Keep Moving Forward, and Other Things I've Learned I'm Doing.

Two things happened to me today --  I had my mid-year review, and I saw someone I knew at the grocery store.

Now, you're probably wondering why or how those two things are related, so let me back up.

I don't actually know the person I saw at the grocery store. It was the cashier who rang out my groceries. I don't know him, but I recognized him. The last time I was at this particular store, he was the one who rang me out.

The only reason I remember this is because I happened to be wearing a large, distinctive cameo necklace,which he asked me about.  He was kind of cute in the scruffy,  tallish, beat-poet kind of way, so I told him I'd purchased it for a steampunk costume, and that it seemed appropriate for work that day. (True stories, both. Although now that I stop to think about it, I remember being very uncomfortable with the question at the time.) He, of course, wanted to know more about the costume,  and where I worked, which at the time was a local history museum, and then he wanted to talk about our civil war event, and the little old lady in line behind me looked about ready to spit nails that I only had fifteen items and she was still waiting for me to stop  flirting with the cashier, if you want to call it flirting. It was more of a hold-up where you have to keep doing small talk until the receipt prints.

Anyway. This was at least a year ago. (Obviously he made an impression. Most guys don't go out of their way to make small talk with me. The ones that do stick.)

 Who should be checking out groceries again? Tallish beat poet guy!  Not as cute as I remember -- and today I am not wearing a cameo, or anything vaguely historical. Instead I have my logowear for my new job at a very well-thought-of local cultural institution. The kind of shirt that makes everyone stop and go, "Oh, you work there? We love it there!" It's not a very attractive shirt, but it does get a nice kind of attention.

Lo and behold, he starts doing the small talk thing again! But I'm not having any of it today. I'm a little curt, more than I mean to be, because there's another long-suffering housewife in line behind me and I'm not going to be that twenty-something flirting with the cashier, who's not that cute anyway. So, what do you do at the Arboretum? Oh, this and that. Must be nice working there. Oh, yes, it is. I like it a lot. He manages to drop the fact that he was at a Civil War reenactment this weekend into the small talk, which is impressive and, quite frankly, a little scary -- does he remember me or something? Or is that his thing with all the vaguely attractive single women who come through the checkout?-- and I manage to say something about how the weather must have been nice for it this weekend, which it was.

Then I take my groceries and get the heck out of Dodge before my frozen yogurt melts.

Last year, the Civil War thing would have been really cool to me, cool enough to make me awkwardly hold up traffic in line at the grocery store and maybe leave this guy my number. This year, it's still cool, but I'm wearing a different shirt, even if it is an ugly shade of green and slightly too small. I have a full time job doing what I love. I just had my review this morning and they've told me that they like me, that I'm doing a really good job even though I've only been there three months, and that I'm a valuable member of the team.

I'm moved up in the world...and this guy is still working as a cashier at the local grocery store. It makes me a little glad I didn't leave him my number. Now, I'm sure he's got plans and dreams and I'm also sure he's a great guy, and maybe I should have given him a chance. But it also makes me aware of how incredibly blessed I am. I've been so worried about being staid and staying in the same place and being afraid that I'm not moving forward, but I am moving forward. From outward appearances, I'm practically in the next galaxy!

It's easier to see the change in our lives when we see something else that's stood still while we were moving.

So, in conclusion, sorry, cashier-dude whose name I could probably find on my receipt. My priorities have shifted. And your hair was cuter last year.

Important Middle Earth Questions: Is There Chocolate In Middle Earth?

Is there chocolate in middle earth?

So, one of the folks I follow on tumblr asked this question this morning, and like the inquisitive person I am, I decided to do some research on this interesting and important question. Let’s explore this a little, shall we?

Chocolate as we know it comes from the seedpods of Theobroma cacao, an evergreen tree whose generic name comes from the Greek for ‘food of the gods.’ (Nice job, Carl Linneaus.) The tree is pollinated, flowers, and produces a fruit whose large seedpods form the basis for chocolate. The fruit is gathered, and the seedpods are extracted. They are then fermented, and quickly dried, before being roasted, hulled, and ground up, and turned into the first step on the road to chocolate.

All of this doesn’t matter to us at all if Theobroma cacao can’t grow.

 Above is a map detailing cacao output around the world. Notice the concentration in equatorial climates. My good friends over at Wikipedia confirm this -- “Cacao trees will grow in a limited geographical zone, of approximately 20 degrees to the north and south of the Equator. Nearly 70% of the world crop is grown in West Africa.” [source]

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew inform us “In its natural habitat, cocoa grows in the understory of evergreen tropical rainforest. It often grows in clumps along river banks, where the roots may be flooded for long periods of the year. Cocoa grows at low elevations, usually below 300 metres above sea level, in areas with 1,000 to 3,000 mm rainfall per year.” [source]

So. Equatorial climates, evergreen tropical rainforest, river banks, low elevations with lots of rain. That's what we need here.

Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas of Middle Earth has several maps pertaining to vegetation, climate and season conditions in Middle Earth. Based on the pieces of information she gathered from what one hopes to be a close reading of Tolkien’s work, she suggests that Gondor, the southernmost region Tolkien’s work touches on in any detail, has mild winters and hot, dry summers, similar to the climate of the Mediterranean and Southern California. She also suggests that further south of Gondor, in Harad, is arid grassland, similar to what one might find in the Great Plains region or in Central Asia.

Nowhere in her maps is any mention made of rainforest, or of a climate with a rainfall level significant enough to support a rainforest. (Those would make really cool Ents, though, don’t you think?) >So, in answer to the question, “Does Middle Earth have chocolate” my answer is… No, probably not in the known world. Now, Tolkien doesn’t ever explore whether there’s something farther south after Harad.  Maybe there are equatorial climates and rainforests as one goes deeper into the interior. (Maybe that can be a subject for a fanfic – explorer/diplomat goes to Harad after the king returns, comes back with cacao beans. Cue new fad for drinking chocolate in Gondor.) One has also to consider whether Tolkien considered his world to exist on a globe or on a flat plain. If the flat plain, is it meteorologically possible to have an equatorial climate, given that all the other climates represented in Middle Earth don’t have such conditions? I’m not a meteorologist or a physicist, so I don’t know and can’t speculate. Let me offer you some honeycakes in consolation. I do know Middle Earth has bees.

Moving Out, and other 'Emerging Adult' Life Choice Quandries

A room with a view or a room of one's own, it's all the same to me...

Yesterday at lunchtime I sat, by myself, in the heat of a Midwest afternoon, and contemplated selfishness, fiscal responsibility, and moving out of my parent’s house. Not necessarily in that order.

Yes, I am one of those recently graduated twenty somethings still living in my parent’s basement. (Yes, I am actually in the basement.) I’m not complaining – I love my parents and they’re very easy to get along with. In fact, I rather enjoy living at home. I’m not contemplating this move because of anything anyone said or did, or didn’t say or do. I’m doing it because I’m afraid I’m lazy, because I’m too comfortable, and that if I don’t do it now, I won’t do it at all.

I’m a member of that generation that the phrase ‘emerging adulthood’ was built for. We graduated with degrees in things we liked and moved back home  to cower underneath a lot of student loan debt. Some of us had helicopter parents. Most of us grew up with internet connections in our homes and technology to help us around every corner. We’ve been called entitled, lazy, vain, and overeager for our quick fix of self-esteem boosting. People write all kinds of articles about us telling how we’ll be the downfall of civilization or just a new chapter in human history or points in between. (You can read articles here from Time, here from the New York Times, and here from USA Today).

It’s hard to be an ‘emerging adult’ and not take some of this to heart. As someone who grew up listening to everyone talk about twenty somethings and credit card debt and the housing crisis and student loans, I feel like a pretty financially responsible person – I pay more than my student loan lender asks me every month (part of my evil plan to pay back my loan early) I have a pretty healthy trio of savings accounts that get regular deposits, I don’t use my credit card except to buy plane tickets, my new job allowed me to start a 401(k) that gets 3% of my paychecks, I almost can’t bring myself to shop in regular retail stores after thrifting for so long, and I always consider what the cheapest thing is at Starbucks before I take myself out for coffee, which only happens once in a blue moon anyway, because from my side of the tracks a Starbucks habit sounds like the first step on the road to ruin.

And I don’t want to consider myself a mooch, either. In high school, I had no part time job, no money, and no car. I ended up getting a lot of help from a lot of people that I couldn’t necessarily pay back. Oh, you’re ordering in pizza and everyone has to pay their share? Someone had better pick up Merc’s five dollars. When I got to senior year, my parents not only bought me a car so I could get to my student teaching gig but also started giving me what amounted to a stipend ($75 dollars every two weeks to make sure you eat and keep gas in the car we bought you.)

As I quickly discovered, $150 dollars a month can go a long way towards keeping a car in gas and paying for groceries for just one person if you play your cards right. I learned to love my crockpot, and I made sure that every time I had something, I shared it. Oh, we’re having a birthday party for someone on the floor? Let me bake you cookies. Pizza on Friday night? In reparations for years of other people paying for mine, let me pick up the bill. You just invited me out for frozen yogurt? I have a coupon, and in the interest of making things easy for the cashier, let me get this.

My grandmother, who is one of the most generous people I know, explained to me once that the reason she is so open-handed with her grandchildren is because she never got anything from her grandparents (who were emotionally distant as well). She wanted to be the exact opposite for her grandchildren, and she is, and that’s the kind of person I’ve striven to be, in college and after. Generous, but not to the point of exceeding my income.

But now I’m back at home, and thrift and economy aside, I’m starting to feel like a mooch again. I pay my share of the car insurance, fill my own tank and pay for my own oil changes, I contribute to the communal cupboard once in a while, I do the dishes and any other chores when I’m asked, and I participate without complaining in the yardwork. And I know that whatever evidence there is to the contrary, I’m still a burden on my parents.

Which is why I’d like to move out.

My younger brother, who next year is starting his sophomore year at college, just signed a lease (with mom and dad’s help) on an apartment. He commuted to school last year to save money, and now he’d like to live closer to school and have a normal college student social life that doesn’t involve two trains and a bus trip. I get that. But my brother is also significantly more independently minded than me, and I’m worried, as the oldest and a bit of a homebody, that my staying at home is setting a bad example.  (It also doesn’t help that my other brother, who is also younger than I am, asks every couple of months when I am getting my master’s degree and when I am moving.)

I’ve been at home for two years since graduation. I have a full time job now. Why shouldn’t I strike out on my own? Isn't that what Virginia Woolf alluded to when she said "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction"?

I put this suggestion to my parents, listed off several apartments I’d seen on craigslist, talked about how I’d run the numbers and thought I could make it work.

My mother shrugged and my father said no. “I want you to be financially stable when you move out,” he said, citing something about owning your own car and being able to put a downpayment on another when the old one goes and being able to afford a house. He’d spoken with a co-worker of his who owns shares in several apartment complexes as a side business. When this co-worker was younger, his grandfather had given him the same advice about owning and not renting, and he didn’t take it until several years later. Renting is a black hole for money that doesn’t pay you back. But buying a two-flat living in one half and renting out the other, that is the way to go.

 Where do they even have two flats? And when will I be able to afford one of those? And if I save a little every month for the long-awaited for house, can’t I have my own front door right now? Surely a little 600 square foot studio that I can bicycle to work from isn’t too much to strive for. My grandparents also keep asking me why they haven’t met a boyfriend yet. There’s not a whole lot that sounds more derpy to a potential date than ‘Sorry, no, not my place, I live with my parents.’

I rustled up a list of potential apartments anyway, sat down at lunch to call them – and then felt incredibly guilty about it. Am I only doing this because all my friends have their own apartments and I'm embarassed to say, "Here, come over to my house. My parents might join us for dinner"? Was I being selfish for wanting my own front door and forks and a rice cooker and a washer and dryer and a place to bring my friends on Friday nights? I’d be buying more things just to furnish the place, and that’s a little materialistic. Am I only doing this because I want more stuff? The energy use of a small apartment like that would be more than if I was living at home – lights to keep on, dinner to cook.   Just the other day, in light of six family members needing to be six different places with only four cars, my dad had dropped me off at work and taken my car. They couldn’t do that if I didn’t live with them and didn’t give them the flexibility of that extra vehicle. Living in community means that you save on things like energy use (if five people are all in one room they can use the same lights) and cooking dinner and yes, driving to work every day.

And it would be lonely, being just me. Living in community means just that -- community.

So, friends, I am putting this question out for you. What are your thoughts, your feelings, your experiences with moving out? 

Hello! (This Musical Won't Change Your Life!) Thoughts on the Book of Mormon

Friends! How go things with you?

Life has, of late, not left a whole lot of brain power for writing, so posts have been necessarily sporadic. But last week my good friend Artemis (she of the Thor/Loki/Fandom conversation) asked me to come along with her to see Book of Mormon, and after we’d discussed it a long while on the way back to the train station, she said, “So, you do realize you have to write a blog post on this now, don’t you?”

Well, she did pay for my ticket, so yes, I do have to write a blog post on it now.

Let me preface this by saying that Book of Mormon is not a musical I would have elected to go see by myself. I’m not a fan of South Park or the particular brand of humor on that show, and I’m not really crazy about Mormons,  and I’m really, really not a fan of making fun of anyone’s religion. Pretty much I was going because I had the next day off and my friend had a ticket. So I went.

And, surprisingly, I kind of enjoyed myself.  For those of you who, like myself, have not been bothered with Book of Mormon, let me give you a summary.

The musical opens with a class full of eager young Mormons who are finishing up their missionary formation and going to do their required two years of missionary service. (As an aside, this is pretty much the only song in the show I absolutely loved. Here, let’s listen.)

We meet Elder Price, who’s kind of the ‘spit shined shoes, gets everything right, teacher’s pet’ type, and Elder Cunningham, who’s kind of…not that type. Elder Price is really hoping he gets assigned to his dream post, Orlando, Florida, and Elder Cunningham is just excited that he gets to go somewhere and maybe make a friend. As you’ve probably guessed, for the requisite comic element, these two characters get paired together to do their missionary service in Uganda, which Elder Price is less than thrilled about. The audience sees the families of these two young men saying goodbye at the airport, giving some sense of how they turned out the way they did, and then, after some clever scene changes and less than memorable songs, they arrive in Uganda.

There’s a very famous piece of writing often taught in Post Colonial Literature classes called “How to Write About Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina, in which Wainaina points out all of the accepted tropes or stereotypes western authors use to talk about Africa. (One of those tropes being that you can always just talk about Africa as a big mass, because, as all men of learning know, Africa has no internal distinctions, cultural boundaries, or ‘difference’ to  distinguish one part of the continent from another. ) (Please pardon my sarcasm.) If you’ve never read it, it’s a really great piece of writing, and very relevant here because that’s what Uganda is in this play. The scene opens and it’s all there – the dung huts, the sad people milling about in the streets, the requisite warlord who’s terrorizing the villagers and stealing the luggage of well meaning white missionaries. It’s a bit of dead horse – which is a little funny, because in a bit of clever visual punnery, there actually is someone dragging a dead horse across the stage.

I’m not sure if this is okay, but when the curtain came up on this scene, I frowned. The villagers started singing and making jokes about how they have maggots in places I don’t want to think about, and I felt like I was watching some kind of post-colonial train wreck. Which I expressed to Artemis during the intermission. “What if,” she said, “the way that the set is done is supposed to convey how Price and Cunningham see and perceive Africa?” We agreed that both men set themselves up to think that the place they’ll be going will terrible – and lo and behold, it is. I think that’s pretty fair. We find what we expect to find. (Does that mean I expected to find stereotyped Africa in the play? Food for thought.)

After arriving in the village, Price and Cunningham learn that (as we might predict) the mission has been unsuccessful thus far. It’s hard to sell religion to people who can’t get their basic needs met every day. Price, being the goody-two-shoes that he is, decides to take matters into his own hands – and gets nowhere, until he and Cunningham meet up with the village leader’s daughter, Nabalungi. (It’s a reoccurring joke that Cunningham, who thinks she’s really cute, also can’t remember her name.) Nabalungi, unlike the rest of the villagers, is really sold on what Cunningham and Price are talking about when they talk about paradise.

But somewhere their wires have crossed.  Price is talking about the heavenly paradise after death – Nabalungi is convinced that if they convert to Mormonism, they’ll be granted access to Salt Lake City, which sounds like a paradise to her. “My mother once told me of a place/ … I always thought she'd made it up/To comfort me in times of pain/But now I know that place is real/Now I know it's name/Sal Tlay Ka Siti/Not just a story Momma told/But a village in Utah/Where the roofs are thatched with gold.”

Ah, gold roofs. A staple in the dreams of every immigration narrative. And it gets better!

“They have vitamin injections by the case” “The warlords there are friendly/They help you cross the street/And there's a Red Cross on every corner/With all the flour you can eat.”

With a paradise like that, it’s not difficult to see why the missionaries aren’t getting anywhere. These are folks who are really down on their luck. (Wainaina would probably have something to say about that, too, but we won’t go into that now.)

Now, this is where the story gets interesting. Price gives up, but Cunningham, who wants really, really badly for his friend to stay and not get reassigned to Orlando, decides to give the missionary work another go. He starts reading from the Book of Mormon to the villagers – and when they stop paying attention, Cunningham starts adding a heavy gilt of pop culture references, action, and drama. That seems to work – but they still don’t understand how this ‘book about America a long long time ago’ can help them here in Uganda. So Cunningham does what any stressed-out teenager does – he lies. He starts adding elements into the story that make the Book into a document that applies to the villagers’ lives. Of COURSE there’s something in the Book of Mormon about struggling with AIDS and dysentery and warlords and your daughters being raped!

But it works – people start converting. The lying and pop culture references, of course, get Cunningham in a ton of trouble when the Mission Elders want to come and see how the mission is doing and get treated to a dramatic interpretation of Cunningham’s new and improved Book of Mormon. (Which I was also kind of not okay with for lots of reasons, but I’m weird, so we’ll ignore that and move on.)

Having found out that everything she’s been told about god and paradise is a lie, and that converting to Mormonism doesn’t mean she gets to go to Salt Lake City, Nabalungi tries to run away. The villagers, however, try to talk her back into a good relationship with God. She tries to explain that everything Cunningham’s told them is made up, that it never happened, and that subsequently, it doesn’t mean anything.

“Of course -- it’s a metaphor!” the villagers exclaim. “Prophets always speak in metaphors. You don’t actually think Joseph Smith fucked a frog, do you?” Duh! What do you think we are, ignorant or something?

(Frog fucking was one of those elements Cunningham added in for cultural relevancy, as a helpful alternative to fucking virgins to cure AIDS, and it gets brought up a lot. I guess I just don’t like humor that relies on sex jokes.)

 I think what saves this from being a total post-colonial train wreck is the fact that there are some points in the play where the villagers really take  a stick to the eye of the missionaries and point out that their missionary work (which is pretty much limited to ‘Here, let us give you this book, accept Jesus as your  lord and savior’) is really useless, especially when you have to worry about things like your daughter getting raped by the militia or where your next meal is coming from or whether the nearby river will flood your house and take away all your possessions and arable farmland.

And the moment described above, for me, saved the whole musical. The smartest line in the whole production is spoken by one of the villagers, the villagers whom everyone has assumed know nothing about the world and the way the world works. They’re not dumb – they know a great deal. They just don’t have the resources or agency to do anything with that knowledge. Until Cunningham wakes up some of that agency with his storytelling. If the people he talks about in his version can stand up against their evil warlords or live with dysentery, why can’t you? What Cunningham has done with his reimagined Book of Mormon is what many great preachers do every Sunday – he made it relevant to his audience. (His methods might be a little questionable, but he did it with good intentions.)

And that brings me to the real point of this blog post, the ‘take’ that Artemis wanted from me. I’m one of the only really religious people Artemis knows. (I'm more culturally Catholic than what I can in good conscience label authentic Catholic, but the point still stands.) She and I were watching the same show with two different agendas, and she wanted to know how my religious agenda  had taken in and interpreted all of this.

One of the things that struck me throughout the play was the missionary work itself. As the play points out, just talking to people about Jesus isn’t very helpful. (Duh.) However, a doctrine of works, as some theologians have termed it, is much closer to what Jesus advocates for in the new testament. (This Sunday’s gospel reading from Luke was the story of the Good Samaritan –a doctrine of works reading if ever there was one.)  Now, we could talk A LOT about how ‘good works’ can go really, really wrong in lots of ways, but essentially, the idea of doing good works comes down to religion being practical and supporting the practical, day-to-day needs of the community. Cunningham did this by addressing his ‘scriptures’ to the problems the community faced everyday, giving them hopeful stories that would support them as they went about their work.  

The other thing that struck me was the play’s message about the authenticity of religion and religious practice. We’re given two characters: Elder Price, who does everything by the book and would be a perfect religious example except that he’s only doing these things in the hope of an earthly reward, and Elder Cunningham, who hasn’t even read the book, is unaware of basic dogma, and yet genuinely wants to help people by sharing the feeling of solace he gets from his God. Both of these religious practices are wrong, to a certain degree, and both could stand to have a little more of what the other has. Blind, unquestioned faith is just as harmful as no faith at all, and the Christian God also says that you should live and work  for the betterment of others, not just for yourself.

So, to summarize, the Book of Mormon wasn’t a waste of time, but some of the humor was probably wasted on me. I can, however, appreciate a story that promotes a little bit of dialogue, which this show did on a variety of different subjects, and for that, I can say that if you're going, you'll at least have something to talk about afterwards.