I hate phones.
Not, like, any specific one. Or even the concept, really. I think it's great how much phones connect people. But I hate them. More accurately, I hate having to talk on them. I don't want to call in a pizza order if I can help it; I don't want to call customer service to work out an issue. I just don't want to be on the phone. (I don't mind talking to friends and family on the phone, however. Go figure.) But why? Tracing my developing personality--and, maybe, finding an answer to the question in the process--can be difficult. How much of what I see in myself is directly grown from what I've done in the past, and how much of it is a result of innate tendencies? I feel like I've grown more introverted over the past couple of decades--was it my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that made me feel like I had used up all my extroversion? (This one definitely makes sense to me, but perhaps that's just sublimation.) Still, there is one thing that I deeply misunderstood and has continued to affect me ever since it happened in 2001 that may be a clue to my animosity toward Alexander Graham Bell's invention. I worked at the Convergys, a telemarketing/telesupport firm close to where I grew up. I had just graduated from high school and needed a job to get money for the aforementioned mission. The Convergys hired me as an inbound operator. Our client was American Express and it was my job to "activate" the callers' credit cards. Really my purpose was to lie to them ("while your credit card activates…" when the card was already activated) and then try to upsell additional (and unnecessary) features on the credit card. The more features I sold to them, the larger my paycheck would be. I'm not much of a salesman, despite my understanding of words. I figure this is mostly because if I truly believe in what I'm selling (or, in the case of the mission, preaching), then I get myself tied into the sale and feel personally rejected, and if I don't care at all about what I'm selling, then I don't care if someone else wants to buy the product or not. This was certainly true of the Convergys job. I worked there throughout the summer of 2001. Shortly after the terrorist attacks on 11 September, with the strain of starting college, preparing for my mission, and deeply hating the menial, pointlessness of my job, I started looking for a way out. What ended up being the worst thing for me (mentally speaking) was when a customer called in, sick of the endless phone-trees and being placed on hold, and threatened to cut up his card. I told him that the card was now activated and that he could use it immediately, then ended the call. Nevertheless, my 18-year-old brain misheard what he said. I thought he'd threatened me with violence if his card wasn't activated immediately. He hadn't. He definitely only said that he'd cut up the card, not the teenage phone operator on the other line. But my fight/flight response was triggered and a surge of adrenaline tsunamied through my system. I'm not a fighter--like, at all--so the mental connection between that spurt of fear-induced adrenaline forged between me and two things: American Express (a company I don't much care about or give thoughts to) and telephones. I won't say that this is the original "trauma" that led to my telephonic antipathy, but it's certainly a component to it. Nevertheless, becoming an adult has meant that I've had to use the telephone more frequently than I would like. Sometimes I do have to set up appointments or sort out a problem via phone. It's not pleasant and I often try to come up with alternative ways of handling the issue sans that technology. (The fact that I don't want to talk to employees at stores if I can help it definitely limits these alternatives.) So the fact that I've called Gayle's oncologist office two or three times during the first two weeks of chemotherapy is an indication of something to me: When it comes to helping my family, I can overcome my distaste. I was on the phone as soon as my help wasn't enough to help her through the migraines that knocked her down the first day and when the antinausea medication was only making things worse. I hate using the phone, but more than that, I hate seeing my wife curled up in pain and feeling powerless at the sight. Here's what I've learned: Sometimes the only way you can fight for the ones you love is by doing what you don't want to do. I can't go through chemotherapy for Gayle, but I can be her liaison to the oncologist's office. Her fight is against an uninvited return of cancer; mine is a mangled memory that has affected me for many years. There's no parity between these things--one of the hard parts about watching a loved one go through health problems--and I'm not trying to assert that there is. Still, if fighting over the phone is the only way I can help Gayle, I'll do it. The Sundays of 2020
There are so many things rattling around my head right now, few of them positive or happy. This is not unusual, as Sundays have historically tended to be the days that my depression is keenest. That being confessed, the past nine months have seen that historical trend skewed. It isn't much of a surprise to me to realize that the pressures of being in an extroverted (we prefer the term missionary-minded) church as an introvert were wearing me down. In Church BC, I would be fine in the first hour--Sacrament meeting, after all, requires very little in terms of personal interactions--then find solace in drawing notes about the Sunday School lesson. I sat next to my wife, whose presence calms my anxieties and explicates my eccentricities to others, so though Sunday School required more interaction, it was mediated by Gayle. Once the third hour showed up and I was off to the gender-segregated Elders' Quorum, thinks became even more uncomfortable. It's hard for me to really parse how I felt in many (by no means all) of the EQ lessons. I do know that part of what made me uncomfortable--and still does in other circumstances with other people--were the invisible lines of power that adults have to navigate. Some don't care about them, don't worry about them, or intuitively weave through them, but I'm not someone like that. In my classroom, there are very clear lines of autonomy, authority, and expectation. If something bothers me in my classroom, I can address it. In more grown-up situations like Church meetings and family gatherings, those clear lines efface. I don't know if it's appropriate to call out someone for a particularly egregious bit of stupidity, and when I do, I worry that I will have ruined a relationship or caused offense. (Example: I'm pretty quiet when my brothers-in-law gas about politics, but it was only when one of them declared the Second Amendment gave him the right to shoot someone on his property that I had to speak up. He retreated when I said that, but I know that it raised questions in his mind about what I think with regards to the Bill of Rights.) The stress of being in that kind of situation is really draining. It should come as no surprise that, when the Primary presidency stopped by the Elders' Quorum to find last-minute substitutes, I would almost always volunteer. I could be a warm body and quietly urge six-year-olds to sing along with Primary songs. Those are power dynamics I can understand. Church attendance--a major portion of a Mormon's Sunday--was one of the reasons that the first day of each week was one in which my depression was larger. Add to that the feelings of inadequacy that I gleaned (rightly or not) from my own lack of piety, faith, and commitment as opposed to what was on display at the local chapel, and you've a ripe recipe for feelings of self-loathing and -insufficiency. The gospel of Jesus Christ is very positive and affirming, very confident in the individual to become better, through the merits of Christ. The Church is very good at (purposefully or not) generating a type of pious competition. And while everyone's experience varies (and I should say that my current ward doesn't have this problem quite as much as previous places I've attended), what I've outlined here pretty well reflects how I feel about the end result of three hours of worship. In the past eighteen months or so--maybe longer? It's hard to tell with COVID fog in the mix--the Church shifted to a two hour schedule, with more focus on learning the gospel at home. I appreciated the change--for what should be obvious reason--though not all of the problems I had with Sundays disappeared. Once the pandemic struck and in-person worship cancelled, I felt significantly better about Sundays than I had in a long time. This doesn't strike me as some sort of cosmic indication about how I should treat Church services--if it's ever safe to worship in person again, I'll be attending once more--as it also tracks with the other areas of my life where additional stresses show up, and how those anxieties receded once the expectation of non-participation became the norm. In other words, not having to be around other people meant that I wasn't as stressed as I had been during the Before Times™. By worshipping at home exclusively, there have been some positive moments. My wife and I are in control of the situation and conversation, and my boys are (I hope) gaining a more intimate understanding of the doctrines we abide by. The down side to this, of course, is that trying to keep a seven-, ten-, and thirteen-year-old interested in the topic without it becoming too diluted for the older one or too complicated for the younger one has been a hit-and-miss proposition. Sometimes things go well. Sometimes they don't. The yearning here is hard to define: I don't really want to go back to the weekly slog of feeling inadequate and acting as though I'm excited to be at church. Yet I know that it's important to create friendships and connections with my neighbors (I know hardly anyone in the neighborhood), something that has been neglected throughout 2020. Maybe this upcoming year will see some sort of breakthrough in my own spiritual journey. Maybe. The Cancer of 2020 This week marks another surgery for Gayle. She needs to get her chemotherapy port "installed", which will require another out-patient surgery, another dose of general anesthesia, another afternoon in a waiting room where I watch the sunlight slide across the carpet to an early sunset. I'm yearning here for a quick recovery and that the process not take as long as last time. I'm sure it won't. The fact that we're at this particular part in our journey against Gayle's breast cancer is hard for me to come to grips with. There are so many things that have made me despise this year, but Gayle's cancer is by far the largest. We've done a fair job of using the holidays as distractions, keeping the need to focus on our annual celebrations as excuse to avoid thinking about the necessary steps. We did that with Thanksgiving; we did it again with Christmas. Once the holidays were over, however, reality came knocking like a debt collector on our door and now we have no choice but to face what's in front of us. Here's what is currently most on my mind about the cancer issue: Like so many people, I've been holding on to the hope the arrival of the vaccine would provide. The light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel is glimmering and could even possibly be sunlight. The conclusion of this pandemic's nightmare feels tantalizingly close. Real life and normality are returning…but not for us. After going through this hellacious year with the entire world suffering with us (to an extent) gave, if nothing else, a sense of solidarity and mutually shared and -endured hardships. But not for us. The hardest trial we have to face right now is stretching before us all the way into the early days of summer. I won't be able to attend my school's graduation without knowing that there's another chemo appointment either just passed or on the horizon. I'm looking down the barrel of another half year of difficulty and stress. It's possible that many people's goodwill toward us was heightened by the pandemic (and I'm grateful for that; the amount of help that people have extended to our family will always be a highlight of a dark year), when we were all having a hard time. But when the vaccine has finally added up to pulling the numbers down, we will still be in survival mode. We will still be taking each day as its own challenge, focused on trying to accomplish the most we can with what we have. We will remain in the crucible while so many others will be able to move into the next stage of rebuilding. It's hard to not feel a bit of acrimony over that. And while I acknowledge the great blessing and privilege I have that this is our grand trial (rather than, say, the manifold miseries that this world could otherwise offer), that doesn't diminish the fact that this is one of the hardest things I will ever have to do…and I'm not even the one who is going through with it. Up until 2020, the worst year of my life was 2007--my oldest's two emergency heart surgeries were some of the hardest things I've ever been through--and this year is the year that keeps on giving. I yearn for this nightmare to be over, to leave us alone, to move on…I yearn to move on myself, but the tendrils of 2020 are perfidious and plentiful, stretching into the future to corrupt us in ways both visible (the divisions of the country will not be miraculously healed because of a change in political parties) and invisible. I'm done with the problems of 2020; the problems, however, aren't done with me. The Sacrifice of 2020 Though it may seem contradictory to what I was saying in the Cancer of 2020, there has been something that has weighing on me for the past five-or-so months. I write this hesitantly, knowing that some who read this may feel called out and/or attacked by what I have to say. I'm speaking in broad terms and generalities, for the most part, though there are no broad terms that don't encompass some individuals. There isn't a way to sugar coat my feelings here, which are raw and angry. If you're not interested in seeing that, feel free to skip ahead to the next topic. Or stop reading, I guess, that's okay, too. At the beginning of the pandemic, back when we were unsure about what to do and what, exactly, would be required of us, there was a sense of communal response, mutual responsibility, and joint reaction to the immense trial in front of us. We were throwing down tracks as the train barreled behind us, responding to contradictory impulses as best we could. Education, economy, and governmental authority all started straining in ways that we didn't know how to handle. School was dismissed and moved online, with poor results happening for the majority of students. Business had to close down for a bit, and when they reopened, lukewarm support from states forced other businesses to stand up for public health, leading to the sorts of viral videos of entitled white folks screaming at Costco employees because of the business' requirement for a mask to enter the premises. The governor's vacillation and unclear explanations about what public health needs were added to the confusion. This is a story we all know. As the summer waned and the pending school year loomed, it became clear to me that the people of my state were never actually interested in the lives of others. The way we drive in Utah is, apparently, the way we view the world: Incidental to us and there for our exclusive use. We, and only we, matter. Everyone else can, well, die a preventable death. The data are pretty clear: Every time there was a call for the community to sacrifice for the betterment of the entire state, it was ignored. Mask mandates in schools were a hot button issue for a while, if you recall, because some people viewed the possibility of a teacher getting sick because of COVID-19 exposure a price they were willing to pay. The speed with which teachers went from being praised during the spring and derided (and, let's be brutally honest here, threatened with death) during the fall truly was breathtaking. We teachers were asked to put it all on the line while every Chad and Karen out there got to lather up their indignation at the idea of wearing a mask to the store. And skipping a holiday? Upset traditions? Oh, well, that was not a sacrifice they were willing to make. This hits me very deeply. I got sick with COVID-19, brought it home, infected three other members of my family, and could have been responsible for the death of my oldest son, because Utah was willing to do piss-all to get the virus under control. Utah has been doing horribly with the COVID response, with cases constantly escalating, ICU beds beyond safe occupancy, and an ever-increasing death count that--considering the sparsity of our population--is mind-numbing. Utah failed me entirely. I was told that if I did the right things--washed hands, cleaned down surfaces, kept my distance, wore a mask--I would be "safe" at my school. I wasn't. I was lied to. Like many (I don't even know if I can say most), I sacrificed a huge amount this summer. Every time I stepped out of my house, I knew I was putting myself and my family at risk. So I minimized those. We skipped every family gathering--from my sister's wedding to my nephew's baptism to each birthday and holiday. Oh, sure, we visited in the backyard with masks on from a safe distance on Mother's Day, but we didn't have a Mother's Day dinner together. We didn't go when I could see my siblings or my kids their cousins. We went, just us, for a quick visit in the backyard. And every time I did something like that, I felt guilty for not being more careful, for not taking "one for the team" and letting go of what I wanted so that the state could be healthy again. But it was a waste. I contracted COVID from a student--one who had been sick the week before but his parents wanted him at school so that they could go to work--and it very nearly led to a coffin and a tombstone. For over three hundred thousand Americans, it actually did lead to the cemetery. Yet the sacrifices of the rest of our country is too much? Those deaths are a price they have to pay in order to disrupt others' lives the least amount possible? Each time I see a video of people being together, or hear about other people's kids going off to play with their friends, I'm reminded that my children have not been in their friends' houses since March. More than an entire year of my kids' childhoods has been stolen from them by this virus. At the outset, I thought that we were "all in this together!" but it's clear by the roving bands of maskless teenagers that I see slouching through the neighborhood, the "sovereign nation" types strutting about the stores without keeping their distance while their mask is below their chins, the lies of parents who Tylenol their kid before sending them off to school with symptoms, and a litany of other stark examples that we are not in this together. We are in this alone. One thing my self-sacrifice taught me quite clearly: It doesn't matter what I do if others don't sacrifice with me. If it were a simple matter of the Dowdle family taking the rules of the pandemic seriously, we wouldn't have COVID in the state. But I have to rely on everyone else to do something for (and I know this is shocking and monstrous to dare dream) someone else. That, it has been made quite transparent to me, is asking too much of the community I live in. My responsibility for keeping my family safe was one that I took very seriously. I'm not saying that I was perfect at the lockdown. I'm human, too, and there were times I caved. Yet each infraction of the rules--we visited Sanpete county during the summer because there were very few cases there, despite knowing that traveling was a risk--made me feel guilty. Nevertheless, I do the most I can as often as I can to try to help put an end to this pandemic. So when I see videos on social media of family gatherings for the holidays, where mixed families have come together to do their annual traditions, with all the fixings, trimmings, and habits unchanged, it hurts me. When I see news clips of college-aged kids going to parties, dancing and singing without masks or social distancing, it hurts me. When I catch a glimpse of a selfie taken during 2020 with two friends who "haven't seen each other in ages!" smiling with their heads close together, it hurts me. Time and again I look out to see the solidarity of action. Instead I see the indifference to human suffering that has made America the world leader in both COVID cases and deaths. We have more than doubled the number of dead that World War I claimed, and it seems as though we're well on our way to have more dead to COVID than we lost in fighting on two fronts during World War II. As other countries demonstrated, it didn't have to be this way. We were told how we could save lives; we just felt that our lives were more important. And you know what hurts the most? Being a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints means that, in part, I am supposed to "mourn with those who mourn". Yet so often it's members of the Church that I see who are doing the very things that are causing others to mourn. (The kid who brought COVID to my class? You guessed it: His family that sent him to school sick is LDS.) Yeah. That's the one that really hurts. COVID isn't going away. The coronavirus is potent, potentially mutating, and more of a threat now than it has been before. The vaccine still has question marks about whether or not inoculated people are still capable of transmitting the disease, to say nothing about its safety for non-adult people. My son wants the vaccine, but we don't know when we'll be able to say it's safe for half-hearted folks. The anti-vax and anti-mask movements have much more potency than logic would dictate is possible, and the fact is, we need more people to become vaccinated than have indicated that they would. The need for other people to sacrifice for each other is just as high as ever. But when has that ever meant people will do the right thing? So I yearn for my sacrifices to not feel invalidated by the selfishness of others. I yearn for some sort of solidarity and recognition of the crises we're facing. I yearn for a stopping of the hurt. The End of 2020 The year closes in four days (at the time of this writing). I have written about 480,000 words thus far. I had the chance to teach a Harry Potter class that was magical, generating worthwhile memories for the students involved. I have taught in all sorts of new ways that I had never anticipated, including livestreaming a lesson from my car while stuck in line for my COVID test. I have been rocked by personal tragedies, familial struggles, and societal unrest. I have been reprimanded for speaking up for Black lives and saying that they matter. I have missed more days of work than I have cumulatively missed throughout my entire career. Almost all of my goals ended as failures or were forgotten outright. There is precious little that I will cherish or treasure from this year. While there were moments of gasped-in air, the majority of this year I spent drowning. I yearn for this year to end. As the eleventh month of 2020 begins, I found myself drawn to a map. See, I had this partially formed idea of a story that could be fun to write for NaNoWriMo this year. Unfortunately, I don't know if that's really something I should commit to, what with my wife's recent breast cancer diagnosis. While the treatment looks, at this point, pretty straightforward, I don't know if NaNoWriMo is right (write?) for me this year. If I choose not to participate, it'll be the first time since 2015 that I haven't been a part of the writing challenge. I'm the kind of guy who, when he's experienced a positive thing once, believes he must always experience that positive thing again. This is one of the reasons that I return to It every summer since 2017, why I look forward to October and my teaching of Paradise Lost, and even the fact that I really like commencement ceremonies at the end of the school year. These--and many others--seem to make up the repetitious threads of my life's fabric. Omitting them can be almost painful sometimes.
But if COVID-19 has taught me one thing only, it's that we can let go of the barnacles of tradition. After all, yesterday's Halloween celebration was decidedly less-than-familiar: We barricaded our porch with decorations and pumpkins. My younglings, dressed in cobbled-together costumes, dropped the Halloween candy through a six foot tube from our porch and out the mouth of a pumpkin carved to look like it was puking. A handful of trick-or-treaters showed up; a couple of them laughed at my middle child's costume (dressed as the Orange One from Among Us). I stayed inside where I played zombie video games. By 8:30, the boys were cold, no one had come to the door, and so we settled in to watch Ghostbusters. Pretty tame Halloween, to be honest. This morning, I awoke at what felt the normal time, only to be surprise that it was only 7:30am. It took a bit to realize that the clocks had done their biannual treason and I was again in Mountain Standard Time. I normally don't mind the "fall back" part of clock transition, though this time--Ahaha ha--it did take me by surprise. After filtering into consciousness via social media doomscrolling, I got up and got ready for the day. With the boon of an extra hour, I sat down and started a tentative first chapter of the ghost of a story that's in my mind. May as well try, I figured to myself, since you've the extra time. Two hundred words later, I wasn't about to return to the page. See, I'd set the story in the dimly familiar locale of southern Florida. I served my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Miami back in '02 through '04. I still have a lot of fond memories of those two years--and a lot of bad ones, too, as all important experiences bring with them--and that was the primary motivation for me choosing to have this NaNoWriMo idea take place there. After all, I'd spent a couple of years really traversing the area (albeit behind the wheel of a car) and learning a lot about the Latin community that inhabits it. What better way to add a dash of verisimilitude to my story's stew than with a revisit to my old tracting-grounds? My story involves a middle school student, so my first order of business was to dig around and see what middle- or junior high schools were in my favorite area of Hammocks. Despite knowing, even as a barely-even-twenty-year-old missionary, that I wanted to one day be a teacher, I didn't put a lot of time in learning about the school system of Florida. Sure, I probably asked more questions about school than most missionaries did, but I remember really only learning that they started--and got out of--the school year later than I was used to, and that they didn't like the statewide test. Some things don't change, regardless of where you are. I had some faded memories of noting that there seemed to be more external hallways, as well as a tendency to have multiple floors (which was odd to me: My high school's design is a sprawling single-story affair, though I've come to learn that my experience is hardly the norm). But what else was I missing? I hadn't asked kids what it was like to go to school near the turn of the millennium back when I had the chance. I could maybe ask some of my social media contacts--though I don't know if I'm going to put enough effort into this story to make it worth soaking up someone else's time. At any rate, I started poking around, trying to find schools that I maybe biked past during my final few weeks in the sweltering suburb of The Hammocks. It didn't take long before I found the old Little Caesars Pizza where my roommates and I would frequent--usually once a week--to buy ourselves (each, no less) a Hot-N-Ready pie. Shoving past the fog of years, I used Google Maps' Street View feature to plop myself in the middle of Hammocks Boulevard. Off to one side was the familiar-yet-forgotten archway leading into the Blossoms subdivision. A member family--an older couple, if I remember rightly--lived at the far end of that street (which is pictured at the top of this post). Seeing it gave me a jolt. Not surprising that it was the same place I had passed so many times, but that I had actually found a piece of my memory on my little computer screen. I slid down the digital road for a bit, noting Hammocks Middle School to my right (as I was trying to retrace my decade-and-a-half old bike path home, I immediately headed north). I had never noticed it before; or if I had, I'd forgotten. I tried to find my old apartment; no luck, though I think I may have come close to finding it. (Didn't I use to live just off of SW 154th Ave? If so, what was the lane, if it was indeed on a lane?) The then-familiar turns are now lost, to say nothing of the difference of tapping my way through the streets as opposed to cruising on my bright yellow 15-speed bike, right-pantleg tucked into a sock to keep it from being eaten by the gears, tie flapping in the humid breeze. I hunted down the chapel where I attended services, where I helped baptize the last family on my mission in May of 2004, a couple of weeks before I returned home. I smiled in fond remembrance at seeing the Publix nearby, marked on the Google Map with the white grocery cart on a blue field. Seeing that reminds me of the Miamian habit to abscond from the grocery store with the cart (many of the people lived close enough that they didn't need to drive or they were carless), resulting in occasional graveyards of abandoned wire carts on the side of the road. My companion and I, biking past them, would do an impromptu joust where we would give a nearby shopping cart a swift kick as we cruised past. If we could knock it over, we won. I only won once, though it nearly sent me toppling over, too. (As a 130 pound--maybe 150 counting the bike--elder with a poor grasp of Newton's Third Law of Motion, I didn't realize how solid a wire cart really is; I understand that better now.) I tried to find other familiar landmarks, with the occasional, "Wait, I think I remember that!" mumbled as I zoomed in and out on the map. I cruised to other areas where I'd live, including Hollywood (we're still in Florida, mind you) and stared at the bizarre-yet-endearing semicircle roads that spiral off of some of the traffic circles there. I looked over Bayside, where we missionaries would sometimes spend our preparation days. I gave a fond sigh as I looked at the grid-like (and completely out of sync address system) of Hialeah. Memories of October 2003 came, when the Marlins won the World Series and bedlam brought us out of our apartment. (Missionaries for the Church aren't allowed TVs or to listen to the radio at that time, so while we knew that the World Series was going on, we didn't know any details. I, personally, don't think there's a way for me to care less about baseball, but I was still happy that the entire city, it seemed, was happy.) Cars honked, people shouted, and it sounded almost like we were being invaded. But, no. Just baseball. Other recollections slip in and out of my mind, not only as I fiddled with the map but also as I write this essay. I don't consider my mission often--or, more accurately, I don't dwell on my mission often. Every time I speak Spanish, it comes with it a whiff of humidity and too-sharp sunlight. Whenever my "second state" does something newsworthy (which is now memetic, even), I think about some of those places that I took for granted, took for constant. It's natural to do so. Yet locations are Horcruxes of memories: They're places where parts of our souls are shaved off and stored, personal snapshots in the photo albums of our minds. Revisiting your elementary school, saying goodbye to your grandparents' home, driving past the turn to your first apartment as a married couple…these nostalgic particles drift around, undisturbed until some excuse puts you back in the place where you once were. Not all of these memories are fond ones--the waiting rooms in children hospitals, the intersection where you almost died--but they're part of the wheres of what makes up our whos. Looking over the maps that I used to pore over in the evening while trying to determine where I would go to work the next day reminded me that it was one thing to see the world this way--removed and above, complete and broad--and quite another to live it. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick has a line that has long stood out to me, and I think that he's pointing at what I'm trying to say. "It is not drawn down on any map; true places never are." I have long struggled with my addiction to Twitter. I gave it up for Lent, then was right back on the thing as soon as it was "allowed" again. I spend approximately two minutes (not exaggerating) a day on Facebook and multiple hours--spread throughout the day--on the bird-platform. I've talked about it before, so I don't need to rehash old statements. The long and the short of it (#shakespeareiseverywhere) is that I prefer that social media to the Book of Faces.
One of the reasons that I like Twitter so much is that it gives me a chance to read from a lot of unexpected sources and get insights into what a lot of people are talking about. I've purged my follow list a couple of times, trying each time to focus more on what I really want out of the platform: Information regarding agents, writers, and goings-on in the world of my interests (teaching and publication and comic books and video games and Shakespeare and…and…). I do a poor- to fair job parsing down the accounts, then tend to accumulate more and more until I need to winnow again. It seems that time is upon me again. What's happening is kind of inside baseball (to use a phrase I know exists but doesn't make any sense to me), but the basic thrust is this: Comic book and book publishing are getting their turns in the sunlight, and it isn't a pretty sight. I don't buy a lot of comics these days--I don't buy a lot of anything, thanks to Ms. Rona--so I don't know exactly who's doing what and how they're abusing their power. However, this site helps put a finger on the reckoning that's going on. It isn't just comic books, either: The reason that I even found the aforelinked website is because a writer named Myke Cole and his friend (and fellow writer) Sam Sykes both are dealing with allegations of misconduct and abuse. I say allegations, but Myke Cole, during the heat of the #MeToo movement, wrote about it in February 2018--and it seems like he hadn't changed his attitudes or behaviors. I don't know the details of the newest stuff, but both he and Sam Sykes have been called out as perpetrators of sexual harassment. I own one book each from the two men, though I've never read them. (I'm a fan of ebooks in principle, though I tend to prefer non-fiction on my ereader, and since both of the purchases were electronic, well…) Their main interest to me was watching them banter across the internet in some decidedly hilarious interactions. Cole had a lot of worthwhile things to say about the recent protests, about how white supremacy usurps and twists historical concepts to serve their purposes, and the need for police defunding and abolition. Sykes had a number of insightful threads about the creative and writing process, and he was a great amplifier for artists whose work he liked. As far as I knew, they were just normal creatives on Twitter with books for sale. I guess I was right: They were "normal". And that's the problem. It's not hard (like, really not hard at all) to recognize that all people deserve to be treated as human, that their consent and preferences be taken into account when interacting with them, and that they should never be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Women in particular (and by that, of course, I include transwomen--because they're women, obvs--and non-binary people who rely on female designations for whatever reason) are human beings with equal rights, boundaries, and personal agency. Yet women in particular end up becoming targets of sexual harassment (and worse) far too often. Men, too, are put into compromised positions by others in power. It is an abhorrent reality that too many people face. The #MeToo movement helped show us how pervasive sexual misconduct (to put a too-polite word on the behavior) is within American society. Misogyny in any form ought to be anathema to, well, everyone. It has no place in our world. …except that it's here. It doesn't deserve to be here. It's like the divine right of kings: At best a relic of an antiquated age that needs no renaissance, at worst a tool that some may seek to remain in power for whatever personal gain they hope to achieve. (And lest you think that there aren't a lot of people who wish for a king in America, you perhaps haven't been paying attention to the loudest and most ardent followers of President Trump.) Misogyny (and its less-frequently seen sibling, misandry) shouldn't be in the world, yet it is. And we have to do something about it. No cancer is cured without intervention; no malady of humankind will go away without confrontation. There are lots of complexities in this issue, but the part that is most salient, I think, is a recognition of power. As cis-het White males who've been published, both Cole and Sykes are in positions that create a power imbalance. Power imbalances are inherent in our system--parent/child, teacher/student, politician/voter (in theory), employer/employee--and the differences in power positions is the area in which abuses are most likely to occur. The idea that an abuser can do heinous things and get away with it is one of the ways that these power imbalances become more and more entrenched. In the case of two published and visible (comparatively) writers, there's an additional power dynamic that a non-writer may not immediately see: Envy. I can't speak for other creative enterprises (though I imagine it's pretty similar), but in the writing community, aspiring writers are the most vocal and eager component of a fanbase. Book signings are often scenes of long lines of would-be writers hoping to get a bit of the signee's luck to rub off on them. The reason is pretty simple: It is extremely hard to break into writing. It's even harder to make a career out of it. And it's next to impossible to gain a wide readership. The competition is omnipresent and fierce. Going to a writer's conference is going into a place where the air has been replaced with desperation. Aspirants are desperate to learn something that will get them on the other side of the panel--to have "made it" and to be the one dispensing advice rather than writing it down. Published authors are desperate to keep their success going--to shill their books to the attendees and hope that the can earn out sometime in the near future. Editors are desperate to find someone whose work will provide a stable residual income for them; agents are desperate to strike a partnership with someone whose writing they love. Despite the fact that everyone is desperate, there are different degrees here. Power is strongest in the editors. They tend to be the ones acquiring the new talent, going to bat for the new books and new authors. This means that the editors have additional leverage over people who are desperate, and that increased power can far too often translate into heinous abuses. (A non-writing example would have to be Harvey Weinstein, who doesn't need any more thought spared to him.) Though neither Cole nor Sykes is an editor, they're both guys who "made it". They're one step closer to the dream. That means that people who might not normally accept an off-color or sexually suggestive remark will give a partial laugh and half-smile when it comes from an author that they like, or an agent they're thinking of querying. Richard Paul Evens learned the hard way that giving an unsolicited hug to fans can cross a line he didn't realize was there--and he did it, as the article says, probably "thousands of times". Were there thousands of victims? No. But there were some, and they were victimized because of the power imbalance. (Another example of this, though its effects are more diffuse: J.K. Rowling, despite having a lot of progressive concepts and values in her books, is a TERF, and she's recently come under fire for comments that dismiss transwomen. In this case, her power is less personal--she has an immense influence in the writing world, despite the fact that she isn't writing nearly as much as she has in the past--and it has turned into a flashpoint for a number of fans. So while you couldn't say that a specific person is harmed by Rowling's statements in the same way that the victims of Cole's or Sykes' behavior have been, there's still a kind of abuse that's happening here.) The results of these allegations have come rapidly. Cole has removed himself from Twitter for the foreseeable future; Sykes is insisting that victims continue to speak out. Everyone responds to this situation in slightly different ways. In my case, I remain in an uncomfortable crux that I've been in for many years now: What to do with the fact that human beings are behind so many of the things that I love. This isn't to dismiss the negative things that come from the embedded misogyny and racism that has built the world I live in. Being human means making mistakes, of course, but that doesn't mean that success should be deprived you because of those mistakes--but neither does it mean that second (or third or tenth) chances should be afforded, either. In some cases, it's a matter of reception. Milton and Shakespeare are near and dear to my heart and they're also emblematic of the Dead White Male that dominates the English departments. Eve in Paradise Lost moves between shockingly original and disappointingly dismissed. Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is a portrait of Stockholm Syndrome and one of the great tragedies in the canon, despite being a comedy. How can I maintain my feminist credentials, as it were, when embracing these two anti-women writers? Neither Milton nor Shakespeare can be "cancelled"--their presence in the world of letters is settled, at least during my lifetime. Their works are crucial to our modern identities, regardless of whether or not we recognize it. And I can't very well stop buying Milton or Shakespeare--they aren't getting royalties, and voting with my wallet will do nothing to their reputation. If economics is the barometer, the Bard and the prophet-bard are safe from reprisal. But what about Rowling, Cole, Sykes, or any other number of "problematic" authors who've done/said something that shows a sinister side to them that I can't agree with? My dollars will support Orson Scott Card if I buy his book, which means that I continue to empower a known- and proud homophobe. Is buying another round of butterbeer at Universal Studios only prolonging how long Rowling will be visible, pertinent, and capable of spreading her misconceptions about women? Now that I've purchased their books, is my continued non-reading of Cole and Sykes a way of boycotting them? And how is that different than the fact that I haven't gotten around to reading their books in the first place? These kinds of questions have been on my mind, as I said before, for years. And while I may have given examples that don't resonate with you. Maybe there are other views that these people espouse that you fundamentally disagree with--like Cole's calls to abolish the police. So you're okay with seeing his career end (will it, though?) or go on an unexpected and prolonged hiatus. You now will no longer buy books from a guy you weren't planning on buying from anyway. Have you done something to him? A creative's life is one of perpetual rejection (most of it's hidden, as authors don't stalk bookstores and feel personally offended when every patron who walked past her book on the aisle leaves without even picking up the book), so are you doing anything by boycotting his books? People talk about voting with their wallets all of the time--I used the phrase myself in the course of this essay--but I don't think it's quite as clear cut as we'd like to assume. After all, you may be able to buy a book from Rowling or Card or Sykes or Cole, but you could just as easily buy a book from Okorafor or Kuang or Chu or Kowal. All of these authors write in the same science fiction/fantasy genre, so why not pick one of these "less problematic" writers? Except you can't go to Hogwarts with Kuang and Okorfor's version of Ender is a Black girl named Binti, and does Kowal have as much fantasy violence in her books? In other words, you normally can't read one person's book and get the same story from a different author. So if Hogwarts means something important to me, something crucial, then I can't just go anywhere else. See? It's complicated… Or maybe it isn't. What's the difference between writers anyway? If you don't like one person's story, buy someone else's. Write your own books (which only makes sense to anyone who's never tried to write a book before). Don't do research into the humans who make your art. Don't expect them to abide by your own morals. Only buy from those who share your morals. Only retread what you've seen before, keeping your diet safe and vanilla, hypoallergenic and without surprises. Refrain from interpreting, interpolating, or interrogating the books you read--it's just fiction, it's just a story. No need to put anything else into it. I don't know how to square this circle. I bring it up from time to time in an attempt to get my feelings figured out, but it always slips free. I don't want to support people who've done harmful things. I don't want to give a pass to creators whose content I like simply because I like what they've made. I also have to acknowledge that someone has a problem with everything that I like for a whole host of reasons, so I have to understand what my own lines in the sand are…and what that says about me. Lastly, what this whole sordid tale exposes to me is the reality that I, too, have made mistakes. Never have I knowingly acted in a way that was intended to be inappropriate or harassing, sexually or otherwise. But that doesn't mean that I haven't been the reason someone felt unsafe or that I had ulterior motives in what I said or did. I know that there have been times--I can think of a couple--where brave women told me that what I was doing was making them uncomfortable. I immediately apologized and changed my behavior and that was the end of it. How many times have I inadvertently "shot mine arrow o'er the house, / And hurt my brother" (Hamlet 5.2) or sister? Lots of questions, I fear. And, as it happens so often for me, precious few answers. In the past year and a bit, there have been three notable video game releases--Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 3 Remake, and Final Fantasy VII Remake. I wrote about Resident Evil 2 Remake back in January 2019 when I finished it for the first time. I have since replayed it a good three or four times, still enjoying it quite thoroughly. In fact, in anticipation for RE3 coming out at the beginning of April, I replayed RE2 and had a great time blasting my way through the infected of Racoon City yet again.
But what I was really waiting for was Final Fantasy VII Remake. I have an enormous soft-spot in my heart for Cloud and his colorful crew--enough that I should maybe expand on some of what I talked about back in January of 2018--and I have been waiting and hoping for this game for over a decade. Really, ever since Advent Children came out, I wanted to see LEGO-style Cloud remade with newer graphics and video game mechanics. When Square Enix announced that FFVII Remake would be a reality and that we need only wait a bit longer, I was skeptical. After a certain amount of time, anticipation far outstrips what can be delivered. (This is the problem with Half Life 3, though there are stirrings about that actually coming to pass…) It's hard not to be excited about something that you're, you know, excited about. But the more I focus on wanting a thing, the less impressive it tends to be when I finally get it. So, I specifically avoided watching trailers (except for a couple of times, when the temptation was too great), and I did my best to think on other things. However, as it got closer, the demo dropped, and I was immediately excited--I played through the demo twice the day I downloaded it. Suffice to say, I have been a rather-pampered gamer in the past little while. In fact, that's what I wanted to talk about (I will try to write a review of both RE3 and FFVII in the near future, while the experience playing the games is still fresh): The strange way iterations in the video game medium differ from other media. Make vs. Remake Films are notorious for this: We have classic films that Hollywood knows contain a lot of quality, and they get remade with modern sensibilities, acting styles, costumes, and special effects. Almost always, they are an inferior product. I'm not a huge film nerd, but I can, off the top of my head, list a handful of movie "reboots" or remakes that failed to make a lasting impression. The Mummy, Godzilla, Ben Hur, Clash of the Titans, Total Recall, and Robocop all came and went with hardly a note. In fact, the aborted "Dark Universe" was supposed to be a cinematic contender of the classic Universal monster movies against Marvel's undisputed creations, but fell apart at inception because of many reasons that aren't really relevant here. The point is, with just over a century of film history, we've repeated film ideas constantly. It isn't like film invented this phenomenon, though. Lost to us now, there is a version of Hamlet from the late 1580s (maybe early 1590s?) that we only know about because people wrote about how bad it was. Maybe it was an early draft of the play that Shakespeare himself wrote (which is what Harold Bloom argues), or maybe it was just a trashy version of a familiar story. What Shakespeare went on to write--the Hamlet that has changed the world--is, on a story level, a reboot of the Ur-Hamlet. (And, yes, I would love to read that play.) But even Ur-Hamlet is based upon a Danish story about a prince named Amleth (whose name cracks me up…just relocating the last letter to the front and boom! new name). In fact, almost every story that Shakespeare told was actually a retelling--and he did it better than anyone else. Drama, being the forebearer to film, that makes sense. But even in poetry--arguably our oldest form of permanent communication--we see retellings and reimaginings. While The Aeneid is more of a spin-off from The Iliad, we see Homeric and Virgilian echoes throughout almost all of history. New forms take the epics and uses their tropes to experience the stories again (think, for example, of the experimental novel Ulysses). Even the Bible isn't free from retellings, as the sublime and unsurpassable Paradise Lost shows. What's the reason for this? Being a would-be writer, I understand this impulse. Some stories--and, in many ways, the way the stories are told--have an unexpected influence on a person. A creative person often will take that influential energy and redirect it through their own lens and talents in a hope to glean a piece of the original's power and put it into their own work. I despair of my own writings when I read Steinbeck or It, because I can't reach the level that I see. I want to try my hand at those influential stories--it's the reason I retold Hamlet for my NaNoWriMo 2019--and see if I can "do what they did". But as a consumer, it's a desire to reclaim the awe the original inspired. I envy anyone who gets to come to Paradise Lost for the first time, or experience It without expectations or prior knowledge. There's something inside of these stories that can't be caught anywhere else--but that doesn't mean we don't want to try. Within the Digital I understand why people want to retell and rework and reimagine and remake their stories. What's so fascinating to me about this phenomenon in video games, though, is why they want to try again: The technology has improved. Assuming Bloom is right and Shakespeare decided to try the story of Hamlet again, it wasn't because there was a new innovation in the medium of his story. It wasn't like they discovered they could have stereoscopic sound in the Globe Theatre. There wasn't a technological advancement in printing that made Milton think that the story of Genesis could now be told in epic poetry. (In fact, his choice of epic poetry was a commercial risk, as nobody read or wrote in that format anymore; he was using an antiquated format for his Bible fanfic.) Final Fantasy VII was originally released on the PlayStation because that console had the greatest amount of power available to the developers at the time. They crammed as much content as they could into three CD-ROMs, using every shortcut* they could to be able to tell the story as possible. The limitations of their technology prevented them from doing all that they wished to do. With the continual increase of processing power, photo-realistic graphics, and improvements on acting capture (a level beyond motion capture) technology, video games now have the ability to tell their stories more fully, with greater detail and precision than ever before. The medium itself is changed. So the desire to revisit that which was technologically-confined is, I think, understandable. But what surprises me is that these remakes are, from a standpoint unaffected by nostalgia, superior to the originals that inspired them. And that is a controversial statement. The Power of Nostalgia There's another form of iteration at play here: As rising generations--in this case, the much-maligned Millennials of which I am one--begin to create, they often recreate. It's a call-back to a "simpler" time (simple only because the creator was a child during that time, and most kids have the innocence of childhood to paste over the hard parts of history). I think the best example would have to be Back to the Future, where the modern (1985) clashes with the idyllic (1955). The majority of that film takes place in the fifties, with only the framing concept being in the eighties. The stuff that was modern to Marty Macfly is nostalgic to me now. Stranger Things takes this feeling as the primary part of its appeal (even though it's technically historical urban science fiction--not a particularly large genre, to be honest). It's common for this to happen: Soon enough, early 2000 pop-culture will be used in our stories as creators who have fond memories of a pre-9/11 world will take creative control over our television, movies, novels, and video games and use that nostalgia as fuel for interest in their creations. That is the nature of how we tell stories, I think. Originality is simply a combination of two previously uncombined elements, but those elements still exist. We can find fingerprints of others throughout any story, if we really try. What's happening now in the video game world, though, is that the power of nostalgia is being coupled with outstanding quality. Resident Evil 2 will always be one of my favorite video games. I played it countless times and could probably knock it out in a single afternoon with minimal saves if I really wanted. My long-standing fascination with zombies comes from that video game. (In fact, I tried writing a zombie story in middle school that involved an evil corporation that accidentally turned people into zombies and had to be stopped by the main character, a gun-toting, ponytailed girl who wasn't afraid of the monsters.) I have a huge amount of nostalgic appreciation for that game…but I don't recommend it. Not because of its violence or gore (which is so much worse in the remake), but because it's a product of the times and the technology. The voice acting is bad, the animations strange, the controls a mess…everything that we now use to judge a game's quality** renders Resident Evil 2 as a definite pass. Yes, it's influential and continued the survivor horror genre in video games. It's an important game. But it's no longer a "good" game…at least, not without context. Resident Evil 2 Remake, however, is excellent on almost every front. Again, without the nostalgia-glasses, it deserves the acclaim it's received and could be considered a better game than its original. If you add back in the nostalgia, its power is diminished a bit (since it can't ever be experienced in the same milieu of life in which I experienced the original), but only a bit. Where it fades (the twists and turns of the story aren't a surprise, for example), the nostalgia of being in the Racoon Police Department, hunting for the Diamond Key more than makes up for it. Final Remake Much of what I said about Resident Evil 2--and, by extension, Resident Evil 3--doesn't apply as much to FFVII. That game is still wonderful, and even has a retro vibe*** to it now. In fact, I insisted that my son play FFVII on his iPad before he played the remake on the PlayStation 4, as I didn't want him to create nostalgic memories of something that I didn't have. I wanted, in this particular case, his experience with Cloud to be dictated by the original PlayStation version. And I think I made the right choice (though my other boys won't have that experience, since they've watched me play FFVII Remake and have now started formulating their own childhood memories that will one day bloom into nostalgia). My oldest is at the perfect age to allow these types of memories to shape him and go with him. And while I think FFVII Remake is a remarkable game, the power of the connection between the original and me can't really be undone. I'll never be able to feel about Remake as I did about the nineties' version, because I'm not that person any more. I'm not in middle school in an America that had been at war since before I was born. I'm no longer living in a world with corded telephones and no home internet. What I made out of that game is contingent on when I encountered that game. So of course the remake can't really generate the same sort of feelings. Instead, whenever I play FFVII Remake in the future, it will remind me of this time, of the chaos and strangeness of living in quasi-quarantine as a virus ravages the world. The context of now will continue to affect how I feel about that game, just as the context of then affects me now. Still, it is remarkable to me that the video game industry is able to be iterative in its reiterations. I think there's more to this than happenstance, too, but I won't know for certain until we get remakes of things like Overwatch or Fortnite…and maybe we won't. Perhaps our technology has reached a place that current ideas can be realized fully on the first try (albeit with a patch or two), preventing the necessity of remaking anything. I guess we'll have to wait and see. --- * FFVII had "solved" the problem of not enough processing power by having all of the character models be simple geometric shapes, imbued with a subtlety of movement within their animations to convey their feelings. The other members of Cloud's party would disappear, walking into his body so that the game didn't have to render three characters at once. When they went on to develop Final Fantasy VIII, the developers at Squaresoft wanted to keep the models of the characters the same in the battle sequences as in the world--no more of that blocky, severely deformed character model idea. That desire nearly prevented the game from being completed, as it was one of the most difficult programming feats the developers had to do. ** Not the story, though…I've never seen the caliber of story as one of the graded components of a video game review *** If you were curious, I don't much care for retro aesthetic. I didn't like pixelated video games when that was all I could get. I disliked seeing cover art that looked so dissimilar from the product. Retro gaming doesn't appeal to me because it creates a false impression of nostalgia--it looks like my gaming past, but it's a brand new game that I didn't actually play. Without nostalgia to smooth over the rough (pixelated) edges, I don't get a lot from the game. At the end of February, I decided to do something that was a greater sacrifice for Lent than I normally do: I gave up being on Twitter. I didn't delete my account (though I did ditch the app on my phone), and I had a couple of visits there (sometimes a link from a news article took me to Twitter; I watched a Dave Matthews livestream from his home and tweeted how much I liked it; my website automatically shares a link whenever I publish a new essay), but for the most part, I did exactly what I said.
Here's the thing: I'm not Catholic. I have a few acquaintances, mostly from my quidditch days, who are Catholic. That isn't to say that I've a lot of claim to the tradition. Like much of my understanding of Mormonism and the culture of the Church, I recognize that Protestant--and, sometimes, even Puritan--influences have dictated what my religious experience encapsulates. My choice to participate in Lent had more to do with a desire for a kind of religious solidarity within my own tradition: The safest sort of religious experimentation that a person could do. The impetus is actually years old: I was talking to Dan Harmon, one of my quidditch buddies, who was came to my school to talk to my creative writing students about screenwriting (which he had studied in college). I took him out for lunch once the school day was over, and he readily agreed to eating pizza, which he'd given up for Lent. In subsequent conversations, it turned out that Dan wasn't Catholic, he just liked participating in these sorts of religious traditions. (I don't know what his current stance is on any of this, as I've lost contact with almost every vestige of my quidditch life.) That inspired me to try the same thing, using my Mormonic upbringing to conceptualize it in a way that made sense to me. To that end, I decided that, if I was going to do something for Lent, I would need to give up something that I would genuinely miss. For Dan, he gave up pizza; for me, I gave up Twitter. See, I have a hate/tolerate relationship with Facebook, but Twitter is a different animal. In Twitter, I feel as though I'm getting glimpses of other parts of the world. Yes, there's the center of a Venn diagram there: I follow certain people because of mutual interest. Authors, book agents, fellow teachers, dinosaur lovers, and comic book geeks inhabit my Twitter feed. (I also, quite begrudgingly, follow all of my representative legislators, though none really uses the platform for much of substance.) I also have made it a point to include LGBTQ+ and people of color in my timeline to give me an additional dose of "I didn't know that". In other words, Twitter helps broaden my view of life and living, with a lot of interesting things going on. And, boy, there are a lot of things going on right now. COVID-19's ravaging of the world is worth talking about, and the solidarity and commiseration that happens on social media is definitely one of the best parts about this crisis happening when it has. We've all had a good laugh at a post that was shared by a friend, neighbor, or whoever that perfectly recreates our own feelings. It's times like this when social media is at its best. Giving up Twitter, then, was a really hard decision. I made it before the crisis escalated to the point that our country's leadership could no longer deny it, and I think that was a good thing. It meant that I had already made the decision, so I didn't have to try to rationalize whether or not to commit. I'd done so; only thing left was to keep the course. At first, it was pretty difficult. I'm quite used to Twitter and would jump on during loading screens of video games, when I had a random thought to share, or just because I was bored with the conversation happening around me. Its ubiquity brought me comfort and I definitely dealt with a type of withdrawal. What helped--and what, I think, is the point of Lent--was that, during those first few days off the platform, every time I considered what I wanted to do and had to reject the "Go on Twitter" impulse, I had to think why I was missing it. End result? Participating in Lent meant that I thought about Jesus a lot more than usual. I'm convinced this is the intent of Lent, as it was a more authentic sacrifice than almost anything else at that moment in my life. I could have given up wearing a man-bun for Lent, but that wouldn't have mattered at all because I don't normally wear--or even much care for--the man-bun look. And though Twitter can have great value, its largest contribution in my life was to burn time trying to learn something new amid the constant stream of thoughts and words, 280 characters at a time, scrolling across my screen. Losing that but replacing it with the thought of "Hey, this reminds me of Jesus and His sacrifice that's coming up" made a difference in my life. The downside of this, however, is two-fold: One, I learned that I still need/want to scroll through social media. Two, that itch wasn't lost as much as transferred…to Facebook. I'm not a fan of Facebook. At all. Yes, there are some positive things about the website, and it could even be a good tool for improving the world. And, of course, the vast majority of people who read this essay will have become aware of its existence via Facebook. (I get the irony, folks.) Anyway, Facebook (as an entity; not individuals utilizing it) is not really improving the world, and it likely never will, but hey, at least there was potential at some point. As it stands, I don't like the platform for a number of reasons. Some are petty and nitpicky (I hate the fact that it doesn't automatically post the most recent posts--the fact that you can switch things around, only to have it change depending on the device you're using only makes it worse), while others are larger (Facebook is better at ads, especially the way it culls posted information to sell more stuff that I don't really need…and, yes, Twitter does this, too; they're just not as good at it). But there's one thing about Facebook that really grinds my gears: I know (almost) all of these people. That may sound counter-intuitive, as that's the entire point of Facebook. But Facebook is like dancing in a car at a red light: You think that you're pretty much doing your dance by yourself, only to realize that everyone you went to high school with is sitting in the car next to you, watching you with mixtures of embarrassment and interest. If a person on Twitter dislikes my hottake on something, I can block them and move on with my life. Detritus is as detritus does. But on Facebook, many of the responses to posts come from "friends" that I've accumulated over the years. Blocking or unfriending them comes with strings; there's a diplomacy, a politics involved with no longer being a part of someone's Facebook life that isn't as apparent in Twitter. If I don't like following a celebrity or an author because she says something stupid, then there's no real loss there. Facebook, however, changes the dynamic. If someone I know says something stupid, then it's in my face, again and again (because of that idiotic "Top Stories" default). Under normal circumstances, I can roll my eyes and choose not to engage with Facebook at all. I get my itch to scroll scratched elsewhere. But this year's timing between Lent and the COVID-19 crisis has meant that I couldn't scroll through Twitter whilst waiting for my video games to load. Instead, I was on Facebook a lot more, which meant that I was exposed to bad ideas more frequently. (And why is it that the worst ideas of your friends are the ones that show up the most often?) When it finally got too much and my distaste for the platform reached its zenith was when a friend from my mission posted memes and comments criticizing, downplaying, or entirely dismissing the quarantine. Now, I am no defender of America's response to the pandemic: We had a lot of warning that was ignored from the top down, and we still have a false-hope narrative that disregards science and history to try to mollify people. Until a vaccine that is tested, proven safe and effective, and ubiquitous, my family--with our half-hearted son--will be endangered by any premature "return to normal". Choosing to let our son out of the house is actually a life-and-death decision that we will have to formulate going forward. America has lost over 20,000 people at the time I'm writing this, and it's probably higher due to underreporting of numbers. Our lives permanently changed when 9/11 saw a tenth that number die--COVID-19 is going to radically alter America and the world. So when friends--not internet strangers or possible troll/bot accounts, but people I've broken bread with, been in their homes, took classes with in high school or college--spread idiocy like, well, a virus, it gets beyond tiresome. It gets dangerous. And it isn't just that someone else might read their meme and think, Hey, the quarantine is stupid! Sure, that might happen, but the danger comes from the further spreading of disinformation that is too easily shared. For example, I heard someone talking about a handful of different COVID-19 related stories: Almost all of them were either false or unproven. It's as if people are unaware that Snopes exists. Being exposed to that is damaging to my mental health, because the message I hear from falsely optimistic people, or those who don't actually maintain appropriate distances, or who go to the airport to welcome home missionaries in direct defiance of Church and state requests is a simple one: The life of your family is irrelevant. Living with an at-risk member of the populace means that I can't, in good conscience, head to the store with a mask on and think all will be fine and dandy. Living with an at-risk member of the populace means that I could be a vector of disease. As I told my students, half-hearted people don't get to survive pandemics. The only way to save my son's life--again--is to lockdown my home and take every precaution that I can. And as much as I recognize the heartache and sadness that comes from not celebrating Easter as a large, rowdy extended family dinner, it also means that we don't have to miss going to the funeral of someone we could have otherwise protected. So, yeah. I'm not a fan of Facebook. That's where I see the most frequent eye-rolls and yeah-rights of the whole pandemic issue. Is Twitter a better place than its competitor? I honestly have no idea. I haven't been on Twitter in multiple fortnights. I will say this, though: The only way I get through this potentially months-long tragedy-in-waiting is through the help of my friends. And Facebook gives me a view of many of them that tells me that may be a false hope. I hate seeing that. I hate feeling and thinking that. Yet I can't shake the sentiment. I learned that, while giving up Twitter for Jesus was good for my soul, Facebook certainly wasn't. The hard thing is, there's still something that I desire from social media. I want…something that social media provides. If I can find a way to scratch that itch a different way, I'd probably be less stressed and worried. Maybe I should start an Instagram account… In response to the COVID-19 outbreak and the dismissal of schools, I've been working at home this past week. It's been quite a strain to figure out how to create a viable and valuable experience for my students with events moving so quickly. One area that I'm trying to keep going is my Shakespeare class, which is an elective and isn't really designed for circumstances like this. One of my students, however, passed on a suggestion from her dad: Write about how Shakespeare responded to the plague. It was partly in jest, but it sent me down a rabbit-hole of research and made me think more about how lucky we are to have Shakespeare at all. So, without further ado (and a special welcome to my students whom I've sent here as this week's assignment), here are some of my thoughts on Shakespeare and disease. Shakespeare Shouldn't Have Lived The bubonic plague was one of two major plagues that ravaged Europe throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This plague has been studied a lot, with many different hypotheses about its source, its transmission, and much more. Rather than wade into the controversy, it's clear that bubonic plague came from bacteria, probably thanks to ticks that lived on rats and thereby spread. (Hygiene is important, folks; wash your hands and don't keep pet ticks, I guess.) Bubonic plague caused a swelling of the lymph nodes (buboes is the word used to describe this process; hence the name) that led to harsh, darkly colored splotches on the skin. Sometimes the buboes would get so large that treatment involved lancing and draining the swollen areas. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), this often led to a painful death. Pneumonic plague was highly contagious from person to person via sputum (y'know, what one expels during a cough or sneeze) and tended to be highly contagious for the same reasons that we're concerned about the novel coronavirus. In both cases, people didn't know what was the cause of the diseases, nor how to combat it. They did find that keeping their windows closed and fires stoked seemed to reduce the risk--probably because the homes were too hot for the rats to visit and so they left more people uninfected. The Shakespeare home on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon (which still stands to this day, is cared for by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and, humble bragging here, I've visited twice) was near an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1564--the year that William Shakespeare was born. Park Honan, a biographer of the Bard, imagines a terrified Mary Arden Shakespeare doing everything she could to keep her first-born son, William, safe from an invisible, insidious disease. Having buried children already, it's safe to assume that Honan isn't too far off. In all honesty, William should have died in his cradle and been buried in the graveyard of the Holy Trinity Church. With plague being essentially everywhere, it's a miracle that he survived long enough to write anything at all. Outbreaks of plague varied in intensity and lethality (the worst, of course, was the Black Death between 1347 and 1351 where approximately one-third of Europe ended up dead…maybe as many as 200 million by the end of it, though the numbers are disputable), but was always an issue. There's a reason that mortality rates are often quoted as being so low in the past: Infant mortality was incredibly high, which drags down the overall mortality rate. In the case of John and Mary Shakespeare, their family would eventually number eight, though only one of their four daughters (the second Joan) survived to adulthood. (If you care to know, the birth order was Joan, Margaret, William, Gilbert, Joan, Anne, Richard, and Edmund. There are more details in Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life if you're interested.) A Plague on Both Your Houses Shakespeare's adult life was predominantly spent in London. Countless hours of his life were spent on the boards of different theaters, mostly the Globe, where he enacted his own plays while writing new dramas that would fundamentally change the Western Canon. However, plague continued to, well, plague the City, which meant that there were major disruptions to his life because of the disease. On an almost week-to-week basis, the theaters could be closed if plague-deaths rose too sharply--say, thirty or forty deaths in the previous seven days--the playhouses would be closed. While there wasn't anything like advanced ticket sales to worry about reimbursing, Shakespeare and his troupe definitely lost money during times of public health emergencies. There were three different times when he had to close up the theater for a protracted amount of time, though: once in 1592, again in 1603 (with an outbreak so bad that the newly-crowned James I was unable to greet his English subjects), and lastly in 1607. The last one happened shortly after Lent, which was the only time that Shakespeare was steadily away from the theater anyway. So following a forced religious vacation, he then had a forced health hiatus. How long were these? Well, they varied: the Elizabethan closure saw him away from the stage for nearly twenty months, though there were a couple of brief seasons there. He spent almost a full year out of London in the 1603 outbreak, and something like sixteen months for the one four years later. Now, Shakespeare didn't rest during this time. Much like our shifting of habitual gears during our voluntary quarantine, there was still plenty to do. He just needed a place to do it. Many troupes would use this time as an excuse to get out of the packed city and out into the midlands of England, and Shakespeare's was no exception. In a way, it was a type of social distancing--rather than remaining in the cramped quarters of London, they would travel out into the countryside where they could tour from village to village, gaining a few shillings or so at each stop. For Shakespeare, he believed with the rest of the people of his time that it was the air--a miasma--that caused the sicknesses. Country air, it was believed, was more healthful and beneficial to the body. That fewer people were close together, a natural social distancing, is the more likely explanation as to why the country was, overall, less likely to be plague-afflicted. To go from place to place required money, of course, but it also required special permissions. A group of people couldn't simply travel through Yorkshire and put on plays at every town. If they tried, they could get in huge trouble. Not only that, but more puritanically-minded city-, town-, or village councils could reject the players before they even set up their portable stage. To overcome that, a troupe would need a patron. In the days of Queen Elizabeth, the players at the Globe were called the Lord Chamberlain's Men--they had the permission of the nobility to perform. This was a pass, as it were, to showcase their stories in many places throughout the realm. It was not, however, carte blanche, and there were ways of being overruled if a person of power took a disliking to them. With the advent of the Stuart king, the Lord Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men, with a royal dispensation to be allowed to perform. This allowed the company to continue on, despite the health problems besetting the country. Lessons Learned? As I researched and refreshed myself on this aspect of Shakespeare's life, I'm surprised by some of the things that are similar--and different--between our experience now and his. The social distancing was a natural consequence of being an agrarian society, one that we're far removed from. However, the government frequently took away the free exercise of market-behaviors from its people whenever the threat to the public's overall health was high. We haven't seen a lot of rebellion against this quarantine yet, and though it could very much be considered legal, there's always a possibility that the police powers that are being lightly used in our situation may turn into some nasty lawsuits later on. America isn't England--for obvious reasons--but we still have a tendency to do what we're asked when an existential threat like a disease threatens us. I'm also struck by the ingenuity of Shakespeare's work. He took the time to write additional plays--indeed, this may be one ingredient into why he was able to produce the staggering number of plays that he crafted--and diversified his skills by selling his pen to write some of his 154 sonnets. Like us, he surely got to spend more time at home and get to know his family a bit better. And, like us, that probably was a double-edged sword. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that disease stole away his only son, Hamnet, in 1596. There's not a lot to go on--a burial registry--but it's a stark reminder of the fragility of youth in the face of an invisible invader. Hamnet was 11; my second child turns 10 today. The idea that he would only have one year remaining him is too painful to entertain. I have no proof of this--after all, King John was written sometime in the 1590s, and perhaps even in 1596--but this speech given by Constance, a grieving mother, strikes me as reverberating with a greater depth of emotion than an imagination (even one as prodigious as Shakespeare's) would be unable to convey. I feel that these lines speak from experience: Grief fills the room up of my absent child, And there's also this to consider: Despite the dangers of living through these plague years, Shakespeare did survive. He gifted us the unparalleled endowment of his writing--another miracle, as is the fact that the writing was preserved--and changed the world as a result. Maybe, in a smaller way surely, we, too, will get through this difficult time with great gifts for the future.
My grandmother died at the end of January. I haven't written about it because I've had a lot of conflicting feelings about it. It was one of those She's been suffering and it was her time kinds of deaths, and I don't think that's wrong. She was in her nineties and had been slipping away from us pretty steadily over the past few years.
My grandma gave a lot to me, especially in my early years. I learned piano at her side, I mowed her lawn for a summer or two, and I went up to her house every month to play with cousins and listen to some Bible stories. She was generous and loving and kind--as well as happy and scolding and accepting and impatient. She was, in other words, a person, and a wonderful one at that. When I got word that she was in her final days, I had just stepped off of the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride at Universal Studios Hollywood, which caused more than a passing conflict of emotions. I had to kind of put the news out of my mind, as there wasn't a lot that I could do at the moment and there wasn't really much news at all…just that she'd fallen asleep and was no longer waking up. It took a bit of time for her to finally pass, which was late on Wednesday, 15 January. Earlier that week, despite the logistical problems of the day, my wife, children and I went to the care center to say goodbye. She didn't know that we were there--or, if she did, we had no way of knowing--and for my youngest, he hadn't any real memories of her save the declining woman in a wheelchair that he'd visited with his own grandmother on occasion. While we stood there, looking at her shriveled form, I pointed out that she was a lucky lady, as she'd been able to raise not only her kids, but to see her grandchildren (me) and her great-grandchildren (them). My oldest, who has a massive heart condition, said softly, "I probably won't be that lucky." That's when my heart cracked and I was unable to stop the tears that I'd stoppered while in the room. We said our goodbyes, dried our eyes, and left. We never saw her alive again. Part of what made me struggle so much with the death of my grandmother is embarrassingly selfish, a part that I'm loathe to put into words: I was, when it became clear that she was about to die, more upset that her funeral would prevent me from going to a writing retreat I'd had planned for months than because my grandmother was gone. I can rationalize some of this with the understanding that I have a few coping mechanisms that help keep me going, and attending a writing retreat is one of them. Mental health and self-care and all that. But it was a great frustration that I felt, as it were, emotionally blocked about processing Grandma's death because I was too inwardly preoccupied. Thankfully, we were able to reschedule the retreat so that my brother and I could come along--and, as it turned out, one of my fellow writers' grandmother died the day of the funeral, which meant the reschedule truly was for the best--but I still can't shake the feelings of selfishness and frustration at myself that I harbored during those days. The fact that it's now the ninth of February and I'm finally writing about this says a lot, I think, about how I felt. When the funeral came, it was the bittersweet experience of saying goodbye and nurturing the connections of the still-living, the quasi-reunion around a casket that is the paradox of death. I was happy to see my sister, who lives in Portland, as well as cousins whom I haven't seen in years. During the service, my dad spoke about his mother, playing some of the music that she loved to play on her piano--the soundtrack of my memories of her--and he cried. That was hard for me to see, not because I have a problem with seeing people cry, but because Dad doesn't normally get that emotional. He's a steady guy--marching onward resolutely and with a natural aplomb that I envy. I wept when I heard his tender words, and I listened to the music that he played for us--the intricate guitarwork that he's so well-known for, the gift that his mother gave him and he, in turn, gave to me--and I felt the reality of loss and the hope of living come over me. My contribution was a closing prayer, which I ended by quoting William Shakespeare, asking God to send "flights of angels to sing [her] to [her] rest". We all take solace in different things, I suppose, and I could think of no other way of honoring my grandmother than to share what matters so much to me in one last commemoration of her. The fog-drenched day made our trip to the cemetery more unsettling than is normal--I'm not a superstitious guy, but fog is an uncomfortable thing--and the graveside service was cold, though sweet. As a pallbearer, I got to carry my grandmother's remains to their final resting place. That is one of the great honors of being in a family, and I'm happy that I could help. After the graveside service was over, we returned to the church building for a luncheon put on by my grandmother's old friends and ward members. As we passed her home--sold over a year ago and no longer "Grandma D's house"--the sun broke through the fog enough to let a brilliant sunshine coat the road. That evening, I got to have dinner with my sister, her fiancé, and the rest of my brothers and sisters-in-law. It was another indication of God's goodness, I think, that we could take that time to be together--to use the sadness of confronting the inevitable to grow closer together. This may sound strange, but I've been thinking about Grandma almost every time I've sat down to play the drums. I bought an electronic drum set the week of the funeral; it had arrived on Thursday. It has been a new coping mechanism for me as I've been trying to understand what it is that Grandma left me, which is my own middling talents as a musician. As I mentioned before, Grandma taught me piano (as well as Sister Vest, who picked up where Grandma left off), but I learned guitar thanks to the steady patience and support of my dad. Recently--that is, in the past year or so--I've been composing my own music. I wanted to try to fully compose, rather than finding beats on the computer, so I picked up the drums. I play along with my guitar playing almost every day, striving to improve my talents in this area now. And as I drum, I think about what Grandma taught us about nuance and dynamics, about how to use the instrument to evoke a feeling. When it comes to the drums, that is a harder order to fulfill, but I find it guiding my playing nonetheless. And, since I've only had the drums after she left us, I like to think of this learning of a new instrument as an homage and invocation to and for my grandmother--a kind of rhythmic "thank you" to what she's given me. This remembrance is a poor substitute for the woman: Memories always are. Yet it's now what I have left. Yes, there are items--gifts and paraphernalia, the remnants of living--that will be in the family for subsequent generations. But it isn't about the things; it's about what I choose to make them mean. Occasionally, I will remember the jars of "Grandma loves me raspberry jam" which she would send to me while I was on my mission, or think of her stylized "OK" on the piano book where she would check off the song as completed. I may recall the smell of her home, the descent down the narrow stairs to her basement, the few months where, as a five-year-old, I stayed with Grandma and Grandpa while our home was being completed. It's possible that my thoughts of her will be perpetually shaded by the strands of pine trees at the cabin where I used to spend October General Conference in her company. It may be when I try to tease nuance out of a cheap electronic drum set, or pass by the familiar turns that would take me up the mountain to where Grandma lived. However it happens, I'm confident that I will keep remembering Grandma Dowdle. Lots of tweets and social media posts are showcasing the major personal events of the past decade. I threw together a quick list myself, but thought that it could be worthwhile to go through with a bit more detail. As far as I can remember, here are some of the interesting things that happened in the twenty-teens.
2010 The decade began with me and a fellow teacher doing a short film Winterim. (Winterims will be brought up in each year for the simple reason that they're actually something different in my otherwise pretty consistent teaching career.) This was my second year at the school, but the first year as a full-time teacher. By the time March came along, my second child was born, which was a different experience than the first one--having a wireless baby was new and exciting. Not only that, but the delivery wasn't as hard on my wife, which was great: I couldn't understand how women could have more children when I saw how badly it hurt my wife to give birth our first. With Number Two arriving, I comprehended that births usually don't lay up the mother for a solid week. Of course, that doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of hospital stuff that year. Son Number Two had a condition called hypospadias, so he had to have a minor surgery along with a circumcision. Not only that, but Son Number One had his third--and, thus far, last--heart surgery to correct his tricuspid atresia, which consumed the entirety of June. At the time, we lived in our townhome, which fit our family just fine. We kept going forward with work and school (I was taking night classes to get an endorsement in history). I began work on what I thought would be my magnum opus, Writ in Blood. This would consume my writing for a couple more years. Come August, the curriculum I had taught for the past two years shifted a bit, pushing the 10th grade toward a broader swath of history. Instead of going from middle ages to the Victorian era, I now taught from the Italian Renaissance up to modern day. This shift was (so far) the biggest change in my curricula that I've had to adjust to. I'm glad that we did, as I much prefer what I teach now. Still, it was one of the biggest changes in my career. Just before Thanksgiving Break, the school moved buildings. We went from a refurbished bowling alley to a custom made school. Though I've moved rooms a couple of times since those days, I am happy to report that we haven't had to move the entire school again. That's a relief, I must say. 2011 I started this year teaming up with the same teacher as the previous year. This time, we did a Garage Band Winterim, where we set the kids up in small bands, had them compose a song, and then perform it for the parents at Winterfest. This was fun, as it gave me a chance to play the guitar more than I normally do, and the students did--for the most part--a really great job. Most of this year is pretty unremarkable, save for a couple of things. One, I pressed on with Writ in Blood, which remains one of the books that I'm most proud of, despite the fact that it was flatly rejected during submissions and rather ruined when I went back and tried to tinker with the thing. The second is that this is the year that I deeply studied World War II. That gave me a whole new way of seeing this monumental event, which is something that I try to transmit to my students every year, even now. I believe we went to Disneyland this year for the first time with our oldest. He loved it to pieces. 2012 Thus began one of the biggest pivots of my life: I taught the Harry Potter Winterim to nine students. Then, with them, my wife, and my coteacher, we flew out to Orlando to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The class was inexpressibly impactful, and it ended up changing not just how I viewed the book series, but sent me down a path I never expected: I started playing quidditch. This came about because we learned how to play with the Winterim, but the enjoyment of the sport led to creating an actual team. I joined the Crimson Fliers during the summer of 2012, which I pursued for four years or so. I still love and deeply miss quidditch, in part because of its connection to such a special experience (the Harry Potter Winterim specifically, but Harry Potter more broadly, too), but also because the people I met during quidditch are some of the most remarkable human beings I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know. It's a scar--one that will likely remain with me for another decade. I continued working on Writ in Blood as I finished up my history endorsement. Back then, I would go to class on Saturday mornings, take three hours of notes, eat a high-calorie, low-cost lunch at Burger King, then slam out a chapter or two at the UVU library before heading home. I really enjoyed this, as it allowed me time to write. By this point, I had stopped teaching three sections of Socratic Seminar and instead had things like mythology or two sections of creative writing to help round out my teaching day. That sort of flexibility remains with me to this day, meaning I have two sections of Socratic 10 and two elective classes of different stripes. The election of 2012 was a divisive one (aren't they all?) and it was the first time since '08 that I was more than just dimly aware of politics. Because I'm Mormon (you know: a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), there was, I think, an assumption that I'd be voting for Mittens Romney; I didn't. I think about that election a lot--how the GOP tried a nice guy approach and was soundly defeated, so they went with the most vile they could and won--and how the world might be different had Baseball Mitt had taken the White House. At the very least, we wouldn't have to deal with Agent Orange. 2013 This Winterim saw me making comic books with the students. Like almost all of the Winterims of the decade, I taught with another teacher. This time, it was the art teacher, who's also a big comic book fan. It was a fun experience, but in the aftermath of what 2012 had done for me, it wasn't particularly memorable. By the time 2013 rolled around, I was pretty established in my career. There was a reputation at the school to maintain, plenty of stuff to keep me busy, and the addition of our third child--another boy, bringing our family to its full allotment. I turned thirty that year, which meant a lot to me at the time. I think the idea of having finished my twenties with every goal checked off save one (being published) was significant. I think this also gave me a bit of an existential crisis, as I didn't really have a lot else to try to do. Not that this year specifically stands out to me, but I should point out that every year, Gayle and I went down to the Utah Shakespeare Festival, both during the summer and again in the fall with the students. We had family vacations of all different sorts, though I'm hard pressed to remember what we did each year. I do know that in the fall of 2013, though, I got a new assignment: Teaching the Shakespeare class. I remember this specifically because I sat with my newest son on my lap, reading Twelfth Night aloud to him as he slept. It was a pleasant experience, to say the least, but it was all in preparation of teaching the Concurrent Enrollment English 1010 class with a fellow teacher at the school. So it was equal parts preparation and pleasure, I suppose. The Shakespeare class was greatly enhanced by what came around at the end of the year and beginning of the next. Over Thanksgiving Break in 2013, I left the country for the first time: I took a short trip to Paris to better prepare for Winterim 2014. This was surprisingly impactful to me, and I rely on my Parisian experience whenever I'm teaching my students about Les Misérables or French history--especially the First World War. There's something profound about being in the places where history happens, and I'm hopeful that someday--not that I've any idea how it'll happen--I can return to Europe and England. 2014 This was the Winterim that has the largest effect on me, followed by the World Wars Tour (2017) and my first Harry Potter (2012). I and a dozen or so students flew out to England and had a literary tour. We visited the big tourist sites (and sights), including the Tower of London, Trafalgar Square, and Piccadilly Circus. But we had special additions: Seeing John Milton's grave, visiting Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare's grave, and the Harry Potter backstage museum in Watford. We saw the Eagle and Child (where Tolkien and Lewis would meet and talk about their fictional worlds that have made such a large difference in my life), Cambridge, Oxford, and many other places that will always live on in my mind as foundational. It was truly a remarkable experience. With that sort of a high, it was difficult to return to the normalcy of 2014. I had finished Writ in Blood sometime between 2013 and 2014, and having spent over three years on a single book, I decided to no longer try to write sprawling behemoths. Instead, I began what is my normal way of working, which is to make a novel that's between 50- and 100,000 words. The first experience I had with that was writing Chelsea Washington and the Pathway of Night, my only attempt at a young adult novel. I'm still pretty happy with it, at least in terms of what I was trying to accomplish, and it really helped set me up with the idea that I can start and end a novel in the same year--in this case, it only took a couple of months. My experiences with quidditch continued apace, and I went to Quidditch World Cup 7 in South Carolina that April. It was wonderful to see so many committed athletes, to try to play better than I had before, and to go through something that I never thought would be a part of my life: Sports. Despite going to England for nearly two weeks, I'm pretty certain we went to Disneyland this year. I know we went at some point around here. Strange to say, it's kind of hard to remember. I do know that it was at the end of this year--right before Thanksgiving, I think--that a couple of important things happened. One, we decided to move out and rent our townhome, thus allowing us to save a bit of money with which to--we hoped--spend on a newer, bigger home. The five of us were feeling a bit cramped. (Also, my calling as Elders' Quorum president had been eating away at me and this would get me out. It's selfish, I know, but that's the truth.) Two, I self-diagnosed myself as having depression. It came about slowly, as I realized that what a lot of people on Twitter were describing was similar to my own experiences. Once I realized that I have some sort of chemical imbalance in my head, a lot of my life started to make more sense. I didn't do anything with this information, per se, but it was an important start. 2015 Winterim this year went to The Lord of the Rings, which involved not only studying the text closely, but having the students try to pull a Tolkien and invent their own languages and secondary worlds. It was pretty fun, and I know that I enjoyed it. Much like the comic book Winterim, however, it hasn't stuck in my mind as strongly as some of the others. This year saw me and a coworker joining forces to tackle the Shakespeare class again, which was necessary because I'm still without a Master's degree. Still, I enjoyed teaching Shakespeare in this way, with the texts being the foundation for the different styles of writing that we were teaching the students. Quidditch World Cup 8 happened (again in South Carolina), which I attended with my team. It was fantastic--the Crimson Elite finished 18th in the nation, which is no small thing, in my view. It also marked the last time that I was to play a tournament with my quidditch friend. I retired from quidditch some time between 2015 and 2016 (I don't remember when, exactly). I don't regret that--it was sweet while it lasted, but it couldn't remain. But that doesn't mean I don't miss it. Living with the in-laws was far from an ideal experience, but it did help the way we'd hoped: We were able to get some money saved up for our own house. While we were basement dwellers, my oldest son turned eight, which meant that he decided to be baptized into the Church. I hadn't really anticipated it happening in my in-laws' ward, but my wife and I bought the townhome in January of 2008--eight or nine months before the housing bubble popped. That slowed down our ability to move on from "Old Place" (as we now call it). That summer was a new chapter (lol, pun) in my writing, as I finally mustered up the courage to ask my wife if I could abandon her for the better part of a week to have a writing retreat. I went in the middle of June and wrote most of what I later called Conduits. I wrote 34,443 words (I made a spreadsheet that kept track of the numbers) and had at last figured out how I can best work: Highly focused, in a single place, where my responsibilities can't reasonably be split in any other direction. Since then, I've had numerous retreats, all of which having done a great deal to help my writing along. Oh, and I also started my annual NaNoWriMo tradition this year, too. 2016 This Winterim was really great for me, as it was a chance to teach about dinosaurs. I teamed up with the biology teacher and we had a great time talking about dinosaurs, having the students come up with their own museum layouts, and learning about the terrible lizards. We even visited St. George for a day or two to see some dinosaur-related things, and we got lost in the Nevada desert with a bus full of kids. We made it home all right in the end, and it was a great adventure for us all. By the time spring rolled around, our renters were ready to move on and so were we. We sold our townhome and, with the equity (not much, but some) from it, we were able to move into a much bigger home. New Place (as we call it) is where we still are, and where I'm writing this now. Our first summer in New Place was a busy one, as we moved in on the fifth of July. We had a lot of settling in to do, as well as adjusting to the new commute we'd have every day. Not only that, but I used a week or so right before we moved to go out to the cabin and have a writing retreat. It's become a staple of my summers, now. By the time November came around, Gayle and I were preparing for another European trip--packing bags, making sure we knew where our passports were, getting schedules settled--and then the election came. It's fair to say that I was much more attentive to the entire thing, and the feelings I had about the election are still raw. We had started listening to the Hamilton soundtrack during our move, and so there was a sense of optimism that I'd been harboring for a few months. When the election came out with Clinton having over three million more votes yet still losing the presidency, I had a really hard time believing that America was on the right track. I've yet to change my mind on that. 2017 The World Wars Tour was supposed to be a really powerful and profound experience--and, to an extent, it was--but there's always an issue with time. We spent far too much of it traveling from one place to another, rather than really soaking in what each place had to offer. I definitely would do the tour differently if I had a chance to try again, but the trip wasn't a disaster by any means. It was, as I've mentioned before, an incredible experience that changed my life. Walking through a death camp, through a battlefield, through a museum of collected artifacts, of talking to a man who saw his own father die on the family room floor because of Nazi shells…it was unforgettable. My Shakespeare classes were changing again--we were doing a "Stage and Page" version of the class now--but other than that, there really weren't a lot of big things going down. My writing continued, with some weekly progress in the form of my creative writing classes, though without any sort of progress on the publication front. I'd finished a couple of other books, though I was still reluctant to edit them in any sort of noticeable way. Then summer came, and I brought my writing group along with for a writing retreat. It was very successful--in that month, I wrote over 77,000 words--and it also brought into the world War Golem, the book that I think is the most prepared for some sort of publication. (Whether or not that ever happens is unknown--doubted by me, believed in by most everyone else.) That summer was also remarkable because it was a Disneyland year. I remember this fully, as I got to visit an old high school friend who lives in California. We had a great trip with the Mouse and my friend, including a visit to Blizzard Entertainment campus and seeing some of the neat things they have there. On the way home, I picked up a copy of It from the Barnes and Noble in St. George. That book, as any frequent reader of my essays knows, has also fundamentally changed my life. 2018 I had originally planned on doing a Shakespeare Winterim, but it fell apart at the last minute and I ended up needing to dust off an old one and resubmit it: Thus I taught, for the first time, a repeat Winterim. Ironically, it was the same one that I'd taught my first year--now almost ten years before. The Video Game Winterim was really enjoyable--we played VR games, students invented their ideas for their own video games, and I blew their little minds with some light theory. I wouldn't mind doing that one again, though not for another year or two, methinks. I'd prefer a fresh crop of students--no double dipping. This year marched along in pretty familiar strokes. We did manage to go to Moab for a family vacation during Spring Break, which was a lot of fun. My second son decided to get baptized. My wife and I kept teaching; I kept doing the things that I'd normally do (going to LTUE in February, for example, as I've done every year since the beginning of the decade--I guess I should've mentioned that in 2010, yeah?). One thing I started doing differently in 2018, though, was writing in my reading journal about the things that I thought about whilst reading a book. I don't do that with all of them, but getting into that habit meant a lot. When summer came around, I decided to reread It, this time with pen in hand. Some of my most honest and profound personal thoughts came because of that experience, which is why I love It. I had my writing retreats--solo (56,000 words) and as a group (33,000 words)--and pushed out War Golems, the sequel (it has a plural on it, see?). I haven't looked at the book since I wrote it, but it's never too far from the back of my mind. I'm still not certain how I feel about it, which is probably a good thing--it's not settled, as it were. One remarkable thing about 2018, however, was that I was accepted to a special training at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. I went there with a coworker and had a fantastic experience. I saw much of the city, the monuments, and the Library, as well as some time in the Folger Shakespeare Library and I got to handle original, 17th century copies of Paradise Lost. It was definitely a highlight of the year and of my whole life, honestly. 2019 That brings us to this year. My Winterim was on fantasy literature, so we got to go to my wife's happy place, Evermore, and I got to enjoy a lot of time in some of my favorite pieces of literature. Both this year's and 2018's Winterims saw me teaching by myself--there wasn't time to pull someone in on last years, and this year's didn't need another set of hands--but I still had a good time. It was not, perhaps, the most incredible experience I've ever had, but not everything has to be. One of my writing group friends suggested that we pool together some cash and rent an Air BnB for a winter retreat, which we did at the end of January. It was successful, despite being shorter than I'm used to, and I finished up a NaNoWriMo book, as well as worked on a novella I've been picking at for over a year. I ended up with just over 15,000 words for the day and a half of work. A surprise came our way when my wife was offered a slightly different teaching job for the fall of 2019. Instead of teaching six classes of eight grade science, she would only teach three classes and spend the rest of the time as a teaching coach. She decided to go through with it, despite her reservations about the new administration at her school. Summer saw us at Yellowstone National Park--which the boys in particular loved; I liked it, despite having conjunctivitis--as well as a couple of writing retreats (75,000 words between the two) getting some of my novella-project taken care of. The new school year started without me teaching creative writing for the first time in almost a decade, as well as a CE class and a Shakespeare class--separate this time. It has been a fairly straightforward year, though the decade has treated me differently than I had ever anticipated. Never would I have thought that I would be a world traveler; not on a teacher's salary--and, strangely enough, I only went because I'm a teacher. My family has blossomed and continues to grow. My oldest now comes to school with me (he's in 7th grade). I have written over 1.7 million words since I got married, with the vast majority of those being written in the last decade. The one great regret--the largest failure of my goals and thoughts about the future--is that I'm still unpublished. I know that everyone has a different path, a different journey toward being published. Knowing that, however, doesn't really take the sting away. I do hope that I can change that…though I don't know how I will. I'm not really sure what the future holds. For now, it's enough to look forward with some hope, some trepidation, some familiarity, some newness. In short, there's a life in front of me. I now only need to go and live it. One of the things that surprises me as a teacher of Paradise Lost? Students would not want to live in the Garden of Eden, according to how John Milton presents it, because "it would be boring."
I know that they're fifteen years old ("I'm sixteen!" That One Kid™ is always quick to irrelevantly point out) and still getting a grip on the world, but it really is shocking to me. Here's the deal with Milton's Eden, in case you've forgotten since the last time you read the poem: The Garden is filled with every conceivable fruit and vegetable--indeed, inconceivable fruits and vegetables are also available. There are bounteous rivers, crystal clear, that are healthful and delicious. Animals live there with no danger, including lions that play with lambs, snakes that coil around harmlessly, and tigers prowl through herds without the latter getting freaked out. It's not unusual to see an elephant writhing his "lithe proboscis" to entertain Adam and Eve. The days are warm enough that a constant cool breeze is needed--and provided--and beautiful scents fill the air around flowery bowers. At one point, the amiable angel Raphael says that Eden is patterned after Heaven, which, he tells us, has variety and change because it's nice. I take that to mean that something approaching seasons is possible there--though Adam and Eve don't stay in Eden long enough for us to see for certain. Additionally--and this is crucial for me to explain to my predominantly LDS students--Eve and Adam are fully expecting and waiting for "additional hands" to come to them. That is, Milton doesn't conceive of a sexless or childless Eden*. And, since there's no pain in Eden, childbirth is (we can assume) essentially painless. Death, of course, is completely foreign there ("Whate'er Death is," says Adam when the topic comes up (425)), and wickedness is likewise unavailable. In short, the Garden of Pleasure** is truly a paradise: All of the things that make life beautiful, none of the weaknesses that make it miserable. Milton, I think, does this on purpose: If we as readers are to feel like we've truly lost something, it can't be a conditional paradise. Eden must be a place that we long to be in, so that when it's lost (the spoiler is in the title, people), we care. So when I ask the kids if they'd want to be Eden, their number one critique is that it would be boring--and I don't get it. A lot of kids argue that without opposition, there's no growth. No growth is, essentially, uninteresting (or, rather, boring). And while I understand that from a postlapsarian point of view, Milton goes to show that there's plenty to do in the Garden--gardening, as a matter of fact, to say nothing of exploring all of the cool and beautiful things in Eden--because, again, Eden has to be a place that we'd unreservedly want to go to. "But you wouldn't have anything to do after a while," the children groused. "Eventually, you would waft yourself heavenward," I rejoined, "refilling the celestial halls with humans-turned-angels to refill those numbers lost by the fall of Satan and his Atheist crew!" "What would you do, though? Just, like, tend a garden?" "Yeah." "Nothing else?" "There's an elephant who writhes his lithe proboscis…" And what they're saying--or, rather, what I'm hearing--is that they don't realize just how monotonous life really is. You'd think they would: They are, after all, students. There is a constant grind of schedules, bells, expectations, and repetitions. But they have summer to look forward to, or graduation, or a job… …but that's where I am, and I have to say, it doesn't feel like there's a lot of growth here. There are small lessons here or there, but life has hit the this-is-life-for-the-foreseeable-future-and/or-until-you-die plateau. I've been teaching the same curricula (with some noteworthy exceptions) for over a decade, going through the same jokes, asking the same questions, pointing out the same cool things. I get quite a bit of satisfaction from that, but when I zoom out, the monotony of day-in-day-out living is grinding. Living becomes habitual. Mountain peaks of the past fade into rolling hills of the present and it gets to the point where speedbumps give me nosebleeds. Part of the reason that I can see so far into the future is because there's nothing to climb between here and death. In other words, this brave new world that is filled with so many possibilities--more possibilities than I can ever hope to touch--will collapse until there's variety in the names I memorize and that's about it. Oh, sure, there are changes. My children are still at home and in school, so watching them grow and learn and burst out into the world will be moments to look for and savor. I don't deny that there will be changes, of course, and new joys--and also new sorrows. A life in Milton's Eden would omit that last part, which is why I'm still baffled by my students' responses to the question "Would you want to live there?" When they answer, in effect, "I wouldn't want to live a boring life that's the same every day," I realize that I need to refrain from telling them that I ask myself almost daily: Is this all there is? --- * In LDS doctrine, our First Parents were told that they had to "multiply and replenish the earth"--which is interpreted to mean that this "commandment" was in effect at the same time as the prohibition on the fruit. Where Mormonism and Milton differ is that LDS doctrine claims that childbearing was impossible whilst Eve was in Eden. Until she and her husband departed from the Garden, they couldn't have kids. Milton just assumes that, had Eve not partaken of the fruit, all of humankind would still be in the Garden all the way up to present day. ** Eden in Hebrew means "Pleasure". |
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