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tie-dyedlife · 6 years

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Hello, I need some advice.

I'm not the type to vent like this, but lately ive felt very stuck.

I graduated in may of 2018, almost a year ago.

My plan was to take the summer off then go into college, which due to lack of motivation and some other issues, did not happen.

During that period of time from August to December i can honestly say has been my lowest point, i felt lost. I had no idea what i was doing or where i was going. I have a job, so that's kept me on some sort of path and schedule. But i tend to overdo it. I take everyones shifts, worked overtime, open to close, mornings, nights, classic workohic. Which was fine since i wasnt doing anything else, and i wasnt complaining about the paycheck, but it made me exhausted. constantly.

Once the new year started, it was like i was an entirely new person. Up until now I was so positive and so happy. I went to the college to talk about classes, starting writing and drawing and doing the things i love again, i even figured out what it was i want to go to school for, who i want to be and where i want to end up. For that breif period of time i felt so good and i was so happy and so excited for the future.

But i can feel it coming back again. I feel usless. I missed the deadline for colege classes not because i was busy, but because i just didnt do the online registration. I filled out maybe a fourth of it and let it sit open on my computer for weeks. I never touched it again. I knew i had to do it i just couldnt. or wouldnt. I feel like a failure. Though i live at home i find it hard to face my parents, i know they're disappointed. I havent talked to my dad (whos a harvard graduate) in weeks. me going to college was never an option, and ive let my future slip through my fingers. i feel like a failure and a disappointment all the time.

Everything was fine but now reality hit me and i feel stuck again. I dont want to wait until summer classes, but its too late. I would concider online classes, but i know me. I would never sit down to do it. I'd shrug it off and never get it done, just like with the registration.

I need to know my options. I need to know what i can do to help myself. Ive tried researching it but i came up empty handed. Is there anyone out there whos gone through the same thing? Anyone at all who can tell me what i need to do? Please someone, help me

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foxandfiction · 4 years

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so i havent written anything in a LONG while (since 2017?) for a very good reason: i was going to school fulltime. good news: i finished! i finished in december and i walk at graduation in may. hopefully i learned something about writing. i enjoyed myself, at the very least, and i was grateful to have made myself write frequently about literature, even if it wasn't the way and type of lit we were looking at in school. i don't know that i will come back to this frequently. after all, it's february and i've been free from the school grind for months now. but sometimes a book sparks an idea in me that i have to write out. so here we go. niko rides again.

truly devious / the hand on the wall by maureen johnson.

so here is a thing: i like maureen johnson enough as a person that i will usually read her books, despite the fact that she writes mostly YA hetero romances, and infrequently anything fantasy and never sci fi. when she announced she was writing a mystery i was interested because i do like mysteries but the genre as a whole is often difficult to enjoy for other reasons. and so, expecting it to be a stand alone novel because i am a fool and an imbecile, i picked up truly devious.

this isn't to say it is a bad book. it's just 3 books.

a brief summary: stevie bell has just been accepted into ellingham academy, a prestigious private boarding school with a checkered past. the site of several famous kidnappings and murders of the ellingham family that established it, the school is known for inviting brilliant students with very specific passions to study there. stevie is invited because of her expertise on the ellingham case-- her goal being to solve the murder while she attends the school. of course, when accidental deaths seem to be more than accidents, the case may not be solely located in the past.

intriguing.

the case itself is interesting and fun, relying on the weird school and its strange inhabitants, both presently and in the past, their penchant for secret passages and riddles, to propel the mystery forward. yet the mystery is not the sole content of any story. recently i caught up on the magnus archives (if you like audio horror.... please give it a go) and in the q&a after the most recent season they were discussing constructing a mystery. horror, of course, must have some sort of mystery. as they discussed character arcs coming to head, they brought up how such a thing can sacrifice the mystery-- poirot's character development consists of not knowing who killed someone to knowing who did it.

this is not to say that truly devious sacrifices some mystery or some character development for the sake of the other. rather, truly devious operates as two different stories with the same cast, contained in one trilogy. stevie solves the mystery. and stevie gains friends and a romance.

i prefer the mystery.

the mystery, at the very least, does not stand on weak willed politics.

there's two main issues here, in my opinion. one is the issue of representation while still wanting to write a straight romance between two white teenagers. the second is that johnson wrote this during the results of the 2016 american election and its awful aftermath. these are understandable-- at least the latter one-- because no one worthwhile has been positively impacted by this. there are of course several problems with this. the first is what i'll call representation lite. "representation" or "diversity" is something in these cases that are dolled out to a larger cast of characters so there is a variety, instead of any real issues impacting a singular person. instead of any real depth these "representations" get to have, the audience can see them and, if they want, feel included. or they can ignore them. the audience in the know can pick up on them -- stevie's best friend janelle is a lesbian, and janelle's partner is nonbinary. there is a minor character with a physical disability. stevie herself suffers from an anxiety disorder, which is the only one of these things that is talked about beyond mentioning for mentioning's sake.

one thing that struck me as a very sour note occurs in a chapter from the perspective of a witness to the original crime, a friend of albert ellingham, founder of the school. leonard holmes nair (subtlety is for adult novels), talking to some students about how he knows dorothy parker, says, verbatim, "i am a friend of dorothy's".

now. several things. i didn't need this line to know he was gay. you nailed that one maureen, without having to discuss sexuality at all. to a modern audience, that's what this line specifies. in certain contexts it would be amusing-- it is innocuous in 1935, but in 2020, it's full of meaning. the film did not even come out until '39, and i'm not sure when the phrase came to mean what it means now. a kind of circular joke, that is meaningless both to the joke teller and his audience, yet full of subtext to both the author and the readers. it's interesting. it's also a little bit insidious and what i dislike about this novel revolves around it. it is a joke under layers and layers that you must already know something about to know what it means. and yet if you don't you miss it and you miss nothing. it's the "representation" in this novel-- it's buried and it's minor and you can miss it easily, and while it may be well intentioned, its existence is more insulting than inviting.

it's second major flaw is its attempt at a political message. it suffers as much liberalism suffers, by drawing an arbitrary line in the sand where doing the right thing is the goal, if you have someone you like pushing you to do it, but it's ok to fall short if it inconveniences you, scares you, is considered illegal in any way.

here is a minor example: a character who studies environmental science talks about writing a paper about all of the plastic in the ocean. not two chapters later he talks about how he likes tuna salad, as if the majority of plastic in the ocean didn't come from the fishing industry. i'd chalk this up to author ignorance (and not character ignorance because i think teenagers are smarter than that) but johnson is vegetarian, maybe vegan; she is at the very least a big fan of isa chandra moskowitz, noted vegan cookbook author. (if you care about the environment.... go vegan).

here is a bigger example: throughout the novel there is a commentary on a fictional senator who could very well be a number of real senators. he's your run of the mill republican, in my opinion: racist scaremonger who wants a "return to personal responsibility". stevie's parents work for his campaign, despite her personal objections to him. after making out with a housemate several times, she discovers he is the senator's son. the kid is supposed to be just as against his father as stevie is, although he is, in perhaps the politest way i can phrase it, chaotic as fuck.

maybe i am just jaded but i can't imagine anyone with money not being tainted by their parent's politics that work to get them this money. yet they do end up together, and a large part of the secondary, non-mystery plot is her love interest's work to ruin his father's bid for presidency.

there is a turning point where, the boy and some friends (not stevie and her friends, because it Felt Wrong) find out that his father has been blackmailing shady people for campaign finances. great. until, instead of exposing them, they decide to destroy the information, because it is less illegal.

oh..... ok? i mean, if he got dirt on these people i don't think he couldn't do it again. if he reports it to the press, he destroys his father's bid for presidency and the lives of the awful people he's extorting. it's a win-win scenario. will the kid go to jail? maybe, but even if his father is pressing charges against him, he's still a rich white boy. he'll be ok. doing something illegal for the greater good is ok. lots of things were once illegal. that doesn't make them immoral. maybe doing the right thing, like absolutely destroying any chance your awful father has at holding a position of power, is better than taking an easy way out.

maybe, if you want to write a mystery, write a mystery, and if you want to write something political, don't feature the police as a trustworthy organization.

but what do i know.

#review

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