Ramona, The Champions, and Parenting

Recently I realized that my son has already hit the age where he has discovered that his dad isn't the hero he though he was when he was little. My middle daughter might be there, too. Heck, even my youngest has probably known it for a while. 

The problem is that I am often not great at doing anything. They see me lose my temper while playing video games and get tired and yell at them when it's bed time. The other day I was trying to write a blog post and my youngest girl wanted to sit by me and I said, "I'm sorry, I can't write with someone sitting right here." She wanted to know if I would play a video game instead and she can just watch, but I was like, "the fans need a blog post."

We both know that this last part is a lie and life would have gone on just fine sans said blog post, but also that writing them is something I do for me and sometimes a dad needs to do something for him. That's what I tell myself, but it's a bad look. I'm not proud of it. I'm not proud of how many times I've been reading or watching Rube Goldberg machines on YouTube and one of my kids has sweetly asked if I want to play a game and I say "can I just sit still for a minute because I'm exhausted."

I just read Ramona and Her Mother to said youngest girl and that wasn't what I was planning on writing about but it's actually not a bad idea. I've loved Beverly Cleary since reading Dear Mr. Henshaw in elementary school, but I didn't read Ramona books because duh, I was a boy. Now that I'm reading them to my kids I find that they are wonderful and I cry always.

Ramona's mom and dad get angry sometimes, and it really affects her. While I was reading, my wife would come in and out of the room, and afterwards she'd tell me how the book made her feel when she read it as a child. One part she remembered perfectly: it's when Ramona's mom and dad get into a fight and go to bed angry. Ramona can't sleep, so she climbs into bed with her unfortunately nicknamed sister Beezus and they wonder aloud if their parents are getting a divorce. That's heavy stuff for a little girl and it's heavy stuff for adults, too.

Even with their fights, though, her dad is clearly a better dad than I am. The book was written in 1979, and it's clear that he does as much housework as her mom does. That's pretty remarkable for the time and according to a recent study, leads to ambitious daughters. He is "cross" sometimes (I wish we'd bring back the word cross), but soon is ready to laugh things off again. He doesn't like his job, but he leaves his work at work and is ready to love his kids. I often felt bad reading it to my little girl who just wanted to sit with her dad while he wrote or played Stardew Valley.

I know, you guys. I know that she'll grow up and not want to play games with her dad anymore and I'll look back on every single time I turned her or her sister or her brother away when all they wanted was to spend time with me. I'll sing "The Cats in the Cradle," and I will probably cry like I just read a Ramona book. I definitely will not look back and say, "but that blog post was pure fire," because by then it will be something I only reflect on with embarrassment.

Ramona could not understand why grown-ups always talked about how quickly children grew up. Ramona thought growing up was the slowest thing there was, slower even than waiting for Christmas to come. She had been waiting years just to get to kindergarten, and the last half hour was the slowest part of all. - Ramona the Pest

That's something that happens with parents and kids, we know that. Some kids idolize their parents even though their parents are demonstrable garbage piles and spend the rest of their lives trying to love them again in spite of it. There are kids whose parents are driven and disciplined and create unbelievable achievers and maybe pushed too hard on violin or sports or whatever and their adult kids eventually look back in awe at everything they did for them.

And then there's the ones in the middle. Kids of parents who most of the time are doing their best but blow it as often as they don't. These kids promise that they will never make the same mistakes their folks' made, but at some point in their own parenting hope that they can do at least as well with their own kids. At some point most of us look back on our lives in amazement that we survived and that we are as happy as we are, whatever level of happy that is. Not because our parents were flawed but because this world is a meat grinder and it will tear you to pieces and we look around and see the casualties every day.

As a dad all I want is my kids to do better than me. I want them to know at a young age the things it took me a life to try to figure out, and like scientists taking over for the generations before them, build on it and do even more. If that means they look back on what I did and critique it honestly and find me wanting and make some changes and unlock more secrets to living a happy life, I'm glad they're doing it differently if that's what it takes.

That's what gets me to the book I really thought I was going to write about, which is Book 1 of Champions. Whoops, I tricked you into reading a post about a comic book. Not sorry at all. Comics are good, and you can put that on my headstone. In fact, please put that on my headstone so that bored kids on Memorial Day who explore the cemetery looking for anything interesting would revisit mine every time and wonder who I was. Maybe they'll leave comics there and I can read them as a ghost. This is literally the best idea I've ever had. Oh my gosh. If I don't ever write a will I hope this blog post is legally binding because I want this bad.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Champions. Here, look at the cover that I have verified I can use according to copyright law because it illustrates the comic book in question:

Marvel

Here's what you're looking at here: in the front is young Cyclops who was brought forward from the past to remind old Cyclops (who had turned villainous) to see his young optimistic self and change--which doesn't work--and who is now stuck in a time he doesn't understand. Then there's The Totally Awesome Hulk, who is Amadeus Cho, the 7th smartest man in the world. Then there's Nova. You know Nova. And the floating pink girl is Vision's daughter Viv who is like a robot? And then of course in the middle with the lightning bolt is Ms. Marvel. I don't need to talk more about Ms. Marvel, do I? Read Ms. Marvel.

Matt Howard
Born: 7/23/1979; died whenever of Mountain Dew poisoning
Comics are Good

Summary: a Korean-American, a Pakistani-American, black Spider-man, a robot, a white guy, and the son of an alien and a Mexican housekeeper team up after quitting The Avengers because The Avengers don't get it anymore. The Avengers are old and wrong and disappointing and it's up to the young kids to fix the world. This book is the worst nightmare of baby boomer journalists who pay their house payment exclusively with columns about how Millennials are to blame for everything.

Millennials, a generation of MURDERERS pic.twitter.com/I7PimFWTaO

— brandon sheffield (@necrosofty) August 26, 2016

They kind of have a point, though. If you're not following the comics because you're not insane, this is coming right after Civil War II, where Captain Marvel and Iron Man get in a war and drag everyone in and terrible things happen. The Champions vow to do things differently, and they do. They rescue girls being trafficked in Baltimore, fight for the rights of Muslim girls in the Middle East, and take down a racist sheriff in a small town.

Marvel

Yeah, you guys, they're wearing costumes and one of them is giant and green and another is pink, but the thing that's awesome about Champions so far is that they fight real-world problems, and they don't do it with their powers. Instead they empower the people who live there to solve their own problems and just provide some very, very powerful backup. Because they've figured out that a superhero can fly into a city and stop a crisis right then, but not protect everyone all of the time (and also because in real life the people who are reading these don't have super heroes to save them so they have to do it the old-fashioned way).

They don't have everything figured out because they're just kids. They definitely screw up and argue, but also they don't let the fact that they're just kids stop them from trying. This week I was in a meeting with some high school kids who want to do science on a property I manage. They don't know a lot, but that doesn't mean they can't discover something that's never been discovered before. I saw a presentation this year by a kid who frickin' blew the roof off of badger behavior and got worldwide attention. He didn't know that's what he was looking for, but recognized it when he found it and advanced science.

We spend all of our time wringing our hands about how the next generation is making our world uncomfortable for us, but never stop to think about the world they are inheriting. It's a different place, and the kids who are growing up on smart phones and unpaid internships and fidget spinners and racism didn't invent those things, the generations before them did. They're just stuck with them.

The most boring thing you can say is that young people's adaptations to a world we created but are rapidly losing touch with are wrong.

Books are scary!

The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison? - Reverend Enos Hitchcock, 1790

How about chess?

A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages...chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body. Chess has acquired a high reputation as being a means to discipline the mind, but persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require out-door exercises--not this sort of mental gladiatorship. - Scientific American, 1859

Here's the thing: we complain all day about how kids are so cynical but don't take any credit for the cynicism. We could argue that our entire nation is still recovering from a president who hired criminals to break into the opponents office while kids who should be in college or learning how to be carpenters or artists or whatever were dying in jungles and there were less than 500 bald eagles left in the United States. Even Captain America was so disgruntled he gave up the costume for a while.

Just in my lifetime I've seen a presidency where 138 members of his team were investigated, indicted, or convicted for various scandals and his administration thought that the AIDS epidemic was funny. Then we get a president who appoints a sex-offender to the Supreme Court, then a president who commits adultery and lies about it, and has been accused multiple times of rape, then we get one who attacks a country in response to a terrorist attack that country had nothing to do with, then a president who ramps up US drone programs responsible for killing somewhere between 400 and 800 civilians. And those are the conventional ones. I can't imagine the lasting imprint this current administration is going to make.

If our government officials are (heaven forbid) our parents, and we the kids, we've got plenty to complain about. The signs of abuse are all there. The effects of trauma last generations. And we have the right to want something better for the future. But sure, let's blame the historic amounts of marches and protests on the fact that millennials want free stuff. That works, too, I guess.

Ramona Quimby isn't a real person, but I still think she turned into a great woman because her parents were doing their best. They're always poor and Ramona has to spend time with the neighbor and her pill of a granddaughter and sometimes they fight. But they love her and they're good examples. Her mom gets a job because the family needs it, but stays at the job because she loves it. Her dad scrubs the bathroom after work. They are just barely making it, and I know as a parent that they want their kids' life to be easier and better and more fulfilling and sacrifice to get there.

The Champions have super powers, but want to do something new with them. The old stuff isn't working anymore. While The Avengers are saving the universe and fighting among themselves, somebody has to save the neighborhoods in a way that makes it so they don't need saving anymore. Of course the internet is losing their mind that comics are suddenly filled with social justice warriors (here's a rebuttal, btw). But guess what, they always have been.

Every generation overstays its welcome and gets real sad about it, but that's only because most of us don't spend time with actual young people other than being annoyed by them on public transportation. It doesn't take much to realize that maybe they aren't like us because we were wrong sometimes and they're figuring out how to be right. It's not the craziest thing I've read in a comic book.

The Song and the Silence and Not Screwing This Up

I thought for a minute that I wouldn't write a single word of my own this time, because I pulled enough quotes from the book I read that it could be a post in itself. That's how I justify writing about all the stuff I write about anyway. I make my jokes and metaphors and airtight arguments, but it's all in service of the book I read, right? Like this is definitely not about me, because I mean haha like we need another white guy telling everyone what to think about race and sexism and domestic abuse. Really I'm like read this book.

Right? I definitely don't expend the vast majority of every post telling stories about me and explaining how much I get it and if you guys had only read the books I've read we'd agree about everything. And certainly, certainly, have I never just kind of shoehorned the book in at the end because the point I was trying to make was only tangentially related to it anyway.

Boosting the voices of women and people of color, that's what a good ally does. Not making it about him. Not wasting paragraph after paragraph justifying my existence in a world in which the majority of voices look just like me except usually with hair. O the eternal plight of the white man! To be told all his life that he is special by every TV show, school teacher, and video game but faced daily with his own mediocrity! Why does my blog not have more views, our heroic white man says. Is not my voice unique? Is it not noteworthy? Should I not be praised simply for existing?

Honestly I kind of just talked myself out of writing a blog ever again just then. Oof. This is really awkward. Is this journey of mine of constantly learning and hoping that what I'm learning is of value to someone, and especially hoping that someone will read the book I read, reach out to me and say, "Hey Howie. You exist and I exist and this book exists and isn't it nice to just say that out loud sometimes?" Answer: maybe? I don't know.

Here's what I do know: the more I read about the history of Blacks in the United State of America the more overwhelmed I get. It's really something, this society we've built on the backs of at least one entire race (after stealing it from another). And when they didn't work hard and fast enough we whipped and beat them. And when they fell in love we separated them. And when they had children and were instantly smitten with their babies and thought what love is this? I hardly knew it was possible we took their babies from their arms forever.

They thought about their babies, obviously, because that's what human beings do. But instead of imagining what phenomenal things they would accomplish and make them proud, instead they thought about them slaving in a field at 8 years old. Already knowing the sting of a whip and the fear of death.

I imagine a lot of people don't want to talk about this anymore. There's a history of that. Let's get to the book so I can talk about it. So. Because Yvette Johnson--author of The Song and the Silence--had an NFL football player for a dad, she grew up in a wealthy white neighborhood. Her friends were all White and they were the token Black family. Her dad played for the Chargers, so everyone loved him. Johnson's mom grew up dirt poor in Greenwood, MS, and was hyper aware of race, but Yvette consciously chose not to acknowledge it.

When she learned about the civil rights era at school, it was with a similar kind of distance that I did. Which is kind of an acknowledgment that the time before it was probably pretty bad, but also that things were OK now and it's probably not worth dwelling on it anymore. Remember Remember the Titans? But now there are lots of Black football players so yay!

When Yvette was ignored by the woman at the makeup counter who offered a makeover to every other woman who entered, she assumed it was because she wasn't dressed as nicely as the other women there. At this point she would sometimes spend $1,000 on a single outfit. So one day she dressed up just to prove her point.

I moved closer to the woman at the counter so I'd be ready to accept her offer when she made it. But she didn't offer me anything. Instead, she awkwardly adjusted her body so she could look past me and then motioned to another woman, "Free makeover." I wanted to believe the best. This was not about race. Somehow she just wasn't noticing that I was interested. 

I stood in front of her, smiled, and said, "Hi, I'd like a makeover."
Her persona of crisp excellence and warmth fell away in an instant. She let her shoulders sag, rolled her eyes, and said, "If I give you a makeover, you're going to have to buy something.

She got a makeover, bought a ton of makeup, and walked away proud. "My mom would've made that interaction about race. I refused to do so." She starts to blame her mom every time something comes up that makes her think that racism still exists. "I could be free from whatever ailed my mother and the rest of my family because I wasn't going to wear my race like a martyr's cloak. I was beyond race."

So that's the background. That's the status quo. And with good literature something is going to happen to Yvette that upsets that status quo and sets her on a path from which there is no return. That inciting event comes about when she talks to her grandmother while researching for a family history course in college. She learns about Booker Wright, her grandfather, a man who owned a restaurant during the day, and worked in a whites-only restaurant at night. Booker, it turns out, had a part in the civil rights movement himself, but a unique one.

That clip was part of a documentary called Mississippi: A Self Portrait, by Frank DeFellita. It aired only once, but that clip stuck with people. Because it was never re-broadcast, it disappeared and was only known by its reviews, the majority of which talked about this scene.

When Booker appeared in Frank's documentary, he set alight a fire of compassion in the souls of complete strangers throughout the nation. He didn't speak about voting rights or access to public spaces, as important as those issues were--instead he won them over with his vulnerability. He stood in front of a camera and revealed the deepest parts of himself as if he believed that if people could really see him, really understand what it felt like to be Black in his world, that it would arouse in them not just sorrow but indignation and a commitment to action as well.

Only after Johnson blogged about it did the clip come back to light. The filmmaker's son reached out to her and asked if she wanted to make a new documentary about her grandfather, which brought her back to the Mississippi Delta, specifically the town of Greenwood.

This is the most synopsis I've ever written for a blog post. I got carried away. It's such an interesting story. Johnson goes back and forth between her own life and her telling of Booker's. This might be a huge surprise to you, but it turns out that there are parallels.

Maybe if they'd been living in a different time, the Whites of Greenwood might have been able to better connect with the national conversation on race. Unfortunately the message Greenwood Whites received from this national fervor was not one of compassion for Blacks and concern for their civil rights. Instead, filtered through local leaders with segregationist agendas, the message impressed on many Whites living in the Delta was that it was once again time to fight. Just like in the war for Southern Independence lost less than a century before, outsiders from the North were once again trying to change the South. Only this time, it was hippies and communists who were coming into their towns to recklessly rip away and destroy the sense of magic and community they'd labored to create.

THAT SOUNDS SUPER FAMILIAR.

ALSO THIS

When describing the Blacks who were determined to integrate the Lefore Theater and the Whites who didn't want it integrated at all, Sara referred to them as two "groups who were trying to stir up trouble," making life difficult for the "decent respectable citizens" of Greenwood. 

Sara loved her family, wanted to protect it, and had dreams for her children. Like many others in her community, she seemed blind to the simple fact that Blacks had the same dream.

Sara Miller is a local woman who wrote a journal in 1990 for her family that Johnson quotes often. Her experience as a white woman in Greenwood tells the story of an idyllic, near perfect town of her childhood and a roiling, dangerous one during the civil rights movement.

"Every year," Sara Miller wrote in her memoir, [Fountain's] would put a large curtain over the side window until Thankgiving afternoon, when they opened it for everyone to see what the new toys were that year."

Her daughter, who decided to publish Miller's memoirs, added her own take:

"Greenwood and the Mississippi Delta, in the 1920s, was a harsh and brutal place for many of its inhabitants, white and black, but... for Sara, looking back from 1990 to her childhood, Greenwood was a magical town, set squarely in the center of the universe, and peopled by kind and quirky characters."

Let's go back to that first quote: in it she says that Blacks who wanted to go to a movie and the ones who used violence to stop them were both "groups who were trying to stir up trouble." This was a situation so volatile that when one white family decided they didn't care that the theater was not integrated, they'd watch a movie anyway, their house was shot at. I feel like I've heard talk like that somewhere recently. If only I could place it.

Greenwood, like many towns in the South, was a great place to live, if you were white. Mississippi southerners liked it that way. In DeFillita's documentary, and unnamed white man puts it this way:

"And this thing became a moral issue... Now this was quite a traumatic experience for us in the South, and I think it was for the rest of the nation, to be told all of a sudden that what you've been doing, what you've been believing in, the way you've been living all your life, and the way your parents lived before you and forebears, is not only wrong but immoral is quite a shock, and unfortunately it's easy to understand why the attitude of Mississippi to this new order of the day, this new change, was one of inflexibility and one of defiance."

For Blacks, Greenwood was a very different place. In Greenwood a 14-year-old boy named Emmett Till was visiting family. He was falsely accused of making lewd gestures and remarks to a white woman in a candy store. His mother had told him that in the South it was dangerous to be black. She said "to be very careful… to humble himself to the extent of getting down on his knees." But Till was from Chicago, and a teen, and visiting family. Maybe he didn't act as humble as the locals thought he should. We'll never know what set them off, but man.

The teenager was abducted at gunpoint from his great-uncle’s home on this day, Aug. 28, 60 years ago, by two white men who accused him of having whistled at a white woman in a grocery store. His body was found in the Tallahatchie River three days later. He had been brutally beaten and shot in the head. 

An all-white jury acquitted the defendants (the husband and brother-in-law of the woman who complained about Till), who later confessed to the killing in a raw, unremorseful interview with Look magazine. One said that they had intended only to beat the teen, but decided to kill him when he showed no fear — and refused to grovel. 

“Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless,” J.W. Milam, the woman’s brother-in-law, is quoted as saying. “I'm no bully; I never hurt a [n-----] in my life. I like [n-----s] — in their place — I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, [n-----s] are gonna stay in their place.” - Time Magazine

Greenwood got so bad, Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a telegram to John F. Kennedy specifically to address the growing tension.

Source: jfklibrary.org

A man from Greenwood's local White Citizen's Council murdered a civil rights activist 100 miles south in Jackson.

Medgar Evers was getting out of his car and preparing to walk into his Jackson, Mississippi home. His wife and children were heading toward the front door to greet him when Byron De La Beckwith, a prominent member of the Greenwood community, shot Evers in the back in his driveway while his children were on their way out to greet him. 

The following year, De La Beckwith was tried twice for the murder of Medgar Evers, with both efforts ending in hung juries. Mississippi's White community continued to support him. His bond and legal defense were funded by the White Citizens' Council, the group that was determined to stop integration, and the former governor of Mississippi interrupted one of the trials to shake De La Beckwith's hand.

When Johnson returns to Greenwood in 2012, she finds it still almost completely segregated. As schools integrated, Whites fled to private schools, leaving the public schools unfunded and ignored. Blacks flocked to White businesses they'd always wanted to frequent, but Whites did not return the favor, leading to economic collapse of Black industry. As more and more horrible stories emerge, she starts to feel her mother's anger. "...there were times when I felt as if I was drowning," she says. "I didn't want to read anymore, I didn't want to see even one more photo of a Black person being beaten, but I couldn't stop."

Their lives were compounded by one trauma after another: the daily trauma of racial abuse, and the physical trauma of being beaten without cause. I stumbled upon an article about the long-term effects of trauma and how repeated emotionally traumatic events can influence an individual's biochemistry, causing not only psychological scars but also chemical changes that influence how someone interacts with their environment. These chemical changes can imprint themselves on genetic code, allowing the remnants of trauma to be passed down from generation to generation. 

My head was spinning.

The study she references could be this one, in which traumatic experiences altered the DNA of mice. Or it could be this one, in which 32 holocaust victims' DNA linked increased stress disorders to their children. The point is that even if racism was completely eliminated from everyday life (which it totally hasn't been), even then the effects would continue for multiple generations.

Creating new laws was only the beginning. Civil rights legislation couldn't keep one group from devaluing another; it couldn't stop them from maintaining distance and nurturing ideas that only served to deepen division. No law is complex enough to address the myriad, nuanced ways in which a group of people can be systematically held back, degraded, and quietly denied the right to a life of respect, safety, prosperity, and peace.

I hope I boosted Yvette Johnson's message a little. Sorry this post didn't have as much me in it. I'm just so sick of this. I'm sick of racists thinking that they are winning and feel brave enough to openly declare themselves. And I'm sick of presidents who say that the people who are fighting for equal rights and those who are using phrasing, symbology, and hand signals that were used by a political party that murdered 6 million people just because of their race are both to blame when a young woman and two police officers lose their lives.

We're all going to remember this time. It feels big. Will it be an annoyance? Will it make us uncomfortable when players who have experienced racism first hand for their whole life kneel during the national anthem? Do our children hear us complain and say, "Why don't they just play football like the good white people pay them to do?" Will we wring our hands, like the citizens of Greenwood, and say they are making life difficult for "the respectable citizens?" Will our grandkids say that we were products of our time and did the best we could? I bet they won't. We have way too much evidence that we should have known better. The memes alone will damn us.

Good night everybody. Let's not screw this up.

Lab Girl and When I Learned Way Too Much About Pumpkins

I think this blog is best when it's not dependent on the current news cycles. Sure, I've jumped in on the bandwagon of good good essays about whatever's on the news, but I'm never the guy with the best opinion put in just the right way. I think I'll leave that to everyone else. There's been some stuff in the news lately that is all cuckoo-bananas, and I've had a lot of opinions about them, but you've read all the stuff by now and I've got nothing new for you.

You already know how to feel about Charlottesville, Tina Fey, and Joss Whedon. If there was ever nuance in those discussions it's gone now. Already at this point there's the right answer and everything else is the wrong one, and that right answer depends mostly on what city you live in and what kind of mustard you use.

Besides, I've talked about most of this stuff in general anyway. For example: I'm afraid of totalitarian governments, and am aware that totalitarianism comes from the right and the left. In that second link I work through the idea of free speech. You can watch me literally do it, because I set out to make one point in that post and ended up talking myself around to the opposite side. And guys, I'm happy to leave the recent news to his family to sort out, though I get why it's being discussed. Honestly I haven't thought of Joss Whedon as a "feminist icon" for quite a while now, because I think if he were really as feminist as he says he is, he'd be giving more jobs to women.

For real, though. These posts take too long to be digested and forgotten as the news cycle moves on. This isn't my job. These are like pots that I lovingly create out of clay where the clay is the 26 letters of the Modern English alphabet, the wheel is an over-sized ergonomic keyboard, and the Patrick Swayze behind me, lovingly guiding my hands, is my local library: nuzzling me with its never-ending supply of free reading material that is my collective muse. I miss you, Patrick. Haunt me with your blog ideas once again. Occupy the Whoopi Golberg that is my library card and serves as an intermediary between me and the treasure trove that is your love/all those books. Dance with me, Whoopi.

I give these misshapen pots freely, like your amateur friend who wears a lot of scarves. I do it with the understanding that they may only be marginally useful, because they are somehow somewhere between an ashtray and a flower pot--yet useless as either--but I put my very soul into them. Much like how Thomas Kinkade puts a tiny bit of his DNA into the signatures he places on his "paintings of light." Where am I going to put these pots when I know he's going to ask about them when he comes to visit, you say. I'll never invite him over again. This gift is a curse and our friendship a sham.

I want these to be unlike Joss Whedon scripts, which is to say somewhat evergreen. I'm often dismayed when I look back at old posts that I'm proud of but are too dated because it's about the election or mongoose. Nobody wants to talk about that anymore. I want Howie's Book Club posts to be like Monty Python sketches: only appealing to nerds timeless. If this were my job, it would be one thing. A post makes money, it's no big deal if it disappears into obscurity when we move on to the next crisis; it paid my rent for the month. But when I'm just doing this to do it, it's a whole different scene.

Here at the HBC, we talk about big ideas. We talk about mashed potatoes here. We define flotsam and jetsam. We explore the psychology of drama kids. Metaphors, philosophy, a woman with the proportional strength of a spider. You know that quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt but who the heck knows if anyone really said anything? The one that says, "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." Well that's us here. We're not going to talk about celebrities here because we are bigger than that. We are going to talk instead about pumpkins.

What's a more modern American thing than taking a crop that is so ingrained in human history that pumpkin seeds were found dating back to 7,000 years ago, evidence of their being a staple for food and functionality, and turning it into a Minion. OK, you guys, this is good because it dovetails back to what we'll be talking about soon. That article I just linked is from The Atlantic, which I consider a reputable publication that has been around since 1857. But when I click on the link for how long ago pumpkins were discovered in Central America, this is the source.

So that's a Suwannee County Extension's newsletter reporting an elementary school tour of a pumpkin patch. Where do they get their information? Who knows? So I dig further. I find the reference to 7,000 years to 7,500 years ago when pumpkin seeds were used. So I go to Wikipedia. That entry reaffirms the 7,000 year number, but its citation is pumpkin-patch.com: "Everything you need to know about pumpkins for Halloween!" Also The Columbia Encyclopedia. Which is a dead link. Pumpkin Patch dot com might look only slightly less professional than Howie's Book Club dot com the website, but it's not inspiring confidence.

How far does this rabbit hole go? What is it that Big Pumpkin doesn't want us to know? Whatever it is, I was going to get to the bottom of it. Which I did, ten minutes later, when I found this textbook, which apparently costs $253 dollars but I could access enough of to find some kind of scholarly information regarding pumpkins. The number checks out, you guys. The part about the drying them out and making mats out of them goes, too. Kudos to the Suwannee County Extension, but in the future be a dear and save a guy some time and cite your sources. Turns out the rabbit hole goes approximately as deep as it takes to fit a few rabbits.

Anyway, this is part of my point. We'll get there. So back to pumpkins. Clearly, now that we know the historical record, entire civilizations have lived off of the humble and noble pumpkin. They make mats out of it or whatever. European settlers loved the things and made soups, hollowed them out and packed them with food and baked them. Basically every one of us can credit our very existence to one of our ancestors at some point staving off starvation with one of these heavy orange SOBs.

So Americans spend $100 million dollars a year hollowing them out, throwing all of the food part of them in the garbage, and then carving something ridiculous into them to display for one night before letting them rot long enough for a teenager to throw it from his or her car at my mailbox. Some of us might save some seeds and fry them so that our kids can eat one and say, "it's ok," and not eat anymore even though they asked us 1100 times to fry them because it's "part of Halloween."

If it took existing for thousands of years of cultivation for this to have been carved it will have been worth it

In my book, this means that we're doing pretty well as a species. Many of us are suffering, that is for sure, and many of us do not have the discretionary funds to throw at large gourds that serve no purpose other than to provide free advertisement for perpetually sold out Broadway shows. But enough of us are doing well enough that we'll take that life-sustaining Vitamin A, potassium, and fiber, wrap it up in soggy newspaper, and send it to the landfill. This is like if we took the thing that basically sustained almost half of an entire nation and shot it out of guns at stop signs. You know, for fun.

There's two points here. The first is that sometimes we do things just cause. That's what comes next after our basic needs are filled. Leisure/exploration. And as anyone who has slaved over a Jack-O-Lantern or painted figurines for a role-playing game or made costumes for Comic-Con can tell you, sometimes leisure is work. Sometimes you do something just because you want to find out if you can do it, and if you can learn something while you do. That's the second thing: sometimes we want to know the answer to something even if it has little to no bearing on our life.

I think this is why babies put so much stuff in their mouths. It's clearly not because they're hungry, because babies actually don't eat any food, choosing instead to spit it onto their chin and absorbing nutrition by mashing bananas between their fingers. Instead, they are learning. Babies are little scientists whose mouths are the equivalent of mass spectrometers. What's this made of, they say, and can I destroy it?

The amount of time that humans have been eating pumpkins isn't a question that has bearing on my life. In fact, I hadn't even thought about it until I looked up how much we spend as a nation on pumpkins. But once I saw that number, I thought, how did they come up with that? Because it's interesting. Also how does a little seed turn sunlight and soil nutrients into a giant orange ball that is so, so satisfying to throw out of a moving vehicle? These are important questions.

Like, in Lab Girl, which is the book I read, Hope Jahren is trying to figure out what hackberry seeds are made of. She's a paleobotanist, and hackberry seeds are often found in ancient sites. They are seeds so tough that they can survive centuries of harsh winters and pass through an animals gut unscathed, just waiting for the perfect conditions to germinate and sprout. Since they stick around so long, she guesses that there is data in these pits about conditions from ancient times.

So she uses an acid that dissolves peach pits. It works on some of the seed, which suggests part of it is made of the same stuff, which isn't a surprise. The surprise is the stone like structural lattice behind. Something that the living hackberry tree created. So she borrows some mass spectrometer time in the middle of the night when the creepy lab guy with no boundaries won't be there, and discovers that the lattice is the exact molecular structure as opal. Hackberry trees create rocks. That's nuts (haha). From here she learns how to tease out trace elements from the seeds to calculate climate conditions from ancient history.

That's pretty cool, I think. Like that matters to all of us, whether we believe it or not. But at the root of all of this is just plain old curiosity. That's kind of the thing about science and pumpkins. Sometimes you don't know what you're going to end up with when you start. It could be useful and worth putting on Instagram, or it could be trash that you quietly throw away in order to maintain your illusion of a perfect life. At one point Hope and her endlessly loyal lab partner Bill spend a week taking samples of sphagnum moss in Ireland, only to have them swept into a garbage can at airport security because they didn't have the permits. That's science, too.

Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.

I'm not going to belabor the pumpkin thing. You get it. Really I picked pumpkins because Lab Girl is about plants and pumpkins are in the top 3 funniest plants there are and the other two are only funny because they are so phallic.

Plants are amazing, that's one thing we learn from this book. Their endless toil to turn sunlight into sugars, while constantly fighting drought, disease, and competition, is inspiring. Jahren draws lots of parallels between plants and humans. Even though she recognizes that in very fundamental ways we are very different, there are still life lessons to be learned. The chapters alternate between very accessible science and personal stories from her life.

Public and private organizations all over the world have studied the mechanics of sexism within science and have concluded that they are complex and multifactorial. In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can’t possibly be what you are.

There's that, too. The sexism in sciences. I don't know if you've heard about this, but it's still out there, I'm told.

I’m good at science because I’m not good at listening. I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman. I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine. I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous. But I was told all of these things by people who can’t understand the present or see the future any better than I can. Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along. I don’t take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it. When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences: You shouldn’t take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.

I thought that part was pretty interesting, but it wasn't the whole thing. I thought there would be more of it. Jahren is unrelentingly determined, so he recognizes the bias, and then puts her head down and plows through it. For the most part it's really breezy and fun. Jahren has a knack for humor and an even more impressive knack for metaphor. But you guys it wouldn't be a Howie's Book Club approved book if it wasn't a bummer sometimes.

Here's the frustrating thing: Americans want to shoot potatoes out of guns and cut holes in pumpkins and shoot off firework shows that cost literally thousands of dollars in their front yards, but we do not want to spend money on science. We "like" Facebook pages called I Effing Love Science that are really just pictures of space, and yesterday we all gathered in public spaces and loved on an astronomical event that was perfectly predicted by scientists to the second, and yet we'll be damned if someone asks us for one more penny to study the world around us.

You may have heard that America doesn't have enough scientists and is in danger of "falling behind" (whatever that means) because of it. Tell this to an academic scientist and watch her laugh. For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don't have too few scientists, we've got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation... The list goes on and on.

And this isn't Sarah Palin making fun of fruit fly research (though that has led to major advances in medical science). This is environmental science, and I hate to be the one to point this out to everyone, but the environment is where we live. It's not just where we go camping or trees in which hippies live to hug spotted owls or whatever. It's everything. Water, air, pumpkins. All of it. It's all the stuff. We happily study things that are built to kill other people. We should be studying the stuff that keeps us alive.

Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help.

Those of us throwing pumpkins away are the not sick in this case. We're talking about the dang future here. If you can, shut up and help.

The potatoes grew bigger as carbon dioxide increased. This was not a surprise. We also saw that these big potatoes were less nutritious, much lower in protein content, no matter how much fertilizer we gave them. This was a bit of a surprise. It is also bad news, because the poorest and hungriest nations of the world rely on sweet potatoes for a significant amount of dietary protein. It looks as if the bigger potatoes of the future might feed more people while nourishing them less. I don’t have an answer for that one.