DEADLINE JANUARY 28

Here's the plan. Go to regulations.gov and copy ED-2018-OCR-0064 into the search bar to comment on the proposed change to the Title IX rule regarding sexual assault on college campus. You can also try this link.

Here's my letter, which you can use as a general template if you like. There are some tips for submitting a successful comment here. Also, if you need more information, this is a good resource.

Re: ED-2018-OCR-0064

To Whom it May Concern,

I am commenting on the proposed rule: Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance.

I am a volunteer on my local rape crisis team in a community with two major universities. I sit with victims in emergency rooms during exams and evidence collection and advocate for their rights. I also answer hotline calls for the local rape crisis hotline. Many of the victims with whom I work are university students.

I am deeply familiar with the many ways in which universities avoid reporting and investigating sexual assaults on campus and recognize that while it is a result of intense pressure to protect the reputation of the university in order to sustain enrollment and alumni donations, it comes at the cost of student safety. Specifically I think it’s dangerous to limit university liability to assaults that take place on school campus, as most students live off-campus. I also believe that the “preponderance of evidence” standard already included in the rule is appropriate in regarding student discipline, and should not be removed. While I recognize the potential harm done to students in the extremely rare case of false accusations, I have seen no evidence that the long term impacts are harsher than having an assault go unreported, and being forced to continue pursuing education knowing that your assaulter is still allowed to walk free on your campus. Finally, the right of the accused to cross-examine victims through an adviser would have a profound cooling effect on victims feeling safe in coming forward with an accusation. Instead of a trauma-informed interview of each party individually, as is becoming increasingly common among law enforcement agencies, it would create a courtroom-like atmosphere where aspects of a victims lives can be probed in an invasive way that, while immaterial to the details of the assault, can often be used as a way to intimidate and invalidate a victim.

I have spent hundreds of hours in hospital rooms with victims and their families. The exam and evidence gathering process is invasive and painful, both physically and psychologically. The interview with police can be humiliating. Pressure from family and friends to stay quiet can often be oppressive. There are already so many factors preventing victims from propertly reporting a rape. Please do not introduce further obstacles to a victim’s safety. The proposed changes would be a massive step backward in the fight against an insidious epidemic happening amid what should be an exciting and productive time in a young adult’s life.

If it they have not yet be considered, I urge you to review the following peer-reviewed articles in the interest of meeting the standard for best available science: “Sexual assault incidents among college undergraduates: Prevalence and factors associated with risk,” by Claude A. Mellins, et al. PLoS One. 2017, “Prevalence of sexual assault victimization among college men, aged 18-24: a review” by R. Lane Forsman. Journal of Evidence-Informed Social Work, 2017 and “Barriers to Reporting Sexual Assault for Women and Men: Perspectives of College Students,” by Marjorie R. Sable et al, Journal of American College Health, 2010.

I understand that no rule is perfect, and advocate for data-driven progress in all policy decisions. I do not believe that the proposed rule changes are consistent with the known science regarding this issue. For the foregoing reasons, the rule should remain in place without these potentially disastrous changes.

Sincerely,
Matt Howard
Volunteer Victim Advocate

An Unkindness of Ghosts and Let's Just Call It a Day

A scientist, Aster had learned something Giselle had not: decoding the past was like decoding the physical world. The best that could be hoped for was a working model. A reasonable approximation. That was to say, no matter what Aster learned of Lune, there was no piecing together the full mystery of her life. There was no hearing her laugh or feeling her embrace. A ghost is not a person. - Solomon Rivers, An Unkindness of Ghosts

The domain for www.howiesbookclub.com renews at the end of each April. It doesn't cost a lot to keep it going, but I think I'm going to let it lapse. I'm not sure if I'll still keep writing blog posts, but when I consulted my Stranger Things brand Ouija board, the demons that the warlocks at the Hasbro lovingly bake into every batch of flimsy cardboard and cheap plastic planchettes told me that it's probably the end of this particular era. Who knows? This may be the last post you ever see. If so, I hope you have as much fun as I did. Also, we're finishing up with a pretty good book so there are worse ways to go.

I don't know where it comes from, but I've always had this feeling that if people could just see inside my head, everything would make sense to them. Sometimes I manage to spin words around a thing in a way that seems more or less foolproof, and when whoever I'm arguing with doesn't immediately change their mind, I assume it's because they weren't really listening. I imagine that's part of why people tweet or make facebook posts or write blogs. If only you'd read the way it works in my head, this thing would be solved and then we could all move on to the next problem.

When I watched Zootopia, I thought "this is going to solve everything." I really thought that. It made one billion dollars and was the second highest-grossing movie that wasn't a sequel or based on a book ever. It makes such a subtle point that you're lulled into having a good time and then holy smokes, you just got hammered with social justice. It makes such a good argument and does it so cutely I don't know how you argue with it. And so many people saw it.

Imagine my surprise when enough Americans voted for a man who said that Mexican immigrants were all rapists and where men were still getting stabbed on the bus for standing up for Muslim women who were being bullied. Refugees from some of the most war-torn countries ever were turned away in airports. My face was like wha-

That sounds ridiculous, but also I can't figure out why. There are books and movies that change the world. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring is credited with leading to the outlawing of DDT as a pesticide. The Marylin Monroe and Clark Gable picture The Misfits changed policy regarding feral/wild horses in the American West. Casablanca helped turn the American people from isolationism to supporting the war. Listen, am I comparing Zootopia to Casablanca? Of course I am, and not just because both heavily feature a Shakira song (note to self: Google before publishing to make sure).

At some point this blog went from being a chance for me to talk about the books I was reading to a platform to kind of outline the way I see the world. I think there's been some growth on some of that and I hope to keep growing and learning, but for now I think I've pretty much covered it. I've noticed that I'm repeating myself often, even using the same articles to back up my points. A couple of people have told me that they read a book because of my recommendation, which feels good, but for the most part it seems like a few years of very hard work little to show for it.

I think we're ready to move on from this kind of thing; the thinkpieces that everyone races to write to put the newest headline in context. I must have read six articles just today about how I should react to the Aziz Ansari news that by now you're probably already bored with. The thing is, I already reacted to that news. I read a few articles that supported my opinion, then hate-read two that didn't. It didn't change my mind at all. It's the same thing I've always suspected these articles to be, whether they are about why men don't like the new Star Wars, or whether it's OK for a sitting president of the United States to call other countries shitholes without understanding our country's role in how they got to be that way. They are a script for us to memorize and regurgitate when we get to work, or get into online fights, or chat about during dinner.

Like going through the seed catalog and imagining a garden, sitting down and writing these posts or long facebook rants that get comments like "here, here" or "well said, may I share?" makes me feel good sometimes and absolves me from getting my hands dirty. I could order every beautiful heirloom tomato in that catalog, put them in a drawer, and never plant a one. Then, while eating a boring BLT with tasteless grocery store tomatoes, I could grumble about how it's society that gives me these red waterbags when I asked for some flavor. I could write a thinkpiece about it.

It's time, I guess, to admit something that I've always kind of known. Thinkpieces don't put heirloom tomatoes in BLTs. Actions do. That's what An Unkindness of Ghosts is about. Actions, I mean. Not BLTs. Anyway, just read. This is the last one. You'll survive.

"Zero BLTs!" - Howie's Book Club

On paper, the character of Aster could be easily dismissed as the most PC character ever to be found in fiction. She is black, intersex, and probably somewhere on the autism scale. Instead of being a handful of cliches, though, she's deep and complex and funny; even if sometimes her humor is unintentional. Aster is a passenger on the HSS Matilda, an ark in space built to escape a dying Earth in search of another habitable planet. The Matilda is massive, with multiple labyrinthine decks surrounding a center filled with rotating crop fields and a nuclear reactor known as Baby Sun.

Somehow in the time since the ship departed several hundred years ago, the same kinds of people who would say something like "I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery — they cared for one another.... Our families were strong, our country had a direction," found themselves in power. We don't know how long they've been in charge, but it has been long enough that most folks don't know any other life. If ever there was a democracy, it has been replaced by some kind of succession-based monarchy/theocracy. The sovereign is selected by God and his will is His, that kind of thing. Surprise! It's super racist.

Aster is on Q deck where it's almost always dark and the power is regularly restricted, leaving the residents with no heat. Guards patrol everywhere and do everything you'd expect small-minded people with no oversight would do. Aster, already struggling to belong anywhere because of analytical brilliance paired with a basic inability to decipher social cues, also straddles the two most distant social classes. Aster is essentially a slave, but also the assistant to the ship surgeon, one of the highest ranking members of the ship.

At first I thought that not fitting neatly into the mythical this-or-that sex binary was also a metaphor for being stuck between worlds, but I don't think that's the author's intention. It's just who Aster is and she is unashamed. I bet most real life people want a rare physical condition to be a defining character point, and this fictional one probably doesn't either. Aster, like most of the women on her deck, is the product of repeated and horrible trauma. Nobody wants that to define them, either, but usually that's not their choice.

Anyway, there's lots of stuff going on here, but essentially we're looking at a science fiction treatment of the antebellum slavery South. If you're on the top deck, or even one of the mid-decks, you're whte and things are A-OK. Even if you're in a middle deck and white, at least there's someone who has it worse than you, which is almost as good as being rich. You're on a thrilling adventure through space and you're probably not in a particular hurry to get to where you're going. Like Sara Miller, the real-life white Mississippi woman whose words appeared in this blog a while ago, you love the annual festivals and feasts but don't spend a lot of time worrying about the backs of people upon whom your entire life is propped.

A world that is unbearable for so many multitudes cannot continue, even if it's comfortable for a few.

Aster didn't mean it. As much as it frustrated her, she understood the logic of Giselle's psychosis. Everything dies, so exert control by burning it away yourself. Everything will be born again anyway. There's no such thing as creation, merely a shuffling of parts. All birth is rebirth in disguise. 

This book is so well-constructed you could use it as a text for how to build a novel. Nothing is introduced without being paid off in some way, even from the first page. It would almost seem coincidental, but there's a good reason for it. It's full of perfectly fired Chekhov's guns. In one case a literal one.

It's also relentlessly brutal because guess what; An Unkindness of Ghosts isn't really about a ship in space. If you're going to write a sci-fi treatment analyzing American slavery, it's going to be gnarly as f. It has to be. It would be irresponsible to delve into this kind of thing otherwise because while the very concept of enslavement is evil, it only touches on the depravity that was not only prevalent during that era, but actively and systematically protected by every level of government. Trying to talk about slavery as an abstract concept without dealing with rape, abuse, neglect, torture, and all of the rest of it is like when hotel staff just wipe the glasses out with a towel and put the paper back on top. It looks cleaner, but the nasty stuff hasn't gone anywhere.

I'm curious if multiple arks went out in multiple directions, each one morphing into its own new society over hundreds of years. Was this the natural progression based on the future society that existed before the ships took off? Or did a pluralistic society with a few weeds lurking in there eventually get corrupted? Or is this the natural tendency of humans when left to their own devices? Those are pretty good questions. There are an infinite number of possible outcomes for the other ships, some may be beacons of human innovation and paragons of equality, but the HSS Matilda isn't one of them. At least not yet. With someone like Aster aboard, anything seems possible.

What We Lose and Mourning With Those Who Mourn

In this regard I find myself dubious about the politics of women’s peace groups, for example, which celebrate maternality as the basis for engaging in antimilitarist work. I do not see the mother with her child as either more morally credible or more morally capable than any other woman. A child can be used as a symbolic credential, a sentimental object, a badge of self-righteousness. I question the implicit belief that only “mothers” with “children of their own” have a real stake in the future of humanity.

I don't have a lot of experience with grief. Friends of mine have died, but each time it has been after an extended period in which I hadn't seen them. At one point, Tony was one of my three or four closest friends, but I hadn't seen him in nearly a decade when I found out he'd overdosed and died. His funeral was weird and uncomfortable; it was held in a church that he hadn't attended in probably twenty years and filled with people who had probably never set foot in a chapel before. His sister gave a lovely talk, and the bishop who clearly never knew him doled out boilerplate platitudes that hopefully comforted the believers, but probably gave little to the majority of the attendees. I didn't envy the guy's position, but wished he'd spoken less.

One of Tony's close friends stood to talk, but was overcome by emotion and just sat down. Later my friends and I had a little party where we told stories about him and walked to the gully where we used to play and scattered a small bag of his ashes. I hope that the friends he'd made later in his life all had a chance to get together, too. Looking at his Facebook page it was clear he'd made an impact on their lives and they were suffering badly. In their messages I saw a lot of the same things I knew about him. He didn't judge anyone. He was emotionally available. He was funny. He liked to look straight in your eyes and get frickin' deep about something and wouldn't let you laugh it off.

I remember him introducing me to Rage Against the Machine in his basement and telling me what the machine was and explaining who burning guy on the cover was. Another time he decided to become a vegetarian, shortly after we went to a local concert and he disappeared for a while. He showed up a few hours later saying that on a whim he'd jumped onto a freight-train, depression-era hobo style, and jumped off near a McDonalds and ate the biggest hamburger they made, then he walked back. He would get mad that we all had a crush on his sister.

The news hurt bad, but it still struck far away from me. Like when I saw on Facebook that a work friend from years back had been t-boned at a stoplight, or when several acquaintances from high school committed suicide in the same year. I wasn't there among their family when it happened. I didn't watch it happen over months or years. There was a hole in my life, but not one that hit me every day.

Three of my grandparents have died, one of whom died pretty young of pancreatic cancer when I was a young teen. When we were waiting for my Grandma's diagnosis our family decided to hold a fast for her. Among LDS people, a fast usually lasts two meals and you don't eat or drink. The idea is that you want something extra badly and so you sacrifice to get it, also when you haven't eaten your body is weakened, which is supposed to heighten spirituality. Obviously we wanted the diagnosis to be good, but also we wanted to be comforted if it was bad.

I was at church that day, and someone found a big bottle of stale sprinkles and I kept eating them. I couldn't figure out why they were so delicious until I realized that I was starving, and then I realized why. I felt pretty awful about breaking my fast, but had honestly forgotten. Surely the God I believed in wasn't going to take away some of the strength of all of our prayers because a teenager forgot for a minute and ate some handfuls of sugar, corn syrup (which is also sugar I think?), corn starch, and food-grade wax (gross).

The diagnosis was bad and she went fast. One day, I think it was the Easter party, my cousins and I were playing tag or something and my mom asked us to play on the other side of the house so that Grandma could watch us play through the window. The memory that sticks with me every time I think of my healthy grandma is my sisters and I finding an old unopened Alvin and the Chipmunks card game in the basement and asking her if we could open it. She read the instructions and taught us how to play. I don't remember if the game was good, but was amazed that you could learn to play a game by reading the instructions. Up until then I thought of games like they were oral tradition; someone just knew the rules and we didn't question how. I thought every grandma kept a box of foil-wrapped Ding Dongs in their freezer, just for grandkids.

Both of my wife's parents have passed away, and in those cases the grief was more immediate and awful, but I feel like those stories aren't mine to tell. Watching her go through the death of two parents in such a short span was gut-wrenching, and being unable to do anything about it made me feel useless.

The weirdest part of grief for me is how everyone else's life just goes on when your own seems to be in tatters. I would run errands for my wife and there were cars on the road of people just going to work and yoga and shopping or whatever. The checkers at the store had their own problems and seemed completely unaware that a family had lost its matriarch. It makes you want to scream at the teens jostling around and joking in front of you; "don't you know that people are sad today?"

We don't do that because it would never stop. There are always sad people. While we post pictures of our Christmas dinners and happy kids with toys and sleepy parents who had to wake up too early because Santa came, or families in matching pajamas, someone is mourning. I have a friend who catalogs all of the local deaths on Christmas day. Each headline is the story of someone for whom the most wonderful time of the year is now a constant reminder of their loss.

What We Lose calls itself a novel, but it feels more like an autobiographical braided essay. I'm not sure what is true or made up in here, but it doesn't matter. Clemmons wrote it immediately after her own mother's death, and the emotions are so raw that it's a little uncomfortable sometimes. It seems rare to sit in grief when it's so urgent and the wounds are still so open. Her ability to capture that is a pretty amazing feat.

Loss is a straightforward equation: 2 - 1 = 1. A person is there, then she is not. But a loss is beyond numbers, as well as sadness, and depression, and guilt, and ecstasy, and hope, and nostalgia - all those emotions that experts tell us come along with death. Minus one person equals all of these, in unpredictable combinations. It is a sunny day that feels completely gray, and laughter in the midst of sadness. It is utter confusion. It makes no sense.

Thandi, the main character, bounces around in both time and topic. Sometimes she discusses the crime rate in South Africa (complete with graphs), others she talks about love and race. As a South African immigrant to the United States, she straddles the middle ground that's talked about in a lot of the books I've read. She feels like she doesn't belong anywhere.

I've often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless. You may be able to pass in mainstream society, appearing acceptable to others, even desired. But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe. Even while you're out in public, feeling fine and free, inside you cannot shake the feeling of rootlessness. Others may even envy you, but this masks the fact that at night, there is nowhere safe for you, no place to call your own.

The bananas thing to me about grief isn't that it seems like it sticks around for a long time, it's that people ever move on. I think about last spring when a mother and a bystander drowned trying to save a 4-year old child from a river near where I live. The mom left four kids, the bystander didn't know the family and left behind a wife. Honestly I don't know how people come back from that.

We were crushed this year when our beloved cat died. Going downstairs and telling my kids, especially the daughter whose bed our little kitty slept in every night, was one of the hardest dad things I've had to do yet. The other night I was looking under my bed for some chapstick or something and thought I saw her looking out at me, just like she used to (which was against the rules and she knew it). I can't imagine what it's like to lose a child. And someone loses one every day.

I realized that that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something, but reality resists it. Death is inert and heavy, and it has no relation to your heart's desires.

I don't really have a hopeful ending for this. I don't think that's the point. The frustrating thing about grief to me is that I never know how to help someone who is going through it. There's so much terrible stuff we tell people who have lost a loved one: "God needed them more than you did," "they're in a better place," "actually it's kind of blessing if you think about it." We want them to feel better because their hurting makes us uncomfortable when what they need is someone to mourn with them.

Here's a great illustration by Brené Brown.

I think that What We Lose does well is to bring us down in that hole. It points out how useless it is to ask someone who is hurting, "What can I do to help?" We need to know what it's like to hurt, and some of us have never had to hurt like that and we have no idea what it's like. If your best friend who you had brunch with yesterday and was your number one source of emotional support died today, my story about my old friend dying is the closest I have to what you're going through, and there is no comparison.

This was the paradox: How would I ever heal from losing the person who healed me? The question was so enormous that I could see only my entire life, everything I know, filling it.

We don't just grieve when people die. We mourn lost friendships, we pine for the days before health problems have changed our lives, we hurt for children and friends who have undergone a trauma that will change their lives forever. And we're all so bad at helping (I have been terrible about it). Maybe you're like me when you read the inside of this book jacket and think, "I don't want to read about someone's mom dying." It's not fun, but if we really want to help someone it's necessary. And to do that, we need to be able to crawl into that hole with them. It'll make sense if you watch the video.

Akata Warrior and a Very Important Instruction at the End

Overconsumption is a universal human trait,” Orlu pointed out. “And so is ignorance. - Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Warrior

I'm told that beards are going out of style, which I guess is a shame because the brief period in which they were was the only time I can think of when I was in style. It's also a shame if I decide that being in style is something I'd like to continue pursuing now that I've tasted the delicious savor of looking like the guys in men's magazines, if only between the bottom of my nose and the top of my Adam's apple. Because folks, I hate shaving.

I do shave, though, and daily. I was in a creative writing class once and there was a guy in our class who only wrote fiction in the Star Wars universe. Not only that, but the entirety of his fiction was based on his campaign in a dungeons and dragons-style pen and paper role-playing game. That's all fine, by the way, if you're someone who likes to write but hates even the prospect of being able to collect money for said writing. But he was also kind of mean. He would just tear apart everyone else's writing while refusing to accept any critique of his because nobody else understood what he was doing.

It should probably go without saying at this point that this man had a neck beard. Years later, when I first heard "neckbeard" as short-hand for the kind of guy who sits in his basement and writes multiple-page-long screeds about women not liking nice guys, I lost my mind with laughter. His single status is not a result of, as many of us would have guessed, his never leaving the basement; instead it's because women only like men who are awful and he refuses to let himself sink to that level. He is noble, this man, and his only requirement is for a woman to like Star Wars, but understand that she could never like Star Wars like he does (also she must be fit, beautiful, low-maintenance, never wear makeup, cook well, and understand her role in the relationship, which is to say she will give everything and will never receive anything of meaning in return).

Is shaming men with hair on their necks OK? No. Is it OK if he is also the kind of man who also spends hours online telling women that they should shave their legs daily? I submit to you that it is not only OK, but in fact the only way through this dark period in each of our lives that starts about halfway through kindergarten and ends at death. When I'm not sure where your nose hair ends, your mustache begins, or am sickly fascinated by the fact that there seems to be no delineation between beard hair and chest hair I think your opinion is less valuable.

There are times in my life where the only way to break myself of a bad habit is to see how I look from the outside when I meet or talk to someone with the same or similar habit. I felt like pretty hot stuff writing a novel during national novel writing month until I went to an event at the local library and saw another dozen people doing the same thing. Where I was thinking of myself in a tweed jacket and a pipe banging out a masterpiece, seeing the sweaty, desperate people just like me writing out pages and pages of words only a mother could pretend to enjoy deflated me a bit.

My creative writing friend from college with his gross black hair trailing down his neck like an advancing army of Sith warriors from the Old Republic made me touch a hand to my own nerf-herder scruff and reevaluate my life. Since then I have at least been able to keep it clean neck-wise, but I've sure hated it. I cut myself all of the time, which reminds me of a time when I went on a date as a teen. Like most of my social outings, it consisted of a free movie at the theater where I worked. We walked in, I said hi to people I worked with, and at some point in the movie I scratched my neck and found a wad of toilet paper I'd used to stop the bleeding of a now-routine shaving nick. I asked my date, annoyed, why she hadn't pointed it out, and she said it was to see how I reacted when I found out. She wanted to see if I had a sense of humor about embarrassment. It was a test I failed.

All of this dovetails into a goal I've had for the last six months or so that I'm trying to double down on as we enter the arbitrary frontier known as a "new year." That goal is to be an adult about stuff. Like all good goals it has very few measurable qualities and at no point will I know that I've accomplished anything, but the general gist of it is asking myself if the thing that I am doing or I am about to do is something an adult would do. It sounds awful, but it really isn't. It doesn't mean don't be silly, or go down waterslides, or laugh when a baby is clearly pooping in his diaper but is trying to be chill about it. It means taking stock of my day-to-day decisions and deciding if they are going to leave me in a better or worse place afterward.

I'm not sure if it's a generational thing or it's just more obvious to me because I'm living through it, but I feel like men my age figured out who they were at 16 or so and have just stayed there. Their hobbies and sensibilities and maturity level don't seem to have increased much since then. I'm including myself in that camp. When I was 16 the main thing people knew about me was that I like Mountain Dew. That was a stupid way to define myself then, and it's even more obnoxious now. It reminds me of an old co-worker who, at 50, still quotes Fight Club like the satirized viewpoint of its main characters' toxic masculinity is a relevant and even remotely valid point of view.

Here are some upshots of these decisions: I've stopped collecting old video games and have slowly replaced much of my video game time with reading good, solid, weighty books. I pay closer attention to how I dress given the circumstances I'm dressing for. I noticed how little soda the people I tend to look up to consume and am trying (this one is the hardest one, you guys) to cut down. I'm learning how to improve my cooking. What I've found over and over is that with a little extra effort and some learning curve, there are better and more satisfying ways to do everything. The newest addition is this: I'm trying to shave like a man.

See, for Christmas I got a starter set for a safety razor style shaver instead of the eight-blade disposable jobbies all over the place. Honestly up until now I thought the only use for razor blades anymore were to hide them in your mouth so that you can cut yourself out of a jam when you get captured. Instead of using the gel and quickly shaving in the shower and then dealing with bumps and ingrown hairs that make it a misery, I'm now whipping up shaving cream with a brush like Mad Men Man got for father's day that one time. I'm using aftershave, which up until now I assumed only existed so that novelists could lazily evoke memories of their fathers.

Not a sponsored post. Yet. Call me, you guys.

Like so many things I learned to do poorly as a teen (sleeping, eating, talking to human beings) and have spent decades attempting to do the right way, shaving this way is harder but better. For example, my whole life I've been taught to shave against the grain because that's how you get a closer shave. That's wrong! When you do that you shave under your hairs and that creates those ingrown hairs that suck so bad. Also, when you start paying attention to how the hair on your face and neck grows, you realize that it's going in all kinds of directions. You guys I haven't even started shaving my face yet and already just on my neck I'm dealing with four different directions. For someone who approaches every 4-way stop with the trepidation that should be reserved for only the biggest of decisions, it is a daunting undertaking.

Another benefit is instead of furtively cleaning up that nasty neckbeard in the shower, I'm doing this whole routine in front of a mirror which forces me to consider my current level of fitness in a way that is profoundly disappointing. I'm all for body positivity, my dudes, but that's for other people. Your boy has decided that if he's going to be shaving in front of a mirror for this long, luxurious regimen, he's gotta get cut so it's not so grody up in there.

I'm still getting the hang of it, but that's the whole point I'm trying to make. I think that so many of the things that make modern life modern give us 70% of the quality in exchange for removing the learning curve. The best example of this is cooking. Since being diagnosed with kidney disease I've learned how to make my own sauces, stocks, and soup bases. I've grown more of my own food every year since my first garden. Once you put in some initial work, though, the effort is about the same as the crappy alternative and the outcome is significantly better. Like, how can someone call no-bake cheesecake the same thing as the baked kind? There should be a law against that. It's obscene.

I learned how to braise, you guys

I get so mad about that cheesecake thing.

Anyway, the value of obtaining of knowledge is one of  the things that stuck with me about Akata Warrior. It's in Akata Witch, too, but I didn't think about it as much. If you remember from my last review and also from the book which you inevitably read because I said it was good, you'll recall that people who can use juju are called Leopards, and those who can't are called Lambs. In the Leopard world the only form of currency comes from obtaining knowledge. It's called chittim and it falls at your feet whenever you do learn something new. This could be from reading or someone explaining something to you, but is most often earned by doing something you didn't know you could do.

I was super fascinated with this idea as I powered through this wonderful, wonderful book and loved the idea that there was an immediate tangible reward for knowledge gained. In real life there is, too, it's just not as quick. Further complicating matters, there are a million different ways now to circumvent the gaining of knowledge for something that's almost as good and just happens to make someone else rich. From bread makers to frozen dinners to bagged salad, someone is happy to charge you extra to ensure that you don't learn the skills that they've convinced you that you don't need to have but were at one point considered vital.

I said that Akata Witch was a lot like Harry Potter. That wasn't a bad thing, but it's also impossible to ignore. Akata Warrior is its own book in every way. Once the initial world-building is in place, it gives Okorafor the chance to really explore in a way that is, to me, profoundly deeper than the Potter universe ever does. It's clear that with this book we're only getting the briefest glimpse of what the world she's created is and does, and unlike a lot of books and movies that dig deeper into unique fantasy worlds, it doesn't fall apart with further exploration.

"Leopard People read books by everybody and everything. We look outside and inside. But you have to be secure with yourself to do either..."

Sunny, after defeating a serial killer attempting to bring Ekwensu, one of the biggest and worst masquerades into the world, is starting to see visions of a city in ruins. She assumes it's the end of the world that the return of Ekwensu will bring about, starting with oil spills in the Niger delta and followed by mass fires. While that threat looms, she's also dealing with a brother who has gotten involved with a nasty gang, a freaky djinn, and some friction between her fellow warriors. It's all way fun and imaginative and was a great post-holiday read.

Anyway, that's my thing this week. Learn something new that improves your life in a way you can physically touch. Replace the quick way with the right way. Google how to bake banana bread, or better yet, use my favorite recipe. Make this roast chicken. It's one million times better than the rotisserie chicken at Costco and the stock it makes will improve everything you cook with it. Learn to knit. Take up carpentry. Bake me a cheesecake. The options are endless as long as you definitely do that last one.

History of Wolves, Kids, and Wetlands

Maybe there is a way to climb above everything, some special ladder or insight, some optical vantage point that allows a clear, unobstructed view of things. Maybe this way of seeing comes naturally to some people, and good for them if it does. - Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves

I feel like 80% of the books I read have a blurb about "coming of age" on their back, and still I don't know what it means. My guess is that any book that features a teen but isn't for teenagers qualifies. If I were forced to come up with a definition, I'd guess that it means the point when a human being makes the transition from thinking that the world is a relatively safe and wholesome place to finding out that oh my gosh it is not. Please do not force me to make this or any other decision my life is stressful enough as it is.

I think about this a bunch because I have a 15 year old and my guess is that some of the messed up garbage I read in these books have happened to him or someone he knows personally and that's maybe the scariest thing I've thought about in my adult life. It's even worse thinking that it's probably similar for my 11 year old and maybe even my 9 year old. My kids live a pretty sheltered life; they don't watch a lot of TV, don't have phones or social media, and even PG-13 movies and T-rated video games are screened by one or both of their parents before our kids see them. I'm not saying that's the only way to raise kids, just how we do. I remember being in 4th grade and having kids tell me plot points from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies that gave me nightmares but they seemed fine about it and probably aren't serial killers (probably).

Recently I helped in my daughter's 6th grade classroom during a party, and was reminded again at how vastly different the backgrounds are for various kids and how bananas it is that we put them all in the same room and expect them to behave the same. Class sizes are large in Utah, with an average of 25 per class in elementary schools compared to a national average of 16. In my kids' school, it's even higher than that. Child Protective Services estimates that the rate of child neglect or abuse is 9.2 in 1,000, which translates roughly to one kid for every one hundred. In my kids' school, that's one per grade.

And those are only the reported cases. It's estimated that one in four kids goes through some form of maltreatment in their life. Of those, 78% is neglect, 18% physical abuse, and 9% sexual abuse. If you're reading this and like me were lucky enough to not experience any of that but still thought that school was hard and sometimes terrifying, just imagine what it's like for a kid who is hungry, afraid, or emotionally traumatized. I honestly can't. 

What I've learned is that you can't just look at a kid and know that he or she is going through something that even us adults wouldn't be able to handle. I knew kids in high school who came from rich families and dressed like the only clothes they had were found in Eddie Vedder's dumpster. I also knew kids who were scrupulously clean and only wore designer clothes who sometimes didn't see their parents for days and ate cold spaghettios for dinner some nights and nothing others.

When I volunteer at the domestic violence shelter, a lot of the time I'm playing with kids. That sounds tough, but it isn't. It's actually super fun. Most of the time you'd never know that they'd been exposed to abuse of some kind; they're just regular kids. Some of them look unkempt and have messy hair (like my kids sometimes), and sometimes they look really skinny, but others look like they are always either on their way to or from a photo shoot for a sponsored post on a mommy blogger's Instagram. Sometimes they might be clingy or grumpy or whatever, but guess what? So are mine. I'd be willing to bet that unless they are licensed therapists, anyone who claims they can tell a child is in an abusive relationship just by looking at them has probably sent at least a thousand dollars to a Craigslist scammer at some point, too.

We complain a lot about kids growing up too fast and a lot of us parents spend much of their time trying to preserve the innocence of our young kids. Most of us have spent some time looking through pictures of our children, starting with when they were babies up until whatever age they are now, and watched their smiles fade over time. When they were toddlers everything was a delight and they laughed and laughed and the only time they cried was because their little cheeks hurt sometimes from smiling too much. They seem so sad now, we think. The light in their eyes is faded. Their shoulders sag from the combined weight of too much homework in their backpacks and the knowledge that the only time people care about fairness anymore is when billionaires expect something in return for their campaign contributions.

I wonder if the tragedy is two-fold for us. Like, on the one hand it's so sad to watch these little happy monsters whose sole existence is filled with joy while reality dawns on them. But also we're faced with the knowledge that we couldn't fix it. We're the adults now and it's still not safe out there and it feels even less safe sometimes and that's happening on our watch.

That's depressing as crap. But this wouldn't be the HBC if we stopped there. The good part is that you and I still experience joy on the regular. Somehow in spite of all the headlines and horrible stories we read here in Howie's Book Club of which you are a member just for reading (you're welcome), we still experience awe and wonder and intense love and super funny memes. Sometimes my cheeks still hurt from smiling too much, like both times I've watched Thor: Ragnarok.
As a habitat biologist, one of my main goals for ecosystems is resilience. A resilient ecosystem is one that can be flooded, burned, dried, buried in snow, or any other number of natural disasters and still thrive. Healthy environments are, by definition, resilient. It's why sometimes you might go hiking with me and remark on how beautiful it is and get a lecture in return about how precarious that beauty is. "Don't fall in love with those trees," I might say. "If this place burns once you'll never see them again." It's one reason people don't invite me to go hiking with them (the other is my motto that when it comes to hiking short, there's no such thing as too short). 

This is why there's such a premium placed on wetlands. One reason we think wetlands are so important is that they act as filters for polluted water before they go into larger water bodies. They also soak up floodwater like sponges, preventing damage to the surrounding areas. Americans used to call them "swamps," and converted them to farmland. Now a city in Illinois is engineering wetlands instead of spending millions on constructing and maintaining water treatment plants, because wetlands manage themselves.

Nature is like that. Many times when things are out of whack environmentally it's because we removed a part. Aldo Leopold said, "To save every cog and wheel is the first precaution of the intelligent tinkerer." We get rid of wolves and we have too many elk; we drain the swamps and get fish-killing algae; you take the Jedi out of Rogue One and get... the best Star Wars movie in almost 40 years. OK, that last one doesn't work, but you get my point. The point is that human beings are animals and we're part of nature, even if your clever fashionista friend on Instagram insists that the only outdoors she's interested is the one opposite the "in" door at REI. We are the result of the same evolutionary pathway that created wetlands, aspen stands, poisonous snakes, and frickin' cheetahs. Our history is littered with war, disaster, and famine and our ancestors survived and passed the best on to us. Each one of us is built to weather the worst there is; it's all written there in our code.

A professor and a journalist tried to figure out why human beings laugh, and in their research found that there are two kinds of laughter. One is the spontaneous kind that happens whether we want it to or not, like if someone farts while saying a prayer. The other is social, and evolved in primates later:

This sort of laughter was a signal that things at the moment were OK, that danger was low and basic needs were met, and now was as good a time as any to explore, to play, to socialize. “What the humor is indexing and the laughter is signaling is, ‘this is an opportunity for learning,’” Gervais told us. “It signals this is a non-serious novelty, and recruits others to play and explore cognitively, emotionally and socially with the implications of this novelty.”

 What that article tells us is that we've been laughing for somewhere between two and four million years. You guys, that's a shload of memes.

By their nature, it came to me, children were freaks. They believed impossible things to suit themselves, thought their fantasies were the center of the world. They were the best kinds of quacks, if that’s what you wanted—pretenders who didn’t know they were pretending at all.

That's the kind of thing you'll read in Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves, which is a mesmerizing story about the year that changed 14-year-old Madeline's life. She goes by Linda most of the time. Or commie. Sometimes freak. This might surprise you at this point, but she's kind of an outcast. She grew up in a collectivist cult/commune started by her parents, but by the time we meet her it has been disbanded so now it's just her and her mom and dad in a cabin with no plumbing or electricity on the shore of a Minnesota lake popular for its walleye fishing. She's the extreme version of a free-range kid.

Madeline's coming of age story isn't the traditional one. She doesn't fall in love with a boy or have an adventure with her friends during her last year of high school and reflect on the bitter sweetness of growing up. Instead, she witnesses what she considers "one of the best accounts of the origin of human evil." I can almost guarantee that it's not what you think. Of the various profoundly flawed individuals in her life, herself included, there is no sneering villain. Instead, it's humans doing what they think is the best for themselves who hurt each other the worst.  

At the trial they kept asking, when did you know for sure there was something wrong? And the answer probably was: right away. But that feeling faded as I got to know him.

Madeline befriends Patra, a young mother from across the lake and her young son Paul and ingratiates herself in what seems like a very normal family. Patra's husband is finishing up a manuscript in another state, so she's grateful for the responsible teen who teaches Paul about Minnesota life in the woods and on the lake. There's a new teacher in school who fascinates Madeline, and a beautiful, broken girl named Lily in her class. All this is set against the backdrop of a lake community in flux from the sleepy cluster of houses that explodes with tourists to a permanent luxury community; something the adult Madeline no longer recognizes. 

We are treated with periodic flashes forward of her as an adult, sometimes not recognizing the young girl and her decisions that year. Other times she reflects on how it impacted her life later.

Later, I could get that drizzle feeling just about any time I saw a kid on a swing. The hopelessness of it—the forward excitement, the midflight return. The futile belief that the next time around, the next flight forward, you wouldn’t get dragged back again. You wouldn’t have to start over, and over.

Throughout History of Wolves, characters find themselves in impossible situations and sometimes do drastic and awful things to escape them. With the exception of one, they are survivors all. But their survival can sometimes come at deep costs to themselves and others.

It's a fascinating book that stuck with me. It makes me think of the little town it's based in. From a short-term perspective, the housing boom around the formerly near-pristine lake will be devastating to the local environment. From the long-term, though, I think nature wins. It might take a hundred or thousands of years, but it always does. Like children still laughing while playing a game during a class party when home is at best empty and at worst violent, it survives.

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.