Maybe I'm Going a little Overboard on the Hellfire Cross Country Speeches

The Midwest Division Three Cross Country Conference Meet was this weekend, and it was sort of a mixed bag. Personally I ran the best race of my life, running a personal record of 26:54 and coming in 18th overall, but the team came in second. Usually second isn’t half bad, but Grinnell Cross Country has high standards, given our near-continuous thirty year winning streak. Maybe part of the blame is on me, since the pre-race speech might have riled people up in the wrong way.

So we’re the underdogs, right? Aren’t we the scrappy band of rebels standing up to the evil empire? We’ve seen these stories so often that it’s practically an instinct to slide ourselves into the roles of the good guys.

But come on! Stop lying to yourselves! WE ARE THE EVIL EMPIRE!

Because what kind of underdogs have thirty years of conference titles in their locker room? Admit it, we’re the entitled brats, the elitist scum, the low-down worthless arrogant bastards, and damnit, we’re proud of it!

Because here’s the thing: the commoners can’t govern themselves. This race is your divine right, so go on, take it, and crush the unlettered masses under the weight of your glory!

We run under a banner of scarlet and black, of darkness and blood, of plague and suffering and pain and death! None shall question our righteous tyranny!

Stress and Release

Roughly 48 hours from when I post this, I will be in terrible pain. People dodge describing it that way when they recount cross country races, but really, the most important part of competitive running is pain management. Even when you don’t have a side stitch or IT band injury or the urgent need to vomit*, there’s always a persistent pain that is less a hurt localized in a part of your body and more a message in your brain saying “This is intolerable” on infinite repeat. Every race is harder, and every race hurts more, and conference, looming just two days away, promises to be the fever pitch of the entire aching season. 

I’m still not entirely sure why I even like running. Sure, there are a lot of little good things that come out of races. One is the glory of doing well, another is experiencing little moments of adrenaline-fueled fiasco that seem a lot like war stories without the possibility of dying or killing.**. But even all added up, none of these explain why I really like racing. The only thing that comes close is that sense of relief I get from stumbling across the finish line, knowing that the pain is over and I can sleep for the rest of the day if I want to. No matter how I do in a race, that second when all the stress and hurt and fear streams off me is nothing short of magical.

But that doesn’t work as an explanation either. The relief only lasts for a few minutes at best, and then I’ll be looking forward to six hours of doing homework on the bus while my legs cramp and ache the whole way back. Compared to the weeks I spent worrying about conference and the months I spent training for it, a couple minutes of euphoria seems like a raw deal.

This cycle of stress and release seems like a trap I’ve been falling into so often that I don’t even need to look more than a week back to find another example. Last week I had mid-semester exams, the time of the year Grinnell College students rightly term “hell week.” Over the course of the week I had three papers that ran a combined total of 20 pages to write and a test to study for which I had to know over 500 individual, hyper-specific facts. Even though I’m not much of a procrastinator, plowing through those last few days left me dizzy with the pure volume of work. But the promise of perfect release from responsibilities in the form of fall break pulled me through. But that release only lasted up until the the afternoon of the first day. After that I had to admit to myself that I really getting bored.

My mom’s favorite line in literature comes from the end of Ernest Hemmingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises: “‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” There it’s used to describe an impossible longing, but I think it works perfectly well to describe things we actually do achieve. Isn’t it pretty to think that spending a week doing nothing would be fulfilling? Isn’t it pretty to think that finishing conference, or even winning conference, would sustain me for the rest of my life? No matter what I tell myself, that’s inevitably what I expect going into these things, and ultimately what comes up lacking.

But sometimes it gets sort of on my nerves when mom quotes that to me. Yeah, sure, I get that nothing’s perfect, but there must be something truly satisfying out there, right? Otherwise, what’s the point? But as much as I long for it, I can’t help but doubt, having been let down so many times. I think that this is where so much of my worry and doubt from religion comes from. What would heaven even look like? Dante described it as being like a fly trapped in amber, stuck forever eternal pleasure. That’s probably a lovely idea when you’re poor and starving and striving for something to live for, but as an overprivileged young person, I can say that eternity without moving still seems like its own kind of hell. No matter how happy I was, I’d want to stretch my legs after a few thousand years.

Which I think means that I have to loop back to the suffering that started this whole quandary off. Maybe what gives running meaning isn’t the pain in the moment or the relief in the end, but simply the progress through the race, knowing I'm getting closer to the end. That edges dangerously close to the old cliché, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” But I think it goes further than that, because you have to believe in the destination, and really enjoy it at the end, for the journey to mean anything in the first place. It’s the same with my schoolwork. As much stress as it generated, I really did enjoy writing those 20 pages and learning those 500 facts. But I never would have started them if I thought the paper would never reach a conclusion or the flashcards would just keep on coming forever. This cycle of work, completion, and rest seems scary when you think about it in the big picture, everything does when it’s followed by, “And that’s how it goes for the rest of your life.” But I really wouldn’t have it any other way, especially when I’m caught up in the cycle of thrill and relief, my gaze no higher than the next project. So this is one of the rare times when the permanent answer to a serious problem might just be “Don’t think about it, it’ll be fine.”

__________________

* Fun fact: I’ve once gone through a race with all three.

** For example, at a race two weeks ago there were these mud pits so deep and sticky that they regularly claimed racer’s shoes. One guy a couple paces ahead of me got one foot stuck in the mud and the other foot tangled up in a loose string of flags lying by the edge of the course, so when he tried to move forward, neither of his feet would budge. All his forward momentum sent him tumbling head-first into the mud and, since I was right behind him, I had to leap straight over him just to keep moving. 

Nineteen Opening Lines

My teacher at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute swore that the most important writing prompt anyone could do was to sit down and write ten opening sentences to different stories. I’ve probably disappointed her by only doing it twice so far, but I think they’ve turned out well enough to post. One of the twenty is missing because I just kept on going after the first sentence and it ended up a 10,000 word story that I’m not quite sure what to do with.

1. Elizabeth and I used to hang out by the river at the edge of the graveyard and eat the blueberries that grew on the banks and wonder if eating fruit that grew from decaying bodies technically meant we were cannibals.
2. Since Jennifer had been one of the five people who built the church, she figured she was entitled to destroy at least twenty percent of it guilt-free.
3. I won’t say that everything I’m about to write is true, because these painfully bright flashbulb memories never follow reality all that closely. But everything I’m about to write is something I remember, and every memory of the past two weeks deserves to find its way to paper somehow.
4. The unauthorized pioneer must be lost somewhere in the fire at the Office of Defaced Students. (Fun fact: I came up with that one by re-arranging the words on my P-card.)
5. I don’t see anyone blames anyone for anything they did as a kid, it’s like getting arrested for a crime someone who happens to have the same name as you did, someone who died a long time ago. But that’s the way this society works, so okay, I’ll apologize.
6. “Unless you have had very unfortunate childhoods,” said Ooida, “up until now the only gunplay any of you have seen has been in movies, where there is one good person who is very skilled at shooting and about two hundred bad people who are so unskilled at shooting that they won’t remain people long enough to see the credits. And, unless you have had a very fortunate understanding of humility bashed into you, I bet most of you are thinking that you must be that one good person.”
7. Everything Armando needed for survival, food and water and protection and a place to hide, he found in abandoned P-card with the picture just rubbed off enough to resemble him.
8. With nothing but a couple characters, colored blue and underlined, people traveled from the peaceful shallows of big-name social media and email to the abyss of a chatroom where something akin to a cult of prophecy was emerging.
9. It didn’t hurt much, but it wouldn’t heal unless I cut away the unclean flesh, and the only tools I had to use were my teeth. I did what I had to.
10. Over the course of six months, with dozens of interchangeable aliases and through a variety of forums, both electronic and hard-form, I managed to sell all of Mary’s old shit for about six thousand dollars.
11. He was starting to become a part of the land when I found him.
12. Adults had humored him at first, then got annoyed, and finally became disturbed by the increasing number of specific details until they practically begged him to admit that it wasn’t true.
13. At the end of Aunt Karen’s story, the jewel eyes of the statue were cut and sold, the precious metal that made up its body was melted down into coins, and the stone pedestal it sat on crumbled from centuries of wind and rain. “Still, it’s here,” she said, pointing at a patch of knee-high weeds like any other in her backyard. “There’s nothing left of it anymore, but it’s still here.”
14. Whenever Walter got anxious in school, he rubbed the bottom of his desk with his index finger. When the constant erosion made a tunnel through to the other side in mid-October, he wasn’t proud or embarrassed or surprised. He just started rubbing a different spot.
15. Rick Pecka had eighteen independent online personas. Twenty one, if you counted actual people he impersonated. Sometimes they all got together in a chat room and had a conversation. They were never pleasant conversations.
16. The call to work rang out over the speakers and I got out of bed. Same as any other morning starts. Really not even worth mentioning.
17. Of course the hollowed out book had another hollowed-out book inside of it. That was the must Rebekah Cain-like thing Rebekah Cain had ever done (short of continuing to exist as Rebekah Cain, which was an extremely Rebekah Cain-like existence).
18. I wanted to find Darren Amundsen because I’d get paid if I did, whereas Darren Amundsen wanted to stay hidden because the lightest consequence he’d face if found was a life in prison. So, you see, he had a much stronger motivation than I did from the start. You can’t blame me for not doing a very good job of bringing him in. 
19. Five minutes before, the list of things I wanted out of life would’ve been highly specific, overly ambitious, and about twenty pages long. In the time since, it has condensed into a single item: live through the next hour (making it to my sixteenth birthday would be great, but let’s make it through this first and take it day-by-day from there).

Things I Can't Understand

Since “John writing about stuff he likes” is basically all there is to this blog, I think I’ve made my interests and disinterests pretty clear by this point. Anyone who’s read most of my posts could probably guess that my five favorite things are (in no particular order): religion, Legos, running, the color green, and English-language written narratives. I guess that makes my five least favorite things theological apathy*, Megablocks, weight-lifting, the color red. I’m not exactly sure what the opposite of English-language written narratives would be, though. Some kind of bizarre silent French film would probably be the most accurate answer but, in terms of what I actually hate most, it would probably be STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). It’s not that I hate what STEM does, obviously I’m happy writing on a computer and not getting polio and all the other things that logical problem-solving has done for humanity. I just really can’t understand how anyone would ever be interested in that stuff. That seems harsh, especially coming from a student at a liberal arts college. But I’ve never been able to feel for people who get excited by the sight of numbers and greek letters on a white board. And at Grinnell there are a disproportionately high number of people like that.

We all have things like that, don’t we, interests where the appeal just doesn’t make any sense? Every time I’m near a road with my younger brother, at some point he’ll gasp, turn, point at some completely ordinary car and say something like, “Look! A Ford Jeep BMW Heffalump WRXABC!” He’s even got this idea to take out all the seats in our family’s minivan and put the engine in the center of the car because “it would just be so cool!” Same with me and Bionicles, I don’t expect an average bystander to understand why I think it’s essential to differentiate between Makuta Teridax as the calculating psychopath he turned out to be and Makuta as the sympathetic villain he was originally conceived as. But there are certain things where it seems like it should matter more. Every day I’m surrounded by people who have dedicated their lives to pure math and pure science and pure computer wizardry, many of whom talk about how English “isn’t really their thing,” and I can’t help but wonder why.

Is it something to do with the rush of solving a problem that seemed impossible when you set out? Sure, maybe, but is it really worth all that frustration to exhale and take a moment of satisfaction before moving on to the next problem? Maybe it’s less the the science and math itself, but the implications of what it does? Yeah, but there are people who honestly get excited to take calculus class. Where’s the thrill in punching numbers into a calculator to solve a problem without a real-world equivalent? Sometimes I think that none of these people really like it, that they just know it’s where the money is, so they pretend to themselves that it’s their passion while secretly working on their novels at night. But, really, most of the time I admit that I have no idea.

There’s something tempting in the sort of exclusivity. Ever since I’ve declared an English major I haven’t exactly been shy about letting people know. Usually it comes with some self-deprecating quip about how I’ll be living with twelve roommates for the next decade, but I really don’t mind the persona of a starving artist. Back in elementary school kids got super defensive of their Hogwarts house, then in middle school it shifted to Camp Half-Blood cabin. Different name, same game, since in college people get tribal about their college majors.

And maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing. I mean, you can’t do everything, and I was sick enough of math and science in high school to want to be done with it forever. But, under the thrill of making myself a loud and proud English major, there’s always been this feeling that I’m missing out, that while I’m reading and writing eight hours a day, some people out there are making real change and I’m wasting my shot to be a part of it, or even understand it. Of course, sit me down with a math textbook and that feeling will dry up quick, but show me the result of some incredible science project and it’ll come back, no question.

I think the answer is that these different interests aren’t as different as we make them out to be. I always wrote off music as one of those things I’m just not good at. Sure, I like listening to it, but I never had the technical skill to excel at piano or the sharp ear to be a discerning critic. But, three years ago, I was in the attic of this great all-purpose shop in Detroit which housed the music studio for a grammy award-winning artist and my grandfather’s art studio. It was Christmas time, so the place was full of shoppers, and crowds huddled in the music studio. Some people came forward to jam on the array of instruments available to anyone talented enough to join in. The music was rough and unfinished, not the quality of anything you’d hear published, but there was something incredible in all these strangers fitting their talents together so naturally, and so isolating about having no idea how they were doing it. So instead of listening, I bummed around the empty, drafty art studio, examining the pencil lines and brushstrokes on my grandfather’s paintings, another thing I could always appreciate but never imitate or understand. Then this kid, about my age, came out to talk to me. He was a musician and music editor, he’d even designed some tracks for a Korean band he’d met online and regularly preformed at local venues. Then he asked me what I did, and I talked about the literary magazine I edited for, and eventually the conversation fell into a strange balance between the two interests. He admitted he didn’t know much about writing, and it was clear enough I knew nothing about music, but we talked about how there were so many people in the field, struggling and publishing online and forming these odd little communities and learning from each other, and it all came in a way that made writing and music fit neatly up against each other**. It was almost like what was happening in the studio: random people off the street, fitting their skills together and making something new.

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*Distinctly different from atheism. I think that atheism is crushingly depressing, but it makes some pretty compelling points and is vital for any broad discussion of religion.

** I ended up copy-editing a zine he published (turns out he’s a lot better at writing than he let on, so there wasn’t much for me to do). If you want to check it out, here it is.

The Stupid Little Spider

Back in middle school I was assigned to write a satirical fairy tale. My brother and I had a lot of fun writing the first draft, which we called “The Stupid Little Spider.” But my mom insisted on reading all of my essays before I turned them in, and she thought I had taken the spirit of the assignment a little too far, so I had to start from scratch and came up with some crap about mice. Anyway, my brother and I really liked the rejected first draft, so every weekend for a couple months we wrote a new entry in the Stupid Little Spider collection. The illustration from above is from one of the later chapters, which were messes of random violence and non-sequitors. I used to think the early ones were actually pretty funny, but looking back on it, the best you can say about them is that they make more sense than my first story.

Chapter 1 

Once upon a time there was a stupid little dedicated spider. He decided to build a web.

A donkey came along. 

"Come, spider," he said. "Let's go frolicking." 

"No," said the stupid little spider. "I'm working on my web."

A hippopotamus came along.

"Come, spider," he said. "Let's go take some meth."

"No," said the stupid little spider. "I'm working on my web."

A fish came along.

"Come, spider," said the fish. "Let's go skydiving."

"No," said the stupid little spider. "I'm working on my web."

The fish, donkey, and hippopotamus talked amongst themselves and felt bitter that the stupid little spider had blown them off. So they devised a plan.

Finally, the stupid little spider finished his web. It was crummy and tiny and insects pretended to get caught in it just to taunt him, then flew around and flipped him off.

The stupid little spider said, "Oh well, I suppose I was wrong to take advantage of my friends. I'll go apologize."

The fish, hippopotamus, and donkey were waiting for him with flamethowers.

Then the stupid little spider got torched.

Then they torched his stupid little crummy dumb stupid spider house and all of his stupid little crummy dumb stupid personal belongings, and the police station just for good measure.

Let that be a lesson to you kids: don't trust fish.

The End

Chapter 2: Revenge from Beyond the Grave

As you remember from last week, there once was a stupid little spider. He got torched by his so-called friends, the hippo, the fish, and the donkey.

The stupid little spider decided to have revenge from beyond the grave.

As a ghost, he went to the donkey's home in Topeka, Kansas.

"You ki-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-illed me!" said the stupid little spider. "To repent, go outside."

"Oh no!" said the donkey. "I'd better go outside."

He went outside. The stupid little spider locked the door on the donkey. Left outside without his jacket, the donkey froze to death.

The stupid little spider's ghost went to the fish's house high up in the mountains.

"You ki-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-illed me!" said the stupid little spider. "To repent, go to the island in the middle of the big lake. There, you will find my shrine."

"What shrine?  I just had a picnic on that island last week with my cousins, and there wasn't any shrine," said the fish.

"Shut up," said the stupid little spider, "or else I'll give you lung cancer!"

The fish, terrified, went down the mountain to the big lake and, noticing his boat was gone, jumped in and tried to swim. He drowned.

The stupid little spider's ghost went to the hippopotamus's house in the far, far north.

"You ki-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-illed me!" said the stupid little spider. "To repent, stab yourself repeatedly, then set yourself on fire, then jump off a cliff, then stab yourself again. And if you're still alive, then take up smoking."

"I didn't kill you. That was the fish," said the hippopotamus. "All I did was burn down your house and hawked any flame-retardant stuff we found in the rubble.”

"Sorry, my mistake," said the stupid little spider. Then he faded away.

The hippopotamus overdosed on meth and died.

There’s a lesson here, kids: don't trust fish.

The End

How Bionicle Explains the Bible

Since I’ve already dedicated two posts to the subject, it should be clear enough by now that I’ve had trouble letting go of Bionicle, even though it’s a Lego theme that’s been discontinued for almost a full decade by now. I’ve spent way too long pondering things I really don’t have the time to worry about, like if Bionicle really was as epic as I remember, or if it was on par with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Power Rangers, bizarre nostalgia properties that really only matter to a core crew of believers. It doesn’t help that, when you look at the Bionicle story from a zoomed-out perspective, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Last week I tried reading the Bionicle Wiki to get my childhood whimsy fix for the day, and the plot was strange, confusing, random, and dumb. Explaining why would take about three hours and show my obsession a little too openly, but trust me, even for the initiated, the story as a whole is a fiasco.

Though this might still be nostalgia talking, I think there’s something more to it, something I got from it that you can’t get from taking in the whole story in at once. And fact that one out of every ten people my age seems to have the same kind of deep knowledge as I do makes me think that there really is something more. Because even though we have the same kind of deep knowledge, none of us ever remember the same things. It’s like reading Greek myths, how some say that Narcissus got turned into a flower and other say that he stared at his own reflection for so long that he starved and a flower grew out of his grave. Some people remember that Lewa was mind-controlled by the Rahi infection, others remember that it was actually the Bohrok that got him*. I think the mythology example works really well, actually, because in the same way that myths are bound together from multiple sources, Bionicle never had a single medium. There were novels, comics, online serials, video games, and movies, all telling different scraps of the same story. But, if you put all of them together and try to iron out a coherent narrative, you see it for the mess that it is. Really the only way you can get that epic scope is if you enjoy it as a kid would: getting the bits that you can and filling in the rest with your own play.

That’s a good place to end, right? Set out a problem, proposed a solution, and tied it all up with a little bow, all without offending any major religious authorities.

Only I can’t end it there, because I have to point out that a lot of the same things I’ve seen in Bionicle, I also see in the Bible.

After taking a class on the Hebrew Bible for less than half a semester, I’m already pretty sure that everybody who claims that all of it is literally true has never actually read it. If so, they can’t be all that happy with the God and universe that they live in. They’d be living with a God who changes their mind constantly (mostly concerning whether or not to kill a lot of people), then firmly announces that God never changes their mind. They’d be living in a universe where human ingenuity is sometimes rewarded and sometimes answered by God scattering people across the globe and separating them into nations destined to fight each other for the rest of time. They’d also be commanded to ritualistically sacrifice animals at a temple that hasn’t existed for almost two millennia. 

All these bizarre inconsistencies arise because, according to most scholars, the Bible was never intended as a single document, but was written as separate narratives that were haphazardly stitched together years later, a lot like the Bionicle saga (except one of them is a holy text with billions of followers). And in both Bionicle and the Bible, much of the awe comes from the parts of the story that are left blank. Why does God choose Abraham to lead the Israelites? Why does God create humans in the first place if we screw up almost constantly? Is God even one being, or three, or more? We can search for answers all we want, and there are some fascinating and compelling ones out there, but the real power of faith doesn’t lie in its dogma, but in its mystery. And the act of approaching the answer, to me at least, feels a whole lot like what I felt when I was about five years old, my Bionicle collection sprawled out in front of me, and I picked them up one by one to play out the blank spots in the story.

__________________________

* Turns out that both are true, which makes Le-Korans seems really dumb for falling for the same trap twice.  See what I mean about the overall story being a fiasco?

If God was an Entrepreneur

The other day a friend of mine sent me a post on some junior-businessman’s form speculating about how God would fare as an entrepreneur. While I can’t share the original post for privacy reasons, I can show you all my response, which I think shows the practical value of taking a Hebrew Bible class and going to church five times a week every week for ten years:

God would've been a terrible entrepreneur. Yeah, banging out heaven and earth in seven days is impressive, but after a promising start he'd have to answer to investors on a number of difficulties, including:

• Employee mistreatment (God forbids Adam and Eve from eating the Apple of Truth, even though it teaches them marketable skills such as wearing clothes).
• Major project setbacks (God goes through the trouble of creating all of humanity, then changes their mind and wipes out nearly everyone and everything with a flood, then changes their mind again, and all we get from all that trouble is a rainbow now and then).
• Negligence (God just sorta forgets about Hebrew in slavery under the Egyptians for about four hundred years).
• Workplace discrimination (Leviticus lays out harsh and illegal bans against gay men, those with tattoos, those wearing clothes of mixed fabric, and the uncircumcised. Also, "No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD" (Deuteronomy 23:1), which is just plain cruel to people already down on their luck).
• Flagrant nepotism (Isn't it a little convenient that God's one and only son just so happens to be the Redeemer and Holy One of Israel?)

Truth

Back in high school, I really wanted to live through something, something big and important that would make my life story worth reading as part of a historical moment. Then Trump came into office and I realized that most historical moments get their titles because a whole lot of people suffer.

It was especially strange time to be a freshman at a very liberal liberal arts college. In learning how academia worked, it seemed to me like high school put a distinctly unscholarly amount of emphasis on objective truth. In my most radical classes I wasn’t allowed to use the word “reality” in papers and the very existence of history was questioned, and even more scientific classes like psychology suggested that memory is constructed and absolute certainty is impossible. It was strange and new, but I wasn’t entirely opposed to it. In high school my favorite books and movies had been the ones that blew up your idea of what was real and what was an illusion (The Things They Carried, The Life of Pi, Memento, The Usual Suspects, to name a few). I had this world view that conservatives were the boring, hard-fact folks, the people who took the Bible as literal and wouldn’t deviate from it, while liberals saw the nuance and subtlety and numerous meanings. Questioning reality was popular and, like all adolescents, I wanted to be with the in-crowd.

Things changed on election day. I fell asleep when the polls were down to try and make this night pass faster and woke up to the Primal Screaming Catharsis Ceremony when they declared the victor. I’d taken his flagrant lying as a joke before, but now that he was really going to take office, I started paying closer attention. As I did, I noticed a disturbing pattern emerging. Trump and Fox News dismissed objective reality with the same kind of rhetoric as a lot of my professors. Maybe they weren’t quite as eloquent, but the core message was the same: media narratives are controlled by those in power, and no one can really know the truth anyway, so trust what your intuitions and you’ll be one of the smart ones. It was such a disturbing thought to approach, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I was falling into the same trap as all the crowds with “Make America Great Again” hats. And it seemed like I wasn’t the only one, as liberals I knew started to change course and champion objective truth and hard facts.

I’ve been thinking about the Kavanaugh hearings a lot lately (it’s hard not to when your dad is on CNN about it twice in a week), and it’s been bugging me how the whole country has a stake in the debate, but no one but Ford and Kavanaugh (and maybe Mark Judge) can ever really know what happened in that bedroom. I believe Ford, based on Kavanaugh’s evasive answers to questions and the statements from people who knew him, but it can never go any further than faith. It’s easy to get caught up in all the charged rhetoric surrounding the debate, but I falter whenever I start riding that wave of righteous anger because there’s always that chance that it could all be a lie. And in all this the Republicans are the voice of the high literary critic, asking you to embrace uncertainty and asking if you would ruin a man’s life on evidence you can’t be sure of. And, if I really wanted Kavanaugh on the bench, might I see the facts in a whole different light?

When we do have to confront uncertainty, the best we can get from questioning our own assumptions is humility. That’s what radical conservatives are forgetting. They’re co-opting academic language of bias and respecting other opinions, but they aren’t doing it in search of a greater truth, they’re doing it to deflect criticism so they can get away with red-faced yelling at a crowd who meets every lie with cheers. And yeah, that anger is its own truth, in a way. But if you’re going to question reality, the first step is to admit that not everyone sees it the same way. Truth for Kavanaugh might be that he wasn’t at the party and is being smeared by a partisan opportunist. He might have even managed to convince himself of that. But at least consider Ford’s truth with the same weight, that she underwent a traumatic experience and kept it secret for as long as she could, until she realized that she couldn’t in good conscience let the man who assaulted her rise to the supreme court, even if telling the truth meant she would be publicly berated and receive hate mail for the rest of her life. And, with that in mind, the opportunist narrative doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it?

There’s this great term I learned my second semester in Grinnell, just a couple days after the inauguration . It’s “Thick Description,” and it means understanding an issue through so many perspectives that you can’t come to any one simple truth about it. The anger of poor white people living in the middle of the country is its own truth, and the government indifference to issues like the opioid epidemic and growing anxieties about a changing economy show show that the anger has a legitimate base. But theirs can’t be the only story, the people who are hurt by the person they elect have to be in there too. And only by encountering the contradictory truths can we really come to any deeper understanding.

I Briefly Hijack Philip Kiely's Blog to Talk About Nothing

As you might remember from last week, Philip Kiely and I ghost wrote each other's blogs. You can find Philip's post on my blog here but, since Philip only lets a meticulously selected circle view his writings, I have to put my post on his blog here so the unlettered masses can see it. Which works out great, actually, because I had no clue what I was going to post for today.

Hello all! It is me, Philip Kiely! 

As Philip Kiely, I attend Grinnell College and am currently majoring in wealth-acquisition. I enjoy certain kinds of masculine-coded activities, such as violence, but not other forms of masculine-coded activities, such as being disinterested in clothing. My sole pursuit in life is to earn enough money to provide a suitable dowry in my upcoming marriage to Taylor Swift.

So join me, readers of strictly-concealed identities, as we journey through all your favorite sections, such as: “My Ongoing Quest to Monetize the Elderly With Computers,” “Daily Anecdotes Told Entirely in Computer Language,” “Assigning Pieces of Media Numerical Values Out of Five, Accompanied by a Snarky Summary,” and “Inside Jokes!”

[Editor’s Note: Yeah, it’s been fun doing a bad job of mocking Philip, but I can’t keep this up for an entire email. This is John Osler, one of Philip’s D&D buddies (which is roughly the substance-free/nerdy equivalent of drinking buddies), and he’s letting me guest-write this week’s post in exchange for letting him write a post on my blog.]

Music Thoughts That Sort of Merge Into Political Thoughts Halfway Through, Mostly by Accident

So I’ve been listening to a lot of Ben Folds lately, which is odd because I can’t stand 75% of my favorite songs by him. Granted, some (“Army,” “Gone,” “Zak and Sara,” “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces,” “From Above”) manage to keep up continual momentum, but the ones that I’ve been really into these days are mostly just a sad guy speaking quietly with occasional piano accompaniment (“Mr. Peepers” and “Levi Johnston’s Blues”). But, as boring as the bulk of the song is, the chorus is so vibrant and full and well-crafted in every word that it makes up for the rest. I could just listen to the chorus on infinite repeat, I guess, but I don’t think it would have the same effect. In order to really feel it, you need the burst of music to puncture the rest of the non-music all around it. 

A side-effect of listening to songs with minimal music is that I pay much more attention to the lyrics than I would if the tune just swept me along. Though I might’ve missed it if there were more instrumentation, “Mr. Peepers” isn’t exactly subtle; its thesis is pretty clearly that people quietly doing their jobs and upholding the law are a key element of our democracy that is under attack in the Trump administration. This is a point I agree with (though it probably needs a little more nuance if told in non-song form, since I think there is a place for civil disobedience), but hearing it over and over made me realize how obvious it is, and how often I’ve heard it expressed over the course of the past two years. We keep on saying the same things over and over and over again, and nothing ever changes. Maybe it goes to show how ineffective Facebook posts really are, or maybe we’re just not talking to the right people.

Several (Ultimately Ineffective) Attempts at Describing What my Tuesday 8x1 Kilometer Cross Country Workout was Like, in Which I was Jittery From my First Cup of Coffee in Over a Year and Exhausted From the Lack of Sleep That Necessitated Said Cup of Coffee

1 A soft, weightless, blurry world of constant motion in every direction, none of which I could control (least of all my own orbit around the track).

2 Like constantly being on the verge of waking up and feeling the epiphany that you actually have a physical body, so you’re always in awe of the fact that you have a right hand.

3 A harsh ringing in my arms and legs. Like, really ringing, as if their vibrations would turn into music any moment.

4 My mind fizzling every so often, like that Kurt Vonnegut story (“Harrison Bergeron”) where every person of above-average IQ has to be blasted with random noise every couple seconds so they aren’t any smarter than anyone else, except instead of noise it’s a purely psychic disruption.

5 Like being really, really carsick.

6 As if I could reach out and rub the surface of reality so that the reds of the track and the greens of the grass would blend together into a brown paste.

7 Something I wish had gone on for longer, though I would’ve quit in an instant if I’d been given the choice.

8 Pretty much an amalgamation of every story about getting high I’ve ever heard (though I wouldn’t know since I’ve never experienced it).

9 Something I should’ve told my coach about.

Starred Reviews

1 Bleak House by Charles Dickens (any given chapter individually): Spectacular! Blending rich imagery with a satirical yet moving plot and charming, fully formed characters, Dickens earns his name as the greatest Victorian novelist as he perfectly captures the spirit of the age while telling a tale that all can relate to. Five out of five stars.

2 Bleak House by Charles Dickens (the book as a whole): Come on, man! Look, I get it, you wanted to mock England’s byzantine legal structure, so you made the plot and prose intentionally convoluted and hard to follow. Brilliant idea, but maybe before starting you should’ve thought, “Hm, nearly two hundred years from now, there might be some put-upon English major who is burdened by my lengthy prose, of which he is expected to read 70 pages a day, and if the lad fails to do so will be admonished by his peers and professor during in-class discussion.  And, for this folly on my part, this student may rate my work two out of five stars in his guest-column on some sort of newsletter displayed on machines powered by lightning! Perhaps this would work better as a novella.”

3 American Vandal, Season 2: Seriously brilliant. Yeah, it’s about a villain known as the “turd burglar” pulling a variety of poop-related pranks, so it doesn’t exactly sound like high class television right away. But trust me, it is. The gross out humor soon gives way to a well-paced and remarkably poignant story about how loneliness and social media feed into each other in today’s high schools. On a particularly important note, it shows the stress and pain of high school socializing in a far more accurate way than I’ve ever seen on TV. It all sounds very clichéd when you spell it out, but it feels so authentic on screen that the danger of social media seems new and real and powerful, even to someone who uses it every day. Four out of five. 

4 Veggietales: While I enjoyed these cartoons a ton as a kid, they were my only exposure to certain parts of the Bible up until now. So, when I’m reading the book of Esther for my Hebrew Bible class, all I can imagine during the horrifyingly violent segments is a couple computer-animated peas carrying an asparagus off to the Island of Perpetual Tickling. Three out of five stars.

Outro (The Real Philip Speaking … or so you think)

Thanks, John, for filling in. You’re welcome back anytime, assuming you haven’t just stolen all of my readership for yourself. 

RE: People who take a long email blog as a sign I have too much free time:

“Forgive me, this is a long letter. I would have written you a short letter, but I didn’t have the time.” –Mark Twain

But I realize it was a long read. This one was only half as long and I’ll be sticking to that.

The next installation will be a regularly scheduled episode written by me, Philip Kiely!

Best,

Philip Kiely

Grinnell College,

Wealth Acquisition Major, class of ‘20

Philip Kiely’s Future “Autobiography” Ghost Writer, John Osler