whirled

Here is how it works: You sign up by Halloween (one week from today). You will get to choose a “theme” for your sketchbook, or ask them to assign you a theme. The themes can be interpreted as strictly or as loosely as you like. They send you a sketchbook in the mail. You fill up the sketchbook by the end of January, and send it back. Then it will go on a tour of museums and libraries with all the other sketchbooks people are filling up.

I thought this sounded neat! If you do, too, go go go and take a look! It is $25 to participate– that includes the fee of them mailing you a sketchbook just for the project. They also just sent me a code that will get you a small discount: ADDAFRIEND

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My coworker, Glenn, gave me that this morning, after expressing his dismay about the number of “This is a sign” signs at the rally this weekend.

Oh, yes. I went to the “Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive” this weekend, with sunnyrea and kutiechick. Sadly, I left my camera in their apartment, so pictures will have to wait. I will leave you with one photo of myself:

The rally was kind of amazing. Have you ever felt hundreds of thousands of people jump in unison? Have you ever heard the sound of their feet echo off the buildings that surround you? Explaining the impact (no pun intended) of being involved in such a demonstration is not really going to do it justice.

We went to Rocky Horror after the rally, which was also super fun. I haven’t been in years! I was disappointed, though, to hear all the sort of “new” shout-outs, lots of references to really contemporary things that sort of seemed out of place. And there were a lot of people doing really long shout-outs, which I don’t get the point of, because they all overlapped each other and were impossible to hear. The live cast was really good, though! I liked the guy who played Frank a lot.

Sunday, I came home, and watched the first episode of The Walking Dead. It was literally gorgeous. I am still not entirely sure how I feel about a serialized zombie TV show, even based on a comic, but the first episode was excellent. Did anybody else watch?

There haven’t been many comics lately because I’m working on a longer project and I really only have time to do one thing a night, so the comics have taken a back seat to the other thing I’m working on, which is about 1/5 of the way completed. If I have some time to do some, I will post them, but it might be a while til I have time to do anything new.

I have actually been writing more. I don’t have the time in my day to work on something like a, say, NaNovel, because I can commit to about 500 words a day, but I’ve been writing some prose every day, and I’ve been reading a lot more books. I’m up to about a book a week, which is awesome, when I haven’t read in so long. I’m reading a lot of books that have been sitting on my shelves for years and years, and I’ve been buying new books, too. I have been reading Shannon Hale’s Bayern books and last week, I read Chalice by Robin McKinley, which I loved. It was about bees! This week, I’m reading Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, which I’m enjoying, but not as well as I like most of her other books.

Last weekend, I went with my mom to Columbia University Teacher’s College Reading & Writing Project’s first ever Parent-Child day. My mom wanted to go because a lot of the parents in her school were going, and asked me if I would come along as her child. Which was excellent because one of my favorite authors, Kate DiCamillo, was speaking there. I really liked what she had to say, especially for the kids. She talked about how she doesn’t like to write, how writing is hard, and it’s not something that comes easily to her. I thought that was a great thing for kids to hear from a professional and successful writer who’s written a very wide variety of types of books. I think a lot of the time, kids thing that being good at something means you like it and it’s easy, and so I thought it was great that she told them that. She also follows very few rules: she doesn’t use an outline, she doesn’t plan things out. It made me decide to go back and write something without an outline, which I haven’t done in about ten years. I’m rewriting a story I wrote when I was in my early 20s, a horrible fantasy story that was very trite and cliched, because I think I figured out how to make it into something better. So I guess in some ways it has an outline, but I’ve been veering away from the original plot quite a lot. I’ve also started working on another story I’ve had in my head for a while.

I wish I could write short things! But I’m terrible at short stories; everything has to be long, long long!

I’ve strayed from the topic of elections quite a lot, and it’s time for me to go vote, so I will go do that and possibly write more later.

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karnythia

When I was twelve, I went on a school-sponsored camping trip. We went away for a week, and stayed in cabins for all but one night. On the last night, some of us were selected by lottery to go on a tent overnight.

I was one of the lucky kids who was chosen to go. I’m not sure how it happened, being the social outcast I was in middle school, but I wound up in a tent with a group of the more popular girls in my grade. These girls were usually very nice to me, but why they chose me for their tent is still beyond me. But they were friendly and inclusive, and for that night, I actually felt like I belonged in their group.

We pitched our tent fairly close to a tent belonging to a group of boys in our grade, one of whom I had a massive (and I thought, undying) crush on. I thought nothing of it.

Then it was time for bed, and in hushed whispers, the girls in my tent arranged a game of Truth or Dare with the boys across the way. I remember feeling apprehensive– I was thrilled, in part, to be permitted, even if just for one night, to be included in a game that was one of those secret realms of the popular, a game to be played at parties that boys came to. But I was also afraid. What if someone asked me to do something I didn’t want?

I decided the easiest way to deal with the situation was to just answer “Truth.”

We played without leaving our tents, whispering our demands and our responses between the two. It made it difficult to come up with good dares, but somehow, they came anyway. It was strange, though, this lack of association that the boundaries of the tents created.

When my first turn came around, they asked me, if I had to date any boy in the school, who would it be?

Of course, the boy it would have been was in the next tent. I was mortified, I didn’t want to say his name and have them all laugh. He already had a girlfriend, as much as any twelve-year-old could have a girlfriend, and it was one of the more popular girls, that these girls were friends with. I said I didn’t know, I didn’t like any of the boys.

They said I had to pick one. One of them suggested a name, a boy who was nice enough but probably someone they thought was socially acceptable for me to date– not too cute, not too popular.

And I named a completely different boy, one whom I thought was very conventionally attractive but not someone they were friends with, who I thought wouldn’t be an asshole about it if he found out.

They all laughed at me, incredulous, because he was shorter than me. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, but it wasn’t really that big a deal. I was a little embarrassed for a moment, but we moved on.

Another girl asked for a dare, and the boys told her to hand her bra across to their tent.

Things went quiet in our tent for a moment. The girl in question looked at all of us and whispered, quiet enough that the boys couldn’t hear, that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

One of the girls told her to just tell them, but she was too embarrassed to let the boys know she wasn’t wearing one. Finally, I asked her what size bra she wore.

“34A,” she said.

I said that was my size.

The girls looked at me with disbelief. “But your boobs are so huge!” one of them whispered.

The boys didn’t seem to catch on that this was taking so long. I suspect maybe they just thought that’s how long it took to get a bra off. I, meanwhile, started taking off mine, and handed it to her. She gave it to the boys, claiming it was her own.

The boys passed the bra back a couple of minutes later, and it didn’t look like they’d done anything weird to it. Knowing the boys in question fairly well, I think the dare was largely spurred by a combination of genuine curiosity and the fact that that’s what they thought they were supposed to be doing. None of them laughed or made any lewd comments. It wasn’t creepy in the way it might have been, and I didn’t feel pressured to hand over my bra.

The other girl was spared humiliation, and the game went one, but I don’t remember anything else about it.

It was the first time anyone told me I had big breasts. Uncertain, I went to my mom and told her an edited version of this story (leaving out the fact that it had come up during a game of truth or dare). She took me bra shopping shortly after that, and I was re-fitted with a 34C. In eighth grade, I was wearing a D, and then a DD.

By the time I was in ninth grade, I was having to special-order my bras.

But that night was the first moment in my life when I was even aware that I had breasts that were even a little larger than average. Somehow, looking in the mirror every day, the way preteen girls do, I never noticed the difference between the shape of my body and the shapes of other girls’ bodies. It took another girl to point it out to me, in the dark, in a tent. Until that moment, my breasts had never been part of my identity, and after that moment, it became increasingly difficult for them not to be.

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Before I describe the dream to you, there is one detail that I need to explain:

Ribollita is an Italian soup. Its name literally means “reboiled,” and it’s pretty much: leftover soup. But the idea is that you take leftover minestrone soup and boil the crap out of it so that the veggies get really mushy, and then you pour it over day-old bread.

Here is Giada DeLaurentiis’ recipe for it, if anyone is curious.

You will understand when I describe the dream why this is so important.

Most of you know that I frequently dream stories that i am not in, stories that are like I’m viewing a movie. For example, two nights ago I had a dream about a cartoon television show that was like a cross between Venture Bros. and beatonna‘s comics. It starred a time-traveling Roman gladiator who was a sort of Brock Samson-esque character who was fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. There was a scene where he pumped his fist at the heavens and shouted “Nooooo!” So that’s what my dreams are usually like.

But in this dream, it was about me.

I was in my new apartment in Queens, unpacking some stuff, alone. It was the evening.

The phone rang.

Another thing you have to know to truly appreciate this dream is that I have not had a landline since I lived in Boston in 2005, and before Boston, I hadn’t had a landline since 2001. When I called Time Warner Cable to get my service switched to the new address, they told me that my bill would actually be cheaper if I added a landline service. Like, by $13 a month. So I added a landline. I don’t even have a phone to plug in, but I will have a line.

Now, in the dream, I was answering my landline.

It was my godmother, who lives in Colorado.

“Are you home?” she asked. It was a weird question, because she called my landline.

“Yes,” I answered.

“It’s happened,” she said.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“The Ribollita,” she said. “And they say there are fumes heading toward Queen.”

Now, she wasn’t talking about soup. And in my dream, I knew what she was talking about, because the word didn’t mean soup. It meant something that filled my heart with terror.

Again, I have to stop and explain something. In New York City, there is a section of the island of Manhattan where the bedrock is too far below the surface to build skyscrapers– if you’ve ever been to Manhattan, you would know that this is the downtown section between the Financial District and Midtown, where skyscrapers are possible.

In my dream, the Ribollita was a term for a hypothetical geological phenomenon whereby the massive construction in the upper and very lower portion of Manhattan would somehow cause the deeper bedrock in that middle section to buckle and send a massive seismic wave through the island.

I’m not sure how I would have not realized this was going on, or felt any kind of effect from it just across the river, but there you have it. And why in my dream, this phenomenon was named for a kind of soup is beyond me.

So, I gathered up my computer and a few things to take with me, and went outside to wait– and of course to see the effects. A few blocks away from where I am going to live, you can see the whole city skyline, so I went over there, and ran into someone– a woman I know, but I don’t remember who, it might not be someone I actually know in real life– and scanned the skyline. Of course, there were lots of weird spatial anomalies thanks to it being a dream, and when I got to the Empire State Building, it was standing at such an extreme angle that the spire of it was hanging over my head, and bricks were falling from it– yes, I know how completely implausible it is for there to be bricks falling from the ESB, but there you have it.

The river was alight with boats of people trying to escape Manhattan.

And then a brick flew from the other direction, over my head. I turned around, and there was a little boy standing there. I scolded him for throwing a brick.

“They’re angry at us,” he told me.

“Who is?” I asked.

“They are. They did this, because they’re angry.”

I asked again, who.

“I’ll show you,” he said. “Come with me.” And he started walking into a subway tunnel– of course, you should also know that in the area I’m moving to, the nearest subways are overhead, not underground.

But that’s when my alarm rang and I had to go to work.

I still can’t get over the idea that I dreamed of a disaster named after a soup.

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That pinch of earth came from the salt flats that were plentiful around Dandi. The man who took it was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. That lone action signaled the beginning of one of the most successful nonviolent resistance movements the world has ever seen.

When Gandhi picked up that piece of salt-encrusted earth on April 6, 1930, he committed a crime under British law.

When he took that earth and boiled it to produce salt, he broke the law yet again.

In India in 1930, only the British government was legally allowed to harvest, refine, or sell salt. Even though many people along the coasts of India lived on land where salt was plentiful and easy to acquire, a person could be arrested even for gathering salt from the salt flats, even for his or her own consumption. The British maintained control over the salt trade in India, and had done so in one form or another since the eighteenth century. But beginning in the 1820s, the British government instituted a tax on salt that was so exorbitant that a year’s supply of salt could cost the average Indian family half of their yearly wages. Then, in 1882, the Salt Act was passed, which made it illegal for ordinary people to make their own salt by boiling seawater. Everyone in India was forced to buy their salt from the British at exorbitant rates.

On April 1, 1930, at Surat, in the midst of his pilgrimage to Dandi, Gandhi said of the tax,

There is no alternative but for us to do something about our troubles and sufferings. And hences, we thought of the salt tax…

…I have gone through the holy books of Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. All these state that women and the poor should at no time be taxed. Muslims, Hindus, Parsis– all conume salt in equal quantities. The government has, however, found a device whereby all have been taxed. This is an inhuman law, a Satanic law. I have not heard of such justice anywhere in the world; where it prevails, I would call it inhuman, Satanic. To bow to an empire which dispenses such justice is not dharma but adharma. A man who prays to God every morning at dawn cannot, must not pray for the good of such an empire.

With this in mind, Gandhi had embarked upon his satyagraha, a phrase which he coined himself to describe his preferred form of nonviolent protest. Satyagraha is a combination of two Sanskrit words: Satya, or Truth, and Agraha, or Firmness.

Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or nonviolence, and gave up the use of the phrase “passive resistance”, in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word “satyagraha.”

Many of the political issues in India at the time didn’t affect people equally across all religious or ethnic groups. But everyone needs salt. It is not only a staple of any Indian diet, but it’s necessary for livestock and for many common household purposes. It was because of this that Gandhi chose it as the focus for his first major satyagraha after the Declaration of Independence issued on December 31, 1929. And it was because of this that Gandhi’s satyagraha gained broad support among many people across India. Salt was a common touchstone that could bring people together against the insidious and unjust policies of the British Empire.

On March 2, Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, and appealed to his better nature, explaining that he and the disciples at his ashram in Sabarati would be enacting an exercise in civil resistance. He detailed the plans for the march from the ashram, and their plan to defy the Salt Act. Therein he said,

I know that in embarking on non-violence, I shall be running what might fairly be termed a mad risk, but the victories of truth have never been won without risks, often of the gravest character. Conversion of a nation that has consciously or unconciously, preyed upon another far more numerous, far more ancient and no less cultured than itself is worth any amount of risk.

I have deliberately used the word conversion, for my ambition is no less than to convert the British people through non-violence and thus make them see the wrong they have done to India. I do not seek to harm your people. I want to serve them even as I want to serve my own. I believe that I have always served them. I served them up to 1919 blindly…If I have equal love for your people with mine, it will not long remain hidden…If people join me as I expect they will, the sufferings they will undergo, unless the British nation sooner retraces its steps, will be enough to melt the stoniest hearts.

The plan through civil disobedience will be to combat such evils as I have sampled out.

But Lord Irwin did not even respond to Gandhi’s appeal in person. And the Satyagraha went forward, and Gandhi spoke to the people in each village and city where the marchers rested, and at each stop, they gained more marchers. By the time they reached Dandi, over one hundred thousand people had stood at the road to watch them pass, to voice their support and solidarity for the Satyagraha. Over fifty thousand people met them in Dandi to join on the last leg of their journey.

When Gandhi lifted that piece of salt in Dandi, he rallied the people of India to boycott British-made salt and to make their own salt, or to buy salt from other Indians rather than give in to British tyranny.

Other regions began their own satyagraha against the British, and soon the Indian people were not only boycotting salt, but many other British-made goods. They broke not only the Salt Act, but other laws that hurt the Indian people at the benefit of the British government. Ordinary people refused to pay their taxes.

Around India, the British government responded with censorship, violence, and oppressive force: firing into crowds of nonviolent protesters, beating and arresting people engaged in peaceful protesters. Gandhi himself was arrested on May 4. And while the efforts of the Satyagraha did not bring forth any change in policy from the British, the struggles of the Indian people through the Satyagraha gained monumental international attention. There was no one who could rightly justify the British laws in India. There was no going back to the time before the Satyagraha.

Gandhi’s words proved prophetic.

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Captain’s Log, Stardate 2263.72:
Returning from a routine medical mission, sonar sensors picked up a free-floating pile of detritus on the starboard side.

I ordered two men out in a reconnaissance vessel to survey the debris in the event that it was the result of a wrecked patrol. Aboard the reconnaissance vessel: Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Leonard McCoy.

The investigation team returned with the assurance that the debris appeared to be a free-floating pile of trash from the 20th century. The two arrived back aboard the Enterprise with a small collection of samples for analysis.

Included amongst the samples was one (1) small “flash drive,” a primitive data storage mechanism which can be affixed to a computer for output via an outdated connective device known by contemporaries as a “USB port.” Our technology team loaded the device onto our computer’s main data bank in order to survey the information for anthropological research.

The drive included data from a Terran children’s fiction series familiar to Lt. Sulu. This was apparent based on the squeal of girlish glee which emanated from Mr. Sulu upon recognition of the material. Familiarity of the material was corroborated by Lt. Uhura, who claimed to have read said books in Latin, Hebrew and Klingon during her training as a linguist.

“Captain,” Lieutenant Uhura asked me. “You mean to say you’ve never read Harry Potter?”

“Lieutenant,” replied Dr. McCoy, “are you suggesting the Captain reads anything?”

I pointed out that I have read the autobiography of twentieth century basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as well as many issues of Men’s Health.

Several members of my crew simultaneously went on to attempt to describe the plot of said children’s books. From my understanding, there is a boy who lives in a cupboard who marries his best friend’s sister and flies around on a maneating horse-monster. He has magic powers and goes to a special school where he may or may not be having an affair with his archnemesis. Because of anti-homosexual sympathies at the time of its writing, the headmaster is a closeted homosexual, and his secret relationship is the cause of the second World War. There is also a werewolf.

Mr. Chekhov then tried to illustrate a complex mathematical formula which he described as having to do with the relation between a matter transporter and something he called “apparation,” but I must confess I lost him somewhere in the first sentence and was not listening by the time he got around to making a point.

My attention was mainly required by a curious activity which my deck officers referred to as “sorting,” in which they discussed “houses,” and which “house” they would each live in. Each house apparently had a name and the vast majority of my crew insisted that they would live in a house called after a bird—I believe it was Eagle- or Raven- something, although Dr. McCoy did not live with the rest of them and instead got to live in a house called Puffle-something. Many of my crew members apparently looked down on this Puffle-house with a sort of intellectual disdain.

Mr. Spock, the only non-Terran in my immediate command seemed intrigued by the game and inquired as to the exact definition of these houses. Apparently the bird house is the house for smart people and the Puffle house has something to do with either cuddliness or socialism. I am not sure which.

In an attempt to socialize with my crew, I asked them which of these houses I would get to live in. Lt Uhura immediately volunteered the name “Slytherin,” but as soon as she said it, Lt. Sulu got a rather agitated look and shouted “Gryffindor!” at her. Lt. Uhura said that that was impossible and related my success at the Kobayashi Maru test as an example of my “Slytherin” nature. Lt. Sulu, on the other hand, insisted that my manipulation of the exam was only a result of my dedication to idealism and that that made me a “Gryffindor.” After several minutes back and forth, it was necessary for me to order them separated out of my concern for their physical well-being. However, on reflection, I am quite pleased as I have been made to understand that Slytherin is the “sexy” house.

My crew has now convinced me that I have missed an important part of Terran pop culture by not having been exposed to these books, so I have downloaded the first in the series and plan to begin it tonight. I hope there are not any big words.

–James T Kirk, Commanding Officer, USS Enterprise

PS I also made this:

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