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imagine-jjba · 4 years

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the jojos when they first meet you!

jonathan ;

he’s very open to talking to you! he noticed you sitting by yourself during his school days. you looked lonely, so he decided to talk to you so you didn’t feel too lonely.

of course, he was very interested in what you had to say. he was taken aback when you started talking. your voice was beautiful, to him. he was very attentive with what you had to say when you finally talked back.

he found you to be stunning, really. he’s a very kind soul, after all. wanted to spend his time with you for as long as he could, before you two had to get to your own classes. though, he made sure to keep what you said in mind, just in case you two had talked again.

he’s very polite when he talks to you as well! always calls you by proper names (or, at least tries to) and always refers to you how you’d like to be referred as. he’s bound to forget sometimes, though. he likes to create little cute nicknames in his head to better remember a person. might slip up once or twice.

he also thinks that you have a beautiful name! he’ll say that you do, maybe as a brief compliment. but when you push him farther on the topic of him calling you cute, he’ll go silent with a flustered face.

jonathan would make sure that you feel a little less lonely, maybe tell a few jokes that he knows of, or let you talk to him about your feelings. he’s a very nice man and offers this to everyone he knows, even in passing conversations with those that aren’t so nice to him. he just wants to make you comfortable.

when he finally says he has to leave, he’ll definetly be sure to mention that you can always hang out with him anytime you want to. he’s always open to new friends!

joseph ;

if you were doing something he didn’t like (probably something he was jealous about), he would make sure to say it loud and clear. everyone around you (including yourself) would be able to hear how judgemental he would be.

however, if you were just by yourself, he would just try to start a conversation so things weren’t awkward. it really would depend on the setting where you two would meet. in this case, we’ll go with you meeting him in an american restaurant.

if you were outside, he would mention how cold/hot it was.

if you were inside, he would probably find you to be pretty and would want to flirt with you. so, the natural course of action for him is to come up to you and make some weird conversation.

starting a conversation with this guy is a lot harder than you’d think. he’s outgoing in a confidence sense. he isn’t afraid to speak his mind, which is why he can tend to be a bit obnoxious sometimes. he also takes interest in things such as the latest and weirdest movies and comics. he also always knows random information about the things he likes. he’s definetly use it in conversation.

once you get past the beginning stages of talking to him, it’s quite simple to hold a conversation. he’ll go with the flow of it, following a lead that you give him. if you mention that you like something that he doesn’t have much knowledge of, he’ll ask for your opinion on it. he’s good at talking, but he’s also good at listening.

once you two nerd out together, you’ll find yourselves lost in the conversation. soon, time feels like it had gone by so fast. when you need to get going, you make sure to get joseph’s name. he’ll also find his own little ways of catching you again.

jotaro ;

jotaro doesn’t start conversations with strangers on the street. he’ll only do it if he absolutely needs help with something. you would be the one to most likely start a conversation.

of course, he wouldn’t respond too much for basic chit-chat. he’s not a talker, really. he’d most likely be irritated that you’re even talking to him in the first place. he tends to find others very annoying.

however, if you started talking about something that he enjoyed, his interest would start to peak out. he wouldn’t sound as angry or as irritated. especially when it comes to science related things. he’s always been fond of science and nature, ironically.

depending on how much you know about science, the conversation could either be mostly dead or skyrocket from there. if you knew facts about nature that not many others did, jotaro would be impressed with your knowledge. after all, he didn’t think that any normal person would just know all these things. good thing you’re not as “normal” as you seem!

he starts to talk about his own little facts about nature and science. although it’s unnatural for someone to be so interested in talking to him, he finds a sense of familarity in talking to someone about his interests. like his grandfather, he’s als a nerd. you just have to hit the right cords and he’ll get started.

when he has to go, you make sure to give him your phone number. it’s the least you can do when he’s so interesting. of course, he says that he doesn’t want it, but at least you don’t see him throw it away. he makes sure to keep it with him, just in case he actually does want to talk to you. (he does, he just isn’t sure if it would be socially acceptable to want to talk to someone who he’s only spoken to once).

josuke ;

he’ll most likely talk to you while you’re at school! you’ve been grouped together for a project of some sort, most likely related to math.

if you’re interested in math, he’ll try to follow along with what you’re saying, but he’ll really have not much of a clue. if you’re not interested in math, you’ll pretty much both be stuck together. you two would have to study a lot!

delving into the former path, he’s very interested to work with someone who’s good at this. school is boring, but you somehow make it seem interesting (and a bit cute). from his perspective, math is just things for nerds, something that he isn’t interested in. however, he seems to learn a lot from you.

after you two start talking about other things besides your project, you start to connect. you realize that he’s just a lovable dork, really. he’s very laid back and will also go with whatever you want to talk about, but will also give his two cents. though, he’s very respectful about what you’re saying. not like his dad, in any case.

he also likes to talk about his friends and how much he appreciates them. he says that he wants to treasure them and it’s very sweet to you.

eventually, he ends up dragging okuyasu into the conversation as well. you three start talking eccentrically about things you recently bought and such. depending on your hobbies, josuke might say that he even takes an interest in them!

once you two have to leave for your next class, you pack your things and get josuke’s phone number. after all, you’ll have to talk over the phone for more details about the project, right?

giorno ;

you’re apart of tean bucciarati, so of course you’ll meet him when bucciarati brings him in. you’re not very interested in talking to him at first, as all the others were. but when your capo said that you should respect that he was there, you decided to talk to him.

once you introduced yourself, you were planning on ending it there. however, something caught your eye. it could have been the way that he styles his hair or the ladybug charms on his shirt. you’re not sure about it yet, but you do have some interest about his appearance.

so, you ask him about these quirks in his appearance. he’s very polite and uses proper language, which is very weird to you. it sounds nothing like the way mista or narancia might speak to you, or the way that bruno might coddle you like. he’s understanding in the way that his appearance looks. he doesn’t fuss over it and diligently explains whatever you’re interested in.

after this, he asks you a question that you’re not really ready for. maybe it’s something about your appearance as well, or maybe it could be about why you’re in this gang in the first place. of course, depending on the level of importance to you, you could either explain these things to him or not. he’s a listener more than a talker, but he does have his way with words.

when you two are talking, he finds that you seem interesting. the way you seem to carry around your confidence is, in a way, amusing to him. it sounds like you know what you want, to him.

you don’t speak that much when you first meet him. it’s sort of awkward, in a way. you’re not very sure what to say, but when you do come up with something to say, you’re very confident in your words. you want to be sure you’re saying something that’s not hurtful in anyway.

you two finally stop talking when one of the other members of the team cuts in, starting to make small talk with the blonde. you let them have at it, of course. stepping back, you sit farther in the back, the perfect spot to watch him carefully.

jolyne ;

you two met in prison, of course. you were placed in the cell next to her, so you could hear her talking, whenever she did. after being there for a couple of hours, she started to talk through the walls, just to see if someone would respond to her.

you most likely wouldn’t ignore her after a few times. you’d be bored as well, so you might as well have a listen to what a fellow inmate has to say. she seems like she’s thinking about things, maybe ways to escape? you don’t have much hope for that, but at least you have something to not bore you.

you start talking back to her, finding out things about her that you wouldn’t expect for someone in prison. she tells you why she’s in prison in the first place. she’s not ashamed of it, anyway. but it sounds very interesting, so you ask for more details about her case.

when she tells you more about it, she seems nonchalant, like she’s tired of telling the same story over and over again so, you tell her your story. after all, it’s only fair, you decide. it’s not like she’ll find it more interesting than her story.

turns out it is more interesting to her. she’ll start to ask you questions about it. and you answer. she can get nosy about it, but once she realizes that you’re uncomfortable with a certain topic, she’ll leave it alone.

you two don’t talk about much else after that, but it’s nice that you got to talk to someone about your situation and why you ended up in jail in the first place. it’s a burden lifted off your shoulders. plus, you’re somewhat interested in figuring out what the girl on the other side of the wall looks like. you’ll definitely have to talk to her some more. she’s a very interesting gal!

#jjba #jojos bizarre adventure #jojo kimyou na bouken #jonathan joestar #joseph joestar #jotaro kujo #josuke higashikata #giorno giovanna #jolyne cujoh #x reader #jonathan x reader #joseph x reader #jotaro x reader #josuke x reader #giorno x reader #jolyne x reader #headcanons

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comradekatara · 5 years

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What’s the gaang in college like

this is SUCH a good question. thank you!!! i’m going to answer this in terms of what i think they’d be like if they did go to college, even though i’m quite sure not all of them would or should. this is almost 3k words btw because i have a disease :) thanks :)

aang: aang loves school, but he forgets to go? it’s just that he’s always either a) volunteering at the children’s hospital; b) helping a friend with a flat tire; c) taking his dog appa on long runs; d) giving heartfelt advice to a total stranger who looked sad; e) getting stopped on the street by an environmental canvasser when he doesn’t have his wallet on him and then devoting the rest of his afternoon to helping that canvasser get more donations and signatures from people who DO have their wallets, which is, frankly, a little overwhelming for the canvasser; f) happily embarking on an impromptu coffee date with a total stranger because she has multiple peace sign stickers on her backpack; g) defrosting tofu; h) reading exactly two pages of a book sokka recommended to him before getting bored and simply texting sokka for the highlights; i) painting, for fun; j) subbing in for the school mascot at some suspiciously aggressive sporting event, which aang normally wouldn’t advocate for, except someone asked him to do it as a favor and how could he say no; k) trying to start a vegetable co-op on campus and protesting heartily when his proposal is rejected due to lack of space; l) writing polite but firm letters to textbook publishers asking them to extract their biases from the next edition; m) generously attending parties as a “designated pedestrian escort,” since he neither drinks nor drives; n) making jewelry; o) making friends at the farmers’ market; or p) re-shaving his head. so how is he possibly supposed to make time to go to class??? he tries to do some of his assigned readings, and he always has strong opinions on them. but he doesn’t always make it to class and he’s very sorry about that. he still passes every class though. who’s gonna flunk a kid who missed his final exam because he was helping deliver a baby in the parking lot?

katara: katara is bad at college. she hates her major (because, as sokka wails to everyone who will listen, she chose the wrong major!). she hates her classes and she hates her professors and she hates studying. she hates the library and thinks anyone who goes there for any reason is “pretending to work” despite very compelling evidence to the contrary. she hates that campus buildings are named after dead slave-owners and colonizers, and she consistently gets arrested for trying to vandalize their nameplates. she is always able to find things to occupy her on campus–for instance, underpaid dining hall workers to advocate for, or a new college republicans group to protest, or an updated round of enrollment stats reminding her that higher education remains racist, classist and colonialist and upholds existing biases in society. she is constantly threatening to drop out and start an organization encouraging young activists not to go to college. however, she also finds her ongoing tangles with the dean too invigorating to ever stop: because of her anger and intensity and many unscheduled appearances at his office and sometimes even his houes, the dean is scared of her. katara is having a very traditional college experience in her own way, discovering new causes and coming into her own as an activist. she is just not, unfortunately, passing english 101.

mai: for mai, the main difference between high school and college is that in college she finds things to care about, and oh does it feel good. a frustrating experience registering for classes winds up being a happy accident when she begrudgingly signs up for a class examining perspective in literature. the class is electrifying. she gets really into creative writing after that, and writes a batch of her own short stories; in all of them, she uses perspective to give interiority to unlikely narrators. when she’s not writing, she spends a lot of time at art museums and foreign film screenings. while strangers might still think she’s aloof, people she’s shared classes with know better. she is passionate, engaged and argumentative. she is the frustratingly cultured friend in the friend group who will matter-of-factly correct someone else’s references without looking up from her phone, when no one even realized she was listening. and the other thing that’s different as compared to high school is that she doesn’t just hang around azula anymore. she has all these pockets of friends who share her interests, art friends and writing friends and film friends and friends from her computer science classes (yeah, she’s a computer science major because she’s just practical; it’s a thing). the gaang isn’t even at the top of her list of the people she’s closest to; in fact, when she leaves for study abroad, she forgets to let them know beforehand. but she does send back half-melted chocolates.

azula: hot on the heels of being the fastest runner and toughest boxer at her high school gym, azula gets to college and finds herself… no longer the best. the first five months of her freshman year go like this: she is running at the gym one day when she notices another young woman who is noticeably faster than she is and barely breaking a sweat. azula becomes obsessed with her, and starts showing up at the gym at the same time every day just so she can see her again, always claiming the elliptical directly behind this modern marvel just so she can watch her in action. one day, azula catches a glimpse of the woman’s student ID when she swipes in at the front door, and then goes home and creates a facebook account for the very first time just to find her profile and learn more about her. the girl quickly becomes aware she’s being watched (it’s not hard–all she has to do is look at the mirrored wall in order to catch azula creepily staring at her and mouthing aggressive self-motivation. she asks azula what her problem is. azula’s like, “excuse me? how dare you?????” before she finds she has nothing else to say. she storms off back to her dorm and screams at the top of her lungs for a little while. the next day, she goes back to the gym and works out even harder. but she promptly passes out. she has to take a week off to recover. by the time she can go back to the gym, she is too embarrassed to follow this woman around anymore. however, this same pattern repeats itself periodically whenever azula comes into contact with anyone even a little bit better than her. eventually, the stress of competing with every talented person in sight (whether in the realm of athletics, academics, or the board game club that really, really wants to kick her out) starts to take its toll, and azula proceeds to live in the walls for a little while while she thinks things through. while she’s in the walls, she misses her psychology midterm and has to repeat the class.

sokka: sokka loves college. college is almost exactly what sokka wanted it to be, although if he were to name one complaint, it would be that there aren’t enough places to hook up outside. he makes do, though. sokka is one of those brilliantly charming kids who befriend almost everyone, except the douchebags. he gets invited to every house party and every sorority formal and every rich-kid ski trip he couldn’t possibly afford and every late-night philosophical debate in a dorm common room. (he can’t even count the number of times he’s been getting ready for bed at 2am and his phone has buzzed with a text from some acquaintance he took a class with a year ago, asking for him to swing by their apartment and weigh in on a dispute. believe it or not, he usually goes.) sokka takes classes in as many departments as he possibly can: there’s some comp sci and some comp lit, some performance studies and some gender studies, some radio/tv/film, some environmental engineering, a fair amount of electrical engineering, no shortage of poli sci, and intro language courses in as many languages as possible. his adviser is like, “are you even human????” and sokka’s like “wym? i’m on scholarship.” in the end, there isn’t a major that sums up sokka’s focus of study, so he creates one; the unifying thread between all his courses is that he’s studying the future. like, of the world. they let him put the name of his made-up major on his degree, and although it’s in poor taste to frame your undergraduate diploma, he does it anyway, because he likes explaining to people that yes, he made his major up, and yes it was exactly as bullshit as it sounds. he’s very proud.

suki: does suki like college? sure, she likes it fine. she drives for saferide and organizes with campus feminists. she organizes self-defense trainings and also advocates for revising the mandatory new-student training in consent that all students have to take so that it’s oriented towards deterring would-be assailants, rather than putting all the onus on would-be victims. on a lighter note, she also participates in the campus drag show every year, and a number of formerly-straight-identified attendees gush to a reporter for the student paper that they are now questioning their sexuality thanks to “kyoshi’s” performance. also, suki does roller derby, and you would not believe the dyke drama surrounding her and her various exes from the team. it is not to be believed. but as for classes, suki could pretty much take or leave them. she likes art and math. she tries to show up sometimes. often she does not, because she is busy getting high in her truck or having sex outside. sokka doesn’t understand how she doesn’t care about her mediocre grades. suki doesn’t bother trying to explain it.

zuko: naturally, zuko is a literature major. he takes every single shakespeare course the school offers. then he takes a class on milton, a class on dante, a class on female poets of the twenty-first century, and a handful of gender studies classes too; all of these classes change his life. after his first gender studies class, he cuts off his ponytail, determined to unravel the patriarchy in one snip. so it goes without saying that, emboldened by his distance from his father, zuko takes it upon himself to Seize The Day in a way he couldn’t in high school. sure, it’s cliche, but the siren song of that fountain in the quad is impossibly to ignore; he simply must go read poetry under its shadow. he forces himself to go to parties most weekends, always irrationally hoping that this time he might like parties and have a good time, but it takes him until his senior year to realize that he will never like parties. until then, he spends a lot of time mostly hugging the wall for safety and avoiding the eyes of the couples who are making out on the couches. when guys try to flirt with him, he spills his drink on purpose so he has an excuse to flee the scene, and the guys can always tell. he auditions for theater productions and is summarily rejected from almost every acting role; the one role he gets, he butchers, and he can even see on sokka’s face when sokka brings him flowers after the show that sokka knows the flowers were too much. when acting roles don’t pan out, he tries working on a show’s crew, but ultimately it’s not until mai gently suggests he try reviewing the theater productions on campus that he finds his niche. sure, few students read the student newspaper for its theater criticism, but zuko’s reviews are good. they get a prominent place of honor above the fold, and a number of drama professors are willing to admit amongst themselves that they wait for zuko’s reviews before shelling out for tickets. although he does write under a pen name so his father won’t find them. that’s just common sense.

toph: toph is smarter than most of her teachers and knows it, which means she derails class after class with smart questions, counterarguments, and passionate rebuttals. her older friends help her identify classes to take with professors who are welcoming of that sort of thing and willing to have a spirited back-and-forth. that’s how she ends up taking some higher-level philosophy classes as a freshman. (by the way, big mistake, but she gets what she came for.) her class schedule is an eclectic mix of electives cobbled together with little thought for how she’s eventually going to graduate; in the end, it takes her an extra year, and she’s totally fine with that. she has lots of friends and supporters and she also has a lot of enemies; the head of the psychology department memorably calls her a rude little troll girl. she studies abroad more than once, and though she has no reason to work an on-campus job, she has a volunteer gig mentoring high school students. sometimes her fourteen-year-old disciples will follow her around, wide-eyed, from social gathering to social gathering, and they’ll get to fully immerse themselves in toph’s particular college experience. it’s a lot of sniping and also a lot of smoking weed in other people’s apartments. also, she plays football in the park with suki every saturday rain or shine, and though there have been some close calls, neurologically speaking, she has thankfully avoided any concussions. (suki, unfortunately, cannot say the same, and toph is very sorry.)

ty lee: everyone has taken at least one class where ty lee came in late and sat in the back, but no one is clear on her major. what makes matters more confusing is that when people ask her what she’s studying, she’ll say just one of her three majors, which leads people to believe that she is lying. ty lee is studying physics, communications and theology, and while her class attendance is far from spotless, she can always get the notes from one of her admirers. apparently she studies hard, because she’s an honor student in all three departments. outside of class, ty lee is a sorority girl, natch. she freely invites her greek-life-avoidant friends to her fundraisers and formals because she doesn’t understand what they have against the super-fun greek system of which she is proud to be a part! also, she’s not shy about cheerfully reminding her friends that if she doesn’t have enough friends show up, she’ll be fined, with the unspoken reminder that she really can’t afford that shit. this generally motivates people to come through for her. it is anyone’s guess how ty lee manages her active sorority participation, her insane class schedule, athletics (volleyball) and her work-study job (calling alumni for donations–she’s disturbingly good at it, by the way). more than one amazed admirer has posed the theory that she might be a witch. when she hears that, ty lee just giggles and smiles.

#the gaang and #sokka #suki #ty lee #mai #azula #katara #aang #toph #zuko #sinxaschwarz #asks

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ironmoneyhandsathlete · 3 years

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Why the arts and humanities?

I asked a lot of people about the importance of the liberal arts. One that shocked me the most was my teacher's answer. He thinks science is much more important than liberal arts. In addition to him, many people believed that unintelligent people would study the liberal arts. There were many liberal arts classes in the curriculum in my high school and middle schools, such as music and art. However, I rarely took these classes, all replaced by the so-called main courses, such as math and English. My teachers explained that these arts are minor subjects, "don't you want to spend more time on the main subjects for the sake of your final exam score? These minor subjects won't matter anyway." People always praise the importance of science. Chinese parents always say, "If you learn STEM well, you will go anywhere." But I think science and arts are both fundamental. Science keeps the world moving forward, while the liberal arts guide the world to move forward in the right way.

Pleasure body and mind

"You don't have to Scarface your interest in music or art to be a good scientist." I've been looking at PISA scores, a global research project that measures students' overall abilities. According to the data research, the first educational problem in China is that studying outside school is the longest, but the learning efficiency is low. This problem stems from parents' rising enthusiasm for cram school, which is attributed to children's lack of time and proper ways to relax. When my elementary school, there were eight cram classes a week. Although most of those are piano, tennis, the high-pressure condition makes me lose the carefree good time with friends and family. Also, cramming education efficiency is not high. I did learn a lot of knowledge, but I didn't have enough time to digest it and transform it into a comprehensive ability.

What's more, in China, most parents don't think liberal arts are necessary. My friends around me have lots of cram classes only in STEM. Although they are very good at STEM, if I ask them how to relieve stress when they are depressed, they will be silent. Although my childhood was not easy, thank my mother, I have my own really like things. When asked to perform, I have skills to show. The way to release is what most Chinese students lack; they don't even have a way to vent under tremendous pressure. Whenever I am stressed, I will immerse myself in music, whether composing songs or playing the piano, helping me forget the sorrow. My best friend relaxes by painting oil paintings. When she interprets her feelings with different colors, the knot in her heart will be untied. The arts offer people a way to enrich themselves even when they are lonely.

an open mind leads to the ability to cooperate

The beauty of liberal arts depends on the perspective's inconsistency, like a hundred flowers blooming. Authors can't write valuable works most of the time. Still, once one-day, immediate inspiration can lead them to make outstanding results because the creation of the liberal arts doesn't need to follow the rules. They can find their work according to their creative thinking. The audience can put forward different points of view; there is no right or wrong. But science is based on facts to prove correctness; right is right, wrong is wrong.

In the PISA results, another education problem is that Chinese students' cooperation ability is inferior. The ability to cooperate depends on whether they like to have different viewpoints produced. Due to the lack of emphasis on liberal arts, Chinese students are accustomed to having only one answer to all questions. Therefore, in group discussions, they dare not stand on different ideas or even think of other solutions. I applied to the College of Liberal Arts because it paid more attention to the communication between people and the collision of ideas that I had never experienced before. Liberal arts focus on free-thinking, so it dramatically improves students' ability to cooperate.

the root of everything

The liberal arts provide values. Science does not necessarily benefit the world without a correct set of values to guide it. I have heard the phrase "science of conscience" before, which means a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society. We need to know every aspect of this community operation to make a wise judgment so that our ideas can be better accepted and realized. How can we get less liberal education such as history, law, psychology, and sociology? Without that knowledge, we might be smart but not effective. An effective person is good at making their idea works. Without understanding other fields, these scientists can hardly have the big picture to make their research run, failing many good ideas and technologies.

My brother was in CS major. Last year he took part in an innovation and entrepreneurship competition. Because he was in a science class in high school, he had little knowledge of liberal arts. At the very beginning of choosing topics, there was a problem. He did not know what the central contradictions of society were. Later, a sociological friend joined him and helped him choose a hot educational topic. They planned to run the APP to attract consumers, but APP he made was very dull and lacked a sense of design. At this point, an art student friend helped him plan the page and attracted many users. Later, psychology students joined in to help them add some programs to attract and maintain users. In the end, their team won first place. Only then did my brother realize the importance of liberal arts. Without these friends, he had no idea how to use his technology to benefit society.

As a school, we should guide students to have an interest in learning, have fun, and learn without pressure, instead of limiting children's enthusiasm and fantasy for new things. To create equal opportunities for students to communicate, the school should develop a culture of "cooperation over competition." Students can dare to participate in the collaboration, stimulate their talents, and create different ideas.

As students, we should pay more attention to our lives' quality, put down the outside world's prejudices to pursue what we like. In busy work, we also have to leave some time to ourselves and don't be lost. At the same time, we should also pursue multifaceted development. Each subject is not limited to learning specific knowledge, mainly to improve overall ability in more aspects.

#liberal arts #battery life

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ahiddenpath · 4 years

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Epilogue Celebration: Couples

Eyyyy, sorry to hit you up twice in one day, but... I’m behind, so here we are!

I will chat a bit about 2028 couples below the cut!

Keep in mind that the crew are all adults in this discussion.

Taichi

Look, I’m sorry, I really am, but... Ya boi is a mess, romantically. I really can’t wait to get into this in a fic, but Taichi chose a difficult life as an ambassador in the time when Digimon and humans are first coming together. And while I think Taichi is good at surface-level flirting (and also has a strong mind-body connection and physical stamina for... adult activities), I... Really... Don’t think... He Relationships well. Er. Sorry.

So, um... I think his dating life is both varied and... stormy. Lots of casual dating of all kinds of people, but it’s rare for him to introduce anyone to friends and family. Plus, in the wake of... Kizuna events, he starts off adulthood... With a lot on his heart and his mind.

It takes him a long time to find the mother of his child, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t marry/if they separated/if he somehow ended up with someone else.

The good news is that Taichi learns and grows from everything. I know that someday, he’ll find the right person, and he’ll always do his best for his son.

Yamato and Sora

I’m influenced by @adventure-hearts on this one, but I think Yamato and Sora dated on-and-off again during different stages in their lives. They both have enormous dreams that came before their love life, until one day... I can’t tell you if it was emotional, or if their paths suddenly merged somehow, but someday, they fell into step and stayed there.

I think they’re very happy together, but have an unconventional life. They spend a lot of time apart because of their jobs, and they rely on their wide net of family and friends to help with the kids.

I think they are extremely well suited to each other and have a great marriage, but... They both have a tendency to internalize, pull back, and brood. They’re constantly working on their communication.

Koushiro

I think that Koushiro struggles romantically in his late teens/early twenties. He seems to very much want a girlfriend, but he never can spare the time to look for one... And when his friends set him up, it tends to... Go... Poorly. Poor dude puts his foot in his mouth, freezes, or just... doesn’t know how to relate to people outside of digimon and computers/math/science. He also tends to try too hard, to the point where it’s a Bad Look.

My opinion is that Koushiro needs someone... very specific to handle his, um... Koushiro-ness. I pair him with Anami Eimi, a digimon biology researcher whose heart sometimes supersedes her mind. The idea is that they’re both introverted and research-oriented, and they can gab about their ideas forever. But Eimi is warm, with strong social skills and social intelligence. She can’t touch Koushiro’s level of genius, but she’s smart, hardworking, and injects creativity and thoughtfulness into her work. She also foresees the social and political implications of the latest developments in Digital World and digimon research/technologies, where Koushiro tends to focus on the immediate problem (you can’t blame him; he’s constantly asked to put out sizable fires. There is always more fire. So much fire).

They probably work together off and on for a long time before one of them realizes, oh. The part after that is probably a mess, knowing Koushiro, but they get there!

Koushiro’s polite nature and Eimi’s private one make it so that strangers wouldn’t know they’re married. Still, Koushiro’s close friends, like the Chosen, see the way his eyes follow her, especially when he’s uncertain and wanting social cues. They have a quiet, stable partnership, which Daisuke describes as, “Married and boring,” but they’re very happy.

And Koushiro is very curious, the type who wants to try everything at least once, eyyyyy.

The only thing causing tension is Koushiro working too much and failing to care for himself properly. Luckily, Kae and Masami live in the same apartment mansion, and Kae has eased their marriage when needed by cooking, cleaning, calling Koushiro to remind him of Important Husband Things, and making general suggestions about how an erring husband might smooth things over with his ruffled wife. That last one usually consists of, “Bring home dinner/get your ass home/get your ass to sleep/why yes you DO need to apologize for that.”

It also helps that Eimi loves Tentomon, an accomplished Koushiro-wrangler and general peace keeper.

Mimi

Mimi’s all about fun, novelty, and freedom. She dates around and has casual partners of all varieties. Eventually, she decides to co-parent a child with her long-standing romantic interest. They share custody of their son, who also spends a lot of time with grandparents and friends, including the Chosen. Mimi and her son’s father have an understanding that they see other people while they’re apart, but don’t bring them around their son without discussing it first. It’s all amicable, chill, and provides their son with an enormous support network.

I don’t know if Mimi would ever settle down. I think she loves her life with a lot of variety and spontaneity.

Jyou

Marries his high school sweetheart, Bike Girl. They’re both doctors, so they struggle to get enough time together. But Bike Girl is sweet, loving, and most importantly, calm and grounded. Jyou is a huge romantic softy who spoils his wife and takes care of her. Although they both wish for more time together, they get on amazingly. Jyou always feels this... wonder and gratitude that he’s married to her.

I won’t lie: Jyou is the best husband. The other Chosen men wish they could husband as well as Jyou.

Takeru

I really don’t know what to make of this troll. Sometimes, I think he’s a charmer who dates around a ton, and eventually had an “oops” baby that he amicably co-parents with an ex. Sometimes, I think he settled down early and started a family, because he wanted that stability and love and constant presence that he didn’t have as a kid. Sometimes, I wonder if he eventually divorced and went on to later marry a certain childhood friend...

What can I say, he’s a man of mystery.

Hikari

Ahhh, why is this is sooooo hard?

Part of me really wants to see Hikari as an independent woman, and quietly proud about it. Clearly, she has a child... Maybe she had her son and later divorced? Or maybe she’s happily married? I also admit that I do want to see her with Takeru, at least eventually...

Lots of possibilities here!

Daisuke

Oh, he definitely had an “oops” baby with an ex and is currently trying to find a husband or wife. Or maybe he did? Maybe he did!

Miyako and Ken

They’re married, and they are gross about it, lol!

Seriously though, they get on so well. Ken works a lot (Digimon Police is a tough job), and sometimes Ken needs to find peace and quiet in his home (merry wife + loud kids + MULTIPLE kids = TOO MUCH), so there is sometimes a little tension when Miyako wants more of his time. But they manage it, and they keep their family and home running smoothly and happily.

I just... picture it as this ideal family, at least for someone desiring a loud, joyful, energetic, nuclear family.

Iori

Iori married early to a down-to-earth woman who specializes in elderly care. His wife has a big heart and a kind, patient nature. While she loves and respects Iori’s zeal for helping others, she gently reminds him to take care of himself and his family first. She also provides perspective when he gets set in a stubborn mentality. Happily, she enjoys sharing a large apartment with Iori’s mother and grandfather.

Iori is sometimes too focused on the problems of others to see his loved ones properly, and that’s something he works on with his grandfather’s guidance. When he has his daughter, he instantly reassigns his priorities around her, which softens a lot of his problematic areas. Also, he married a woman who knows how to help him redirect his thoughts. He feels genuine amazement that he’s with her. They have a relationship that is... quietly intense.

AND I AM DONE FOR TODAY, WHEW!

#digimonepiloguecelebration #digimon epilogue celebration #chosen children #digidestined

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alixofagnia · 5 years

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OpheThorn II: A Slightly Less Rambling Analysis

The Missing of Clairdelune is a superb second installment in The Mirror Visitor quartet. We get more of what we loved about the first book, more pieces to the larger existential puzzle, yet it smartly stops short of resolving too much so that we stay invested for the third episode. Christelle Dabos allows herself slightly more exposition. But the novel really succeeds by continuing to follow the less-is-more mantra and the showing vs. telling style.

As you may or may not recall, after I finished A Winter’s Promise, I spent an embarrassing amount of time copy/pasting excerpts from this book into Google Translate with the result that I really did spoil a lot of the OpheThorn parts for myself—which I don’t exactly regret. But, essentially, it left me with a bit less to say. I had a good response to my first OpheThorn analysis (it’s here and thank you for all the kind words), so I did think that I’d like to put something out about Clairdelune as well, I just wasn’t sure what. After some consideration (and a re-read), I do have some more thoughts about OpheThorn.

So, here we go.

[Spoilers included this time]

[All fanart images credited to @patricialyfoung]

Intro

Since Clairdelune begins right where Promise concluded, Ophelia is still pissed at Thorn, while Thorn is still pining for Ophelia albeit in his uniquely aloof way. The only real thing that’s made me scratch my head with them is the severity of Ophelia’s anger/resentment over Thorn having withheld his true ambitions from her and her finding out about them from someone else. I just think it’s a little bit of a weak conflict for them given how pragmatic they are. I get that it’s the culmination of a frustrating situation. But I still think it’s weak.

So, once again the two begin on shaky ground, a space they occupy for the bulk of the novel. They are, at least, together a bit more than before and there’s all sorts of lovely tension, mostly caused by Thorn’s inelegant method of wooing compounded by Ophelia’s stubborn refusal to give him an inch. Thorn’s growing feelings for Ophelia were subtly hinted at in Promise and they become more apparent here, particularly when juxtaposed against Ophelia’s stubborn denial of hers for him.

And I just adore the cover art! Don’t you?

Thorn and Autism Spectrum Disorder

This is what I want to discuss. I may be alone in this, but it seems like Thorn could be coded as having autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It occurred to me while I was reading Promise and this time around, I feel comfortable in taking that perspective on Thorn. I like the notion of applying an ASD reading to his character because it explains a few descriptive quirks and makes him more than a “weirdo” or “freak”, which is reductive labeling. When considering his interactions with other characters and their reactions to him, this reading lends an added layer to his actions and overall development.

But let me make something clear.

This book isn’t about ASD, so I’m not suggesting that Dabos intended to write Thorn as having ASD or is trying to make a statement in any way on the disorder, and I’m cautious about how I use this idea to understand the character. This is purely my own speculation/take on the character.

I also want to be clear that I don’t have any personal experience with the disorder. I’ve met people with autism and ASD and they were all very different from each other and had very different needs. So, I’m largely making connections with textbook examples of ASD and they’re maybe a little bit broad because as I said it isn’t explicitly made clear that Thorn has ASD. I may very likely err in my understanding of this disorder. If that’s the case, I apologize in advance and please do correct me or give me your own opinion on this idea.

Here’s an overview from the webpage of the national institute of mental health:

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that affects communication and behavior. Although autism can be diagnosed at any age, it is said to be a “developmental disorder” because symptoms generally appear in the first two years of life. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), a guide created by the American Psychiatric Association used to diagnose mental disorders, people with ASD have:

Difficulty with communication and interaction with other people

Restricted interests and repetitive behaviors

Symptoms that hurt the person’s ability to function properly in school, work, and other areas of life

Autism is known as a “spectrum” disorder because there is wide variation in the type and severity of symptoms people experience. Although ASD can be a lifelong disorder, treatments and services can improve a person’s symptoms and ability to function.

It’s been shown repeatedly that it’s very difficult for Thorn to be an inviting and easy-going person, even with people he cares about. Thorn struggles with communication, is emotionally suppressed, is both uncaring and at times completely unaware of how he presents himself socially, and obsessively consults his pocket watch, particularly when he’s at a loss for words or bored, or otherwise ready to get the hell out of any situation that causes him anxiety. He’s highly intelligent, fixated on order and organization, and has a history (as we know from Promise and learn more about in Clairdelune) of meeting intense emotion with impulsive violence.

Here��s a list (also from the NIMH website) of common symptoms:

Making little or inconsistent eye contact

Tending not to look at or listen to people

Rarely sharing enjoyment of objects or activities by pointing or showing things to others

Failing to, or being slow to, respond to someone calling their name or to other verbal attempts to gain attention

Having difficulties with the back and forth of conversation

Often talking at length about a favorite subject without noticing that others are not interested or without giving others a chance to respond

Having facial expressions, movements, and gestures that do not match what is being said

Having an unusual tone of voice that may sound sing-song or flat and robot-like

Having trouble understanding another person’s point of view or being unable to predict or understand other people’s actions

Repeating certain behaviors or having unusual behaviors. For example, repeating words or phrases, a behavior called echolalia

Having a lasting intense interest in certain topics, such as numbers, details, or facts

Having overly focused interests, such as with moving objects or parts of objects

Getting upset by slight changes in a routine

Being more or less sensitive than other people to sensory input, such as light, noise, clothing, or temperature

People with ASD may also experience sleep problems and irritability. Although people with ASD experience many challenges, they may also have many strengths including:

Being able to learn things in detail and remember information for long periods of time

Being strong visual and auditory learners

Excelling in math, science, music, or art

One can’t help but notice that we can check several of these points off for Thorn. Not all, certainly, but I’m sure you can call to mind some of your own examples of him exhibiting many of these behaviors repeatedly.

Where Does Ophelia Fit In?

Thorn has always treated his relationship with Ophelia in a very business-like manner, almost like a negotiation, which makes sense within the context of an arranged marriage. At the novel’s start, Thorn wishes to make amends, but Ophelia makes it very clear that she will not forgive him for his lies and neglect. His response to her is rather clinical.

“We simply can’t allow ourselves to be enemies,” cut in Thorn. “You’re making my life difficult with your resentment; it’s imperative that we become reconciled. […] Meet me at the Treasury, insult me, slap me, smash a plate over my head if you feel like it, and then let’s never speak of it again. Name your day. This Thursday would suit me.” [65]

I suppose this is a rather annoying response, especially if one is really just looking for a simple and genuine apology. But if we read Thorn as having ASD, then this feels a little different. He’s simplifying a conflict that he maybe doesn’t quite understand; he’s been given a different perspective on his actions and it’s perhaps beyond his capability to comprehend. To compensate, he turns this into a matter of business, which is something he can understand quite well, even going so far as to try and pencil Ophelia into his calendar. But he’s woefully unaware of the frustrating effect his language and tone have on her. Of course, what’s key here is what he isn’t saying: that she’s making his life difficult because he loves her; he wants to be on good terms, but doesn’t know how to fix this. Note that he again suggests violence as a means to deal with her emotion.

When they do meet up, Thorn says,

“I have many enemies. I no longer want to count you among them, so tell me what I must do. That is why you came here, isn’t it? You have a deal to offer me, I’m listening to you.” [152]

He’s desperate. It’s also worth noting that he’s fairly vulnerable in this chapter; he exhibits jealousy and some hurt—Ophelia missed their original appointment because she was with Archibald and forgot about him.

Modest as always, Ophelia asks only for a job, money to pay Fox, her new assistant, and to see the real outdoors again. She lastly requests that he always be honest with her, especially in matters that directly concern her. In exchange, she will teach him how to Read objects after the ceremony of the Gift and he will teach her how to use the claws that he’ll pass to her. She also reiterates, for good measure, that this will be their only conjugal duty. He grants the first three readily enough, but the fourth one trips him up. He does agree to it, but it’s obvious that it will cost him in more ways than one.

While I imagine that he’s receptive on some level to sexual intimacy with Ophelia, I think he’s more afraid of intimacy in general. Sharing things and being honest with a partner means opening oneself up to vulnerability, to weakness. The undertaking he’s set for himself—a mission he’s already devoted 15 years of his life to—doesn’t allow for that kind of intimacy; rather, it requires utmost resiliency, secrecy, and focus. Furthermore, if he were to be seen forming loving attachments (with Berenilde, Ophelia, or anyone else), then that could be turned against him over the course of fulfilling his risky endeavor. It’s that very fear, in fact, which has made him exclude his aunt (and attempt to exclude Ophelia) entirely from his investigation. His pursuit of a noble title and legitimacy is a front, an easy excuse he thought up to satisfy Berenilde’s and the court’s curiosity about why he suddenly wanted to get married and Read Farouk’s Book.

Like Thorn, it scares Ophelia to feel herself falling in love. Perhaps the womanly pride she carries with her makes it difficult for her to open up. After all, love and marriage were never apparently high on her list of things to accomplish either. Ophelia and Thorn are separately dealing with the same conundrum, which is that to love means to fear, and that’s messy. It could get in the way of a life that is humble (Ophelia) and a life that is ambitious (Thorn). Simply put, neither one had accounted for even the possibility of love in their marriage.

Perhaps because Ophelia is a Reader, I think that deep down she likes the enigma and challenge that is Thorn. Yes, he’s frustrating, but she never truly loses interest in him. Indeed, if anything, she becomes increasingly intrigued and is entirely won over when she at last learns all about what he’s doing. Ophelia is very likely the first person to make Thorn both confront and attempt to correct his inadequacy in areas of intimacy. As I touched on in my previous analysis, Ophelia calling Thorn out on his behavior and habits is surely a novelty for him.

“I believe neither in luck nor in destiny,” he declared. “I trust only the science of probabilities. I have studied mathematical statistics, combinatorial analysis, mass function, and random variables, and they have never held any surprises for me. You don’t seem fully to grasp the destabilizing effect that someone like you can have on someone like me.” [377]

Ohhhhkay.

It turns out, she’s a bit of an enigma and definitely a challenge to him in kind. This is Thorn’s way of trying to tell Ophelia that he loves her.

Thorn and Ophelia seek control and wield it differently. Thorn can be arrogant and overconfident with it, and he wants to be its sole retainer. Ophelia also wants to retain it but as it pertains to her decisions for herself, and she rebels against it when she feels like that’s being taken away from her. It’s important to them that they are in control of their own actions and destinies. But what neither one of them understands is that those we end up loving is often (or maybe always) outside of our control. Love has no explanation, and doesn’t require one. You can’t predict it. You can’t dictate it. You can’t calculate it or quantify it.

Ophelia seriously turns Thorn’s life, and everything he thought he could predict or control about it, upside down. Initially unwittingly, then actively, she encourages him to develop.

ASD Made Sexy

As inelegant as he is, Thorn does have his own way of being shocking:

“You wanted me to be honest with you. You will thus learn that you are not just a pair of hands for me. And I don’t give a damn whether people find me suspect, as long as I am not so in your eyes. You will return this to me when I have kept all my promises,” he grumbled, holding his watch out to Ophelia without noticing her stunned expression. “And if you still doubt me in the future, just read it.” [156].

You guys, this is kind of romantic, right? He’s so direct and it really flusters Ophelia, who is steadfastly resisting the decidedly non-business-like turn their relationship has taken. Skip to novel’s end, however, and she has totally changed her tune about Thorn. Right before they believe they will be parted forever, Thorn finally gives a straightforward confirmation of his feelings.

“Don’t go falling down any more stairs, avoid sharp objects, and above all, above all, keep away from disreputable people, alright? […] Oh, and by the way, I love you.” [486]

Swoon.

The fact of the matter is this: despite his unconventional looks and mannerisms, Thorn hits a certain level of sexy. Which begs the question: Can ASD be sexy? Sure, one could say that his sex appeal comes naturally with his role as the male lead, which is directly connected to his chemistry with the female lead. But I think there’s actually an important distinction to be made; it’s not whether ASD itself is sexy, it’s whether a character with ASD is sexy and I think that’s important because you don’t want ASD to be treated as a gimmick in fiction. It matters how that kind of character is presented.

Thorn’s ASD traits make him eccentric at best and a “freak” at worst, by Ophelia’s own description. Some of Thorn’s less offensive eccentricities are portrayed in an endearing light: his brusqueness with silly persons (i.e. Archibald, Baron Melchior) and their silly behavior; wearing his heavy uniform in a tropical illusion when there’s no evident dress policy for officials; preoccupied with tending to the order of his office over the tending of his wounds; launching a dangerous existential investigation all because of an illegal and unjust disruption in odds and probabilities, an utter crime in Thorn’s eyes.

But it’s also important to look at how other characters view him. Those at the Pole may look down on him, but there is no doubt that he commands a considerable level of their respect. He’s at the center of Citaceleste’s political and economical arenas, and has some judicial power as well. In short, he’s the one that everyone seemingly runs to in a crisis. Ophelia begrudgingly admires his self-control, coolness under pressure, and appreciates that he is not corrupt, like the other officials and aristocrats. Naturally, Berenilde regards him the highest. She, more than any other, gives us a glimpse of the true Thorn, putting forward the image of a protector, provider, and all-around genius.

So, the answer is yes. Thorn is sexy.

Ophelia and Asexuality

OK, I realize I’m going off on a tangent here, but since asexuality is a common reading of Ophelia that I see in reviews, I wanted to address that as well.

There are many instances of Ophelia fulfilling, for lack of a better way to put it, the butterfly trope:

Perhaps it was due to the nervousness Thorn brought out in her, or the lace veil obscuring her vision, or the scarf coiled around her foot, or her pathological clumsiness, but the fact is, Ophelia tripped on the final step of the stairs. [28]

Hearing Thorn reawakened such nervousness in Ophelia that she seriously considered hanging up on him. [63]

She did, however, have to admit that Berenilde had got it right: it was indeed out of cowardice, more even than anger, that she’d spent recent weeks avoiding him. [100]

Somewhat embarrassed, Ophelia wondered whether he felt as nervous in her company as she felt in his. [160]

Ophelia felt her blood throbbing against her eardrums, but couldn’t have said whether it was due to sudden relief or, on the contrary, heightened tension. [323]

Ophelia gets butterflies whenever her love interest is near. It’s important to note that she’s not afraid for her safety when she’s with him, although there is one incident, where she thinks he’s going to strike her, which is quickly dispelled by his sincere assurance that he’d never harm her. He gives her butterflies often by doing totally mundane things such as standing in front of her or looking at her, and that bothers her. But why?

Like Thorn, she’s convinced herself that intimacy and love aren’t for her. Some reviewers have praised Ophelia for being a representation of asexuality and, while I think there’s a strong case for her being somewhere on the asexual spectrum, I stop short at positing that she’s totally uninterested in sex or doesn’t experience sexual attraction. She’s noted, on several occasions, both in Clairdelune and Promise, Archibald’s handsomeness. In this novel, she also notes Fox’s.

With his gold braiding and red mane, he was as dazzling as Thorn was dark. Ophelia sensed herself coloring just looking at him. [165]

So, she does experience sexual attraction and, furthermore, she physically reacts to Fox’s appearance (though never to Archibald’s), which suggests that she’s not wholly disinterested in sex. In Promise, she commented that “no man had ever quickened her pulse” and lamented about whether she’d ever feel that way about someone, and I think this is probably the point at which most readers took away that she might be asexual.

But, like...

Thorn is the only man who produces intense and consistent physical reactions in her.

Also, if you look at the [323] quote above, he did in fact get her pulse up. Just saying.

Rather than label her as purely asexual or even being on the spectrum, we could instead speculate that, as a Reader, she’s experienced to some degree love in all its forms through countless objects and perhaps she can’t help having this reaction to love and intimacy. I’m not trying to be cynical or pessimistic, but love can be treacherous and people are driven to do all kinds of terrible things for it or because of it. As wonderful as love is despite that, it seems likely that Ophelia has simply decided it’s not something she wants to navigate. Or she just hadn’t met someone yet who was worth all that trouble.

I’ll Close With This:

“You’re free,” whispered Ophelia. “Free to go, free to stay. I won’t make you leave one cage for another one, although, as you’ve seen, I really don’t live in great security. I decided your fate without taking time to think, or to speak to you. I was selfish…and I still am. […] I still am because, deep down, I would like you to choose to remain by my side. I know that apologizing can no longer change anything, but anyway: forgive me.” [135]

Ophelia says this to Fox after rescuing him from the dungeons of Clairdelune and taking him on as an assistant. Now, when I read this, I couldn’t help but think that it’s precisely the apology Ophelia wants to hear from Thorn. Yet, here she is, guilty of doing to someone the very thing she holds against him. Isn’t it funny how hypocrisy and love are such good friends? As we know, articulation and eloquence are not Thorn’s strengths and some of Ophelia’s aversion to him is based around her inability to accept this part of him.

Eventually, Thorn does make, more or less, the same apology.

“I should never have involved you in my affairs. I knew it would be dangerous. I convinced myself that I had the situation under control, and that mistake almost cost you your life. […] There is one thing that I have tried to tell you several times. I’m no good at these formalities, so let’s get on with it and speak no more of it. […] Please forgive me.” [444-45]

Strangely, she barely acknowledges this; she’s too busy having an epiphany.

At that second, she finally knew with absolute certainty where her place was. It wasn’t in the Pole, it wasn’t on Anima. It was precisely where she was now. At Thorn’s side. [445]

Well, perhaps this isn’t so strange since the novel starts off posing the question to this answer.

Deep down, Ophelia wondered where exactly her first home might be. Since she’d arrived at the Pole, she’d already visited Berenilde’s manor, the Clairdelune embassy, and her fiancés Treasury, and she hadn’t felt at home in any of them. [24]

The theme of home and belonging permeates this novel in a more central way than its predecessor. Ophelia is repeatedly confronted by it, but it’s also echoed in Farouk’s obsession with the Reading of his Book and finding out where he comes from and what happened in his past. When her family arrives from Anima, she sees the Pole and Thorn through their eyes. She ends up defending both from their disapproving remarks and in doing so, she realizes that she has ceased thinking of Anima as her home.

Life in the Pole was like that: wherever one went, whatever one did, danger was part of daily life. And yet, Ophelia reflected, she didn’t hate it that much, that life. [280]

Thorn’s apology seals the deal: she understands now that she was mistaken. Home is not a place. People, those who love you and who you love in return, give a home meaning. Belonging, likewise, is only made possible by the people who accept you and give you a place among them. It’s been hard-won, but she’s found both in the Pole, in Thorn and Berenilde. Her lack of a direct response to Thorn’s words suggests that she’s already forgiven him, that it matters less to her that he struggles with communication, that she’s finally accepted him for who he is and, better still, found him lovable despite that.

If we read Thorn as having ASD, then this intense dynamic between them is a positive treatment of mental/social disorders in fiction, which is really the only point I had to make with this entire thing.

Where Does Ophelia End?

I asked this question in my last analysis. Based off of the fact that, when we left her in Promise, she was experiencing some serious discomfort in body and soul directly connected to Thorn, I predicted/semi-already-knew that she would evolve toward him.

At one point, Ophelia loses the ability to pass through mirrors. We understand that it’s because she’s been lying to herself; after all, her great-uncle made it very clear that mirror-traveling is impossible under such a circumstance. It’s ironic because, by her own admission, she’s a “bad actress” [161] and, according to her mother, “was never any good at lying” [157].

She’s just so stubborn, isn’t she? It’s gratifying then to read when Ophelia overcomes it. Thorn makes a public announcement, cancelling his marriage, refusing to Read Farouk’s Book, and handing in his resignation as Treasurer. He does this to protect Ophelia and her family from imminent danger but at risk to his own welfare and position. He’s basically committing suicide, which very nearly turns literal at novel’s end. Ophelia can only think to go to him by the quickest means possible.

She looked straight at her determined face, beyond its scratches and bruises, finally ready to face that truth that she hadn’t wanted to see. It wasn’t Thorn who needed her. It was she who needed Thorn. Ophelia plunged, body and soul, into the mirror. [416]

I don’t think I need to spell that out.

Thorn and His Watch

To go on a little bit of a tangent, I also wanted to touch on the watch.

I believe it was mentioned in Promise that the watch had been a gift from Berenilde, which is so precious. Berenilde is the only true parental figure Thorn has known. She used her status and wealth to protect and care for him, and seems to understand him as only a mother--one with a child the rest of the world refuses to accept--can. I thought her reaction to Thorn’s suicidal announcement was especially devastating.

She had begun to shake so hard that Agatha rushed to take the baby from her arms. Bent double in her chair, as though punched in the stomach, Berenilde looked imploringly at Ophelia. “I beg you. Don’t abandon my boy.” [412]

Keep in mind that Berenilde has outlived her three biological children, none of whom survived past childhood. Thorn is such a lonely figure that it’s easy to forget he comes from somewhere. But Berenilde’s reminder to us is clear: he’s not the child of his Dragon father nor of his Chronicler mother. Thorn is her child, and she’s terrified of losing him like the others.

While there can be no doubt of her sentiment toward Thorn, it’s entirely likely that Berenilde foisted much of her maternal grief, trauma, and longing onto him without his express permission; he never seems to regard her with any particular filial warmth. Then again, he once attacked Archibald in defense of Berenilde’s honor, after he seduced her away from Farouk, and Ophelia later notes that he “suspended an investigation and jumped into an airship” to be near to Berenilde when she went into labor with her daughter [373]. Thorn is clearly defined rather more by his actions than his words. But the point is Berenilde is the one who gave Thorn his sense of belonging, and I just adore that.

Metaphorically speaking, the watch represents Thorn’s heart, which was given to him by his mother figure and which he gives to Ophelia as a token of his love and trustworthiness. Indeed, it’s even called a “mechanical heart” [156]. Ophelia has Read one of Thorn’s possessions before (dice) and was overwhelmed by the fury and breadth of his emotions. If she were to Read his watch, she’d probably die. Every time he digs it out of his pocket to look at it, to hold it, to fiddle with it, he’s engraving some emotional signature or trace onto it. Ophelia ultimately decides not to Read it.

“Before you go, I would like to return this to you. You need it more than me, and, in any case, I won’t read it. I’ve chosen to trust you—you, not your watch.” [285]

Her words have a profound effect on Thorn, rendering him totally speechless and maybe more confused than ever. At any rate, he misreads the situation and catches Ophelia off guard with an awkward kiss. It’s kind of a heartbreaking scene, because Ophelia simply reacts (by slapping him) and is genuinely baffled that he took her words for encouragement. I don’t necessarily take this to be evidence of her asexuality. I don’t discredit it by any means, but it just feels more like she was taken by surprise.

The thing is, for perhaps the first time ever in his life, he actively desired for someone to know his true heart and to trust in his sincerity, which is why he gave the watch to her in the first place. In his defense, this was quite a pretty and irresistible thing for Ophelia to tell him and I don’t think she’s as put off as she wants to be.

With ears burning and glasses crimson, Ophelia stared at the faded letters on the old wooden panel—“STAFF ONLY”—as if Thorn might, at any moment, retrace his steps, take back his kiss, and leave his fob watch with her, as she’d suggested in the first place. [286]

It’s funny. She wants to erase the uncomfortable physical side of the incident, but she also wants to retain his metaphorical heart. I mean, yes, it’s broken because of some careless action on her part and she asked for it back so her great-uncle could try to fix it. But still. It’s hard to ignore the metaphor there as well: if the heart watch has changed from beating to broken and she wants to hold onto the broken heart watch to try to mend it…

Well, good Lord, it’s just so obvious, isn’t it?

End

Well, that’s about it. As I said, I really only had the one main thought and then a bunch of smaller ones.

I just learned—and am seriously devastated—that The Memory of Babel won’t be released in the U.S. until May 2020. I’m hoping this is a tentative date and that it will be available sooner.

In the meantime, if someone could upload a PDF that I could then spend days plugging in to Google Translate (again), that’d be super greeeeaaaat…

For part III, head here.

#ophethorn #La Passe-Miroir #les disparus de clairdelune #the mirror visitor #the missing of clairdelune #christelle dabos #long book report

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teatalksbooks · 5 years

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Murder is Bad Manners/Most Unladylike* by Robin Stevens

*The publishers are being cute again and changing the titles for oversea audiences...

Tea Recommendation: English Breakfast, with milk and sugar - this is a middle grade boarding school murder mystery! If you would like to read this and you are not a) 13 or b) in need of the anti-shock properties of milk and sugar-laced tea, forego it, and just make yourself a cup of nice plain black tea. It is also immensely important to acquire cookies for your bunbreak. Hazel likes chocolate and gingernut best, but I think I’d go with shortbread because, again, I am not thirteen.

I apologize in advance for the length - if you’re not interested in a lot of meta, skip to the end!

The year is 1934. Hazel, from Hong Kong, age thirteen and one year into her boarding school experience in England, loves learning, sweets, and her best friend, Daisy. Together, they form the Detective Society. It’s been all fun and games so far, with cases such as The Case of Lavinia’s Missing Tie, but then Hazel stumbles across the body of a teacher in the gym - and before she can show anyone else, the body disappears. Everyone thinks that Miss Bell has simply run away, but Hazel and Daisy know better, and are determined to solve the mystery and find the killer.

First off, I would like to thank @mirrormasque for recommending these books as the perfect antidote to the exhausting and stressful end of the school year. They are - sweet, well-written, charming, yet still complex enough to be interesting to readers above the intended age group. If you’re a fan of murder mysteries but struggle to find ones in the sweet spot between bleak and cloying, these ones land there pretty much perfectly.

What makes me love this book - and the ones that follow - so much is the way Stevens utilizes voice. Hazel, as a narrator, is perfect - she’s clever, observant, empathetic. But she’s also thirteen. What she sees, she often doesn’t understand, or doesn’t fully interpret, in ways that readers her age or younger will identify with.

Because of this, Stevens can be inclusive in natural, non-didactic ways. This book is replete with representation - Hazel is Chinese, there are lesbian and bisexual teachers, and there are students in lesbian relationships. In later books, and in this book to some extent, there are students with learning disabilities and students struggling with mental illness. While such inclusivity is a goal for many authors, it’s not easy to do smoothly, and that Stevens achieves it in a completely natural and unobtrusive fashion is impressive. That she manages to work in period-appropriate prejudices and simultaneously make it clear that being from another country or being interested in the same sex is also completely unexceptionable is astonishing.

As an example, when discussing the arrival of The One (the dashing new art teacher), Hazel writes in her case book, “You see, before this semester, the whole school knew that Miss Bell (our science teacher) and Miss Parker (our math teacher) had a secret. They lived together in Miss Parker’s little apartment in town, which had a spare room in it. The spare room was the secret. I did not understand when Daisy first told me about the spare room; now that we are in the eighth grade, though, of course I see exactly what it must mean.” Hazel still doesn’t truly understand, though she pretends she does, in the way of teenagers everywhere.

However, what her discussion of the labyrinthine relationships between the teachers reveals is this: as far as the school is concerned, this secret is no more astonishing than The One’s subsequent clandestine relationships with Miss Bell and Miss Hopkins, the athletics instructor. Any two teachers in a relationship is a bit of juicy gossip. Yet the adult world and the student world are inherently distinct; everything that happens in the adult world is exotic, but other standards apply amongst the students. There’s a clear distinction made between girls who have “pashes” on each other and girls who are genuinely in love - the first is accepted as part of normal boarding school behavior, and the second is a secret that can damage the reputations of the students involved - and both Hazel and Daisy are explicitly confused about what the difference is. Their lack of understanding and experience with regard to sexuality allow them to identify the hypocrisies inherent in the standards presented to them in a way that feels very natural and observational, rather than didactic.

This does lead to Hazel coming off as pretty immature, however. Hazel reads as a couple of years younger than her canonical age, and I’m on the fence about it. It’s necessary for Hazel and Daisy to be a little older than the target demographic because they are literally solving murders. However, Hazel’s voice is appropriate for the 10-12 age range, which is where the book is aimed. From an audience perspective, it makes sense, but as an older reader, it can be jarring. Her immaturity can be rationalized away - she’s a very sheltered kid, and it was a different time - but since the book also spends a certain amount of time working with the uneasy intersection between the adult and child worlds, it can seem a little counterproductive. However, it may also be key to Daisy and Hazel’s characterization, and to the game the book is based around.

It’s clear from the beginning that initially, the Detective Society is imaginative play. The year before, they had the Pacifism Society and the Spiritualism Society, and this year, since Daisy’s gotten into detective fiction, they’re playing at being detectives. Imaginative play is a huge part of childhood, but it’s also something that starts phasing out around middle school (and certainly high school) as adult life starts both intruding more and becoming more desirable. However, unlike the previous societies, the Detective Society is secret - only Daisy and Hazel are engaged in this game. It’s suggested that it’s because they’re best friends and they don’t want anyone else in on it, but there’s an implication, as well, that the other girls might not take it seriously. When, later in the series, some of the other girls do participate, it becomes clear that it wasn’t much of a secret - and that they weren’t especially interested in it. Their later participation is contingent upon the initial success of the Detective Society, and the later necessity (there’s another murder, of course) of participation (here, it recontextualizes the murder as a game for the other girls, and so makes it safe, as well as controlled).

That Daisy and Hazel are so invested in it is a sign of their immaturity; that Daisy is, as always, the instigator, is a key insight into their dynamics at the beginning of the series. The inequality of their relationship is obvious from the first - although there are only two members of the Detective Society, Daisy has declared herself the president - and Hazel the secretary. There’s no reason at all that Hazel couldn’t be co-president or vice-president of this two-person team, but Daisy does not even admit this as a possibility. Initially, I felt like this should rankle more with Hazel, but it becomes evident fairly quickly that the need for control is integral to Daisy’s character and Hazel is friend enough to let her have it unless the stakes are high enough to warrant protest.

That does not mean that their friendship is unproblematic. From the beginning, Hazel refers to Daisy as “perfect.” Not the perfect English schoolgirl - she’s careful to point out that though Daisy pretends to be the game-for-everything girl that everyone at school wants to be and, failing that, wants to be friends with, she is not, in fact, what she pretends to be. She is wearing a mask to fit in - but whether she’s wearing the mask or not, she still puts herself in a place of power over Hazel.

Storybook-schoolgirl Daisy is cream-and-roses pretty, old money, funny (but not too funny), always up for a prank and a midnight feast, and infinitely popular. In contrast, Hazel is the new girl, and even worse, she’s foreign. Real Daisy is sharply intelligent, impatient, secretive, and controlling. She calls herself Holmes and Hazel, Watson - and the comparison, as far as she’s concerned, is very apt. Take Sherlock Holmes and transform him into a British schoolgirl in the 1930s, and you get Daisy Wells. Why, at least in this first book, is unclear - we simply see that this is how Daisy is, and that Hazel accepts her for who she is, even when it means letting Daisy diminish her.

Hazel, as chronicler, is on the surface much like canonical Watson. Loyal, empathetic, and cautious, she’s as intelligent as Daisy, but less assertive. Part of that is because she knows that her acceptance at the school has been contingent upon her friendship with Daisy. Hazel is very aware that she is different from the other girls, and while she doesn’t dwell on it, it does inform many of her behaviors. She learns to don a mask from Daisy, to pretend that she is not as intelligent as she is, not as different. For her, being Daisy’s friend, instead of Daisy being hers, is a form of protective camouflage.

However clear-eyed Hazel is about Daisy, and about their relationship, Daisy’s consistent diminishment of her combines with her own uncertainty about her appearance and leaves Hazel feeling inferior to Daisy much of the time. Hazel was raised in an extraordinarily Anglophilic environment, and has grown up seeing girls like Daisy as the ideal of what a girl should be. Being Daisy’s friend puts her in constant comparison with Daisy - she is quiet, she is not athletic, she is not popular, and most of all, she is not thin and blonde and blue-eyed. While she is confident in her own intellectual capacity and perfectly happy contradicting Daisy when she feels Daisy has, once again, jumped to a conclusion, she is not confident in her body. I blame her dad for that, personally - he’s very sure that Hazel is the smartest, most logical, most morally upright child around, but oh boy does he love him some British everything. It’ll be interesting to see what Stevens does with Hazel’s self-image as she grows up more - in the last book I read, it’s starting to become more of a problem as romantic interests start popping up, and I imagine that in the other three books that are out that are NOT AVAILABLE IN THE US WTF, we get to see even more of that.

The relationship between the two girls is the most interesting part of the book for me, but the other characters are well-drawn, and the plot is solid. So far, I’ve always been able to identify the murderer before the girls do, but in my book, that’s a good thing - I’m thirty, and it means that Stevens is acting in good faith and putting in all the clues. A proper mystery has to be solvable by the reader - if the author holds back the one clue you need to solve the case, it’s cheating! The framing of the story - that it’s a case book - is cute, if not at all convincing, and the ways in which it is a case book will be appealing to young readers, though I find the interruption of the suspect lists to be a little annoying, since we’ve usually just discussed why we’re ruling a suspect out right before we get the list... explaining why we’ve ruled the suspect out.

In that the book is deeply respectful of its readers’ intelligence, it reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones, which makes sense, because Stevens mentions her as one of her favorite authors. According to Jones, writing for young readers is much harder than writing for adults, because kids are so deeply immersed in texts that they pick up on everything, whereas adults need things said two or three times to get it. That ethos is evident in this book is well - it does not condescend to its reader, and because of that, it is enjoyable for all readers, not just for the target demographic.

The last thing I want to mention, since I'm not going to do this for all the books in the series, is that the same thoughtfulness and subtlety about prejudices inherent in the time period (and today...) is also present with regard to historical events and movements in later books, especially the rise of the Nazi party and the remnants of imperialism. It’s pretty great!

tl;dr - a cute murder mystery with complex character relationships, a solvable but satisfyingly complex plot, and diverse characters! Highly recommend. Trigger warnings for murder, blood, unhealthy friendship, but honestly, it’s all appropriate for middle-grade readers.

Amazon - free to read with Kindle Unlimited!

Goodreads

#robin stevens #book review #murder is bad manners #murder is most unladylike #wells and wong #tw: death #tw: unhealthy friendship

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g3rmb0y · 6 years

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How geek culture is a vessel for white privilege

I recently was talking with someone who I run my D&D social skills groups with, and they said they could get a tabletop gaming group of white teens easily. A group of girls, sure. But a group of non-white teens would be a lot harder. That stuck with me, and I began to think about certain aspects of geek culture, and how they’ve either explicitly or implicitly helped me, all while being fairly white (cis male) spaces- specifically, the what, the how, and the why. As I thought about this, I thought a lot about the gatekeeping that goes on, and suddenly it made sense- geek culture is white privilege, and seeing as geek jobs (specifically IT) are one of the few areas where millenials can make good money, the gatekeeping makes sense.

The first aspect that came to mind is tabletop gaming. Tabletop gaming, especially role playing gaming, is a very white space. There’s an effort to increase diversity in this space, but a trip to just about any gaming store or gaming convention shows a bunch of white dudes. That being said, tabletop gaming is growing in the mental health space as therapists are realizing that there is a tremendous amount of social and psychological good that can come from it. Social skills groups are cropping up, and even Pastors are setting up workshops to teach youth ministers about D&D- a far cry from the Christian panic of the 70s and 80s. Kids who play D&D learn team building, communication, perspective taking, study skills, abstract problem solving, and math- and form lifelong friendships with their high school adventuring buddies. Playing a tabletop RPG with someone is a great way to grow close to them, and a really good way to network with folks, while getting a good feeling for who they are. Still, D&D remains a very white hobby, which largely ties back to it's history of being something that has just always been created and run by white people. There's little representation, and little demand for inclusive fantasy, especially given that the source material (Tolkein) is incredibly white. This is slowly beginning to change, especially with Paizo, who has done a very good job at increasing diversity (both on the LGBT and race front) with their books, but there's still a long way to go.

The second aspect is PC gaming. This is one that's a bit more stuck in time, although there's still a large community of PC gamers that attend huge LAN parties, and they tend to be largely white. PC gaming is more rooted in developing technical skills- growing up as a LAN gamer, I had to learn networking, computer repair, and a lot of troubleshooting to get Counter Strike up and running whenever I brought my tower to my friends house, but those skills gave me an edge in getting into tech- I joke that setting up LAN games every weekend in your teens gave you all the skills you'd need to be a sysadmin, but there's a lot of truth to that. I think about why the PC gaming world is so white, then it hits me that most of the kids that got into PC gaming grew up with a PC in the house- parents were rich and tech saavy enough to buy a computer that could play games in the 2000s. Just as the PC world of the 80s and 90s was white as hell, so was that of the 2000s. I think about the progress on this front, and it's still really bad. There's a lot of initiatives to get girls coding, but I'm seeing very few for minorities, and looking at computer science programs at universities, and it's a sea of white guys.

The last aspect is the convention. I've attended a lot of conventions, and they trend very white. I remember about 10 years ago, I met one of the guys that worked behind the scenes at Penny Arcade, and we were talking about the demographic of PAX, and he said they were really courting the 18-25 year old demographic. This has changed a bit for that particular con, but many conventions continue to be very white spaces- although again, the subject matter does play into it- I see a lot more diversity at anime and comic conventions than tabletop gaming or furry cons. My first major tech job I got occurred because of someone I met at a steampunk convention- we hung out at a room party, I told her my life story, and she helped me rewrite my resume and get hired in tech. This is one area that on a lot of levels is getting better- I'm seeing a lot more diversity at conventions, but there's still a lot of racism, especially in the cosplay community, as any non-white cosplayer can attest. I think as more diverse media hits the mainstream, this will continue to change, and that's very exciting.

So, if geek culture serves as a vessel for white (tech) privilege, what is the work around? I think the best thing to do is to share it as much as possible. There's a lot of gatekeepers, so instead, be a greeter that can welcome folks into this world. Help undo the damage that every shitty white dude does when they gatekeep their hobby. Teach girls how to play D&D, and increase representation in your fantasy worlds. Set up a Minecraft server, and ask the non-white kids in your class to join it. Make people feel welcome into a hobby whose state of being seems to make them feel unwelcome in it.

#gaming #tabletop RPGs #white privilege

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mentosmorii · 6 years

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Gardin

Minerva missed being young. Well, she was young, but she had privately held the belief for quite some time now that she was one of those people that was suited to being old. Her mother had been one of those people who perhaps was never going to leave the summer of her life — Minerva loved her, really she did, but it was hard sometimes to like her.

She remembered one of the maîtresses at her old primary school — Mme. Bekhti was one of the younger teachers, only 30 at the most, and the floral blouses she wore made her look like a film star. At the beginning of her sixième year, Mme. Bekhti had complimented her last name, showing her the page in the textbook where it provided the root.

Paradizo, most commonly written as Paradiso, was derived from the Latin surname, “Paradisuis”. It meant garden. Minerva had ghosted over the text, barely feeling the gloss of the pages. She filed the information away, intending to share it at dinner. Maman had smiled, the laugh lines around her eyes crinkling up.

The irony that Maman had remarried Théo, the gardener from Cagnes-sur-Mer, was lost neither on Minerva nor Papa. It was what it was, though. She had mentioned the affair, keeping her voice light as she pretended to work on her essay, to Mme. Bekhti a week ago, and the woman had seemed flustered.

Minerva made a mental note to not joke about connection between her last name and Théo again.

Life was increasingly funny like that lately, and it made her tired. He may have liked how life seemed to be one big cosmic joke, with people’s fates intertwining in clever ways, but the uncertainty made her feel unmoored.

He was gone now, she thought only slightly petulantly, so perhaps she was right to be wary after all.

It had been a week since the rift had closed with Artemis and Captain Short on the other side. Guilt simmered under her skin, waiting for her to think about what had happened in the building that day. She remembered talking to Butler on the top floor, adrenaline making her heart pound in her ears as she shakily made her way towards the stairwell. He had told the guards that he was her father, she thought, and they had left without running into any obstacles.

Butler was quiet on the way out, and she was grateful that he didn’t cry in front of her, although she suspected he wanted to from the hitch in his voice when he talked to the one of the security officers. The thought of seeing an adult feel powerless made her uneasy— she had avoided her parents for days when Théo became a point of contention. The memory of this made her slightly ashamed. She frowned. She had been feeling guilty quite often as of late.

Even so, she knew Butler didn’t blame her for what had happened.

She wasn’t even sure if Artemis was “gone” forever; perhaps he would be back this evening, or tomorrow, or the week after next. She still wanted to apologize. “Ce n’était pas ma faute," she wrote in her lab notebook after the shuttle had dropped her off at Maman and Théo’s new place.

Papa was noticing, she could sense it. The tech-y fellow whose voice she had heard over Short’s com link was most likely responsible for the fact that neither her brother nor father could recall the details from the incident with the People, but it didn't take a genius to see that Minerva had been jittery as of late.

Magic was real.

The fact hadn’t hit her, really hit her, when it was just Nº1 that had been part of her investigation. She made it a point to deal with the hard sciences more often than she did the arts— ambiguity and uncertainty held little appeal. Mme. Bekhti had laughed when she saw Minerva’s scores on the practice test for le Baccalauréat; Minerva had scored well (obviously), but her strengths clearly lay in the maths and computer science section. Factoring in what magic did to things like physics and computing, Minerva felt for the first time in a while that she had lost her edge. She winced. It wasn’t logical to learn the wrong way to do a problem, but she couldn't exactly say anything to her professors.

She imagined herself for a moment, standing in front of le département educational de la France, holding a stack of papers as she explained why she simply could not take le Bac. The directors would push their glasses up the bridge of the noses, asking why she should be exempt from the higher education exam. “You see,” she would say, drawing herself up to her full height, “it’s potentially all wrong”.

That would go over splendidly, she snorted. Ethical or no, she would have to wait until she was old enough to publish to even breach this kind of conversation with academia. She’d be careful about it — there was no way the People would be pleased if she revealed anything that would lend itself to someone inferring that perhaps humanity wasn’t alone in the world. Minerva didn’t plan on being forced to forget what had happened, the thought of being robbed of her memories making her palms sweaty, no matter how she might feel about losing some of her new friends.

Maybe Butler had a perspective on the matter that could help her, she thought as she looked out at the dusk sky outside her window. He was going to be in the south of France this weekend, and she was going to take the train to visit him, logistics be damned. They would both be all right, she knew it.

Her name whispered to her that she was going to be a garden one day. She thought of Théo, Mama, Papa, and Beau. She thought of Madame Bekhti. She thought of Butler. Paradizo, Paradiso, Paradisuis.

#artemis fowl #minerva paradizo #long post cw #my writing #sorry this is trash woops

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humansofhds · 6 years

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Eliot Davenport, MTS '18

“Recently, I have realized that, at the bottom of everything, I came to the study of South Asian religion and Indian philosophy because I couldn’t imagine not reading Sanskrit every day.”

Eliot graduated in 2018 from the MTS program at HDS and is currently applying to PhD programs in South Asian and Religious Studies departments, where she will continue to study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy.

Leaving the Bubble

I am Texan, through and through. I was born and raised in Fort Worth. Same house, same school, same all-the-things for my whole childhood. Religion tied into my life in an early way. When my mom found out she was going to have kids, she thought, “What was important to me when I was small? The Church!” So she immediately started attending again, and my sister and I were raised in the Episcopal Church. My mom worked as the secretary to the rector, so we ended up going to the church school for K-12. It was sort of a bubble of a life.

For most of my life, I wanted to be a priest. Whenever anybody asked me what I wanted to do I would say, “I want to be an Episcopal priest,” and they’d be like “Great, except that you’re a lady.” Turns out that I totally could have, but my diocese was very not progressive. It was stagnant. I didn’t know that women could be clergy until I went off to college and I had already changed my plan at that point. I was good at math and I thought I’d just be an engineer, so I moved to College Station and earned my bachelors of science in civil and ocean/coastal engineering at Texas A&M.

Once I found out about female clergy I called my parents and I was like “what the heck, I could have done this!” They suggested that I put a pin in it and try out the engineering thing. So I did—I worked as an engineer in Austin for about five years. But I still always thought I wanted to go to seminary. About a year into the formal discernment process in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, I thought, “Wait, that’s not what I want after all. Turns out I want to study Sanskrit.” And everybody said, “Excuse me, what?” That’s how I ended up coming to Massachusetts in a nutshell.

Serendipitous Encounters

When I moved to Austin to begin my first real job after graduating from Texas A&M, I realized that engineering had taken up my whole life. I just felt like I didn’t have much of a personality outside of my education and career. So I started to do a bunch of stuff, thinking that year that I would do literally anything that came my way hoping that something would catch me and hold tight. One day somebody said that I should go to a yoga class. I initially thought, “No thanks,’ but something changed and I walked into one, some free class somewhere, and it just stuck. It became my thing.

A couple of years later I started yoga teacher training and was introduced to Sanskrit. From the moment we started learning proper syllable pronunciation, I was hooked. I realized that if I intended to be a yoga teacher who said the names of poses in Sanskrit and spoke with any sense of authority about anything related to the Yoga Sutras, then I better be able to read them as a primary source and not just as an English translation. So, at the suggestion of Professor Clooney, I applied to the University of Texas to try my hand at first-year Sanskrit, and three years later here I am applying for PhD programs.

I started practicing yoga in 2012. I became one of those people who practiced multiple times a day, then I started teaching, and then I quit my full-time engineering job all-together. Then I came here (HDS), and it disappeared from my life. I didn’t grieve the loss of this thing that I had loved; it was just that it's time sort of ended for me. I still do it from time to time, and I’ve started doing it more since graduating. Although yoga is the thing that introduced me to Sanskrit, my relationship to yoga is different now. For me it is physical. I don’t buy into the way that people are trying to package a spiritual experience and a bodily experience all at once. After coming to HDS, I separated the philosophy, the language, and then finally the actual physical practice, so when I do it now I do it just to feel good in my body.

I usually don’t get a lot of good reactions when I tell people this story. Overall there seems to be a sense that this undeniably modern avenue into the world of studying religion, South Asia, and Sanskrit somehow indicates an inability to take it seriously. People have mixed reactions to the idea that the billion dollar, stretchy-pants yoga boom could lead somebody into the academic study of religion, but it did for me and I hope others are lucky enough to let it do the same for them.

Learning Curve

Engineering school never felt right. I never really meshed with that culture. Honestly, even when I thought I was going to be a priest, that didn’t feel quite right either. And then I walked into that first class of beginner Sanskrit at UT and I was like “Oh! I found the thing, and it’s not a place, or a particular career; it’s this other new thing that I’m so glad I ran into.” It was a beautiful accident. And I’m thankful for it, every day.

Because my first year at HDS was also my first year in the humanities, my time here was like a compressed undergraduate education. There was a huge learning curve. I mean, my first paper in my life that was longer than three pages was my first paper here at HDS. So, I had to give myself time and space to properly develop an idea of what I wanted to do. Even now I can say more easily what I don’t want to do than what I do want to do, whether it’s in regard to a simple term paper or a future book. My dearest friend back in Austin teases me that I went from wanting to do everything in all the libraries in all over the world to wanting to do something in all of the libraries on one continent, and now I’m trying to shrink it down to one country, one city, and perhaps a single library.

Recently, I have realized that, at the bottom of everything, I came to the study of South Asian religion and Indian philosophy because I couldn’t imagine not reading Sanskrit every day. This whole world didn’t initially open up to me through English translations of Sanskrit texts or even from the mouths of my professors. I became familiar with some of India’s epic narratives and philosophical works simply by reading them in the language in which they were meant to be heard and read. In fact, it was only after my second full year of language study that I was finally asked to think critically about them from a non-language-based perspective. This perhaps odd way of doing things, learning the language before knowing what my academic questions might be, has certainly affected the way I study. I’ve finally zeroed in on the thing I love reading the most: Indian philosophy. In particular I’m interested in epistemology, philosophy of language, theories of sensory experience, and the efficacy of sound as a source of knowledge. I’m interested in not just what these philosophers had to say, but also the intricacies of how they chose to say it. What do they have to say about language and how, in turn, do they utilize language to do so? For a lot of people, it probably sounds like the most boring thing in the world. But this is what’s captured my imagination, so I am just going with it.

Hidden Motivations

In my last semester, I took a class with Professor Hallisey about Buddhism and modern fiction. In this course, it was incredible to me how we were all presented with the same paper prompts and every single one of us wrote on distinctly different topics for each. When we were asked “What is the author of this novel asking us to reflect on?” each of us zeroed in on such fascinating and differing topics that it made me wonder if we’d even read the same book.

In the final paper for that class, the basic question was: Why read fiction at all? I started thinking about how fiction forces us not only to look into the minds of different authors, but also to dive deep into our own brains to see what we’re reflecting on. Fiction is a conduit for us to live other lives and see what in those lives is important to us. I wrote about grief and loss for one assignment and about the human tendency to self-deceive for another. As I wrote the final, I thought back and self-psychoanalyzed a bit, realizing that those topics are things that are always present in my mind. I was totally unaware of this while I was reading the novels and writing the individual papers. All this to say that this class changed the way I want to approach the works of certain Indian philosophers. In addition to looking at what they were trying to convey through their arguments, I want to analyze the ways in which they were attempting to convey it in order to gain insight into their world. Perhaps this insight may be able to add to our own experience in unexpected ways.

What is it that I think I’m going to discover there? I don’t know. But I want to get into their brains and I want to know why they chose to talk about the things they chose to talk about. Who were they? What was important to them? What motivated them to write these difficult, intense, complicated things? The engineering side of my brain wants to break down the structure of the texts, the specific sentences, words, and letters. But I also want to put the puzzle pieces together of what they were thinking about on the surface to see what they may have been thinking about below it. Hopefully it leads me somewhere I can’t quite yet imagine.

Elton John

I played the piano competitively for a long time. I started really young because The Lion King was my favorite movie. I remember walking out of the film and being like, “Mom—that music! Who wrote it?” And she told me “Elton John!” I said “I’m going to marry Elton John.” She replied by saying, “Do you want to play the piano?” Soon after that I started to play and still do just for fun. Elton John came here last fall when he was awarded the Harvard Foundation’s Peter J. Gomes Humanitarian, and I finally had the chance to see him in person after 25 years. It was amazing.

Interview and photos by Anaïs Garvanian

#Harvard #Harvard Divinity School #yoga #sanskrit #elton john #buddhism #Religion #episcopal #large

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rdacijls · 2 years

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Mini Adventure (Craft Essay # 2)

By: Verzon, Mark Lloyd L.

Age: 8

My mother used to tell me different stories before sleep because she believed that the teachings from the stories were the greatest way for me to grasp diverse perspectives and be prepared for school. My mother cultivated the interest of writing tales and fiction in me, and I would share them with my friends. Unfortunately, some of them were not interested in my writing, so I was grateful when I met my buddy Josh, who also loves writing stories. We began sharing some of our stories and assisting one another by inspiring and discussing ideas on how to create our future stories.

Age: 9

I liked writing essays more and I would much rather write essays than do anything math related at this age. I'm still with my friend Josh, who is still a student, and we're continuing to write new tales and share them with our classmates, with the majority of them willing to at least read them and, unlike previously, we're getting positive responses. Despite the fact that the essay assignment was short, I finished it right away since I adore what I'm doing. While mathematical homework is one of the most difficult assignments I've ever had since I frequently get confused about how to multiply and divide numbers. My parents then viewed my collection of short tales I'm working on and liked it, although they had some suggestions for how I might improve my work.

Age: 10

I still write stories and essays at this age, but I've made significant progress at solving mathematical problems. This is when I decided to stop writing stories because I realized that I needed a break, and unfortunately, my friend Josh decided to go to a different school, and I have no friends who enjoy writing as much as he does, so I tried to focus on the subjects that I dislike, especially math, and one of my math teachers was impressed with how well I excelled in her subject, so she asked if I wanted to compete in a math quiz bee, and because I enjoy challenges, I tried and won third place. After that, I continued to focus on other topics and somehow forgot that I write stories until I came across my collections and had a sense of déjà vu.

Age: 12

This is when I started writing stories again, but I only kept them for me since the things I wrote were strange. My favorite genre is science fiction; therefore, I created several stories with magical abilities and tried to include narrative twists such as tragic or perplexing endings. I also compose stories based on movies I've seen since I enjoy horror films, particularly those with zombies, vampires, and other supernatural creatures. I also made friends who enjoy writing tales, which makes me happy because many students my age are interested in something like this, so I kept writing until my brother taught me how to play online games and I became addicted to them.

Age: 16

I'm still addicted to video games and have lost all interest in viewing movies and creating stories, but now is the moment to decide which strand we should choose. I picked HUMMS because I believe that by participating in this strand, I would be able to continue to write tales and enhance them. Unfortunately, I lost interest in writing, but when vacation came around, I became active again in watching movies, which is why I tried to write a story again, but it wasn't as good as before because most of the stories I wrote were good and the readers could learn something from them, but when I tried it, it was more like a movie full of fighting scenes with no context and everything.

Age: 18

This is me now; I used to enjoy writing, but these days I prefer to play video games. I'm having a hard time coming up with ideas, and tragically, most of the stories I've written in the past have vanished because we moved out of the house where they were written. This subject helps me remember all the things I've made before, and I'm happy to share it with others, but based on the stories I've written today, I'd say they're not very good, and I'd like to improve them, but I don't think I'll have enough time because I'm too busy helping my mother with our small business, and I also want to help them by doing some NFT online games because I believe this is an opportunity for me to at least help them.

The End…

cite: https://www.pinterest.ph/pin/332492384994794540/

#creativewriting #craftessay

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Foundation Delivers the Best of Star Trek and Game of Thrones

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This Foundation article contains spoilers.

Don’t sleep on Foundation, Apple TV+’s excellent adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s once-thought-to-be-unfilmable hard science fiction novel series that chronicles the 1,000-year fall of a galactic empire. The story that was long considered too expansive for Hollywood (although many have tried) finds the perfect home on TV in the hands of creators David S. Goyer (Batman Begins, Krypton) and Josh Friedman (Snowpiercer, Avatar 2). They’ve taken the hefty source material that sometimes reads like half-history book half-math dissertation and translated it into an entertaining drama that resembles something closer to Star Trek or Game of Thrones. The result is an adaptation that’s generally faithful to Asimov’s original work, but that also expands on events in interesting ways that the exposition-heavy novel didn’t in 1951. (But expect a few radical changes along the way, too.)

Many sci-fi fans consider Foundation to be the finest book ever written in the genre, so you might be familiar with the premise even if you’ve never read the novel. But here’s a primer: When professor Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) develops a new branch of mathematics called psychohistory, which can predict the future of large societies, it leads to panic in the powerful Galactic Empire. Hari’s math predicts the fall of the 12,000-year-old empire in just 500 short years, which will lead to a 30,000-year dark age…unless the empire listens to him and helps him create the Encyclopedia Galactica, an archive of all human knowledge for those who survive the dark age to find. Yes, either way, the empire is doomed to collapse, but Hari’s plan could cut that dark age down to just 1,000 years of war, bloodshed, and death. While the empire’s rulers consider executing Hari for heresy, they instead decide to exile him and his followers to the remote planet Terminus, where Hari can build The Foundation and begin the work of compiling the knowledge they need to save future generations. Just in case.

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All this setup plays out in the first two episodes of the series through the perspective of young Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), a brilliant mathematician who decides to leave her home world (where studying the sciences and reading books are punishable by death) to work with Hari on the planet Trantor, the totalitarian capital of the Galactic Empire. It’s through Gaal’s eyes that we step into this world of intellectuals and power-hungry emperors, and while Harris puts in a nuanced performance as calculating Hari, it’s Llobell as Gaal who provides the heart of the show.

From the start, Gaal is an outsider, someone who always seems two steps behind Hari, but that’s because he’s spent years studying the numbers and making the plans which twist and turn throughout the 10-episode series. Goyer and Friedman do a great job of slowly drip feeding this universe to newcomers through Gaal, sometimes a little too slowly in the case of the first episode. But stick with it because the rest of the episodes open things up considerably, revealing a galaxy rich in detail and made all the more beautiful by the quality of the visual effects that make Foundation look it was created on a blockbuster budget. Seriously, even Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas would be impressed by some of the panning shots of ships floating through space.

But don’t go into Foundation expecting Star Wars. The story, which is rich in dense dialogue and hidden meanings, bides its time, and can feel like a bit of a puzzle box, especially when the show starts jumping between characters and settings and time periods. But even when things feel convoluted, the puzzle pieces and the pictures they reveal are almost always interesting.

What begins with Gaal and Hari soon expands to an ensemble cast of characters who are either trying to accomplish the Foundation’s mission or are actively working against it. The latter is the main motivation of the three emperors who rule over the galaxy (one of the big changes to the source material). Lee Pace is unpredictable and frightening as Brother Day, the true man in power while Cassian Bilton (Brother Dawn) and Terrence Mann (Brother Dusk) sit to his left and right in the throne room. As you can imagine, the triumvirate is a contentious environment, especially when a disaster on Trantor demands swift action from the empire. Power struggles from within and beyond the empire’s borders will bring a smile to the faces of Game of Thrones fans who missed the weekly machinations, betrayals, and strategy meetings. Indeed, the “Brothers” are chess players and Pace is the king piece everyone wants to topple.

While the show emphasizes science, philosophy, and politics over space battles, that doesn’t mean you’ll be starved for action, especially when it comes to life on Terminus, where the fledgling Foundation faces many dangers, both from the planet’s unforgiving surface and factions with a bone to pick with the empire. It’s during a precarious situation for the Foundation that we get to Salvor Hardin, the multi-layered “action hero” of the show played by Leah Harvey. To say more about her would be a spoiler for newcomers. But she’s great.

On the spectrum of science fiction, Foundation feels closer to Star Trek, centering on characters who are methodical and critical thinkers over space wizards with laser swords. It values discovery over warfare, exploring and settling planets over blowing them up. That said, it’s by chasing a more high-concept Star Trek feel that Foundation takes liberties with the source material that might turn off long time fans of the book. But these changes really work to make an engrossing work of science fiction for television. As Gaal and Hari quickly learn as they set out on their long trip to Terminus, sometimes sacrifices must be made for the greater good.

The first two episodes of Foundation premiere on Friday, Sept. 24 on Apple TV+.

The post Foundation Delivers the Best of Star Trek and Game of Thrones appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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newstfionline · 6 years

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Young Nigerians choose to fight Boko Haram with books

By Ryan Lenora Brown, CS Monitor, June 19, 2018

MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA--In Gwoza, the gunmen arrived just after 10 a.m., skidding to a halt outside the school on motorcycles and surrounding the Nigerian students who huddled in small groups around the courtyard, frittering away the short break between their classes.

In Damasak, they came as a teacher was placing an exam paper facedown on the table in front of one of her students. This time, everyone in the classroom heard an explosion first, cracking over their heads like a clap of thunder. First one, then another, and another again.

In Bama, it was still too early for school when Boko Haram appeared. It happened before dawn, as the morning call to prayer was just beginning to blast out from mosque speakers around the city. The shooting woke up the rest of the town like a staccato alarm clock.

In the school courtyard in Gwoza, Lydia began to run, tripping over the bodies of her classmates as she fled. In the classroom in Damasak, Aisha ran, too. And in Bama, Fatima’s mother dragged her out of bed and whispered urgently, go. Don’t take anything. Just go.

Today, northeastern Nigeria is a place of suddenly interrupted lives. Since the Islamist movement Boko Haram began its violent insurgency here a decade ago, nearly 3 million people have been uprooted from their homes and scattered across Nigeria and its neighbors. Among them have been about a million children like Lydia, Aisha, and Fatima, for whom the sudden displacement has often meant an equally abrupt end to their education.

For Boko Haram--whose name is often translated as “Western education is forbidden”--that fact is no accident. Their campaign for a fundamentalist Islamic state in northeastern Nigeria has deliberately and brutally taken aim at the region’s schools. Since 2009, the group has murdered some 2,300 teachers and destroyed more than 1,400 schools, according to figures from UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency. Kidnapping children from schools, meanwhile, has become one of the central ways the group has earned its international notoriety.

But as Boko Haram’s war against education here grinds into its 10th year, a quiet counterinsurgency is also building strength. It’s a fight with unlikely front lines--like the battered open-air classrooms inside camps for displaced people across this region, where teachers lead geography lessons in open defiance of the group’s flat earth ideology. Or in the dormitories of girls’ boarding schools, jammed with chattering teenagers in pink hijabs, reading romance novels and braiding each other’s hair as though they have never heard of girls kidnapped in Chibok or Dapchi.

And leading this particular fight are young Nigerians like Lydia, Aisha, and Fatima, who have seen Boko Haram’s terror firsthand, and who, when it comes to their education, have chosen to fight back.

“Going to school is our way of battling against Boko Haram,” says Aisha, tucking a stray strand of hair into her bright pink hijab. After being out of school for three years while in a refugee camp in Niger, the 19-year-old, whose last name has been withheld for her safety, is now less than a year away from graduating from a boarding school in the city of Maiduguri.

“They don’t like education; they don’t want it,” she says. “So just by doing this, we are all fighting them.”

The tenacity of that fight among northern Nigerians has startled many experts. For decades, after all, northern Nigeria has sat stubbornly at the bottom of nearly every national ranking of educational achievement. Fewer than half of young adult women here know how to read, and only 46 percent of children are enrolled in school at all, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics.

“This is one of the most disadvantaged places in the country when it comes to education,” says Babagana Goni Ali, secretary of the Education in Emergencies Working Group at the Borno State Universal Basic Education Board. Historically, he says, many parents here haven’t seen the point of sending their kids to school. Life, after all, often seemed to be on a single track. You grew up. You got married. You started farming. There weren’t really other choices, and certainly none that required you to be able to read a novel in English.

And Boko Haram soon gave many families another excuse. In a YouTube video released in July 2013, the group’s commander, Abubakar Shekau, said, “We are going to burn down the schools if they are not Islamic religious schools for Allah.”

Over the next few years, the group torched schools across the region. The militants often specifically targeted teachers of subjects such as science and geography, which flouted the group’s fundamentalist Quranic interpretation of the world. Sometimes these raids doubled as forced recruitment drives, with the group snatching up young boys to become soldiers and young girls to become “wives” to their commanders.

At first, it seemed to be working. In 2016, the Nigerian government announced that the number of children who weren’t going to school had shot up 50 percent since the start of the crisis. Teachers stayed home, too, fearing targeted attacks.

But as the group retreated from many of the major urban areas in Borno in recent years, Mr. Ali began to notice something. It seemed Boko Haram’s tactics were beginning to backfire.

“There’s suddenly a huge issue of congestion in our schools that wasn’t there before,” he says. “It’s the blessing behind this tragedy. You find suddenly so many more people are interested in getting an education.”

Indeed, although there aren’t yet statistics to show how much the situation has changed, many here say Boko Haram’s insurgency has done something that decades of low educational achievement failed to do. It has lit a fire under people.

“Lack of education is the disease that caused [Boko Haram] in the first place,” says Fanne Abdullahi, a mother of five who lives in a wind-swept camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Maiduguri. She never had the money to attend school herself as a child, she says, and anyway, her parents didn’t approve of a girl learning how to read. So when she grew up and had children of her own, sending them to school wasn’t much of a priority either.

But after Boko Haram attacked her village, killed her husband, and sent the family fleeing in 2015, she began to rethink that. When her family moved into the Bakassi camp in Maiduguri, someone told her that UNICEF was running free schools there, and she decided to sign up her three school-age children.

“Instead of them getting brainwashed by Boko Haram,” she says of her reasoning, “it’s better for them to get educated.”

Now, they join about 3,000 other kids each morning in a huddled collection of open-air learning spaces that serve as one of the camp’s two schools. Their “classrooms” are little more than a concrete platform with a grass roof sagging over them. Most once had walls as well, but nearly as soon as they are put up, school officials say, they’re stolen for firewood.

On a recent morning, as Mastapha Kaltumi taught math to a group of about 50 fidgety third-graders, wind whistled through his classroom, flapping hijabs and fluttering notebooks. Nearby, just beyond the school’s flimsy chain-link fence, children screamed and giggled as they chased each other in a game of tag. A little boy in a raggedy T-shirt walked by flying a kite he’d made out of a plastic bag.

It wasn’t perfect, Mr. Kaltumi thought. There were still too many kids in his class, and too many kids outside not getting to class at all. But it was something. It was a start.

“Many students here are coming to school for the first time in their lives,” he says. And he knew that for many of them--like himself--focusing on addition and long division was a way to get out of their own heads: to forget, briefly, the things they had seen.

From the government’s perspective, it also doesn’t hurt that northern Nigeria’s current crisis has brought a wave of international money and expertise into its schools.

“The government has always had an interest in educating kids here, of course, but the international assistance makes a big difference in what we’re able to do,” says Ali of the Borno State Universal Basic Education Board.

Last year, humanitarian organizations in the region received about $12 million for educational projects in the region. But at Yerwa, Fatima doesn’t know about any of that. She’s got her eye on one thing: finishing high school next year. After that, if she can somehow manage to scrape together the money, she hopes to go to college and train as a doctor. When she lived in a displaced persons camp, she saw firsthand what happens when there isn’t a good medical system.

“I saw people dying in hospitals and just being left there to die because they couldn’t pay,” she says. “When I’m a doctor I won’t do that. I will save your life, and then later, if it’s possible, you can help me.”

#Nigeria #Boko Haram #education in Nigeria

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quasithinking · 3 years

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Gravity’s Rainbow: Part X

About five hundred pages into this monster, the parts began to come together so I could stop asking, "Why was all of that stuff about Pirate Prentice necessary?!" Not that I'm any clearer on what his big secret mission delivered by the Rocket was supposed to be. But I am learning about the people who delivered that message and how it's tied to Slothrop's quest to find the plastic, probably the secret to Slothrop's hardons, in which the message was contained. But that's getting about 450 pages ahead of myself! Currently, I'm at a part of the book where I haven't registered that Slothrop is important at all. He's just a guy who keeps a poster of his sexual conquests that some psychic nutjobs and Pavlovians think is important. This section finds Jessica smoking alone in the dark of her and Roger Mexico's squat located in an abandoned village she can't name and thinking about the imposition of War. She would like the life she and Roger Mexico are living to be less of an imaginary thing wherein they hide from the realities of the War and more, well, you know, reality. The War is too big to conceive, too much to visualize as a whole. And it will not bother them, except maybe by A4 Rocket, and then, well, they wouldn't even know, right? Jessica thinks about a conversation she had with Roger Mexico about the Poisson distribution of the Rocket strikes. I've never had too much trouble with higher math or science (okay, Physics in my senior year of high school gave me some trouble but half of that was my attitude as a soon-to-be-high-school graduate who just couldn't be bothered with all this learning crap) but a college course in statistics was my first real indication that maybe I wasn't as smart as my mother kept insisting I was (although like my Physics course, it's possible that the situation surrounding my enrollment in this particular Statistics class and my apathetic attitude toward the material had more to do with why I didn't understand it). But with this following passage, Pynchon has me believing that my lifelong belief that Statistics is a language that very few have the capacity to learn was correct (not that I need much proof to acknowledge a belief which tends toward my own self interest). "Roger has tried to explain to her the V-bomb statistics: the difference between distribution, in angel's-eye view, over the map of England, and their own chances, as seen from down here. She's almost got it: nearly understands the Poisson equation, yet can't quite put the two together—put her own enforced calm day-to-day alongside the pure numbers, and keep them both in sight. Pieces keep slipping in and out. "Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can't we do something, down here? Couldn't there be an equation for us too, something to help us find a safer place?" "Why am I surrounded," his usual understanding of self today, "by statistical illiterates? There's no way, love, not as long as the mean density strikes is constant. Pointsman doesn't even understand that." The rockets are distributing about London just as Poisson's equation in the textbooks predicts. As the data keep coming in, Roger looks more and more like a prophet. Psi Section people stare after him in the hallways. It's not precognition, he wants to make an announcement in the cafeteria or something . . . have I ever pretended to be anything I'm not? all I'm doing is plugging numbers into a well-known equation, you can look it up in the book and do it yourself. . . ." See?! In Pynchon's description of Roger's statistical life, even the psychics can't get their heads around Statistics! It's mystical hoodoo! This section is a good example of why Gravity's Rainbow can be such a confusing read at times. This section begins from Jessica's perspective as she looks for a smoke in her and Mexico's squat. It then moves to a remembered conversation between Jessica and Roger. But then, during this remembrance, the scene shifts to a morning in Roger's life at The White Visitation seen from Pointsman's perspective. It's easy to lose oneself in these shifts of time and perspective, and to forget where the scene began if and when Pynchon decides to return to what had seemed like a linear bit of story telling. In the now shifted scene, Pointsman feels compelled to drop in on Mexico every morning to try to get a handle on the whole statistics thing. Pointsman's problem, as a Pavlovian, is that he only seems to understand binary results. Does a stimulus cause a reaction or not? (Yes, I've simplified this because I don't know much (or anything at all) about "summation," "transition," "irradiation," "concentration," or "reciprocal induction.") But Roger deals in seemingly random possibilities. What does a 0.37 chance even mean when you get right down to it?! To Pointsman, it simply means you don't know anything at all, really. If the numbers Mexico comes up with don't indicate how to avoid being hit by an A4, what fucking good are they then?! Pointsman's observation of what Mexico's ability to live comfortably with seemingly random probability evokes in me echoes of Douglas Coupland's Generation X (and not just because the word "generation" is italicized in the text!). "How can Mexico play, so at his ease, with these symbols of randomness and fright? Innocent as a child, perhaps unaware—perhaps—that in his play he wrecks the elegant rooms of history, threatens the idea of cause and effect itself. What if Mexico's whole generation have turned out like this? Will Postwar be nothing but "events," newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?" I mean, it's like Coupland's pitch for the book! Probably! Immediately after the bit I just transcribed, the scene shifts again to a night Roger was having a drunken discussion with the Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit about Mexico's statistics. In this brief remembrance, the Reverend asks Mexico a simple question through an analogy of a bit of trivia about the Romans: What fucking good is your chart of A4 Rocket strikes? It's a fair fucking question, really. And then we're back to Jessica's remembered conversation. Almost all the way back to the present narrative! Jessica pointing out that it isn't fair that his statistics don't tell them how to be safer; Roger once again being forced to repeat to yet another dullard that it's just an equation. Ignoring the whole discussion of statistics for a second, I'd also like to point out that the linear narrative (you know, the easy parts of the book!) is clever and enticing and beautifully written. This book isn't becoming my favorite book simply because it's smart and difficult to read and postmodern. It's because of moments like this: "Well, it isn't fair." "It's eminently fair," Roger now cynical, looking very young, she thinks. "Everyone's equal. Same chances of getting hit. Equal in the eyes of the rocket." To which she gives him her Fay Wray look, eyes round as can be, red mouth about to open in a scream, till he has to laugh. "Oh, stop." "Sometimes . . ." but what does she want to say? That he must always be lovable, in need of her and never, as now, the hovering statistical cherub who's never quite been to hell but speaks as if he's one of the most fallen. . . . The scene, once again, shifts to The White Visitation in a memory where Jessica and Pirate Prentice are talking while they watch Roger off in the distance playing in the snow. Pirate deems Roger's attitude toward the "rocket being fair" "Cheap nihilism." And later, when Jessica tells him about the exchange, he admits it. Sure. Cheap. Of course! But why should his reality, his fears, his way of coping with those fears, be less because of what others have truly suffered? Roger Mexico is just as frightened of death as anybody else who doesn't believe in something more, something after. And yet he works at The White Visitation where they all believe in more. So why shouldn't he fear death more than they do? All he has are his statistics and, in the end, they might offer an illusion of control but they offer no solace, no hope, no eternal reward. There's just the end and now, with the marvels of technology, you don't even get any warning about that. The section ends with both Jessica and Roger thinking about Pre-War life and how everything seemed silly and unnecessary and inconsequential. And as a reminder of the life one used to be able to lead without thinking about death constantly, a rocket hits nearby.

#Thomas Pynchon #Gravity's Rainbow

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cascornerfairfieldu-blog · 5 years

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College of Arts and Sciences Student, Lisa Angell, Delivered Inspiring 2019 Commencement Speech

President Nemec, Members of the Board of Trustees, Honored Guests, Members of the Faculty and Administration, Family, Friends, and Members of the Class of 2019. Good morning. I cannot stress enough what an honor it is to be standing here today. Now, just to see what I’m working with here, who here has seen a movie? Very good, great start! As I am going to be receiving a degree in Film and Communication today, I want to share with you a little formula that Hollywood’s screenwriters call “the hero’s journey.” I guarantee you, your favorite movie follows the formula, so I’ll take you through it.

First comes the set-up: four years ago in September the Class of 2019 sat in these same seats and officially joined the herd. We all sat together as strangers, and imagined what our college experiences would be like. The only thing my eighteen-year-old self could think about was my new found freedom, the vast possibilities of new friendships on the horizon, and my plans to attempt to get into a townhouse party later that night.

The important part of the set-up in the hero’s journey is the inciting incident, the call to action that brings our protagonist on an adventure that will result in some sort of growth or change. This call to action occurred at convocation when the speakers explained to us the Jesuit values. They explained that Fairfield, as a Jesuit institution, focuses on educating the whole person. Our education seeks to enrich our body, mind, and spirit, which has become known to us as cura personalis. Fairfield creates opportunities for students to become women and men for others and to strive for excellence.

For our screenplay to really get going our protagonist needs to accept or reject this adventure. So I will take you back again. I remember visiting my sister, a 2016 Fairfield grad, when I was applying to colleges. I remember saying that the core curriculum was way too big, that there would be no way I would want to take classes in a subject like philosophy. After all, my goal was, and still is, to be a filmmaker. My parents, on the other hand, loved Fairfield, as did my sister. So they set up an appointment for me to sit in on a film class. Hidden in the basement of the prep school, as many of you may not know, there is a little world of film-- creativity bouncing off the walls. Often times, for our protagonist to accept the journey, he or she will need some sort of motivation from a mentor, like when Luke Skywalker encounters Obi-Wan Kenobi or when Dorothy meets Glinda the Good Witch. For me, I accepted the adventure when one of the film professors explained to me how a Fairfield education was unique in that you are given the chance to learn it all. He illustrated a vision of a ball, imagine any ball you like, a crystal ball, a basketball, a meatball, whatever you’re into. Now imagine the ball is too big to hold. It is filled with knowledge. He told me that the core allows us to get a better grasp around the ball. You might think the core allows us to grow big enough hands to palm the basketball, but I think it has to do with having people to carry it with you. By learning from each other and being enlightened by other perspectives, we gain empathy. With this we are able to hold the weight of the ball together, the weight of the world.

For the movie to continue the protagonist has to accept the adventure. So on we went. We began to embody Fairfield’s mission. The classes we have taken, the professors who we have made our mentors, the teams and clubs we have joined, the friends we have made. Every opportunity we have grabbed hold of has shaped us into who we are and who we will become when we leave Fairfield. We view the world differently now because of the core curriculum. I, for one, am glad I was able to study across disciplines to enrich my mind and to stretch my intellect far beyond job preparation. The world itself is interdisciplinary and because of our Jesuit education, we are more prepared for what is next. By gaining perspective across every subject, we can connect the arts, literature, history, sociology, communication, business, math, science, religion and yes, even philosophy.

This is the part of the movie where everything is going great for our hero with some peppy upbeat music in the background, but there is no doubt our protagonist will encounter some obstacles. About ¾ of the way through a film the protagonist will hit rock bottom. Without hitting bottom, our protagonist would never grow. I may have just been naive, but the college experience was filled with more growing pains than I ever could have predicted. And coincidentally, Fairfield U had growing pains right along with us, renovating buildings across campus as part of Fairfield Rising. As freshmen, we battled homesickness and ate our feelings away in Barone. At the time, we could either choose to work out in the basement of Alumni Hall while the Rec Plex was being built, or opt to gain the freshman 15; the far easier choice. Our sophomore year, as we felt the pressure of declaring our undergraduate majors and quite possibly altering our life projections, we spent a solid month of our spring semester eating in a tent outside the BCC so Barone could “glow up” and become the Tully. Like Fairfield’s campus, I myself felt under construction. But here we are, at the red ribbon cutting ceremony, just moments away from receiving our college diplomas. And we all live happily ever after, right?

Well, I hate to burst everyone's bubble, yeah “we did it!” BUT this is only the beginning. In a better movie, where the climax of the film doesn’t happen at $2 Tuesday at the Grape, I think we are still in the set-up of the movies of our lives, and the call to action or inciting incident is happening right now. We still have so much growing to do. I came into college relatively closed-minded. Remember when I said I would never want to take a class in philosophy? Well, after I took Intro to Philosophy I declared it as a minor. The many classes I took opened my eyes to think bigger, to question what I thought I knew, and question authority. Just because things are the way they are, doesn’t mean they are the way they should be. Humanity, as it has been across history, is still plagued with wars, corruption, and poverty. And now more than ever, we have increasing environmental concerns. We are in a new age: filled with technology that has shrunk the world and connected humanity at a global level like never before, but also putting an emphasis on self-image, making superficiality the norm. This is the hand that we have been dealt. Now it is time for us to shuffle the deck and deal a new hand. The core at Fairfield has taught us to never take anything for face value and to challenge the institutions that exist in this ever changing world. Now I encourage you all to break away from the herd. Strive to reach new heights. Don’t settle. We have the opportunity to embark on the hero’s journey and make an impact.

Understanding the privilege of being a college graduate comes with the responsibility of accepting the adventure. We cannot take for granted the diplomas we are about to receive, because others may not be as lucky. There is great inequality that exists within this world, within our country, within Fairfield County alone. Are our lives different for a reason? Did God bless us with this opportunity? Or is it just luck of the draw? Is it happenstance or is it fate? Whatever it may be, that does not change the fact that we are blessed to be in the position that we are in.

During a semester abroad, whenever someone asked where we were from, their faces would light up when we would say “I’m from America.” People across the globe look to America as a land where dreams come true. Across the world people try to make it here, in the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream, with a promise for opportunity. But as we know, this promise isn’t kept for everyone. It takes hard work, and a lot of luck. We would like to think that we deserve all the opportunities we’ve been given, because after all, we live our lives like we are the stars of our own movies. In reality, we had no control over where we born, the families we were born into, the circumstances we have been given. What we do have control over is the way we use what we have been given to make an impact and leave a legacy, out of respect for everyone who did not start on an even playing field. After all, the playing field here at Fairfield has the greenest, most well-watered grass I have ever seen!

We don’t know what happens next, but that’s the fun of it. After all, we don’t want to know what happens at the end of a movie when it is only just beginning. Our hero’s journey starts now. As we leave Fairfield, let us seek more than just comfort in our lives. Although money will help us survive, it will not guarantee us to thrive. Of course we want the films of our lives to do well at the box office, (who wouldn't?) but we should also strive to have some substance intended to inspire and relate to one another. To thrive, we must challenge ourselves to never stop learning. Live life in pursuit of gaining a wider perspective on the world. We must always revel in our growing pains. And find incredible co-stars to carry the ball with us along the way. That is how we will experience passion and bliss. AND... never take that green grass for granted. Congratulations, Class of 2019.

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