Suppose there is a drug which causes you to fall passionately in love with someone you previously disliked and rejected. Once under the influence, you care about nothing but having sex with this person; you ignore your job and all other responsibilities. Would you classify this drug as:
A) An amusing way to get you to relax and explore some new stuff
B) An ingenious way to end a centuries-long blood feud
C) A dangerous chemical substance that deprives you of your ability to consent

This scenario comes from the most recent episode of The Orville, and if you’re having trouble deciding whether A or B is the more horrifying option, don’t worry--they chose both. I love shows that center on a group of bickering people on a spaceship in the future, and I’ll cut new shows a lot of slack when it seems like they don’t quite know yet what they want to be--often, like Farscape, they’ll figure it out somewhere in season two and then be brilliant and weird and beautiful. But I think it’s safe to say at this point that The Orville isn’t going to figure it out.

Sci-fi spends so much time worrying about getting the technology and world-building right, but in the end, your blind spots will date your story far worse than, say, having a fax printed on actual paper coming out of your futuristic wall. And The Orville has blind spots the size of a Jupiter dust storm.

The Orville, in its advertising, promised a return to the optimistic tone of classic sci-fi, the kind that was made back before we became convinced that our society was destined to end in dystopia. In the opening episode, we see a brief glimpse of New York in the future: a shining city with skyscrapers covered in gardens, flying cars buzzing around like honeybees. Somehow, we’ve arrived in a future Earth where the entire world is united under a single government, there’s no sectarian violence or war or poverty, and we’ve taken to the stars.

But one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia, and as the show progresses, I keep asking myself: whose utopia is this? And to whom does this future actually look optimistic?

It’s not really a utopia for, say, Dr. Claire Finn, the only woman of color on this ship. She experiences constant sexual harassment from a male coworker. For months, this green blob guy has been faking illness in order to come to the medical bay and press his romantic suit while she’s trying to do her job. Claire rejects his advances repeatedly, yet she never reports him to HR, even when he flashes a dick at her (he’s made of green goo, so this is apparently humor). Then, in the latest episode where date-rape drugs are used to cement a peace treaty, Claire is also drugged, and we see her, under the influence of the drug, accept and have sex with the green blob guy. The wikipedia summary of the episode describes this as Claire “letting her guard down.”

So, we’ve invented space travel and achieved world peace, but women are still being harassed and assaulted at work, and it’s treated as a joke. That’s the most depressing view of the future I’ve ever heard.

I could go on: incompetent white men are promoted over far more qualified women and people of color. A female security guard isn’t taken seriously and faces constant ribbing about her love life. Charlize Theron comes aboard as a refugee from a crashed ship, and the male characters fall all over themselves ogling her. It’s not that I don’t believe that these things could still happen in the future. But if that’s the future you’re showing us, don’t try to tell me it’s optimistic.

And let’s talk about the aliens. Because many terrible things in our world--blood feuds, religious extremists, dictatorships, exploitation, overt racism--these do still exist in the world of the Orville. But not for humans, who’ve presumably moved past all that. Only in alien races do we see these conflicts. The Navarians and the Bruidians have been fighting for centuries over which race has the right to their planet; the Krill follow their god, Avis, who commands them to wage religious war on other races. The parallels to real-life human conflicts are embarrassingly one-to-one.

But in the world of the Orville, these are problems that happen to other people, not to us. And that is actually an incredibly dangerous mindset. It exonerates us. We’re not involved in these struggles, and we didn’t cause them. We have no responsibility to help solve them, except as benevolent outsiders. It might feel like a simpler, more optimistic world, but ask yourself why it feels so comfortable to dehumanize the people locked in these struggles. And ask yourself what it means that the protagonists can massacre two shiploads of aliens without feeling at all haunted.

It’s like the sci-fi version of “Make America Great Again”--nostalgic pining for a simpler time that wasn’t actually ever simple.

Now, you might wonder why I’m picking on The Orville, when almost everyone already agrees it’s a total misfire. But if The Orville were only guilty of awkward writing and poor characterization, I might still be watching it. Those problems are fixable. But unless the season-finale twist is that they’ve been living in a horrifying dystopia all along, the mindset isn’t so easy to fix. We owe it to the genre that I love to do better. And these problems aren’t unique to the Orville. Speculative fiction gives us the power to imagine anything, yet so often we use that limitless power to create things that are so limited. It’s hard to know what you don’t know, but the chance to try is what makes sci-fi so exciting. As Octavia Butler says, there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.

One morning in early October when I was nineteen, my college women’s choir piled in buses out to a small town, and rehearsed all day in the basement of an old white steeple church: learning the lines, the rhythms, the entrances and exits, until our brains were saturated with music. Then at night, we wrapped ourselves in the duvets we’d pulled from our dorm beds and slept in the chapel, stretched out on the pews or in the aisles.

There was a party, of course, but I was skipping it, which is how I ended up in the chapel that night virtually alone. There was just enough light to read, but not enough to make out the details in the arched ceiling, or the faces of the statues in their alcoves. I was wrapped in my duvet up to my nose, my hat pulled over my ears, and I was reading Beowulf.

At the time, I hadn’t studied any Anglo-Saxon yet, so I must have been reading it in English when Grendel appeared, come over the moors mist-shrouded, bearing the wrath of God. I became so obsessed with it later that I learned parts of the original by heart, so that when I play the scene now, it’s the older words I hear, echoing in the rafters:

ða com of more under misthleoþum, Grendel gongan, godes yrre bær.

Chapels by day are perilous enough. By night, they are something out of story and song. The air feels shadowy and strange, and full of empty space. The veil between worlds is so thin you could slip a knife through the seam, if only you could find the right edge. If only you knew the right words.

I haven’t thought about that memory in a while, until a few weeks ago, when our ward’s seminary teacher moved to Colorado, and they asked me to take over the class for the rest of the year. This is a scripture study class for high schoolers that meets at six o’clock in the morning on school days, and people half-jokingly go around in dread of being asked to teach it. I thought it would probably be fun, but I wasn’t expecting this: walking to your car in the dark, the feeling of having extra eyes all over your skin, pricking through the back of your neck, the strange loudness of ordinary sounds. Birds, and the wind, and the car engine. Turning the key in the door of the church, pushing it open to the dark hallway, turning on the lights. Taking out your books, starting the music, saying nothing. Being the only one in the church. Prayer, half-formed. The way the students come in the door in ones and pairs, also saying nothing, half-asleep.

For a moment, on some days, there is this strange quality to the stillness. It seems tied to something about the darkness, or the music, or the hush of steps on carpet in the church alone, but it isn't any of these things really. It reminds me a little bit of Beowulf, and also of The Weight of Glory, and the way C.S. Lewis described joy:

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

Then I turn off the music, and start the class, and human voices wake us. We read about Paul, and Priscilla and Aquila, and King Agrippa, and Jesus. By the time we leave the church, it will be full daylight. There are so many things to fill the day: jobs and chores, people, causes, problems to be solved, injustice to be fought, mistakes, fatigue, fear, laughter. But there is also this, in the space between one day and the next: silence, and stillness, and the chapel by night.

Full disclosure: I am a huge nerd about many things. One of the things is sci-fi shows about a small group of people who live together on a spaceship in the future, and another of the things is linguistics and the evolution of the English language from Anglo-Saxon to present day. Different sci-fi shows take different approaches to the question of what will happen to English several hundred/thousand years in the future--but which approach is the most effective?

1.The Farscape Approach

Stark: Friend or foe, friend or foe, friend or foe …

Rygel: Will you shut the frell up! … Of course it’s a foe, we have no friends!

Farscape, like Doctor Who and Hitchhiker’s Guide, solves the language problem with science. Once injected with translator microbes, you hear everyone speaking in your native tongue, so it would make sense that everyone speaks like Crichton, who is a human from Earth in the very near future.

However, everyone in Farscape does NOT speak like Crichton, which is mystifying. Why are some species translated by the microbes as British? And why in heaven’s name have the translator microbes translated all swear words as “frell”? Were Crichton’s microbes set to PG mode? The world will never know.

2.The Star Trek Approach

Spock: "Random chance seems to have operated in our favor."

McCoy: "In plain, non-Vulcan English, we've been lucky."

Spock: "I believe I said that, Doctor."

There are a lot of different dialects of English spoken in Star Trek, but all of them correspond to ways of speaking currently found on Earth, despite being set in the distant future. Spock speaks in academic, purple English, McCoy has kind of a cowboy thing going, Scotty is Scottish, Kirk is annoying. Earth is united under a single government, but regional dialects and languages seem to persist, as indicated by the fact that Chekov’s first language is Russian. With so many different cultures and languages thrown together, you would expect a starfleet dialect to spring up, or at the very least some slang, but there really isn’t any. In some ways, the Star Trek approach actually works: it creates a suspension of disbelief in which you don’t think about or notice the language, because it is all familiar to you. Unless you’re me, in which case you spend the whole time wondering why they all speak like they live in the 20th century.

3.The Battlestar Galactica Approach

Starbuck: Why can’t we use the starboard launch?

Tyrol: It’s a gift shop now.

Starbuck: Frak me.

Like Star Trek, everyone speaks ordinary English, but all swear words have been replaced by “frak.” I don’t think this had the effect they were hoping for, and I do not recommend this approach. The characters would yell “frak!” in highly emotional moments, and I would burst out in unfortunate laughter.

The problem here I think is that they didn’t go all in. If you’re going to make up new slang for your future English, you need more of it, and other things about the language need to have evolved as well. Otherwise, instead of being immersive and cool, it just breaks the suspension of disbelief completely.

4.The Firefly Approach

Mal: In case you hadn't noticed, her voice kinda carries. We're two miles above ground and they can probably hear her down there. Soon as we unload, she can holler until our ears bleed. Although I would take it as a kindness if she didn't.

River: The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.

Mal: See, morbid and creepifying, I got no problem with, long as she does it quiet-like.

Oh, Firefly. You tried the hardest, which goes to show that if you go big, you end up making some interesting mistakes. In a future world where American and Chinese culture dominate, everyone speaks in a combination of country western with Chinese swear words and some made up slang. It’s got its own distinct rhythm and it’s fun to listen to them talk, but there are some problems with this approach, and it’s not just the cultural appropriation and the fact that none of the characters are actually Chinese. No: when two languages are combined, this isn’t what it sounds like. There’s no evidence of Chinese influence in word order, verb conjugations, pronoun use, or even most of their vocabulary.

For comparison, here’s a video of characters from Frozen speaking Singlish, a language that is a combination of Mandarin, English, and Tamil, spoken in Singapore:

SO COOL, right?

Ok, you might be thinking, of course they can’t speak like that in Firefly, because then audiences wouldn’t understand them. This is true. And this brings up another point: what is the purpose of creating a futuristic version of English in your show? Done right, it creates a sense of a cohesive world, one that is distinctly different from yours. One of the things that works well about Firefly’s dialect is that they never translate the slang and Chinese that they do use, so most audiences are in the dark about what they’ve said (though usually it’s pretty clear from context). Watching people talk when you can’t understand every word they’re saying has a distancing effect; it’s a constant reminder that it’s an alien world, and you’re an outside observer. On the other hand, once you start to learn the slang, it can be even more immersive. It creates an “in” group of people who know the slang; witness the number of people still going around using “gorram” and “shiny” in their daily conversations IRL.

Of all these different approaches, Firefly’s approach seems to have been the most influential when it comes to tv shows (Sci-Fi movies on the other hand almost always take the Star Trek approach of doing nothing, though Pacific Rim had a touch of in-universe slang). SyFy’s current shipboard shows, Killjoys and Dark Matter, have both gone for a Firefly-lite approach; the characters have a distinctive pattern of sentence construction and a sprinkling of universe-specific vocabulary (Dark Matter even uses some of Firefly’s slang), but not nearly on the same scale, and neither has attempted any kind of language blending with non-English languages.

I would love to see a show that took the dual-language approach but really WENT for it, got bilingual speakers of both languages to write the dialogue and act, created a future world that wasn’t based on American culture (or American culture with bits of other cultures thrown in for “flavor”). You’d need subtitles for sure, but I would totally watch that show.

SPOILER WARNING, for those who are trying to hold out (stay strong! I’m sure it would be delightful to see the play without knowing what was going to happen, but I just don’t have that much willpower).

I remember when book 6 came out, and I sat in my aunt’s attic with my cousins, each of us reading straight through, and I got to the ending first and SCREAMED, and then I couldn’t talk about it until they’d both gotten to that part too. Holding Cursed Child, which I couldn’t help going out and buying immediately, makes me feel young and old at the same time, as I sit here waiting for my husband to finish reading so we can talk about it. So, here are some thoughts I jotted down while reading Cursed Child, in no particular order.

1. Rose is amazing.

2. Scorpius is amazing.

3. Albus is...a very believable teenage boy. He is definitely the son of Book 5 Harry.

4. Was Hermione Albus’s first kiss? ...I’m just saying he does not even hesitate in embracing that role, pun very much intended

5. Why are we still protecting dangerous magical objects with riddles that can be solved by children?

6. On that note, why hasn’t the Ministry of Magic come up with security that would prevent people Polyjuicing themselves into the Minister of Magic and just walking right in? I feel like Hermione would have thought of this

7. Harry: “[dramatic pause] My scar is hurting.” Draco: “Oh come ON man not this again”

8. Hermione is amazing in every iteration except the one where she and Ron didn’t get together and she became a mean professor, which was like the “she’s about to close up the liiibraryyy!” scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life”; I’m bothered by the implication that beautiful intelligent women won’t be happy if they don’t end up with their childhood sweethearts

9. But I’m mostly willing to forgive it because Warrior Hermione is such a boss

10. Scorpius appears to have taken over the role of Protagonist and I support this

11. Speaking of protagonists though, I miss Rose and kind of wish she was the mc of this story

12. Seriously I would read seven books about Rose, Lily, and Scorpius and their exploits at Hogwarts, I guess Albus can be in it too

13. But we've established I’m a sucker for rebooting beloved male-centered stories with female leads, see: Star Wars and Ghostbusters

14. Delphi? ...Didn’t leave much of an impression. I would have liked to see her as one of the kids at Hogwarts. Her whole story and development happened before the play started and we don’t get to see anything about how she got this way. However she has a great name and cool hair/tattoos

15. Dang it JKR you’re making me like Draco Malfoy now and I love it

16. I’ve heard a lot of people say Cursed Child reads like fanfiction, and I agree; in fact, one of the things that I think it does quite cleverly is deconstruct the whole concept of story canon. Through the conceit of time travel, elements of the original story are changed, new futures are created: anything can happen. Characters can become dramatically different. I didn’t like the original book 7 epilogue because it felt like too much and too little info at the same time, but Cursed Child is a much better version: one that imagines multiple possible futures for its characters, and allows the audience and the actors to interpret each in their own way. JKR’s choice to do this story as a play also lends itself to this interpretation: plays by nature are subjective; they live not in the text but in the performance, and each performance is different just as each possible future is different. How happily you think things have turned out for each of these characters will depend a lot on how the actors play them, and how the audience interprets them.

17. I also really like the way Cursed Child deals with the idea of parents projecting their wishes and hopes on their children, and the different ways that Albus, Scorpius, Harry, Draco, and Delphi react against that pressure

18. How are they doing these effects on stage???

I’ve been planning to go see the new Ghostbusters ever since dudes on the internet started trolling it a few months ago. Solidarity, sisters. But I was not expecting this kind of visceral fangirl reaction I’ve been dealing with ever since I saw it.

I watch endless clips of Kate McKinnon. I made myself a Ghostbusters t-shirt. I don’t understand how this is happening. I think I have a problem.

I also re-watched the original, which I have to say reads very differently when you come to it with gender on your mind. When I saw it as a kid, I don’t remember much except for the attack of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. What stuck with me the most this time is what happens to Sigourney Weaver.

Let’s review Dana’s arc.

• Dana is a cellist. She gets harassed regularly by her annoying neighbor, who continually tries to ask her out, oblivious to her lack of interest.
  

• She discovers a portal to hell in her fridge; calls the exterminators.

• One of them, Peter, offers to come to her apartment to assess her complaint. He is only using this as a pretext to get close to her. He examines everything in her apartment except the fridge, including her bedroom. He stands too close to her. He makes inappropriate comments. You can see the moment in her face when she realizes she is alone in her apartment with a strange guy who is not going to fix her ghost problem and just wants to get in her pants.

• She safely kicks him out, vows to never call those exterminators again.

• He shows up outside her work. He says he has some information about her problem. He makes some jokes. He asks her out. She says yes, for some unfathomable reason that I suspect has more to do with continuing the story than with believable character motivations.

• A demon possesses her body, makes her proposition and make out with one guy she mostly hates, and then makes her have sex with another guy she definitely hates. The movie treats this as a punchline, but I’m pretty sure what Dana has experienced here is supernatural sexual assault. Her body has been literally taken over and used for sex against her will.

• So clearly what she’d really like to do most after getting her body back is kiss a guy she’s barely met and with whom most of her interactions have been negative, in front of thousands of people.

Dana is not the only woman in this movie. Three other women make appearances: a beautiful ditzy undergrad being flirted with by Venkman, a nerdy ditzy secretary who lusts after Egon, and a ghost lady who visits Ray in a dream. Winston is the only guy in the movie who doesn’t get his own groupie.

This may be the one of the “top 100 comedies of all time,” but its portrayal of women is pretty dismal.

Now is the part where someone says, “You are way over-thinking this. This is just a silly movie about some guys who hunt ghosts.”

YES. It is a silly movie about guys who hunt ghosts. It is not trying to make a point. It is just trying to be a fun story. And that’s where the real influence of genre fiction comes in.

I love this quote by Chimamanda Adichie:

“Stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize.”

Sometimes, we seek out movies and books that will challenge the way we think; show us perspectives we haven’t seen. There are “serious” books and movies written for this purpose. They win prizes. They’re well reviewed. They’re a vital part of our cultural output.

But most of the time, they’re not well-attended. What really gets us out the door is stories. Stories about heroes who save the world, stories about pirates and robots and zombies and spies, stories about dinosaurs coming to life, stories about people who hunt ghosts. We’re there to be entertained. We don’t realize how our worldviews are being shaped by the stories we consume.

Who gets to be the hero? What kinds of relationships are valued? Who’s the victim? Who’s the villain? All these things form a part of our unconscious understanding of the world. That is the power and the danger of storytelling, and it’s one of the reasons I love writing genre fiction.

I’m not necessarily saying that the original Ghostbusters is responsible for the way its most rabid fans speak about women. You can argue correlation or causation there: which came first, the misogynist, or the misogynistic story he loves so much?

But I do have a guess as to why the new Ghostbusters brought out the fangirl in me, and it’s not just Jillian Holtzman’s dance with her power tools.

Though that helps.

It’s not really trying to make a point. There’s no tone of “GIRLS can hunt ghosts TOO,” which would be annoying. It’s a silly movie about some women who hunt ghosts. It’s just trying to be a good story.

Stories matter.

Stories can dispossess and malign without saying a word, simply by leaving people out, simply by casting them as the victim, the villain, the sex object, the punchline.

Stories can empower and humanize people without saying a word, simply by making them the heroes of their story.

Alba Fucens is a Roman town. Unlike most Roman towns, nobody ever built anything else there, so the earth grew over it and it remained as it was. You can wander through the marketplace stalls, scuff up the dirt with your foot to see the tiled floors, hear the water still flowing in the sewers beneath the stone streets, walk through the gate of the amphitheater and see its walls rise around you. You can almost hear the crowds, cheering for your blood.

Alba Fucens lies in a valley, surrounded by blue hills. On one hill, there is the temple of Apollo, which was turned into a church in the 9th century, destroyed by an earthquake, and rebuilt.

On another hill is a medieval town, also abandoned, also a ruin. Like most little towns in this part of Italy, it is built on a hill, crumbling buildings clustered on top of each other within the circle of crumbling walls.

Alba Fucens was never destroyed, says the brochure. The inhabitants eventually abandoned it and built the nearby medieval town, the tiny walled one on the hill.

Why would they leave their beautiful stone city in the valley, with its roads and its market stalls, its fountains and its sewer system that's still working 2,000 years later?

Rome had fallen, and they weren’t safe there anymore. It took a while for the effects to work their way all the way out here, several days’ journey from Rome, high in the hills. But the world had changed.

Alba Fucens is the kind of town you can only build when you’re at peace, when you’ve been at peace for so long your mothers’ mothers have forgotten what it’s like to really be in danger. When your empire is so powerful that it’s ridiculous to believe anyone would ever attack. No one can touch us, says the city in the valley. No one is coming to save us, says the town on the hill. We can only save ourselves.

In Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler, eleven houses on a cul-de-sac in a middle class LA suburb called Robledo wall themselves off and try to survive as society slowly crumbles around them. A lot of fiction has taken the same sort of theme since Butler wrote it, but no one has yet done it so terrifyingly well. Our world has been destroyed by aliens, robots, natural disasters, blowing up the moon, nuclear winter, the undead. In Parable of the Sower, the world is destroyed by none of these things. The climate slowly gets worse, the government slowly gets weaker, unemployment rises, the gap between rich and poor increases, people aren’t safe in the streets, no one trusts the police. Politicians promise change. No one believes them, but still everyone thinks that things will magically get better, that they can go back to the way things were when life was good. Meanwhile, they wall themselves off and hope that the wall will save them.

It won’t.

This is what I know from both history and literature: walls, both literal and figurative, will not save a society, in the end. The things that topple nations don’t come from without; they come from within. Terrorism will not bring our country down, but our response to that terrorism might. Structural inequality might. Blindness to injustice might. Walls might.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~Viktor Frankl.

The knee-jerk response to fear: entrench. Deny that there is anything wrong with us. The blame must lie with others: others who are less important, less moral, less intelligent, less worthy of rights, less deserving of the good life we want for us and ours. We speak of them as groups, never as individuals. We wall them out. The implication rotting behind assumptions like this is: less human. Less human than us, and the people inside our wall.

We cannot let this response win. I do not want our country to be the city in the valley: too arrogant to believe it could ever be broken. Nor do I want to run for the hills. Maybe all societies are destined to end eventually, to be nothing but naked stones in valleys; if so, all I can say is: not today.

Today, we cannot let fear and hate win.

1. 

   Make a pro-con list.

2. Both columns are, of course, equal. That is because they are the physical manifestation of the litany that has been running through your head endlessly for the past few weeks. If one column were longer, this would be an easy choice and you wouldn’t need the pro-con list in the first place.

3. Stare at the columns. Wonder if putting them on paper will get the litany out of your head so you can finally get some sleep.

4. It won’t.

5. Call your parents. Receive advice.

6. Gchat your friends. Receive different advice.

7. Call parents again. Attempt to win them over to the other choice. Convince them this is what you really want.

8. Is this what you really want?

9. Pray.

10. Continue to feel confused.

11. Read some existential philosophy. This will definitely help. Think about all the life decisions you have ever made. Think about how these things you just did, like taking a job in another city, changed the whole course of your life.

12. There aren’t only two options, you know! There are infinity things you could do, with your life.

13. Google MFA programs. Why didn’t you think of this before?

14. Do some math.

15. Apply to some other jobs. Try to get excited.

16. Never hear back.

17. Decide to start your own company. This will be awesome.

18. ...

19. Find Game of Thrones on VidAngel. You have always been curious about this show. Watch the pilot, just to see what it is like.

20. Watch three seasons in the span of two weeks.

21. Your life is pretty great, comparatively speaking.

22. You are very lucky to even have life options like this. Oh my gosh, get over yourself. This is not that big of a deal, cosmically speaking.

23. Ugh, anything will be better than this constant indecision. Make a choice.

24. Pray.

Note: prior to reaching the final step, every time someone says "But, you LOVE your job!" or "But, teaching is so fulfilling!" or "But, the children!", go back to step one and start over.

Welcome to June! Here are some articles from the internet about which I had strong feelings this week. And here is a picture of a bird I drew while some of my students were testing.

THIS IS THE COOLEST THING EVER

Dozens of the earliest written texts ever found in Britain were revealed to the world in London on Wednesday morning...The documents include what is probably the earliest manuscript ever found in Britain – as well as what may well be the earliest surviving example of the name London.

YES TELL ME MORE

Key characters in the texts include Tertius the brewer, Proculus the haulier, Tibullus the freed slave, Optatus the food merchant, Crispus the innkeeper, Classicus the lieutenant colonel, Junius the barrel maker, Rusticus (one of the governor's bodyguards) and, last but not least, Florentinus the slave.

brb have to go write some ancient historical Roman London fanfic starring Rusticus and Florentinus

This article by a girl who quit TFA annoyed me so very much, and I'm trying to put my finger on why...

As I got to know my new colleagues and some level of trust was established, it didn't take long to discover that TFA's five-week training model was a source of resentment for these teachers. Not only were we youngsters going into "rough" schools with the stated goal of changing what they had not been able to, but we had done this with only half a summer's worth of preparation. I began to understand why my TFA status instantly communicated to other teachers that I found myself superior.

...See what I mean? Like, just possibly your colleagues had other reasons for finding your attitude vaguely superior.

Her criticisms of TFA are mostly valid (although she whines about a few things that, really, aren't their fault; for example, you cannot honestly expect them to place you if you fail your certification exam), HOWEVER...

1. None of this is exactly new news, you can't be like "TFA teachers are undertrained, SHOCKING EXPOSEE OF THE TRUTH NO ONE KNOWS BUT ME"
2. Also, she quit after a year! Which is totally her choice, and it sounds like it was the right choice for her, and I do not judge people for leaving TFA if they find it's not for them, but she seems to think that the act of quitting somehow qualifies her as an expert in everything that's wrong with education now, and I just...do not agree.

This seriously worries me: many of my students attend CUNY and I don't know where they would be going if they didn't have that option.

On the City College of New York’s handsome Gothic campus, leaking ceilings have turned hallways into obstacle courses of buckets. The bathrooms sometimes run out of toilet paper. The lectures are becoming uncomfortably overcrowded, and course selections are dwindling, because of steep budget cuts.
The faculty of the college’s well-regarded engineering school is so “disengaged and beaten,” an assessment last year warned, that if “serious shortcomings” were not rectified, the school could fail to earn reaccreditation.

I'm not sure how to fix this, but I suppose I can start by sharing it widely so that everyone at least knows about the issue...

My grandfather, who we call Bobpa, turned 95 this week. He is a brilliant, compassionate man whose fiercely inquiring mind and quiet unwavering kindness have always made him a giant in my mind: a tree rooted deep, straight as an iron rod, always pushing itself further and further into the sky.

When I was sixteen, Bobpa came to Florida to give me my patriarchal blessing. You only get one of these for your entire life; at sixteen, I was a tangled, sleep-deprived jumble of passion and ambition, driven and lost; I thought I couldn’t possibly ever need guidance in my life more than I needed it right then.

Before he gave me the blessing, Bobpa asked me if there was anything in particular I’d like guidance on.

“Just--what to do with the next ten years,” I said.

“Interesting. Why just the next ten?” he replied.

“Well, those are the important ones. After that I’ll just get married.”

He laughed. “Life doesn’t end after you get married, you know.”

“I know that, it’s just--after that, you know, your life is more set. Like, all your major decisions have already been made, and you’re just, like, having kids.”

There are so many things I wish I could go back and tell 16-year-old me, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have listened. What Bobpa said was something like this:

“I’m sure God will give you guidance on this next phase of your life, but remember that there may be many possible ways that you could proceed, and God will usually leave that choice up to you. Each phase of life has its challenges, but each phase of life also has potential for growth and progress. Never let yourself be ‘set.’”

He gave me my blessing, and, like his advice, I didn’t understand most of it until much later. God did not, in fact, give 16-year-old me a clear answer as to whether I should go to college or become a famous ballet dancer (perhaps He knew that the latter option was never very likely). However, over the next ten years (“the important ones”), I did a lot of things: I went to college, I went on a mission, I angsted about jobs for a while, moved to Boston without a job, and then picked teaching; I joined Teach for America and moved to New York. I’m naturally indecisive; at each decision point, I would plead for God to tell me which path was right, and then, generally receiving an intangible sense of benevolence but no clear sign, I’d shut my eyes, cross my fingers, and jump in, hoping that I’d picked correctly. There were crisis points: when I went through years of doubt in college, I remembered Bobpa telling me that that doubt was a natural part of faith; when Grammie died, I learned the true importance of the Resurrection; when I went through the temple for the first time and cried afterwards in incomprehension, Bobpa was there as well. “You don’t always have to understand everything right away,” he said. “Sometimes you have to take the long view. Sometimes, it takes time.”

When I was 25, I fell in love; when I got married at 27, it was the first life decision I made that I was ever absolutely certain about. And afterwards, as Bobpa predicted, my life indeed did not end. It just got much, much bigger. It’s sort of like discovering, upon finishing level one, that your reward is that you get to play level two, and then comes the slow dawning realization that there are actually a lot more levels than you previously thought.

Often, advice to young people takes the theme of “life is short”; there’s tremendous pressure to do everything now, now, now. What I’ve learned from Bobpa is that life is long; infinitely long, in fact, and you are in a very small part of it. You don’t understand everything right now. You have to take the long view. You won’t always have a clear answer to everything; keep going anyway, and you’ll be fine. There is always something more to learn. Never stop asking questions. Never let yourself be “set.”

Life’s too short for that.

I got this idea from the Toast, which does link roundup every day and I love it. So, here are some things I read on the internet this week:

One question I often get about teaching in a Title I school is: How did these students get so behind in the first place? This Atlantic Article delves into one (of the many, many) factors that impact students, particularly students at low-income schools: toxic stress from a young age.

...The problem is that when disadvantaged children run into trouble in school, either academically or behaviorally, most schools respond by imposing more control on them, not less. This diminishes their fragile sense of autonomy. As these students fall behind their peers academically, they feel less and less competent. And if their relationships with their teachers are wary or even contentious, they are less likely to experience the kind of relatedness that Deci and Ryan describe as being so powerfully motivating for young people in the classroom.

Alexandra Petri's election satires are consistently gold. Here's one of the latest:

If Sanders supporters complained about other things the way they complain about election results

CHESS:
This game is rigged. The pawns get to move almost NOWHERE, whereas the QUEEN (DETECT ANY RESEMBLANCE HERE???) can just move wherever she likes with no apparent rhyme or reason. She’s not a bishop or a rook. Why does she move like one? Also, the black pieces have to move second, which is TOTALLY unfair and needs to be looked into, unless I am playing with the white pieces today.

I have always thought it was a little bit hilarious that the Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility are upset about moving into a cottage that is basically my dream home.

Important Influences: Rain is a big influence. It never really stops raining here, so we have a lot of time to stay in and think about what kinds of window coverings would be best and how many more cushions we need to embroider. Marianne is always taking walks in the rain. I swear: one day she’s going to get really sick in a flushed, sweating, erotic way, and I’m just going to be like: I told you the rain was bad.

Finally, my high school English teacher posted this article from American Scholar a few weeks ago, and I think it is the most beautiful thing I've read this month.

I Will Love You in the Summertime

The Polish poet Anna Kamienska died in 1986, at the age of 66. She had converted to Christianity in her late 40s, after the unexpected death of her beloved husband, the poet Jan Spiewak. People who have been away from God tend to come back by one of two ways: destitution or abundance, an overmastering sorrow or a strangely disabling joy. Either the world is not enough for the hole that has opened in you, or it is too much. The two impulses are intimately related, and it may be that the most authentic spiritual existence inheres in being able to perceive one state when you are squarely in the midst of the other. The mortal sorrow that shadows even the most intense joy. The immortal joy that can give even the darkest sorrow a fugitive gleam.

One morning I got to school and found all the students in a long tense mass outside the door. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is it locked?” It wasn’t late; we still had at least 20 minutes until school would start. Then I saw the police at the door. They saw me too. “Are you staff? Come on through,” called one officer. I went in, and as I passed the door, I realized they were there to search all the students, one by one, as they entered the school. “What’s going on?” I asked as I passed. “Routine check,” he replied.

The students filtered mutely into first period, one at a time; some didn’t get through the line until first period was already over. They weren’t angry. They were something much worse: they were used to it.

We never found out what it was about.

I remember a day when I was in high school, seventeen. It was one of those days when I had study hall after lunch senior year, and I could leave campus for two glorious hours in the middle of the day. I passed the security guard leaving, but of course she didn’t look at me twice. The security guard was there to stop strangers from wandering onto campus--not to keep students in.

I don’t remember being told explicitly: We trust you. We expect you to succeed. It was all around us; we breathed their trust like air.

It’s a well-known mindfulness trick that people tend to behave the way we expect. This is doubly, triply true when it comes to teenagers, who are in a constant state of change as they figure out what kind of people they want to be.

We talk so often of the achievement gap in schools, but I think there are other gaps, less seen, just as damaging. One of them is the trust gap.

One of my students took this picture* from his apartment window. Right before he took it, he had an encounter with a policeman who yelled at him for sitting in the hallway of the apartment building where he lived. As he told this story, everyone in the class nodded. This kind of thing happens all the time, they said. Some of them said they use stories like this as motivation--to fuel their desire to overturn everyone’s expectations. Some of them said it was depressing, but they had learned to live with it. Some of them said they understood why these kinds of things occurred, that everyone has a part to play in creating or breaking stereotypes. These are my IB students, brilliant and passionate, picking apart experiences and images to analyze the hidden threads of meaning, examining each thought they have from multiple angles.

I’m working on recognizing things in life I can’t control, and things I can. I have very little control over society’s expectations of my students, but I have a lot of control over my own. I think that one of the most important things I’ve learned as a teacher is finding ways to say these things without words to my students: I trust you. I believe in you. You can do this. I expect you to succeed. When they mess up, I tell them I’m disappointed, because I expected better. When they succeed, I’m thrilled, but I try not to be not surprised.

I am not perfect at this, obviously. I’m working on not beating myself up about that either.

One of the best compliments I ever got from a student: she turned in a 3,000 word essay, the longest thing she had ever written. I knew that she had gotten started late, and I was impressed that she had pulled it off by the deadline. I asked her how she had beaten the desire to procrastinate.

She just said: “I knew that you expected me to do it.”

*photography credit to my student, who kindly allowed me to repost it here

“I just wanted to let you know that while you were out, one of your students killed a fish in front of the class. He said it was for art, and that you would understand.”

You always wonder what they’re doing when you’re out sick.

This is what you get for taking them to the MOMA.

I remember when I got my first fish, felt their four little heads butting into the sides of the plastic bag. I’m holding life, I thought. I’m holding bright gold life in the palm of my hand.

(They died, one by one. Their replacements died. We lost seven fish. Our tank is cursed.)

“I wanted to make everyone question if they could sacrifice their pride to save a life,” he says. He told the class that they had five minutes to come to a consensus on the question of whether or not God exists. If they could agree, the fish would live. If not, he would pour a cupful of bleach into the plastic bottle, and the fish would die.

Argument exploded. He counted down. No one would give in. The fish was killed.

(Well, you did tell them they could do any kind of art project they wanted as long as it made people think. You showed them “Piss Christ” and “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” and debated the value of art that challenges conventional morality.)

The fish was destined to die anyway, he says, because he bought it to feed to his turtle.
This way, it died for a cause.
It died to make people question their beliefs.
It’s immortal!

What I thought, when I held my bag of little fish, was how extraordinary and terrifying it was to have responsibility for the life of something else, to hold it literally in your hand.

And what I think, facing a room of mildly traumatized students who now feel responsible for the death of a fish because they couldn’t agree, is how much like little fish they are sometimes: bright and hungry and butting their heads against the plastic walls.

The first time I really felt Easter, my grandmother was dying.

We had some warning, so that I was able to fly out to see her, lying shriveled and tiny in a mound of blankets, with the house full of music and laughter and tears and food. When I left to fly back to school to finish the semester, she was still alive, but I knew I would never see her again. I should have stayed.

It was two weeks before Easter. I had been sick, and then even when the germs were mostly gone I kept falling asleep for long stretches of time, oblivious to the world around me. A friend got me out of bed by promising to take me to a performance of the Bach St. Matthew Passion--one of my favorite classical pieces. It’s traditionally performed on Good Friday, and sets the text of the Passion chapters of the Gospel of St. Matthew to music.

To me, it is one of the most stunning interpretations of the last week of Christ’s life. You seem to see before your eyes the celebration of Palm Sunday, the apostles’ confusion and fear at the last supper, the betrayal, the long walk up the hill, the turning of the crowd.

And, finally, the death of Christ.
And then it ends.

I walked home from the concert feeling like the sky above me was hanging like an anvil on a thread.

I would have to wait. In a very real way, it felt like Christ was really dead for that space of time, dead until we could sing the hymns to raise him Easter morning. Death walked beside me, terrifyingly real.

That was nine Easters ago, and I haven’t felt it so strongly again until this year. This year, I am trying to get pregnant, and failing. People don’t often talk or write about this, so I had never really thought about it, until I was unexpectedly faced with the roller coaster months: starting off in hope, ending in me crying in the bathroom. Little deaths, month in, month out.

And all the time in between, waiting.

I wonder how time passed for people who loved Christ, when he was dead and lying in the tomb. He’d promised to come back, but they don’t act like they really believed he would. They put him in a tomb sealed with a giant stone. They come back three days later with spices to finish the burial. Their god is dead. They have nothing but a promise to comfort them as they wait in the dark.

Nine years ago, I went to church on Easter morning, two days after my grandmother’s funeral. We sang the resurrection hymns, and I felt them for the first time, as the sun rises, as the seeds split, as the world turns from snow to flowers. It flooded through me, fire and spirit.

Death is not the end. There is no end.
They come back to the tomb, and find it empty. In some way I think all people celebrate this each spring, in spirit or ritual or emotion: life over death, hope over pain, love over fear. We need it not when we’re winning, but when we’re losing. When it snows again after you thought spring was in the clear, and you know you will not get the thing you are praying for right now.

Still, the tomb is broken.
Still, the sunlight shines inside on bare grey stone, quiet and sure and always.
Life in death.
Hope in pain.
Love in fear.

Do you remember the day you realized you wouldn’t always be a child?

Of course you do.

It is early summer, you don’t know what day because they’ve all blended into one, hot and sticky, reading in the trees, scraped knees and mosquitoes and fireflies.

Someone says the date offhand, July 9, and it settles uncomfortably into your thoughts like a stranger sitting too close to you on a park bench.

You look up.

July 9.

It’s been July 9 before, and it will be again, but...

The date sits in your mind, cold and prickly. You lick at it with your tongue, tasting iron.

There will be another July 9, but not this one:
this one will never come again.

Everything slows and you count the seconds
One
by
One
Going by
like
passing cars.

All great children’s literature is rooted in this truth.

Think of Wendy and John and Michael, playing at house and war, while the crocodile ticks by, waiting with teeth.

Or Lyra, gliding above Cittagazze, realizing she can almost see the ghosts.

This is the feeling that you have when you read about Mowgli, running with the pack, playing with the monkeys, wondering what kind of creature he is.

One day he will have to go home.
One day he will have to grow up.

He doesn’t know it yet, but you do.

The truth is the seed from which the wonder grows, strange and ever-changing.

Most things written for children fundamentally underestimate them. They forget how much children really know.

If you were the writer who decided that wouldn’t it be nicer, really, if Mowgli could just stay in the jungle forever with his talking animal friends, I would like to tell you: children are so much smarter than you think. They know the truth that you’ve missed, or forgotten, in your presumed middle age.

They know what real wonder looks like.

They know that isn’t how it ends.

The cathedral is tall and straight, and blackened round the edges, but the lady chapel is
White and gray, windows arching, clear glass.
Empty windows full of trees
Frame the Lady statue, brash
Her eyes are terrifying.

She is the only new thing
But she is not new.

I open my throat and trees rush in
Roots
Split me open like a seed.

We, your daughters,
Are nothing but light and trees.

I am the Lady, she says
I am the green
Sprout seed,
The urgent
Rain,
The root that
Splits the tower.

What have we called forth, with our voices?
Something old, and new,
Rising sun and bone,
Blood and spark unseen:

The goddess in the gray stone
The lady in the green.