hopefully, but his suffering is nothing compared to his mother's. Her ordeal is traumatic in multiple ways, shattering a talented woman on the brink of rediscovery. I have a hard time recommending a book in which someone is treated so cruelly, even knowing first hand that these things happen with sickening regularity in real life. It was worth reading for me, though. I needed the reminder.



Anyway, all of this is to say sorry about the Facebook stuff.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

eBook thing!

Hey remember how I wrote a novel that one time? Well I converted it to eBook format. That's literally all I did. I haven't even looked at the formatting yet. OK, I just looked. It's not great, but it's readable. If there is interest I will work hard on it to make it better.

See I can read that

Anyway, I'm thinking of putting all of my Howie's Book Club posts into chronological order in eBook form, too! Is that something anyone could possibly want? That's what we're finding out here.

So yeah, no pressure. Here's a link to the page where you can download the book, which is called New Deseret, onto your device of choice. It's kind of a fun book set in the not-distant future about what if the United States fell into a civil war again?! IT IS VERY FAR-FETCHED I KNOW. There's a mom and a little boy and a rough kind of character who may or may not help them from crazy Utah up to Oregon, a journey many a liberal Mormon has made. We call them modern day pioneers because they are so brave!!

People get shot in it and I think there's some pretty good banter and there's one part when one of the characters gets verrrrry cold.

If that sounds like a book you'd like to read, again, here's the link.

WARNING: I ASK FOR MONEY. That's kind of the point of this pitch. It's two dollars. If enough people (my definition of enough is actually not very many) decide it's worth paying for, I will definitely start working on doing the same thing with my blog posts, which will be an exponentially more difficult task but it might be fun, I don't know.

Listen. You can download the thing either way. I will never know. Here's even a thing you could do: you could try it for free and if some point you say, "shoot, this is good, this book is worth two dollars, maybe this book is even worth THREE DOLLARS," I am not going to stop you from putting two or three dollars in my PayPal account is what I'm saying right now.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and Being Young

People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed. - Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Sometimes when I'm trying to fall asleep I think about my blog, which in and of itself is very sad, but it gets sadder. I've spent "pages" of semi-imaginary digital text trying to justify this thing's existence and so far I still find the justification wanting. Literally every weekend I ponder the freedom of never having to post again, and yet Monday rolls around and I find myself staring at this window, its square box a prison literally designed by yours truly. 

Like the proverbial raccoon trap in Where the Red Fern Grows, I can release it whenever I like, yet instead I hang on tightly and wait patiently for Old Dan and Little Ann to mete out their instinctual Redbone brand of frontier justice. Like raccoons, there are too many bloggers and not enough resources to feed them. Turn on the light in any dark corner of this dumpster we call the internet and you will find us: frozen, our eyes reflective, a handful of garbage clutched in our tiny hands. In this light, we appear almost human.

My parents have a bird feeder just above the room we sleep in when we go to visit. Since house finches are just so bad at opening sunflower seeds, the majority that they try to eat end up on the ground below, making a pile just outside the window. At night I sometimes hear the sound of chewing, and look out the window to find myself face to face with a raccoon who is frantically double-fisting sunflower seeds. When caught, it freezes and stares back, its hands full of black seeds, like a man on a diet caught with the fridge wide open. It's hard not to imagine it reflecting on the life choices that led it to this backyard, this night. What brought me here, those shining eyes seem to say. Oh yeah, it's sunflower seeds. These things rule.

The sunflower seeds to me that keep me coming back to the festering pile of bird castoffs that is Howie's Book Club Dot Com: The Blog is the thin yet relatively steady stream of recognition that I exist, and that somehow that existence is worthwhile. I'm told rarely, but enough, that something I said resonated with someone, and like the seeds, that rules.

So what worries me when I can't sleep and I've run through every possible way in which I could fail or die or my family could experience tragedy and then I've enumerated every debt I have and then I think for a little bit about how much I want a Super Nintendo Classic, is that in my blog posts I come across as a scold. Really all I'm trying to do is put into words this journey I've been making to try to understand my place in the world through literature, but sometimes I'm also just a little bit preachy.

Nintendo
So many sleepless nights

NO, you say. PREACHY? NOT HOWIE. But yes, it's true. There are times when I may come across as having more answers than the average person. This is pretty unfortunate. If you know me in real life, you'd realize pretty quickly how unaware I am of very basic things happening around me on a regular basis. What I'm saying is if you were to kidnap me and take me to your secret location, you wouldn't need to blindfold me. Also, I can't think of any reasons why you would want to kidnap me. The reason that every book I read seems to blow my mind isn't because I'm super smart and get books. It's because I know, like, so little about anything.
Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of.
This, by the way, has got to be the longest introduction to a point I've written yet. It's almost like the point doesn't matter and this whole thing is just a vehicle to deliver raccoon jokes. Basically I'm writing a Guardians of the Galaxy script. The point is this: when it comes to recommending books I'm a big snooty-patooty about it.

The silliness of this is not lost on me. I'm so obsessed with reading grown-up books that I rarely acknowledge the irony in the fact that just last week I wrote a very long post about social justice based on a comic book about a girl whose main power is that she makes her fists very very large because she was exposed to a cloud of mist that turned her into a cocoon from which she emerged with super powers. Someone told me to call them graphic novels and that would sound more important but I pushed up my glasses and said, "actually graphic novels are complete stories while trade paperbacks are serialized, ongoing adventures kind of like a soap opera or WWE storyline."

Typical library haul
When I read books, though, I read frickin heavy ones. Not heavy in weight because with few exceptions I think really long books are bad for society, but heavy in subject matter. Some of these really weigh on me. I need a break from that stuff and comic books are where reading and play are the same thing. The reason I pick comic books is because comics today are awesome and they only take 30 minutes to read. I got a blog to write, you guys. I can't be wasting book time on spaceships and aliens.

The silly thing is that I allow myself that indulgence but quietly judge people who spend the majority of their reading time immersed in fantasy or science fiction universes. In a literature class decades ago there was a middle-aged woman who said that her "nose was always stuck in a book," which is fine and probably a reasonable way to live. But even though she'd read "thousands of books," nothing she ever read challenged her in any way. She struggled mightily with our class because every book we read in there shook her to the core in ways she'd never experienced. They made her analyze things she'd never thought of before, and that can be uncomfortable. I've said before that the best books take me apart and put me back together again in some new, unanticipated way. It makes me sad that a lot of people I know who call themselves book lovers never experience that.

That's all I'm trying to do here. This whole blog was part of an experiment to get me out of my literary comfort zone. I was reading "big" "important" "literature" written almost exclusively by white men and almost exclusively about what it's like to be a white man. I thought this was important because I was tricked by a society that has consistently and unerringly put a premium on that experience, making it the default against which every other life should be measure. I'm working on fixing it. It has been very rewarding.

That change was in itself the beginning of an experiment to get out of the rut I'd gotten in where all I read were detective novels and I realized that while I read constantly, I wasn't well-read. I started poorly, with a list from a men's magazine about books "every man should read." Some of those books were very good, of course. Some of them were technically very good but profoundly shallow and dehumanizing, and detrimental to my very soul. So many of them were about middle-aged frumpy men who were stand-ins for the author who have borderline abusive relationships with "free spirit" 20-something beautiful girls who throw themselves at the main character for no reason other than to teach them how to live again. Reading them made me say, no wonder people stick to books with dragons on them.

Anyway, that's what Howie's Book Club is about. Sometimes the message gets lost on tangents. Sometimes it spends too much time to get there. But at the core of its little raccoon heart, it just wants to introduce you to books you might like. They are generally serious books. But you guys, if you want to have fun, have fun. When you watch little kids play, they are very serious. Kids play because it's their frickin job to play. It's how their brains grow. I have a pretty good hunch that it's the same for adults.
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.
I feel pretty lucky in retrospect that I was allowed to just be a kid for as long as I was. I played pretend for way too long. We were Ninja Turtles, we trick-or-treated, we had water fights. While kids at my school navigated complex social strata, my friends and I played Mario Kart and Goldeneye in the basement for so long that when we went home we pictured floating guns in front of us, and when we drove we felt like we should be able to powerslide. Most importantly, I didn't have to grow up too early because of abuse or neglect.
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.
Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is a memoir of childhood. She's not even Maya Angelou yet. She's Margeurite Annie Johnson, or Ritie for short. For much of her life she was raised with her brother by her grandma in Stamps, Arkansas. Some of it she spends with her mother in California. Lovely things happen, horrible things happen, and lots of, um, in between stuff happens too. 

She experiences racism, both the crushing unfairness of segregation and threats of lynching and murder in Arkansas and the Northern version favored by "enlightened" whites. "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult." She sees the world around her with clarity, and understands the forces against her. And she sticks with it.
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic admiration.
Angelou talks often about youth. In some ways she grew up too fast, in others she remained childlike. She seems to be able to tap into her youth easily, though, which seems a near necessity for a poet. 
Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.
For terrible reasons, Angelou was mute for five years. What finally helped was a refined old woman in her neighborhood. For a young girl whose world consisted of her Grandma's store and a handful of houses and streets around her, Mrs. Flowers gave her, "her secret word which called forth a djinn who was to serve me all my life: books."

Someone told me once that we don't become new people as we grow up, that we never really change, but rather we are all of us at once. I am a 38-year-old man with a pretty good career and a wife and kids and a lot of responsibility, but I'm also still the 10-year-old who wanted a Nintendo for Christmas so, so badly. I'm still the 16-year-old in the projection room reading one novel a day and walking to the bookstore on break to buy another one. I'm still the 20-year-old living in Mexico as a Mormon missionary, always feeling inadequate, always wondering which one of my sins was preventing me from having success.

Youth doesn't go away, and the harder we try to say we're past it, the more childish we get. Kids hate to see someone else break the rules, not because of a feeling of justice, but because they themselves are following them. A lot of these rules are reasonable, and some are vital to human society. Growing up in the sense of being responsible for our lives is pretty important. "Growing up" by dressing nice and pretending that Avatar: The Last Airbender isn't awesome is not.

Think back to the ridiculous tough-guy posturing of the 12-year-old bully who made fun of his peers because they still watched cartoons and played pretend. Or look at me at the splashpad internally making fun of dads who are wearing Star Wars shirts. Both me and the bully have given ourselves rules that don't matter, and we get annoyed when someone else breaks those rules and seems to be enjoying themselves. It's like the fitness model who spends 4 hours a day exercising and watching every calorie raging at the body acceptance movement. You can only post "Cake doesn't taste as good as being skinny feels," before you start to imagine the person next to you as a giant cake, Bugs Bunny-style.

We're all stuck in the raccoon trap. Nobody is forcing us to behave like adults every day of the week but ourselves. Here's the deal we should make with each other today: let's enjoy things that made us happy when we were kids, too. Slide on the slip and slide sometimes, even if you're not in a swimsuit. If you liked books with elves and crap on them, that's very cool. If I happen to remember very clearly the first time I realized that I had a crush on Rogue from the X-Men, that's... maybe kind of weird. But shoot,16-year-old me derived an enormous amount of satisfaction writing a humor column for the newspaper to make his friends laugh. That's probably why I do this now. Whoa.