Why I'm a Fan of Admiral Holdo

Yeah, so I’m covering The Last Jedi six months after its release, when even the people who want Rian Johnson tarred and feathered are getting a little bored of talking about it. Sorry, but this is honestly how long it takes me to process things sometimes. When I walked out of the theater with my friends and the inevitable, “so, what’d you think?” question came up, I answered with a series of faux-intellectual analysis so similar to The Onion’s thoughts on the matter that if they’d shown up on the street outside the Grinnell Theater with a lawsuit, I would have settled right then and there.

I went into the movie with high hopes for a very particular kind of Star Wars movie, one where the decades-old sci fi tropes were reimagined in a new light. If we’re going to get another one of these things in theaters from now on into infinity, after all, then we might as well get slight variations on the formula. And if there was anyone who was up to the job, it was director Rian Johnson, who did some great trope-work when he reimagined the style and speech of Dashiell Hammett’s 1930’s criminal underworld within a 2000’s high school in his first movie (and one of my all time favorites) Brick. 

For this essay I want to focus just on the sub-plot surrounding Admiral Holdo, one of the most maligned parts of the film. For those who need a refresher (also: spoilers ahead): Holdo is put in charge of the last starship of resistance fighters after Leia is heavily injured. Pursued by the First Order with resources running low, Holdo’s plan is to abandon ship and send escape pods to a nearby planet. Poe Dameron, a resistance pilot and something like the fourth-tier protagonist of this movie, thinks it’s cowardly move that will doom the whole resistance to be picked off one-by-one. 

We don’t really see any reason to doubt him, which is the main complaint that most people bring up when nit-picking this movie, since Holdo could easily have explained how the plan would work. Anyway, Poe and fellow rebels Finn and Rose form a rebellion against the rebellion to pursue a daring escape that ends up killing almost everyone, whereas Holdo’s plan would’ve worked out without a hitch if the double-rebels had just followed orders.

I’m as disappointed as anyone that the answer to “Why didn’t Holdo tell them what she’d do?” ends up being essentially “Don’t think about it,” since in every other respect this is a smartly crafted element of the film that rewards careful examination.

Like I said before, I was looking forward to seeing how Rian Johnson played with genre tropes, and in this sub-plot he didn’t disappoint. There’s this character-type I’ve noticed floating around that writers use whenever they need a secondary conflict without complicating the plot too much. It’s a non-villian, usually a member of the government or some other authority figure, who presents an obstacle to the heroes not out of malicious intent, but because they’re too incompetent or cowardly to trust the heroes’ skill and genius. The best example I can think of is the EPA guy in Ghostbusters or Cornelius Fudge in Harry Potter (though he gets a more complex characterization as the series goes on). The audience is usually signaled to hate this person before they’re even properly introduced, with some sinister line of text or a shift in the musical score. This trope suggests that you can legitimately judge a person based on your gut feeling, a dangerous idea in itself. When the conflict between this weak-willed or stupid person and the heroes start, the story paints conflict between people, even people who have the same goal, as a simple question of who knows their stuff and who doesn’t. This approach actively discourages compromise and, since everyone is the hero of their own story, encourages going out on your own despite what everyone else says.

This character-type bugs me because, in stories of fights between good and evil, any interesting character dynamics or moral insights have to come from the people in the middle. I’ve always been drawn to the people in the middle: when I was a kid I adored Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender and combed the Bible looking for redemption-arcs for Ponticus Pilot and Judas (which I assume are two allusions of equal literary merit). So all of these simply drawn characters feels like a missed opportunity.

That’s what’s so great about Holdo. She’s introduced with every hint that she’s one of these wimps and idiots we’re taught to expect in fiction, especially genre fiction with clear-cut heroes and villains. We have every reason to believe that she’ll doom them all unless this trio of plucky rebels saves the day. But she ends up saving the day on her own, first with her genius plan and next with her self-sacrifice. If she’d been another Neville Chamberlain-type, Poe would’ve stayed the same cocky firebrand as before, but instead he grows as a character through the experience and guilt.

I heard that Holdo’s role was originally supposed to be filled by Admiral Ackbar, and that they only changed it when they realized that someone named Ackbar committing suicide by smashing a flying machine into a base filled with people might hit some raw nerves. I don’t doubt that, but I also suspect that the 2016 election played a role in that decision, specifically in the choice to use a female character. Too many people (myself among them to some extent, back when Bernie was in the running) voted against Hillary Clinton, not because of any well-informed research on her policy, but because she struck them as corrupt, weak, dumb, or cold. Faint knowledge of various scandals reinforced these notions among many. Stories color how we see the world, and I think this trope informed how many people saw the election. Trump was loud, confident, and unapologetic. That’s a trait you see in most cinematic villains, sure, but most heroes too, and that’s never how you’d describe the weak sap in the middle of the two. 

I’m not suggesting that better movies or books are going to permanently our political woes. Only informed discussion and smart voting can do that. But we’re always going understand our politics through stories. Maybe introducing a strong-willed, competent woman who people don’t trust at first but ultimately saves everyone isn’t a bad trope to add to the mix.

Well, that’s that. Hope it’s better than my past coverage of the franchise!

Yeah, So I've Sort of Been Wasting My Summer...

So it turns out that my summer was far less busy than I anticipated. I've been able to spend between six to eight hours a day reading and writing, but even with that I have more time than I know what to do with. Unfortunately, I rediscovered my old Lego collection a few weeks ago and have been sinking my time into that ever since. Because I'm out of ideas for what to do for these Monday from-the-vault posts, I figured I might as well do something in-between a shameful confession and proud display what I've spent all my time building.

As I've said in earlier posts, most of my building has been using Bionicle pieces so far, and I wanted to try out making similar models but with more standard bricks.

I wanted to make two models who contrasted with each other in interesting ways, so I ended with with a segmented, very articulable flying robot and a ground-based machine that's basically just one big chunk.

 I wanted this one to have a strange, unnerving quality to it, so I chose an accent color of lime green (which, fun fact, makes people so uncomfortable that many directors choose to light interrogation and torture scenes with it). And I guess this thing probably would be pretty scary if you were looking at it from minifigure-height.

From normal-human-height, though, it actually comes off as sort of cute, at least in my opinion. The wheel-and-arm build, which I meant to be unsettling since it's unclear if it is organic or mechanical, actually made it seem like an old fashioned wind-up toy. The enormous eyes were supposed to be like  roving spotlights (they can even move independently, though I didn't photograph it like that because, instead of being scary, it just looks like the thing has gone cross-eyed) but ends up making it look childish.

This mechanical dragon thing came much closer to my original vision than the other one, though I'm not entirely happy with it. Even with all the articulation, you can't pose it very well without it tipping over because it's much heavier on one side than the other.

Gotta say, I'm pretty happy with those wings, though. The canon on its back doesn't make very much sense since it would probably shoot things below, not above. Plus I didn't plan to make this thing some kind of war machine in the first place, but now that the canon is in the model looks sort of wonky without it. I guess years of making warrior-robots left me with some bad habits.

Family Separation, Atticus Finch, and Uneasy Morality

With a damaged achilles tendon keeping me homebound, I’ve spent the past few days reading Go Set a Watchman, trying and failing not to get re-addicted to Minecraft, and wondering how I can celebrate the founding of my country in two weeks when that same country is currently ripping children from their parents and holding them in cages. All three of those things disturbed in a variety of ways, but while there isn’t much insightful to say about how it’s surprisingly easy to get a sucked into a manual-labor simulator, I found an interesting connection between the first and third. Or, actually, my mom did.

Like any red-blooded American English major, I love To Kill a Mockingbird. My appreciation for it was actually determined before me prenatally. Before I was born, my parents decided they would nickname me Scout if I was a girl. I honestly sort of wish they’d kept with that plan even when I came out a boy, because Scout Finch might be my favorite protagonist in any story. She’s got a naivety and innocence that seems so authentic to the way that kids really think and act. The fragment of her growing up we see in the story, along with the longer one we see hinted at with the adult narrator, feels so real and personal. But despite all that, she’s not even my favorite character in the book. That title goes to Atticus, of course. His empathy towards anyone, and justice informed by that empathy, makes him the embodiment of everything that Americans should try to live up to. His philosophy helped me make sense of how I could love my hometown of Waco, even as I realized the racist and cruel elements of its past and present. 

Of course, gushing about To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t anything original (there’s a reason it’s taught in nearly every high school English class, after all). And saying that I was deeply disturbed by Atticus’s portrayal in Harper Lee’s posthumously published first draft, Go Set a Watchman, isn’t either. I held off on reading it until now because I’d heard so many complaints about how it recasts one of my favorite characters of all time as a racist. But finally I figured that I needed to read every word of the story I loved, so I picked up a copy.

It was worse than I’d thought. Before reading I’d imagined the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman as a totally new character who just happened to share the name with the final version’s moral center. But Go Set a Watchman doesn’t just change Atticus’s character, it recontextualizes his most noble actions in To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman’s Atticus doesn’t defend poor black men out of empathy, he does it so that black lawyers don’t get the news and come into Maycomb to enact lasting change. Of course, these novels don’t exist in the same fictional universe, but all the same it may hint at a dark hidden meaning for Atticus’s character in To Kill a Mockingbird. He had the resources and the knowledge to get more radical lawyers involved in Tom Robinson’s trial, so why did he go into the trial alone, noble but ultimately doomed?

I read this disturbing revelation at the same time, almost down to the minute, that Trump signed an executive order stopping the separation of undocumented immigrant children from their families. The two moments almost harmonized with their uncomfortable ambiguity. On its face, this was the American system of democracy working. Journalists had uncovered an inhumane practice, the public had raged against it, and the government had stopped it. All the same, it didn’t punish the man who’d decided to break up families on such a massive scale. It didn’t do anything for the 2,000 children who were detained before the policy shift who will remain separated from their families. And it didn’t do a damn thing to stop the countless other atrocities that don’t photograph quite as well but involve just as much human suffering.

One of the great things about living in a family of professors and students is that there’s always someone to talk to about distressing questions in literature and politics. Another is that everyone always has summer break off. So my mom had nothing better to do when I told her about how much the new Atticus disturbed me. She was actually the one who brought the recent executive order into the conversation, and tied the two together with the T. S. Elliot quote, “The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.” 

After a long talk with her, I ended up coming down less hard on Atticus Finch and the American public (Trump doesn’t get off so easy, though). Atticus may have lost his way in his later years and traded harmony in Maycomb’s white community over radical but potentially lasting change even in his prime. We as Americans (me as much as anyone) might have the memory of a goldfish when it comes to atrocities and only really use our democratic power when it comes to the most extreme circumstances. But we all draw the moral line somewhere, whether it’s splitting up families out of spite for immigrants or letting a man die for a crime he didn’t commit. We need to push that line further, and God willing we will, but at least there’s hope. 

My Most Violent Education Essay

For an essay for Education class, I was supposed to write a conversation between two scholars we had read in the format of a script from an academic panel, with myself as a moderator. Possibly as a way to vent stress about my own upcoming academic panel, I wrote myself a very specific personality. The only funny parts are the lines of dialogue marked "Osler" and the scholars' responses to my inane comments, but feel free to read the whole document if you want the unique experience of humor immediately followed by deep fear about the inequities in our nation's public school system.

OSLER: Ladies and gentlemen, to my left we have the pride of the University of Pennsylvania sociology department, author of Unequal Childhoods and co-editor of three, count ‘em, three academic journals! She’s taken on the name Dreamkiller, folks, and that’s ‘cause she’s known for  thrashing anyone who suggests that the American Dream of working your way up by your bootstraps is anything but white-livered tomfoolery! Please welcome: Annette Lareau!

LAREAU: I just want to say, that was very unprofessional.

OSLER: And to my right we have the coauthor of Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality  Thrives in Good Schools. Known world round for cracking the spines of academic tomes and the skulls of anyone who denies that race plays a major role in the American public education system. Please give a round of applause to: Amanda Lewis!

LEWIS: Getting an undergrad to moderate this panel was a mistake.

OSLER: Tonight, we will decide once and for all whether the torturous machinery of capitalism or the sharp bonds of racism are the real cause for gaps in academic achievement. Get ready, because JRC 101 is about to become a battlefield where the ancient sins of the rich and the white are settled in a night of no-hold-barred academic combat! Round 1: What is the relationship between race and class in the American Public School system.

LEWIS: Let me just say that, despite the colorful language in your introduction, you ask a very intelligent question. My stance, as you know, is that within wealthy, successful, diverse schools, schools that express equality as a key value, the tracking system has become a sort of new segregation. The average AP class, for example, was 87.6% white, while the regular class was 53.1% black, and another 36.1% latino.

LAREAU: But couldn’t those difference be explained by economics? I’m not saying that race is not important here, there is an embarrassing disparity in wealth based on race in this country, but in my research I found that class, not race, was the main deciding factor of how parents raised their children and how those children interacted with the school. Specifically, middle class children are raised on what I call a logic of concerted cultivation, by which a barrage of activities teaches them the proper strategies for interacting with institutions like the school. Working class and poor children, who are raised instead on the logic of accomplishment of natural growth, do not gain these same skills and thus are less successful in school. By my calculations, at most 10.9% of the students in regular classes at Riverview High would be white. Is it so unlikely that roughly the same number are working class or poor?

LEWIS: The differences you describe are real, in fact my entire analysis hinges on it, but you erase race too hastily. Since more white students are raised under the logic of concerted cultivation, they are more likely to speak up for themselves, or have their parents speak out for them, which reinforces an idea in the teacher’s mind that white students must be specially looked after. Whiteness gains a symbolic capital wherein the very fact of a student being white means they might speak up, and thus teachers preemptively give them better treatment.

OSLER: So we’ve had some nice abstract sparring out in the clouds up until now, but now let’s get into the blood and guts of how racism and classism work in the real world. Watch out, folks, because it’s about to get raw!

LAREAU: It really isn't. I think the case of Stacey Marshall gets at some of the points Lewis was describing, but at the same time shows the flaws in focusing on race above class. Stacey was a black girl in a middle class family avid about gymnastics. Her gymnastics coach was particularly hard on her, and her mother thought there might be racial undertones to the harsh treatment. So Stacey’s mother advocated for her, and instructed Stacey to advocate for herself, thus instilling the values of concerted cultivation. So even potentially racist encounters serve to reinforce the lessons of class dynamics. A teacher may associate whiteness with symbolic capital at first, but with Stacey in the classroom, they’ll soon learn that at least one student of color speaks up for herself.

LEWIS: And how did the gymnastics team work out for her?

LAREAU: Um, she quit.

LEWIS: You see? And I’m not so sure that Stacey will be treated equally later in life. Even when black parents and students try speaking out for themselves in what you would call an exercise of concerted cultivation, they face more resistance than white parents and students. Specifically when trying to get their children into advanced placement classes, white parents regularly overrode a school’s recommendation while black parents who tried the same technique were met with resistance. One black parent tried to get her bright son into advanced placement math, and his teacher sabotaged his grades so he couldn’t get in.

LAREAU: But I thought you said that parents could override the school’s decision?

LEWIS: Yes, but the mother didn’t know that.

LAREAU: I might be a little presumptuous here, but if the mother is working class or poor, then that’s just a class difference. The system is made for middle class parents, and middle class parents have the vocabulary and skills to understand the system and work it to their advantage. Sabotaging a student for racist reasons is horrifying and inexcusable, but don’t you see that even in that scenario, what makes the concrete difference is class, not race.

LEWIS: But how do you decide what differences are or are not concrete when subtle social interactions carry so much weight? Going in and out of a classroom where you don’t feel like you belong, day after day, does serious psychological damage. And we can quantify that damage using Claude Steele’s research on stereotype threat, which shows that students who feel negatively stereotyped certain situations suffer from extra stress and as a result do poorly.

OSLER: And here we find our brave contestants, collapsed on the mat, bloody and bruised and exhausted. Will one rise to deliver a final kick in the head to her hated opponent, sending her falling into that endless sleep? Or, made battle-bonded sisters by the blows they traded, will they arise and embrace?

LAREAU: Reading perhaps a little too much into John’s comments, I think he wants us to find some common ground to wrap things up. Both of our studies show that schools favor some sorts of culture over others, thus privileging certain students and harming others. In this country, we have an expectation that the education system is essentially meritocratic and equal, but both of our research shows that that is a distant hope at best.

LEWIS: But even there I think I have to push back, Lareau. I agree that the system is unequal, but there is nothing cultural about a black student being told he doesn’t belong in an advanced placement class. That’s racism, plain and simple. Racism facilitated by class expectations that give whiteness cultural capital, but racism all the same.

Mid-Run 911 Call

On my run down the trail by Minnehaha creek this morning, I found a man asleep in the shade of a tree, with his backpack as a pillow. I guess I didn’t know it was a man when I first saw him. He looked like he had taken pains to cover every inch of his skin, drawn his hood over his head and stuck his hands in his pockets. There was no reason why it couldn’t have been a woman or a kid. I thought he was a mannequin when I first saw him, like when a kid in a movie pretends to be asleep by stuffing enough junk under his covers that it looks like he’s still there, when actually he’s out fraternizing with aliens or having whimsical hijinks across Chicago. I wondered why someone would want to fake being under a tree. Maybe it was all part of some sort of elaborate social experiment, to see who would help a random person clearly in need of a place to stay. Maybe I’d be counted among those who passed him by without helping and end up as a data point in a graph that makes people see a decline in common human decency in the modern era.

It’s embarrassing that it took such a convoluted thought process for me to realize that I should help him.

When I came back, he was still there. He got up slowly when I asked him if he was all right; I couldn’t tell if he was groggy from sleep or in intense pain. When I asked them if there was anything he needed he said, “Yeah, I kinda need an ambulance.” When I asked him what was wrong, he said, “Don’t worry, I’m not dangerous,” then mumbled something about drugs that I couldn’t quite make out.

I’m ashamed that I didn’t run faster, that I didn’t dart across traffic or pound on doors to try and find someone with a phone. If this were a story, that’s what the character would have done. After all, for all I knew a man’s life was at stake. But still, I kept up my easy tempo pace until I found a woman mowing her lawn who lent me her phone.

The 911 dispatcher asked me to stay by the creek until the emergency services got there. She seemed a frustrated that I couldn’t give her a clearer idea of what was wrong with this guy. Or maybe that’s just me reading too much into her voice, because I wish I knew. 

When I got back to the creek the man was leaning up against a tree a little closer to the road. He looked almost relaxed, almost happy. I worried that I’d put out a frivolous 911 call, since there didn’t seem to be any life-threatening problem, and that worry kept at me until I saw the red and blue lights flashing over the hill and the sirens getting louder.

I wasn’t quite sure whether to go with the police officer or not, since the dispatcher asked me to stay but the police officer didn’t ask me to accompany him down the trail and it seemed like a violation of something private to gawk at this guy meeting with a cop. So I stayed at a good distance, nearly hiding. 

There wasn’t much I could make out of what the guy told the cop, partly because he mumbled and partly because what he said didn’t make much sense. What I could understand made me realize just how serious the situation was. At one point the guy said, “You don’t have to worry about me, I threw my weapon in the river.” A while later he made a gun with his fingers and put it up to his head.

The officer took the guy up to his car and told me I could leave, seeming a little surprised I was still there. I was worried that the officer would chew me out for jaywalking as I crossed the street, but he seemed more with concerned taking pill bottles out of the guy’s pockets.

I’m probably never going to get the full story on this. The woman whose phone I used might get a call back, but the police have no way to contact me. Probably getting taken in by the police was a key moment in the life of the guy sleeping under the tree, but I’ll never know in what way, because odds are I’ll never see him again.

I’ve tried to work out some sort of meaning from this. I could parse something out if I tried. Something about the guilt of not reaching out to him the first time I saw him, maybe. But really this is a story because I just had a bit role in it, a character without a name, an extra. Something fascinating and painful and deeply emotional happened to get him lying down under that tree. Odds are, I’ll never find out what. That’s probably for the best, since it’s not my story to tell.

Some Dreams I've Had

For some reason, I've been having very intense, vivid, and memorable dreams since getting back from college. Here are a couple of the best:

- ISIS hosted the Midwest Indoor Conference Championship and didn't do a very good job of it.
- I ate a hotdog with pot inside of it, then had to go to a film screening where Queen Elizabeth the First was in attendance. Because Queen Elizabeth is a real anti-drug zealot, I had to try extra hard to hide that I was high, which turned out to be very hard. I've never actually been high before, and my subconscious seems to think that it mostly consists of vomiting, making siren noises, and shouting inane comments about sixteenth century British policy within earshot of the woman who created said policy.
- I got a really nice dorm, but in return I had to sign a contract that I would never snitch on the mob. I had absolutely no moral qualms about doing so, which is sort of troubling now that I think of it.
- I went to the Edina Art Fair, but this time the art was much better and some of the tents could eat you, so it sort of broke even.
- My family had a horror story writing competition, and each story had to be inspired by something you found in a basement. My brother Luke's story was inspired by the copy of Frankenstein that he found in the basement in a very literal sense, meaning that he just copied it word for word. He won.
- It turned out that the third amendment, which bans soldiers from demanding shelter in anyone's house, didn't apply to Grinnell, so I had to let a redcoat stay on my couch. He spent all his time trying to talk me into a computer science major.
- I found out that all of the people from my New York Writers Institute class had been living in a van together ever since I left them last summer. I wasn't sure if I was jealous that they hadn't invited me, or concerned because the van was in really bad shape and it seemed like they were only living there because they were on the run from someone.

Editing and Suffering

Above: All seventeen marked-up copies of my workshop piece for Skidmore, all of which I read over the past few days. I've really come to despise those thirty pages.

I just finished up reading and taking notes on all of the written comments people had for my writing submission to the New York Summer Writers Institute. Even though no one ever asked, I was still paranoid enough to come up with a cover story for why I only read the comments one year after recieveing them: I needed to get some distance from the writing to properly process the comments. The truth (which I guess doesn’t really need that designator since I never actually told the lie) was that I was scared out of my wits to read the comments. Even when I finally brought myself to do it, I turned the page slowly and with a shaking hand, the way that people open doors in horror movies after the monster has already built up a sizable body count. And even though not a single one of the thousands of comments were unfair or needless harsh (with the possible exception of “choose a title, buttface!”), I cringed at half of them and never stopped turning the page with a sense of horror. 

It’s odd that I’d be so sensitive to criticism, because I’m endlessly self-critical (as you know if you pick up on half the humor on this blog). Case in point: around the end of my sophomore year I finished my first novel. I printed out all 150 pages of it on my own dime, jamming up the Edina High School printers three times. I planned to spend the summer marking it up and turning it into something publishable. In the end, I only made one comments on it, scrawled across the top of the first page: “This has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I deserve to by drawn and quartered in public for writing this. If anyone asks why, the executioner should just hand them this manuscript and they’ll understand before they finish the first chapter.” That’s hyperbole, of course, but by less than you would think. It hasn’t gotten much better over time. There’s hardly a thing that I’ve written, published or not, that doesn’t have some major element that fills my with shame.

It turns out, being hypercritical is a pretty common trait in writers. A friend of mine recently started a very good writing blog, and in one of my favorite posts, she shares a few of her favorite comments on her own first drafts. A few of the best are, “I can’t tell if this is dumb, over the top, or great,” and “Not happy with the way this is introduced but yeah the moon is purple fight me” (which is immediately followed by “Remove all references to the moon being purple. That was dumb”). In fact, you hardly need to look into any of the articles about revision (this is hardly an original entry in the ever-growing genre) to find that even great authors are endlessly self-critical. Some even vow to never crack the spine of their book after publication, because there are so many errors that they’ll never get to fix.

So why is self-criticism seemingly an inseparable part of being a writer, while criticism from others is so stressful (at least for me)? After all, the comments that made me bite the tongue were often just more polite versions of what I thought when I was first writing it. 

I think the answer is control. Writing is essentially about control. When you put pen to paper or fingertips to keys, then you’re your own little god in your own little world. That’s a large part of the thrill. When other people comment on your work, you realize that, even with absolute power over time and space and matter, the end result just wasn’t good enough. You let someone else into the system, and they screwed it up, and all while you just needed a couple more days to perfect it.

But you can never really be alone in your little universe. The end goal of all writing is to be read, if not by someone else then, by the version of you a couple years removed, and even that can be truly terrifying. So it’s best to let the world in slowly, in little tour groups of trusted first readers, and handle those waves of fear the best you can. 

My teacher for the New York Writer’s Institute last year was Adam Braver. Basically everything he said over those two weeks was an invaluable insight about writing, my favorite of which was, “writers have to suffer from incredible hubris and equal humility.” The wording suggests that this something writers must overcome, and I think that’s true, but it’s also necessary to the process of writing itself. You need the hubris to build your world and the humility to let everyone else wash in and knock it over so you can build it back better next time.

A final note: I actually lied at the start of this post. I hope to be finished reading the comments by the time this goes up, but I’m actually writing it four days prior, still reeling from the polite and mild and reasonable comments my fellow workshop attendees scrawled in the margins. I wrote this to see if I could motivate myself to get through the rest of the stack. And I think I can.

A final note from two days later: I did.

Everything I Learned in College So Far (In Under 600 Words!)

For my first two semesters of college, I posted these lists of “everything I learned this semester” on Facebook. Now that I’m halfway through my college experience, I’m reposting them here, complete with new entries from my second year of college.

Everything I learned in my first semester:

Spanish History: The only surefire way to kill a Spaniard is to lure him into a canyon and drop boulders on him.

Psychology: The best way to craft an innovative experiment is to ignore every ethical guideline in existence.

Literary Analysis: Poetry is the purest, and also confusingest, kind of writing.

Cinematic Identity: Nothing is real, we are slaves to ideology, time is an imperialist construct, and something about wide angle shots.

Everything I learned in my second semester:

Religious Studies: Apparently going to church every week for nearly two decades does not prepare you for college level religious studies. Also, capitalism is bad.

American Studies: In a sense, "What does it mean to be an American?" is the most important question in American Studies. In another sense, it's the least important question because you're never going to get a straight answer on it. Also, capitalism is bad.

Anthropology: Anthropology is the study of human society (news to me, since when I signed up for the class all I knew about it was a friend's description that "It's about people and thinking and stuff"). Also, capitalism is bad.

Stats: Contrary to my high school calculus teacher's claim, college level stats does not make you a better gambler. Also, aspects of capitalism can be used as questions on stats tests. Capitalism is very bad.

Everything I learned in my third semester:

Global Christianities: Wow, that Jesus guy is getting sorta popular now, huh?

Cross-Cultural Psychology: How to write almost legibly with my left hand (not an actual part of the class curriculum, just a note-taking strategy that turned out to have no benefit whatsoever).

American Literary Traditions: Playing “find the racism, sexism, and incest in Early American Literature” is fun at first, but gets easy, boring, and really disturbing quickly.

Life of the Qur’an: Huh, that Jesus guy even made it into Islam. He’s really blowing up these days, I wonder what his deal is.

What I learned in my fourth semester

British Literary Traditions: Playing “find the racism, sexism, and incest in early British literature” is considerable more fun because they’ve got quirky new ways of describing all those things across the pond! Still pretty disturbing, though.

Intro to Education: After a couple years of psychology classes, which are all about thinking about thinking, and English classes, which are about writing about writing, taking an education class that was learning about learning has finally convinced me that the only thing academia is interested in studying is itself.

Psychological Research Methods: Standard deviation is really, extremely, critically, unequivocally important (though I still have no clue what it is or how to calculate it).

Developmental Psychology: Kohlberg had three main stages of moral development: pre-conventional (in which morality is governed by basic desires), conventional (in which morality is defined by rules and social convention), post-conventional (in which morality is based on universal moral principles), and transcendent (in which morality is whatever the hell you want it to be because, screw it, you got to level four, you cant to whatever you damn well please!)