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Episode 5: Saving What We Love
Show notes and transcript below the cut.
SHOW NOTES: EPISODE 5, âSAVING WHAT WE LOVEâ
ACNH: https://www.animal-crossing.com/new-horizons/
âRewrite the Stars,â The Greatest Showman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO28Z5_Eyls
Reyâs Vision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ib_gszTtig
âYou Will Be Found,â Dear Evan Hansen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSfH2AuhXfw
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, bees. It's me, Sara, sending you light and love, and also a bunch of things I've been super into lately that I think might be your jam. Welcome to A Soft Place to Land.
Item the first: welcome to Apple
Or, shared spaces
Look, okay, in this time, it seems like everyone is playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons and I am nothing if not a follower. At first I thought it would be more like Stardew Valley - the grind of the daily tasks, the deep relationships, ever-evolving, with your townâs citizens, the slow circle of seasons. And itâs not not like that, Animal Crossing. You can play it that way.
My spouse lives on my island, which is named Apple. My daughter named it. We have, now, a museum and a tailorâs, and my spouse and I have found a delicate balance of how we want to play. Where he is the finder of every bug and fish and fossil (and now art, because thatâs a thing), the careful checklist of hot items and optimal paths through seasonal events, I amâŚless so. His house is full of items that bring him delight, a room full of bugs and fish heâs saving to get made into special art items. His front yard is a riotous blooming nest of flowers and lawn ornaments.
My house is smaller, and quieter. I keep only certain furniture and items, and sell the rest, or give them to him if I think heâll like them. I have more floor space, and less decor. My front yard is nearly empty, aside from a birdhouse and a hammock. Instead, Iâve found a soothing rhythm of my daily tasks: clean up the beaches, pick up fallen tree branches, harvest fruit. I catch a few bugs and fish to sell, knowing theyâve all already been donated to our museum. I donât bother with turnips or hot items. Instead, Iâve become the islandâs infrastructure manager. I built a ramp, a couple of bridges. I arrange plots and buildings, reshape where the fruit trees and flower gardens are.
We share the island, but can never interact - we just have the one Switch Lite - and itâs become a sort of game of telephone. We leave each other items or notes, we might drop an extra recipe on the otherâs floor, we make sure the other knows that this or that traveling seller is around today. Weâre together but not, on the island. Itâs nice.
Item the second: is it impossible?
Or, I Want songs
I think Iâve listened to the soundtrack for The Greatest Showman about thirty times now. While I skip some of the songs more often than not, they are all excellently done. âNever Enoughâ is a heartbreaker, the theme song is boss, âThis Is Meâ is the obvious stunner. But for whatever reason (there are a lot of them), Iâve found myself drawn again and again to the duet âRewrite the Stars.â Itâs a love duet, and a breakup song, and a celebration, and also itâs an I Want song with a subversion built into the final lines.
Oh, okay, so âI Wantâ songs, in musicals, are the song where the character sings about how theyâre unsatisfied with their current life, and the song bursts from them to describe the life they want. Itâs a really common trope in musicals in general, and itâs especially common in 1990s animated musicals and beyond, because in the 60s, a conductor named Lehman Engel ran a series of workshops and taught an entire generation of people how to write musicals, and he thought the âI Wantâ song was important, so. You could think of, say, âJust Around the Riverbendâ from Pocahontas, âPart of Your Worldâ from The Little Mermaid, or âTouch the Skyâ from Brave. For musical theatre songs, âMatchmaker, Matchmakerâ from Fiddler on the Roof, âThe Wizard and Iâ from Wicked, or âMaybe This Timeâ from Cabaret. There are a lot of them, is the point.
I Want songs, by their nature, describe the state of discontent in which the singer lives, and also - and this is important - the steps theyâre going to take to fix that. Theyâll keep paddling, theyâll swim to the surface, theyâll run into the wilderness, theyâll seek a marriage with someone worthwhile, theyâll prove their worth, theyâll find a love that doesnât hurt them. The I Want song is also, by its nature, an I Am Going To song.
And at first, âRewrite the Starsâ sounds like that. Itâs two people singing about how theyâre obviously falling in love, but external factors and fear are keeping them apart. As the song goes on - in the movie, theyâre Zac Efron and Zendaya, separated by race, class, everything - the lovers imagine themselves in the world they describe, where they step bravely out and demand the future they want. But then. But then they are brought back to the ground, literally, by one character pointing out that itâs unrealistic, nearly impossible, and leaving.
Itâs a broken I Want song. Itâs I Want and This Is How I Could, But I Wonât. It is a hope spot, of sorts, that is then dashed to pieces.
Item the third: voices in the Force
Or, no one is alone, again
There is one moment - there were a couple amidst the parts I hated - in The Rise of Skywalker that keeps coming back to me. I should note, before we begin, that I am on record everywhere as absolutely loving The Last Jedi and seeing no reason for 80% of what was in Rise of Skywalker to have happened.
Long story slightly shorter, there is a moment in the Last Jedi (Iâm getting to it, hang on) where all hope seems lost, where the heroes look up in despair and begin to accept their inevitable defeat. And then. And then a sky fills with allies come to help. The galaxy answers the call, and everyone with a ship and a blaster shows up. The fight renews. There are several moments like this in that movie, from Lukeâs âno oneâs ever really goneâ to Roseâs astounding description of how theyâll win - ânot fighting what we hate, saving what we loveâ to Leiaâs âwe have everything we needâ - moments that never fail to bring me to tears. Itâs my favorite story element, always: you are not alone. Your fight is not just you against an insurmountable enemy. You have allies, and they are with you, even if you canât see them right now.
In Rise of Skywalker, among all the many things about it that I didnât like, there is a moment where Rey hears all the Jedi of times past speak to her, through her, and tell her: weâre with you. Weâre here, too. Get up. Youâre not alone. And the power of that moment - we hear Luke, of course, and Obi-Wan, both of his actors contributing. We hear Master Yoda and Mace Windu, in thrilling small moments. We hear characters, women especially, whoâve never been heard in a main film but whose lives in animated and EU content are rich and full and inspiring. We hear Qui-Gon Jinn, who sort of started this whole thing, and Anakin, who in death found a path towards being who he once was (and I have issues with that, donât get me wrong, but it brought me to tears anyway).
The rest of the movie, in large part, is missed opportunities and boring filler. But that moment, regardless of anything else, stands with my favorites in the series. Moments of connection. Moments where someone who feels alone and abandoned finds a hand reaching out to them, a nudge in the Force that connects all life, a smiling face (or a grumpy one) with welcome on its lips.
Item the final: you will be found
Or, a musical I havenât even seen
I havenât seen Dear Evan Hansen, and I wonât, probably, unless it gets released on a streaming service or something. What I have seen, over and over, are people singing one or two of the songs from it. âYou Will Be Found,â from what I can gather, features pretty heavily in the plot, and from my skimming of the wikipedia page, the plot is based on a set of lies, so thatâs suboptimal, but - and this is important - that in no way lessens the power of this song.
Remember how âRewrite the Starsâ is so full of hope and promise only to dash it with the last lines? This songâs rooting in lies doesnât matter, because it builds and builds into an overt, loud rejection of the idea that anyone is truly alone, that anyone is beyond help, that anyone is left behind. You reach out a hand and you find another. You seek a spark of hope and itâs there, cupped in someoneâs palms, and theyâve been reaching out to you, too, and now youâve found each other.
Weâre feeling alone, many of us, right now. Isolated and quarantined, and things may be starting to open up but weâre far from safe, and itâs all justâŚitâs a lot right now. And while I canât promise you safety or happiness, an easier way or a hopeful sunrise, I can promise you that you are not, in fact alone. You are apart, you are secluded, you are many things. But alone, you are not. The galaxy is your ally against the enemies at your door. The onus is not on you to call out for help; we are already here, pouring out what light we can into the darkness, seeking your hand with ours. It feels, so much, like grasping in the dark these days, and sometimes weâre too tired or scared, too worn down or afraid, to keep reaching. I understand. We all do it. We all have days when we canât see or hear or sense anyone with us, anyone on our side, and we feel abandoned.
For many of us, though, those days arenât all of them. We have days, too, where we can be the hand in the darkness searching for another. We can be the person singing into space, knowing the song will land in ears that need it. We can shine our lights out into the storm and believe that those who seek it will find it. We wonât have those days all the time, and we wonât always be the ones in search of comfort. The way this works is that we all give what we can and take when we need it. Your days of reaching out and mine donât have to be the same ones. We push and pull together, we find a balance. Weâre not alone. Get to your feet. Look around you. Find another person and pull together on the yoke, and weâll continue to move forward in space and time.
[music]
Theme music for A Soft Place to Land is âRepose,â by Chase Miller, off his album Burnout. Chaseâs music can be found at chasemiller.bandcamp.com. Show notes and episode transcripts are at softplacepod.tumblr.com. You can find me on Twitter @cyranoh_ and you can listen to me jabber on as the foil to my very good friend Anna on our parenting podcast, The Parent Rap, at parentrap.net.
I love you very much. Take care of yourselves. See you soon.
0 notes
Text
Episode 4: Mistakes and Monsters
Show notes & transcript below the cut.
SHOW NOTES:
Seventy Years of Sleep - https://cardiamachina.co.vu/tagged/seventy%20years%20of%20sleep
Critical Role - https://critrole.com/
âNo One is Aloneâ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xaxP_kErTU
TRANSCRIPT:
EP 4: MISTAKES AND MONSTERS
Hello, bees. It's me, Sara, sending you light and love, and also a bunch of things I've been super into lately that I think might be your jam. Welcome to A Soft Place to Land.
Item the first: We deserve a soft epilogue, my love
Or, my Bucky Barnes problem
Everyone who knows me just groaned a little bit at that subtitle. If Iâve talked to you too much about anything, ever, itâs probably either Leverage or Bucky Barnes slash the Winter Soldier from the Marvel universe. Some of you may assume it springs from my decade-long angry crush on Sebastian Stan, who plays him in the movies, and that certainly didnât help. But the real problem is that Bucky Barnes fits into the mold almost perfectly of âfictional characters to whom Sara will get overly attached very quickly.â Naomi Nagata from The Expanse. Donna Noble from Doctor Who. Duck Newton from The Adventure Zone: Amnesty. Bigwig from Watership Down. A million others.
For me, there is something very meaningful about a character with whom you initially click. You start a piece of fiction and something in you just resonates. It also, to be honest, sometimes makes engaging with fiction difficult. I want Bucky to be happy. I want Donna to be happy. I want my precious babies to be happy and I donât want anyone or anything to hurt them ever again. I havenât rewatched Captain America: Civil War in a long time, because I donât want to watch what that movie show what it knows about Bucky, and I donât want to watch what it chooses to do about it, and itâs not even that Iâm mad about as that I donât want to see it again.
Thereâs a poem that makes the rounds on Tumblr and in fandom circles often. That it comes from Seventy Years of Sleep, a fan-written poetry cycle about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes is, I think, less well known, but makes it mean more, honestly, to me. The bit Iâm thinking of goes,
I think we deserve
A soft epilogue, my love.
We are good people
And weâve suffered enough.
And thatâs what I want for my faves: a soft epilogue, loosed from their suffering. A time and a place to heal, to learn to live with the pain they have caused, and the harm they have done, and to find the next right thing to do.
Item the second: Venom in your veins
Or, I promise Iâm not going to talk about Critical Role too much
Itâs just that I have been rewatching the show during this time, and itâs been hitting me especially hard. Itâs voice actors who play D&D together, basically. If you are an anime, video game, or internet person, youâve almost certainly heard one or more of these voice actors in things. And if youâre a tabletop role-playing game person, youâve almost certainly heard of the D&D game they play on the internet. And thatâs all great, Iâm happy to hit you up to explain the appeal, or to advise you where in the first campaign to start watching (itâs later than you think!). But lately Iâve been stuck on a line, a particular line, spoken in a particular way by a particular character. Iâm struggling to give a little context without spoiling anything, so Iâll say: this speech, which Iâm about to read to you, is by a character who has done horrible, horrible things in their past. They were manipulated into the choosing, but they still chose, and they believe without question that the choices they made have doomed them. They will never be forgiven, and they will never deserve forgiveness. Or at least, thatâs what they believe - their friends have different beliefs. But anyway, this character is talking to another, who has recently come to light as having also made choices that, in the choosing, may have damned them forever to be unforgivable. And hereâs the speech. Itâs short, I promise, and Iâve cut out one instance where the speaker says the listenerâs name. Okay.
You listen to me. I know what you are talking about. I know. And the difference between you and I, is thinner than a razor. I know what it means to have other people complicate your desires and wishes. And I was like you, was. I know what a fool I have been for years. And I am looking at him as if I am looking in a mirror. You didnât account for usâgood. That is life. Shit hits you sideways in life, and no one is prepared, no one is ready. These peopleâŚchanged me. These people can change you. You were not born with venom in your veins. You learned it. You learned it. You have a rare opportunity here. One chanceâto save yourself. And we are offering it. And I am pleading with you. To find your better selfâhe is still there. Maybe you and I are both damned. But we can choose to do something, and leave it better than it was before.
Itâs important, I think, to note that âyou were not born with venom in your veinsâ is in iambic pentameter, which always tickles the back of my mind when I hear it even if I donât know why, thanks, theater. And itâs important to note, too, that this is an improvised show by voice actors, and that the character speaking is played by someone with a heavy background in theater, and that when the actor said that line as the character I personally burst into tears and then yelled about it for like fifteen minutes to a friend whoâs also a big Critical Role fan and was also crying.
Item the third: it was learned
Or, all my faves are the same person for a reason
So, okay. This is getting a little heavier than I expected, but weâve got one more place to look before we step back out into the sunlight. Me.
Hi, Iâm Sara. Once upon a time, I was a person with a set of core, sturdy beliefs. They made me who I was. Every decision I made was based on them. Every action I took, every ripple I made, came from this core set of beliefs. And acting off of those beliefs, in the ways I was taught and shown, hurt people. I hurt people.
I was condescending and cruel, vicious, self-righteous. I insisted everyone live up to an example, and when they didnât, I wrote them off as failures. I believed so hard and so loud and so much that everyone who didnât believe the same rang as a liar or a bad person to me. I spent, letâs say, fifteen or sixteen years soaked in and taught and shown that belief, and then, in the space of about a year, it was ripped out of me.
Over the next couple of years, I began to collapse, slow but sure, as the cornerstone and entirety of the person I was dissolved away. When you are built around a belief, and then you donât believe it anymore, and itâs gone - who the hell are you? Who do you become?
When you realize, as youâre terrified and grieving, as youâre brokenly trying to assemble shards into something like a person, that you hurt people before, when you were acting out of your belief, what do you do? How do you make amends? How to reckon with the pain you caused, and your at the time sincere belief that the pain was right and good, justified, that you were doing the right thing? That you did something terrible, many terrible somethings, out of intentions that were sincere and deeply held? That the people who taught you those beliefs, that the people who encouraged them, still hold those beliefs, and may or may not ever realize how deeply you held them, too, and how the damage you have done sprang so strongly from that core? How do you make friends now? How do you deserve them? How do you live with the things youâve done and said, the chances you were given and ignored, the thousands of ways you could have seen the pain you were causing and justâŚstopped?  And you didnât?
Thereâs a reason Bucky Barnes is my favorite fictional character.
Item the final: No one is alone
Or, one anotherâs terrible mistakes
Into the Woods has been an odd sort of touchstone in my life. In high school speech class, reading through a huge filing cabinet full of scripts to chop into monologues and duets, I stumbled over it. I donât know why it was in there, itâs a musical, and there wasnât, at the time, a musical theatre program in my school. It didnât, I donât think, have the musical notation in with it, not that I can read music well enough to have done anything if it was there. But I, having grown up with fractured fairy tales, kept reading, and got to the lyrics for the song âNo One is Alone.â It comes towards the end: two adults talking to two children about loss, and grief, and the ways they can shape our vision. In this little song, there are so many connected ideas about how fear and sadness and hurt can make us forget who we are. That everyone makes mistakes, that no single person has a handle on whatâs right or good. That every choice has a consequence, and that every consequence leads to another choice. That our moralities are constructed around our histories and our choices. That most people are, most of the time, just trying to get through the world with the people they love. Witches and giants arenât the enemy: the pain we cause out of our own pain is the enemy. It can be, in these times, in our interconnected world, so hard to choose. So hard to choose kindness over retaliation, so hard to choose justice over comfort, so hard to choose action over silence. And it can feel so alone. You, standing under a giantâs shadow, choosing to listen to what the giant is saying before you strike it down. You, staring a witch in the face, choosing to understand the decisions she made that led her here. You, looking into your own heart, seeing how every mistake youâve made and hurt youâve endured has built you. Your pain, our pain, makes us, in some ways. It tries to tell us whatâs right and whatâs wrong, but we still get to decide if we agree. No one is alone - not us, not you, not the people who are not on your side. And so, the song insists, since none of us are alone, we can shape the effects of our mistakes. We can make better mistakes. We decide whatâs right. We decide whatâs good.
[music]
Theme music for A Soft Place to Land is âRepose,â by Chase Miller, off his album Burnout. Chaseâs music can be found at chasemiller.bandcamp.com. Show notes and episode transcripts are at softplacepod.tumblr.com. You can find me on Twitter @cyranoh_ and you can listen to me jabber on as the foil to my very good friend Anna on our parenting podcast, The Parent Rap, at parentrap.net.
I love you very much. Take care of yourselves. See you soon.
0 notes
Text
Episode 3: Get Some Sleep
A mini episode.
Show notes & transcript below the cut.
SHOW NOTES:
Hypnic jerks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnic_jerk
The Tetris Effect (game): https://www.tetriseffect.game/
The Tetris effect (phenomenon): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
TRANSCRIPT:
EP 3: Go to Sleep
Hello, bees. It's me, Sara, sending you light and love, and also a bunch of things I've been super into lately that I think might be your jam. Welcome to A Soft Place to Land.
Item the first: Hypnic jerks
Or, what do you do with the brain in your head?
I have never in my life been a good sleeper - or, at least, Iâve forgotten what being one felt like. I know I could, in high school, sleep on the bus and in chairs, a half hour here or there caught while at speech tournaments and choir contests. I used to time naps with hyping jerks - although I didnât know they were called that. Theyâre that thing where your body starts to fall asleep but then panics instead, thinking maybe youâre dying, so it twitches your muscles to make sure you havenât died. What I would do, in my cheap suit and uncomfortable shoes, waiting my turn to argue for or against whatever the topic was for that seasonâs debate matches, is I would hold a pen in one hand and let my head droop. Let my eyes grow heavy, let my breathing slow. Soon enough, Iâd either have a full-body twitch or my hand would loosen and Iâd drop the pen. Either way, that would be enough to kick me out of the drowsy doze Iâd been in, and usually that not-even-a-nap would be enough to let me power through the next hour or so. But since college at least Iâve lost that ability. I have a very hard time going to sleep when I want to, and staying awake when I want to. Itâs even harder to go back to sleep if at any point I am awoken: if I cough myself awake or need to pee or get thirsty, I can expect another good solid hour of ceiling staring time before the fitful sleep comes back to me. I havenât woken up feeling truly rested and refreshed from a night of sleep in years at this point. At best I feel okay, good enough. Pro tip: donât tell people that if those people arenât also anxiety- and insomnia-ridden, as it can sometimes sound very bad when you say it out loud.
Item the second: the Tetris Effect
Or, what do we do when we make a mistake?
For some people, the things your brain summons up when youâre trying to tell it to be quiet and go to sleep are terrible visions of danger and failure, or half-awake nightmares that translate neatly into ghost stories. While those do happen to me on occasion - for some reason my eating disorder often rears its grinning head when Iâm trying to sleep - itâs much more common for my brain to whir in endless grinding circles. For a while, a couple of years ago, I played endless games of Tetris with my eyes closed, hoping I could lull myself that way. Of course, instead, I just remembered how much I like Tetris. Weâve got a Tetris game on our game system now, and itâs not classic but it has fantastic music, and it amuses me to no end that itâs called the Tetris Effect. The same name as the thing where if you play Tetris too long you start to see it everywhere, or other video games, too. And C, my kid, loves to watch us play it. In a strange way, too, itâs a learning tool. I have, out loud, reassured my kid numerous times that, when we make a mistake in Tetris, we stay calm. We take a deep breath. We keep going, and we work around the mistake. We can fix it, most of the time, if we try.
Item the third: Close the box
Or, a visualization that has made a difference for me
The Tetris visualization never really helped me relax, although it is infinitely more fun than listening to a mental litany of all the ways Iâve failed the people I love, so I do still do that sometimes. These days, though, Iâve started using a visualization that takes in equal measure from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ghostbusters, and Doctor Sleep. I catch one flailing, yelling thought in my hand, and I put it into a box. The box isnât much bigger than a shoebox, with a hinged lid. I stuff the thought in the box, as it struggles and yells ever louder to try and distract me with ideas about what color paint would look good in the guest room. I swing the hinged lid down. Thereâs an indicator light on the lid. Itâs green when I close it, and clicks to red. I put the box down and pick up another, and I repeat, ad infinitum. Sometimes thoughts break out of the box - a song lyric on loop, a grocery item weâre short of, a clear and certain recitation of the top five worst things Iâve ever done - and I catch it again, do the same thing again. Itâs the only visualization Iâve ever had that has helped even a little. I think part of why it works is that I am not banishing the thoughts. I am putting them away for the night, knowing that all the boxes open again in the morning. Maybe that gives the thoughts that race around in me some assurance, a little bait to get them to quiet down for the night. Itâs monotonous, and itâs not a guarantee, but it does help. Take each racing, terrified thought. Let it say its piece as you calmly and thoroughly put it in the box. Close the lid, and watch the indicator light. Step away, and start again. Good night, friends.
[music]
Theme music for A Soft Place to Land is âRepose,â by Chase Miller, off his album Burnout. Chaseâs music can be found at chasemiller.bandcamp.com. Show notes and episode transcripts are at softplacepod.tumblr.com. You can find me on Twitter @cyranoh_ and you can listen to me jabber on as the foil to my very good friend Anna on our parenting podcast, The Parent Rap, at parentrap.net.
I love you very much. Take care of yourselves. See you soon.
0 notes
Text
Episode 2: Volcano Day
Show notes & transcript below the cut.
SHOW NOTES:
âThe Fires of Pompeii,â Doctor Who. S4E2 (2008) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1173173/
âAbsolute Candor,â Picard. S1E4 (2020) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9420280/
Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) - https://www.ea.com/games/dragon-age/dragon-age-inquisition
TRANSCRIPT:
EP 2:
Hello, bees. It's me, Sara, sending you light and love, and also a bunch of things I've been super into lately that I think might be your jam. Welcome to A Soft Place to Land.
[music]
Item the first: theories of time travel
Or, the futile, the fixable, and the flexible.
Most fiction that uses time travel as a device has to face the inevitable question: can a person or group acting in the past make change that affects the âpresentâ of the story, or the future? Reminder that when talking about time travel tenses can get weird, so fair warning. There are, uh, letâs say a million ways to work out how exactly past meddling can change a storyâs present or future, but for me they all eventually boil down to three ideas: futile, fixable, flexible.
Futile stories are ones where you can travel back and make all the changes you wish: step on that butterfly, kill your great-grandfather, release or donât release the monkeys. Itâs going to be the same anyway. Youâll find that you are the reason the plague gets released, or you luckily killed the wrong person, or you managed to slow the train just enough that the person running to catch it did, in fact, catch it. Youâre responsible for the present you came from, and it would have happened regardless.
Then there are fixable stories, where you can in fact make a difference in the present you left. Butterfly effect may be in full force, so your sneezing in the past wipes out all life on the planet. Your every action, your very presence, sends out ripple effects that, once you return to your present, will have spiraled out into results you could never have predicted. You go back in time to watch Vesuvius erupt, and you return to a world in which super-intelligent squid rule from their orbital space stations. You change the world, not because you necessarily want to, not in the ways you wanted to, by even peeking at the past.
And then, my personal favorite, the flexible. This is the idea that you can in fact change things in the past, in the short term. You can make change that feels huge and monumental, and you can return to your time - and yet, itâs the same as it was when you left. The names are a little different, the dates a little off, but the setting is what it was before, or maybe slightly worse. Time is like a rubber band, and you can stretch and pull and twist and fiddle with it, but it will snap back over and over again, to roughly the same shape it was before.
And the reason Iâm talking about this is that I tend to root for fiction in which time and history matter, in which our actions and our protagonistsâ actions have merit and agency and can change things.
Item the second: âThe Fires of Pompeiiâ
Or, fixed points in time
There is, I suppose, another option. In the 2008 Doctor Who episode âThe Fires of Pompeii,â the Doctor - Iâm assuming here you have a passing familiarity with the conceit of Doctor Who, but if not, think time-traveling alien and a human companion - the Doctor explains that there are things in time that can change. Lots of them! But, too, there are fixed points in time, things that must happen, that will happen, regardless. The destruction of Pompeii, it becomes clear over the course of the episode, is one of those fixed points, and eventually the Doctorâs companion, Donna Noble, one of my favorite fictional characters of all time, comes to accept that. There is nothing she can do, nothing they can do together, to stop the eruption; in fact, they cause it, and must cause it, and always had caused it.
But.
But Donna, understanding and accepting that, eventually, insists and pleads and orders and begs the Doctor: save someone. Save one person. Save anyone, someone, just one person from this fate. The event has to happen, is happening around them, and they canât stop it, but they can save one person. And so he does, and they do. They save a family, and then they leave.
It could seem callous, and sometimes it does: this family is saved but all the others are left to die. But these days, Iâm starting to see it more as a gesture of defiance. Events around us are huge and crushing, and more often than not thereâs not a thing I or you or hundreds of us could do about it. We canât force huge corporations to stop global warming, we canât force the prison-industrial complex to change their raison dâetre to restorative justice, we canât force our lawmakers to respect and support marginalized people and their rights.
But.
But we can try. This may not be a fixed point. This may be something we can still change. And if it is a fixed point, a thing that is happening and will happen and will always have happened, we can save one person. We can save one family. We can make our anger known and we can lift people one at a time into an escape route. We canât do the big thing, but we can do the small thing.
If historyâs going to be the shape itâs going to be, I choose to believe that we can and should work to fill the shape in with our small actions. Protests that get shut down, petitions that get thrown in the trash, votes that get ignored: theyâre still there. They still happened. One person, here on volcano day. And then another. And then another.
Item the third: Picard
Or, the weight of choices you regret
Thereâs a scene in the fourth episode of Picard, the series, or a sequence of scenes, set in a place thatâs become something of a Romulan refugee camp slash reservation. The titular Picard is responsible for its founding, and has not been back for some years, and returns to find it has drastically changed in his absence. He speaks with a woman whoâd been something of a friend, seeks an explanation for why, suddenly to him but gradually to the people there, the place is now hostile and struggling, full of anger and need. She points out, quite rightly, that he founded this place and then left, never once checking in or following up. âBecause you could not save everyone, you chose to save no one,â she says, in an absolutely devastating line delivered with no recrimination, no anger.
Picard, in that moment, looks shaken, and while he doesnât react well to it - starting a bar fight, yelling, then some other stuff happens and then Seven of Nine shows up, which is great - itâs still a moment that, in the context weâre looking at right now, means so much to me.
If we believe that our choices matter, and we believe that there are forces and powers larger than us that control more of the world than we could ever hope to, itâs so immediately and irrevocably easy to slip into despair. My recycling wonât stop global warming, wonât even make a dent, why try? The carceral system is a money-making juggernaut and a hundred protesters wonât make any difference, so why go and risk arrest?
And I get it. And I feel that way, so much of the time these days. But.
But, because we canât save everyone, we have to try and save someone. Because we canât stop the volcano, we have to pull out the three people we can reach right now.
Otherwise, and I say this with total self-accusation, we are part of the problem. We are part of the problem anyway, but if we can help one person and we donât, pointing to the larger systemic issue we feel powerless against, we fail not only that one person, but also ourselves, and the truth at the heart of where Iâm aiming: that you and here and now and this moment, this small choice, do in fact make a difference.
Item the final: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Or, the echoes of choice up and down the timeline
There is a moment - there are dozens of moments - in this video game, with which I have become ever more obsessed lately, where you are given meaningful choices. Youâre talking to, say, the Iron Bull, a huge horned mercenary, and his company is in danger, and you have choices. You can tell him to abandon his men and preserve an important alliance for the organization you represent. Or you can tell him to save his men and scuttle the alliance.
The game makes it clear: there are upsides and downsides to either choice. It differentiates this kind of choice, the irrevocable kind, by making the dialogue wheel a different color, and by summarizing the immediate effect of your choice as you hover over each option.
But I submit, and hereâs where weâll close, that itâs just as important when you choose smaller things. Choosing a kinder justice when faced with a prisoner. Choosing to laugh with your friends around a card game. Choosing to welcome someone to join you, despite their style or race or abilities or past. These choices shape the game, shape your relationships and the options you have, and the ending crawl, where you see how your people have fared, well. Itâs all your choices writ large.
And there are, always and always, ripple effects you couldnât have predicted. Your continued emphasis on careful planning nudges a characterâs vigilante justice group toward effectiveness. Your open heart shows a reformed murderer the power they might have to help others in the same position. Your support for a character fighting an addiction shows them a way forward free from something that hurt them. On and on, the smallest choices building into a snowball.
Thereâs no ideal condition, really: the game knows you canât save everyone and everything, knows that loss, too, is important and true. But you can, in this game and the best games and fiction and also your life, decide to treat each choice like it really matters.
The temptation can be to freeze, when faced with the reality that your choices matter. There are too many ways to screw this up, thereâs one right answer and if I choose wrong Iâm toast and Iâve lost.
Well, no. Thereâs not really right or wrong answers in most cases. There are different aspects you can choose to emphasize, there are myriad paths you can walk, there are branches that end at the same place. But the more rooted you are in the belief that you can choose, that your choices make a difference, that you can make a choice and continue to make choices about how to deal with that choice, well. Hopefully we learn to see not danger but opportunity, not a failure point but an inflection point. A chance to course correct, to right a wrong, to steady a ship, to open a hand.
You can choose an open heart, a restorative justice, a support role, a championing of what matters most to you. And you can watch, slow but sure, the repeated choices you make (always mercy, always hope, always justice, always laughter, always truth) begin to echo up and down the timeline. You canât change the decisions you already made, but you can try to change the ones youâll make tomorrow. You canât change the effects youâve already created, but you can try to mitigate and shape them into something better. You canât control anyone but yourself (in real life), but you can encourage them, and create a space for them, and show them other ways to choose.
And if we see only wrong choices, only harmful outcomes, maybe we do our best to pick the least bad, and to keep choosing the least bad, shaping the ripples as best we can. Maybe we can work our way back up the chain to a crossroads, and try another fork this time. Every dialogue choice has an effect, even if itâs only for a moment. We can, most of the time, repair the damage weâve done, or soften it, or simply acknowledge and apologize and do our very best to do better with our next choice.
[music]
Theme music for A Soft Place to Land is âRepose,â by Chase Miller, off his album Burnout. Chaseâs music can be found at chasemiller.bandcamp.com. Show notes and episode transcripts are at softplacepod.tumblr.com. You can find me on Twitter @cyranoh_ and you can listen to me jabber on as the foil to my very good friend Anna on our parenting podcast, The Parent Rap, at parentrap.net.
I love you very much. Take care of yourselves. See you soon.
[music]
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Text
Episode 1: Sugar, Butter, Flour
Show notes & transcript below the cut.
SHOW NOTES:
âA Soft Place to Land,â from Waitress, sung by Jessie Mueller, Keala Seattle, and Kimiko Glenn.
Schitt's Creek
Stardew Valley
"Dead Stars,â by Ada LimĂłn, from The Carrying (2018)
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, bees. It's me, Sara, sending you light and love, and also a bunch of things I've been super into lately that I think might be your jam. Welcome to A Soft Place to Land.
[music]
Item the first: "A Soft Place to Land,â from Waitress, sung by Jessie Mueller, Keala Seattle, and Kimiko Glenn.
Or, a title track to parenthood.
[clip: opening]
This whole musical has, more often than not, been on my mind since I've had a kid. It's not only about kids, of course, but so much of it reflects on the ways we grow up, and how our raising stays with us and shapes us, for good or ill, forever. And this song specifically just breaks my heart every time I hear it.
I want, more than anything in the world, for my kid to grow up happy - not all the time, not Stepford-style, but fundamentally happy. Secure in the knowledge that she is so loved, no matter what, that nothing she could ever do or say or not do or not say could change that. Fearless to be herself in the knowledge that behind her are people who stand ready and waiting to catch her, to carry her, to clap as she soars.
Growing up any other way leaves scars, and they never really heal, and I am walking around trying to bear them and maintain them and maybe forget about a few while trying very, very hard not to give any of them to my kid. She's going to have some stuff, and she's going to go through pain, and she's going to cry and be sad and get her feelings hurt, and I want very much for none of it to wound her so deeply she turns inward.
[clip: a dream needs believing / to taste like the real thing]
So, how do I do that? How do I singlehandedly prevent my trauma from messing up my kid?
First I forget the concept of doing anything singlehandedly, ever. The rest is...a process. I rein in my own ish as much as I can, I am honest when I can be about the struggles I'm having, I talk about parenting in a complicated world with one of my very good friends (we have a podcast, I'll link it below). I talk to people. I listen to my kid when she talks, and when she sings, and when she's quiet. I ask her how she feels, if she's proud of herself, if she needs a hug, if she'd rather have some quiet time. I give her space and I ask for it when I need it, and more than anything in the world I try, against my own nature, to tell her and show her how much she is loved.
I do what I can with who I am to give her a soft place to land, and I hope to the universe that it's enough, and I take a deep breath and I do it again.
[music]
Item the Second: the final season of Schitt's Creek
Or, a reminder that where things start doesn't dictate where they go.
[clip: little bit alexis]
Look, okay, if you're an Internet person you likely don't need me to yell about how much Schitt's Creek means to me. It starts, I will freely admit, as a sort of skimmed version of Arrested Development, but quickly shows you that it's actually doing something much more interesting and difficult. It is instead a show about family, yes, but a family that is forced by circumstance to reassess who they are and who they are to each other, and finds the beating heart at the center of their relationships. Stripped of all the obstacles they'd joyfully embraced to keep themselves apart, they find joy.
It's about love - romantic and platonic, mixed-up and weird and shifting - and about acceptance of yourself and of other people. It's a show that, like eternal favorite Leverage, began with characters who completely changed when compared to the people they are now, but are still those people underneath. David is still the vain, needy, insecure, damaged person he was in the premiere, but he's also beloved and loving, generous and funny, kind (especially when no one is looking) and clever. Alexis, who I love more than air, is still brittle in some ways, and too comfortable being overlooked while still angry about it, and prone to take on anything anyone will hand her out of fear no one would ask. But, too, she's found her strength, and her passion, and some of the truths at the center of herself, and she's built a life that works for her, and she's chosen that life again and again. They all have.
[clip: what's your secret stevie]
For me, there's no story I'd rather see than that one. The building a life where you are and making it work for you, the "change is inevitable and needed but I am still who I am" narrative: that's my jam, eternally. I choose this life, every day, and I will keep choosing it.
Also, and this is sincere, Schitt's Creek gave me some of the best ways to talk to my straight friends about the dreams I have re: my own queerness, avenues of conversation I'd never thought of before. Plus, the fanfic is almost uniformly sweet and great, so.
[music]
Item the third: Stardew Valley
Or, a life that means something.
[clip: stardew valley overture]
This is the best video game. It's three years old, and it's on basically every platform, and it has brought me more peace than any one media item has in years.
The basic gist is that it's a farming simulator, mostly. You inherit a derelict farm in a tiny town when your grandfather passes away, and you take it as a chance to escape your soul-crushing cubicle job for a megacorp. And you get there, and everything is difficult. You can barely swing your pickaxe to break up the rocks to make room for a first pitiful planting of parsnips, and you don't have any friends, and there's junk and weeds all over this land that, you suddenly see, you are solely responsible for. And there's a town with people in it, some of whom are nice enough and some of whom seem desperate to ignore you, and you have a little exclamation point urging you to talk to all of them at least once.
Then you look up and it's been a year or two or three. Your crops do just fine, and the chickens in the big  coop cluck happily. You have friends, maybe a partner, and the rhythm of the community has embraced you. You have a place here, standing. You have a life that you've built one swing of your axe at a time.
And that's the thing about it. It's not a game you win, exactly, though of course (like the Sims) you can try to min-max your crop yields, or romance every character, or finish every offered quest line. You can try to make enough money to never have to work again. You can choose to side with the megacorp - they're here, too, because capitalism is inescapable - and kill off the remaining kindness of the town.
But it's a life that matters. Your choices may not affect Abigail's daily routine, but you can play video games and music with her, and encourage her to use the bravery and curiosity that's so obvious about her to go exploring, like she wants. You can't make Shane's alcoholism or depression disappear, but you can encourage him to get the help he needs, and cheer with him as he finds joy again. You can't make George a happy person, exactly, but you can become his friend.
[clip: distant banjo]
It's a life where you can't starve to death or fall ill or be evicted, where your friends are always excited to see you, where your work goes out into your community and you see results from it, where you can have a house and a family and a pet if you want them. A life that's small and quiet, yes - you can't become the mayor, or end the war that's referenced - but far from inconsequential. And there are changes you can make to better your community, small and large alike, and there are people you can help, and there are things you can create. It's a dream of a life that's not defined by anything but what you think of it.
It's silly, maybe, to talk about a video game like that, but there it is: a game that at its heart thinks capitalism is a bad idea, that creativity is the best thing about being a person, that relationships matter more than basically everything else, that nobody likes getting holly as a gift. A place where everyone in town comes out to the fair or the wedding or the jellyfish migration, and you have a place to stand, too. A life you build yourself, a home you make.
[music]
Item the final: "Dead Stars" by Ada LimĂłn, from The Carrying (2018)
Or, being a nest of trying.
Ada LimĂłn is, and has been for a few years now, my favorite poet. Oh, Richard Siken and Mary Oliver and Eve Ewing, of course, too, and a million more - I love poetry, more on that in a moment - but all of LimĂłn's work lately has just been a knife to the neck for me, and I mean that in the best possible way.
This poem in particular has been rattling around as the winter holidays swarm, as domestic life gets yelled about from every TV, as I have yet another crisis of confidence, sure as I always am that while I know full well my worth as a person is in no way tied to how my house looks, I also am a bad person and the proof of that lies in the pile of laundry at the foot of my bed.
But, too, what I like about this poem, or maybe what I responded to so strongly, is its very suburban setting: taking out the trash, looking at the stars. And that's when it turns, and that's when it shakes me back awake.
I burst into tears the first time I read this poem, and then I made my weekly calls to my representatives, and then I wrote some more lore for the Dungeons & Dragons game I run, and then it was time to go pick up my kid from school.
Our little lives in their little boxes, our worn-in grooves on the world, they have value. Many of us have fought and scratched and sacrificed to get them, to settle into them, to stake our claim. And now we have a safe place, safer than some, and we look around and, for some of us, for me, feel guilty about it. I have all of this, and others have so little.
So maybe we wallow, and maybe we whine, or maybe we go the other direction and get haughty and hard-nosed. Or, which I think would be better, we widen our orbit. We survive more, we love harder, we speak out and up from the place where we are safe. We cast our shadow where we can, and we bring the light where we can reach. We've built something safe in our home or our heart or our neighborhood gas station, and the next thing to do is expand it. If my house is a safe place, what about my yard? What about my sidewalk, and my street? The voting location blocks away and the library on the other side of town, the school my kid attends and the ones she doesn't?
What happens if we take the stable footing we're on and start scooting towards the edges of it, bringing its stability with us? What happens if we shout across the lines we draw around ourselves, choose to choose a life eternally pushing our boundaries outward towards each other? We start from here, from the carved-out nook we rest in, and we take a step towards the edge, and we keep doing that. What happens next?
[poem:
[Out here, thereâs a bowing even the trees are doing.
        Winterâs icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute itâs almost in another year.
I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
   the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.
Itâs almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
   recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.
And itâs true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
   Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.
But mostly weâre forgetting weâre dead stars too, my mouth is full
   of dust and I wish to reclaim the risingâ
to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
   whatâs larger within us, toward how we were born.
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
   Weâve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
  No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
        if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
[music]
Theme music for A Soft Place to Land is âRepose,â by Chase Miller, off his album Burnout. Chaseâs music can be found at chasemiller.bandcamp.com. Show notes and episode transcripts are at softplacepod.tumblr.com. You can find me on Twitter @cyranoh_ and you can listen to me jabber on as the foil to my very good friend Anna on our parenting podcast, The Parent Rap, at parentrap.net.
I love you very much. Take care of yourselves. See you soon.
0 notes