First Drafts

Even though last time I finished a novel the announcement post got over a hundred likes on Facebook, I’m ambivalent about admitting that I finished writing another one just last night. I can’t resist mentioning it, because it feels like I should have the right to brag after working on something for two and a half months (three and a half if you count planning) and writing 98,005 words (315 pages). But I’m scared that people won’t take me seriously as a writer if they hear how much I write, compared to how much I ever return to once I’ve got a first draft. The real work of writing, as I’ve heard repeated on an infinite loop in creative writing classes and workshops, is revising. In my life, I’ve written six full-length novels, only one of which has ever made it to a second draft. That’s not a great track record. It doesn’t help that, for at least half of them, I’ve considered burning the paper copies and wiping the files from my computer.

It takes no commitment to write a first draft, really. Sure, you need enough determination to stay focused on a few characters and keep them attached to something resembling a plot, but you never have to look back on a scene after you’ve written it. It’s probably best if you don’t, actually; looking back at something you just wrote is the writerly equivalent of looking down when crossing a canyon on a tightrope. What takes grit and skill is revisiting a scene you aren’t happy with over and over and over, until you either find the strength to destroy something you spent so much time on, or shape into being something better.

I’m honestly scared that I’m getting addicted to first drafts. It’s so fun in the moment to get to know a new cast of characters and explore the new world as it unfolds in your mind. I’ve started to notice physical differences in myself when I’m deep in a first draft, even. Running becomes easier and more fulfilling, because it’s a chance to meditate on what will happen next. I tend to avoid social engagements, because I need so much time to write, but when I do go, the conversations seem to have a poetic flow to them, and little moments that would slide by unnoticed otherwise all seem deeply meaningful. My dreams become more vivid. They’re often terrifying, but even when they’re nightmares, there’s a certain satisfaction in the way that the intense imagination that I’m pouring into my story carries over to my subconscious life. The writing itself is actually more like dreaming than I would like to admit. When I’m in the midst of it, it’s a burst of strange, overpowering emotion that puts the world in a whole new context. And when it’s over, it’s gone and forgotten, maybe forever. Gritting your teeth and reading through typos and plot holes in old work is hard, it’s so much easier to pick another bright, shining story idea and get working, to fall back into the pleasant rhythm of daily writing and let everything that came before fade away.

It’s tempting to get lost in this cycle of creation and abandonment from day to day, and tempting to get discouraged by it if I ever take the long view. But every writer has their own process, and maybe mine features a little less line-by-line edits and a little more writing from scratch. After all, my last two novels didn’t just come from nowhere; they were both adaptations of shorter pieces that I wrote years ago. They didn’t share a single line of prose with the originals, but that might be okay, so long as it works for me.

At any rate, I think that to improve as a writer I need to get over this knee-jerk evasion to anything I’ve already written, and I read an interview with Louise Erdrich recently that gave me an idea for how to get started with that. She claimed that she never has a master narrative in mind when she starts writing. Instead she writes bit-by-bit, sometimes prose and sometimes poetry, until she starts to see patterns between the fragments and weaves them into a story. Other times she takes completed stories that she doesn’t like and scraps them for individual short stories or transplants parts into longer works. I’m not sure that I could ever write an entire novel with that method, but I like her idea that old works still have value. All of the old stories that I thought were better off forgotten now seem more like my family’s basement: full of garbage, sure, but with some real value hidden deep inside it. That’s part of the reason why I won’t be doing archival Monday posts regularly anymore: my old writing suddenly seems a lot more precious than I thought when I started this blog, and I want to hold onto it.

As for the novel that I finished last night, I put the final draft and all my notes in an old shoebox, sealed it with duct tape, put a warning on the top telling me not to open it until December 2019, and put it in my closet in a place where I hope that I won’t notice it. It might seem like I’m falling back on bad old habits, putting it out of my mind for the next year, but sealing it away actually makes it feel like to a promise to myself that I’ll return to it, eventually. And then I’m going to make that damn story work, I swear.

Mutilated Text

Back in October when I wrote nineteen opening lines for a writing prompt, when I was running out of ideas midway through I just rearranged the words on the back of my student ID. Since then, I’ve tried experimenting by making reordering sentences into something new. I let myself change various elements of a word like form, tense, or pluralization (for example, the noun “players” could become the verb “play”), but kept myself limited to the words on the page. The results probably aren’t too impressive in themselves, but it’s an exercise I’d recommend for any writer. When you take out a blank page or open an empty text document, you have hundreds thousands of words to choose from. So many options can get intimidating, so we writers all too often fall back on clichés in language or storytelling. Constricting myself to a couple unpoetic words on the back of a napkin forced me to look carefully at every word and consider its value in a way I don’t think I ever would have otherwise. Anyway, here they are:

• Mica plates the loose clergy and offers all as food for the cash-funded pious. (From the St. Paul’s Episcopal Church bulletin)
• Manufactured friends offer free college! (From the text on the back of a Grinnell College Napkin)
• The key guard’s beltings surpress gnome waggling rings. (From page 94 of The Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook: Fifth Edition).
• Control your creature-horrors, and you control Critchlow, liege of the blue and green coast. (From the Magic: The Gathering card “Murkfiend Liege”)
• Speak legendary, Zegana! Speak among the creatures, on the battlefield, with the greatest power, the greatest control! (From the Magic: The Gathering card “Prime Speaker Zegana”)
• Sacrafice the library, search the land, the wilds, and find the shape of nature. (From the Magic: The Gathering card “Evolving Wilds”)
• Why ask for trust and money in Tobias? Remember, he has left  Gabael in rage and death. (The book of Tobit, 4:1-2)

Anticlimax

In an odd coincidence of scheduling, I’m going to be writing the final scenes of the novel that I’ve been planning and writing for the past four months at the same time as I’m taking finals. At first this seems like a nice way for things to work out: just as all the plot threads and characters arcs that I’ve spent so long planning converge in the climactic episodes, my classes will be reaching a similar kind of conclusion. But I’m not exactly looking forward to it. Part of the reason is because I tend to get into high-intensity writing binges during the end of the story, and I just don’t have time for that during finals week. The larger reason, though, is that I know that the two won’t line up as nicely as I would like. Unless I veer wildly off from my plot map, my story is going to follow a nicely laid out wave of rising and falling action which will hopefully leave the reader, or at least me, with a firm sense of closure. If that’s what I’m hoping for my semester too, then I’m damned to disappointment.

The disconnect between stories and real life has been bugging me ever sense I started reading the Harry Potter books back in elementary school. While I understood that the magic was fiction, I unconsciously expected that my school years would follow the basic plot beats of the novels. And for the most part they did: summer ended, I went to school, I took some classes, there was some drama between my friends and some vague foreshadowing of dark events just outside of sight. But then the last days of school came and went without a master of evil magic arriving for a showdown that tied up all the themes and mysteries of the past year. Instead, final exams came and went, I got stressed and then calmed down, and things ended.

I know that it shouldn’t be surprising that life isn’t particularly well paced, since there isn’t any writer watching over my life to make sure that it conforms to the three-act structure. But, when you live surrounded by stories from childhood, you start to expect that life should follow the tropes of fiction. Sometimes it felt like I was stuck in a poorly written world, waiting for whoever was in charge of my story to die so someone with an iota of narrative intelligence could take over.

And, when I realized that my writer, pathetic as he was, was going to cling onto his worthless life with everything he had, I started trying to write my own climax into my year. I would pretend that final exams were the difference between life and death for me and listen to the soundtrack from boss fights in video games as I studied. I would even try to identify the villain in my year’s story who it would be my duty to confront before things wrapped up (though usually I chickened out before actually facing them, which is probably a good thing, because most of my villains turned out to be pretty decent people in the long run).

I lost sleep and sanity worrying that finals week would be the moment that my whole life had been leading up to. When I turned in my last exam, it really did feel like I’d slain some kind of monster. But the feeling only lasted a couple of seconds. In minutes I was just looking forward to having an evening free from studying, and within a week of vacation I was already bored.

It should go without saying that I’m glad that I don’t live in a story. Most characters in the fiction that I read and write go through more trauma and stress than any human being should ever have to suffer. Moreover, if my life were a story, then what happens after the last page? Even if it was happy ending, there’s no way that I could live in the kind of euphoria that you feel at the end of a novel forever. Eventually, it would get boring.

I suspect that I’m the only one who has grown his life around expectations that life reflects fiction. Actually, I know that I’m not. In my Victorian Literature seminar, I learned that nearly every novel written in the Victorian era ended with a marriage, especially if the protagonist was a single woman. I might think that the way fiction brainwashed me is bad, but it must have been worse for a Victorian woman, learning from the cradle that marriage is the culmination of everything in your life, only to be left wondering “What comes next?” after the ceremony.

I don’t want to say that fiction is evil or manipulative or that we’d be better off without it,  and I really don’t want to discard the concept of the linear plot entirely because, even if it doesn’t  perfectly reflect life, it’s so damn satisfying. Maybe all that I can say is that it’s worth it to think about these things every so often, and to give a little thanks that life keeps on going, even after the final scenes of the latest arc.

A Memorial Service For the Novel That Philip Kiely and I Tried to Co-Write

For the past two months my friend Philip Kiely and I have tried to write a novel together about a group of college students who run a semi-popular Youtube channel and discover a hidden community of aliens. We did a lot of planning and had an very detailed plot worked out (I think the plot-map shows that maybe we went a little overboard on that front), but we still couldn’t get the project to work out. Last night we had a conversation about it and realized that, as much as we both loved the story, taking on an expansive collaborative novel as novice writers was like skipping to the boss battle before you finish the first level of the video game. So, in honor of our novel’s untimely passing, I’m posting my prototype for the first scene. I wrote the first draft and Philip cleaned up the prose and made the technology more realistic.

Nick Pecka learned early on that you can never get rich enough that you don’t have any problems, since as soon as you have enough base wealth to cover food and water and shelter, you start making up really silly needs for yourself, like love and self-actualization and the creation of a flying airsoft gun/infrared sensor shaped like a cyclops-bird’s head. Even being around people with enough money to choose their own dilemmas can bring your own needs into a new tier of silliness, as Nick found out when, in March of that year, he had been recruited by his affluent friends and became immediately invested shooting video to chronicle extravagances in engineering such as their flying, shooting, one-eyed bird’s head project. He had spent the summer wandering around the edges of the group working in the abandoned bank they used as the headquarters for their engineering Youtube channel and made vague noises and hand gestures to make it seem like he was helping. He couldn’t help, because making a propeller-headed attack bird requires a lot of engineering and artistic knowledge, none of which his three years of studying Romantic-era poetry gave him.

There was something deeply satisfying in seeing them work. There was Jeff Nash’s technical jargon about PSI and RPM and Brook Gramarosa Ziegler’s artistic jargon about the surreal fusion of organic and mechanical elements and such artistic language that didn’t mean anything from the interns, who were pretty clearly just contributing enough brain power and muscular strength to get paid. It hadn’t been clear to him at first, but after the long summer Nick understood that Teresa Williams wove the whole thing together, synthesizing all the random ideas into a single vision, a single product, a single, supremely disturbing bird’s head. It was subtle, the cutting motion of her hand to stop someone when they were rambling or lightly nudging one idea a little closer to another, but Jeff could see that she was playing them like one of those mob bosses in the in infinite stream of 1920s crime novels he’d been subjected to by well-meaning grandparents while growing up.

“What do you think of Bella’s new hairstyle?” Brook asked, petting the drone’s green mane.

“You’re not really calling it Bella,” Nick said.

“Yeah, the name really speaks to me,” Brook said, “have you been calling it something else?”

“That creepy flying nightmare,” Nick said, “or, Deathbird. Winged felt-of-hell. Birdman Cyclops.”

“You’re just jealous that she looks prettier than you,” Brook said. Nick winced.

After another few minutes of tinkering, Nick had his shots framed and the others had the disturbing thing running. It would look pretty weird if it were just the functional parts: a four propellers sticking out of a mess of metal and plastic, with the lens of an infrared sensor settled just below the rotor and the orange-tipped barrel of an airsoft pistol just below that. But Brook wouldn’t settle for purely functional, so she’d fit a sharp, slightly open beak over the pistol barrel, made the lens look like a single bloodshot eyeball, and covered the rest of it with furry green fabric. The end result was a beheaded cyborg monster, pure nightmare fuel. This was Brook’s surreal style, and by extension had become their channel’s style, which made it a little less family friendly than some of the other builders on the web, but a whole lot more distinctive.

The idea was that the bird’s head would detect signals coming from small circuits inside balloons and shoot and pop them. In its final form, the drone would zip across town and shoot balloons miles apart, but they hadn’t found the time to navigate the legal and moral grey area of sending a dangerous, unregistered, and deeply unnerving automated flying machine out into a highly populated area, so for now they were keeping it to a limited test: four balloons, one in each corner of the bank. The creepy robot wouldn’t have to fly more than a couple of feet to hit each target.

“Hey, wait,” Nick said as the group set up for the initial test. “You know we don’t start until the camera is rolling.”

“It’s not really that important,” said Jeff. “It’s just a quick test.”

“Yeah, but say it goes psycho and shoots Teresa’s head off?” he said. “Don’t you think that’d fit pretty well into the blooper reel?”

“Sure,” Jeff said, “I’ll go get the mop.”

As Jeff headed for the large plastic bin labeled “cleaning” in the stacks against the wall, the interns filled up balloons, Teresa readied the drone, and Nick got the camera trained on Teresa. The lighting was a little too dim, so he propped open the door out into Meredith main street. 

“You ready?” Teresa asked. Nick nodded, started the camera, and Teresa turned on the drone.

It rose into the air, then just hung there for a second, rotors whirring but everything else completely still as its turret and eyeball stared Teresa down. Through the high-definition preview lens on The Good Camera, Nick saw little parts began to break away from the machine’s tiny vibrations. The thin material that made up the eyeball cracked, slightly at first, then deeper, so half of the white hemisphere hung off, revealing the mechanisms underneath. The green fabric that made up its skin tore in random spots. The bottom jaw of its beak clattered to the bank’s marble floor.

Teresa turned to the camera, an unusual note of concern in her voice. “Should we-”

Then the drone shot forward. Teresa screamed as the rotor tore a bloody streak across her cheek, more in shock than pain. The rest of the crew was paralyzed as the bizarre little machine went rogue, but, acting on pure adrenal instinct, Nick sprinted after it as it whizzed out the door. On his way out he picked up a second airsoft pistol, one that they’d bought when they considered making the bird head double-barreled. There was something unusually natural in his action, like a machine working just right for the very first time, as he slipped the clip in, cocked the gun, and flipped off the safety in time with his step.

In a few long-legged strides he was out on main street. The drone hadn’t gone very far horizontally, only across the road and over to the next sidewalk square, but it had gained two stories of elevation, going on three, and soon it would be disappear above the roofs and their project would be lost to whatever error in programing the stupid thing was following.

It was still all new instinct for Nick, pleasant instinct, as he stepped out into traffic and raised the gun. The screeching brakes and honking horns and swearing drivers shouting that they’d almost run him over were just background noise, a cinematic score to set the mood. The only sound that really mattered was the sharp pop as the plastic pellet sped from the gun into the drone’s rotor and the crash, muffled somewhat by the drone’s artificial flesh, as it hit the sidewalk. 

As Nick approached it, the sounds around him faded from pleasant noise to simply void. His victory was silent, save for the mechanical whirring from the dying machine’s weak spasms. Nick picked it up by the rotor the way you’d hold a freshly caught fish and, smiling, showed it off to his friends, who were gawking from the bank’s open door. In a surprising show of quick thinking, Jeff had picked up the camera and aimed it straight at Nick. Even if he never put the footage online, Nick was glad it existed and hoped that Jeff had caught the badass moment of him standing in traffic and making his perfect shot.

Then a single, slightly wary voice punctured all the glorious silence. “Sir, could you please drop the weapon and the, um, whatever the other thing is.”

“Yeah,” said Nick with a sad smile. “Sure, officer.”

Loop-di-Joop

I’ve always thought that the most beautiful words in the English language are the ones that I’ve contributed. That sounds about as narcissistic as you can get, but it’s true. There’s no logic to what makes a word sound nice, it’s all illogical intuition, and who knows my intuition better than me, after all? My all-time favorite word is Loop-Di-Joop, which was the name of my imaginary friend from Venus back when I was three. I don’t remember Loop-Di-Joop at all (I only know of the name because my parents told me later) but there’s something undeniably pleasing to me about the sound of it. That’s what baby babble is, after all, making noise for pleasure. To anyone else it’s nonsense, but to me, nothing will ever match the elegance and glory of those three syllables.

That’s what’s so wonderful about childhood, isn’t it? You don’t care what your words mean, you just say them because you want to. It doesn’t matter if anyone else can see the strange and wonderful world inside your imagination, it’s enough fun that you don’t need any company. I get discouraged pretty often when I’m sitting at the keyboard, trying to transpose the story in my head into a language that I didn’t create. If only I was content to close my eyes, lean back in my chair, and just live in the illusion.

Only I can’t, because I can’t think like a child anymore. It’s a fun fantasy to believe that there’s a secret world of monsters under the sewer grates, but I can’t jettison the fact that there’s nothing down there but sewage. Somewhere along the line I traded imagination more powerful than anything I’ve felt in the real world for some self-sufficiency and communication skills and about two feet of height. It’s a trade that I never agreed to and, for years, it was one that I wished I could take back. Starting in middle school, I got a feeling I couldn’t shake that I was losing a vibrant imagination that I’d never be able to get back.

It took me a long time to realize, but now I think that maybe losing it isn’t all bad. Looking at the very short, very confusing novel I wrote at age six, it’s pretty clear that I had an active world living inside my head, full of slime monsters and clocks that can stop time and an odd amount of emphasis on keeping your shoes dry, but none of it translated into the real world very well. And, even though I have to admit that it sucks not to be able to conjure worlds from nothing the way I did back when I was a kid, at the same time that I lost that, I learned how to let other people into my head a little with my writing; first with an underground satirical newspaper, then with sharing short stories and novels I’d written, and finally with this blog. Best of all, with writing groups like the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio or the New York State Summer Writer’s Workshop or tabletop RPG groups, I can see that I’m not the only one with an imagination, and that living in someone else’s imaginative world for a little while can be pretty great too. Growing up is a compromise, in the end I’ll never know Loop-di-Joop as well as I used to. But now maybe someone else can know him too.

The Smart Money: A Screenplay About a Man Who Falls In Love With a Giant Pile of Money

Searching through the dark corners of my google drive, I found the script for an absurdist deconstruction of the rom-com genre called The Smart Money. I think the basic idea of a movie where a man literally falls in love with an enormous pile of money and it’s all treated like a legitimate romance is actually pretty decent (if a little on-the-nose), but thirteen-year-old John went overboard with the absurd humor and it turned out practically unreadable. Still, here are the first two scenes anyway. I'm not sure if the randomly capitalized verbs are some kind of obscure joke or if I actually thought that was how you wrote scripts.

1. INT. APARTMENT. NIGHT.

A New York Apartment, messily organized, with posters askew and dishes piling up in the washing machine. There is disturbingly little money on the money pile. GREG and LINDA are having a loud conversation, both are obviously distressed.

GREG: Linda! I just need more time!

LINDA: No, Greg! I have been you girlfriend for eight months, so you know that I am an open-minded woman. But there are certain things I will not sacrifice my dignity for, and chief among them is dating a poor!

GREG: Linda, you know that I’m not a poor! Look at how much of my grandfather’s inheritance is still left. (He motions to the money pile)

LINDA: There isn’t enough, not enough to make me happy. You’ve fooled me for too long, Greg, and I know that before long that money will be gone and you’ll be out on the street, practicing law or writing novels or doing something else that no rational person would ever do!

GREG: No, Linda, don’t leave!

LINDA: I’m sorry, it’s too late for me. I’ll only come back if in 23 days your money pile is twice the size it is now.

LINDA EXITS

GREG TURNS, SITS on his sofa

GREG: Oh God, why did you have to bring me into this world if I weren’t good with money? Why can’t you magically make my money pile bigger?

From behind him, glitter FALLS on the money pile and harp music PLAYS. Little streams of smoke RISE from the money pile, FORMING OLIVIA'S GHOST.

GREG LOOKS at his messy table, PICKs UP a piece of paper.

GREG: Wait a minute, it says here that if I take this to the bank before midnight, I’ll get a million dollars! Wowzers! But midnight is in ten minutes! 

GREG RUNS out of his apartment, down the stairs, into the New York street. The song “The Final Countdown” begins PLAYING.

GREG continues to RUN through the streets, through dark alleys with broken windows and graffiti and gang members sniffing foam. 

DISGRUNTLED LUNATIC #1 STEPS in front of GREG, POINTS a gun at him. “The Final Countdown” begins fading out.

DISGRUNTLED LUNATIC #1: Give me all your money, GREG!

GREG: Never, DISGRUNTLED LUNATIC #1!

GREG keeps on RUNNING. “The Final Countdown” begins playing again, louder than before.

GREG RUNS up to the bank.

GREG: Hi, can I turn this paper in to get my million dollars?

BANK MAN: Sorry, Greg, it’s past midnight.

GREG: Oh no! 

GREG’S ARROGANT RIVAL #1: Hi, bank man! Can I turn in my paper?

BANK MAN: Sure, Greg’s Arrogant Rival #1, but only because you’re my son!

GREG’S ARROGANT RIVAL #1: Thanks, dad!

BANK MAN: Here’s your million dollars.

BANK MAN hands GREG’s ARROGANT RIVAL #1 a million dollars.

GREG WALKS dejectedly out of the bank. “The Final Countdown” fades out.

CRIMINAL approaches GREG. 

CRIMINAL: Hey, GREG, I could give you a million dollars, if you’d help me out with some stuff.

GREG: No! I’d never stoop to criminal activity!

CRIMINAL: Jesus Christ, why would you think I’d want your help with criminal stuff just because I’m a criminal? Talk about offensive generalizations!

GREG: I’m sorry.

GREG continues to WALK dejectedly.

2. INT. APARTMENT. NIGHT.

“The Final Countdown” continues playing, but softer and in a minor key.

GREG: Well, I guess there’s only one thing to do.

GREG POURS gasoline all over his money pile.

GREG: I’ll have to set fire to my money pile and commit insurance fraud.

GREG LIGHTS the lighter. A single tear DRIPS down his cheek and LANDS in the gasoline.

THE GHOST OF OLIVIA (Invisible): Stop! Wait! Don’t burn me!

GREG: What? Who said that! Was it you, God? 

T.G.O.O: No, Greg. It’s me, the spirit of your money.

T.G.O.O. FLOATS up from the money pile, LOOKS down at GREG.

GREG: Jinkers! Am I going nuts?

T.G.O.O.: No, Greg.

GREG: How do you know my name?

T.G.O.O.: I’ve been watching you for a long time. I’ve seen good in your soul, but also great sadness and breaking up with Linda. I’d like to help you with your money problems.

GREG: Would you really do that, spirit of my money?

T.G.O.O.: Yes, I would.

GREG: Is all money haunted?

T.G.O.O.: Ummm, yes. Yes it is. All money is haunted. That’s all there is to it.

GREG: Sounds bonkers! Well, what do I do to fix this money conundrum of mine?

T.G.O.O.: Go to the stock market and invest me! Don’t worry about what happens next. It’s very confusing and probably not worth learning about.

GREG: Okay. Then I guess I’d better be going to bed.

GREG GLANCES over to his bedroom but SEES it filled with trash and paper. 

GREG: Or maybe I should just sleep in here.

GREG COLLAPSES on the gas-soaked money pile and closes his eyes. T.G.O.O. STARES down at him for a moment, SMILES, then DISSIPATES.

That Time I Got so Fed Up With Edina That I Compared it to the 19th Century Russian Monarchy

In my senior year of High School, after successfully publishing a bizarre, Edina specific horror story in the student newspaper and almost getting away with a satircal article where the whole joke was the word “horny,” I decided that the paper really didn’t care what I wrote, so I went ahead and compared the school’s administration to the late 19th century Russian Monarchy. I succeeded in the sense that no one suggested I get suspended this time, but it did lead to an awkward meeting with the school's media specialist. If you want to support the school paper by reading it on the actual website, here it is.

The Edina tech policy everyone’s currently up in arms about is the new cell phone confiscation rule. And, while I think it’s absurd that Edina is trying to saturate the student body with technology, then trying to exact total control over those devices, that isn’t the issue I’m going to tackle today. No, today I’m going to talk about an issue that’s been around as long as Edina computers have: blocking websites.

It’s a good idea, in theory. Anyone who’s ever gone through the comments section on YouTube knows that the internet is often an ugly, hateful, inappropriate place, and Edina High School is an institution charged with educating young people, most of whom are legally still children. Providing some sort of internet safety is a basic necessity. I mean, we can’t have students pulling up pornography on learning devices.

The problem is, the internet is often hateful, ugly, and inappropriate, but also unbelievably large and complex, so trying to toe the line between too much freedom and total censorship has lead to some strange results, especially when certain classes deal with adult themes. In Film and Literature class, for example, there are assignments that are impossible to do on school owned Chromebooks because of restricted mode on YouTube.

Then there are totally banal sites that the school insists on blocking. If I want to read this morning’s Pearls Before Swine comic strip, check the Ask.fm account for the literary magazine I work for, or see the newest Magic: The Gathering spoilers, I have to go out of my way to get around the firewall. I could get it if the school blocked all social media or game sites, but they allow Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and other time wasters way more dangerous than GoComics.

And, in its ultimate goal of keeping students from adult content, the firewall fails. It is possible, on school wifi, to access an image of Jesus, Moses, Ganesh, and the Buddha all having graphic sex with one another. But it would be simply awful if they blocked the site this appears on, because that is The Onion, an excellent source of political satire with enormous educational potential.

This example really underlines the essential problem with blocking websites: there isn’t some binary designation between safe and unsafe sites. School is a place to learn about the real world, and sites that display how the world works will inevitably have borderline inappropriate content.

And Edina Public Schools doesn’t really have a problem with adult content (The God of Small Things, The Color Purple, and Slaughterhouse Five are all required reading for some classes, after all). What they really fear is a lack of control. In the end, the firewall operates on the same principle as the new, wildly unpopular rules concerning cell phones in classrooms. They’re operating like the Russia in the late 19th century, when the monarchy wanted to urbanize without the social progress that inevitably comes with urbanization. The EHS administration wants the benefits of technology without the costs, namely the lack of control of information.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to strive for that, I’m just saying that it’s futile quest.