#also when I mean shakespeare I mean the pen name not the dude because who knows how much of it he wrote and how much others wrote

[actually-nagito]

i don’t care. I don’t care. you are all SLEEPING on David tennant’s Shakespeare career. i don’t think you understand how passionate I am about this. not the “oh he quoted hamlet once haha” no I’m talking about THE YEARS AND YEARS HE SPENT DOING THEATRE, PERFORMING SHAKESPEARE, AND BEING ONE OF THE BEST THEATRICAL ACTORS EVER I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care DO YOU REALIZE HOW IMPORTANT SHAKESPEARE HAS BEEN FOR THE ARTS AND FOR THEATRE DO YOU REALIZE HOW ID DIE JUST TO WATCH HIM PERFORM IN AS YOU LIKE IT OR THE SCOTTISH PLAY ?? OR ANY SHAKESPEARE PIECE PERIOD HE COULD EVEN STAND ON STAGE AND READ HIS SONNETS AND ID BE HAPPY. don’t sleep on his Shakespeare career please I am begging you I have such a love for theatre

[retvenkos]

“i’m color-coding the document. you can’t stop me.”

THE HAM FAM IN A MODERN HIGH SCHOOL AU WOULD JUST HAVE TO INCLUDE...

so first of all, washington is going to be sbo president in his last year of high school

which means that alex, t jeffs, and everyone else are sophomores

peggy is a freshman tho and will not hesitate to take out your kneecaps if you remind her of her unfortunate age

so alex is obviously in all the advanced classes and in like every extracurricular too

he has debate with burr and it gets pretty heated because he. will. not. stop.

he also kills it in english

he has it with eliza

he’s basically just making heart eyes at her all throughout class

and that’s another thing - alex hates the traditional class setting because it doesn’t allow him to speak his mind or learn properly

having to raise your hand??? not being able to argue with the teacher??? woRD COUNTS?????

eliza, on the other hand, is okay at english but really likes her creative writing class

oh, and she definitely volunteers for everything

and if she ever invites alex which involves a lot of blushing he will go no matter what and bring the hamilsquad with him for moral support

(and they definitely call themselves that)

which naturally brings me to jefferson since he hates that stupid group name with every fiber of his being

he is in future business leaders of america and loves it with all of his heart

angelica is in that club with him, though, and things can get pretty out of hand pretty fast

he’s only slightly, hugely afraid of her

he also does mesa because madison is in that and they do every extracurricular together

he’s also a proud member of the french club

which brings me to lafAYETTE who runs the french club and is obviously a foreign exchange student

he will talk with jefferson and while they sometimes agree, they will fight a lot too

he is also one of the biggest haters on jefferson’s obsession with macaroni and cheese

thomas even likes the off-brand kind and it makes laf want to murder

he is definitely the one who helps alex sabotage jeffs the most during the election season - in which he and jefferson run against each other to be a class officer

but what about hercules mulligan, you ask???

he is living the high life because he is literally friends with everyone in every group

sure, everyone admires lafayette, but everyone can get down to party with herc

he does costumes for the theatre department, he’s active with the band and does a bit of singing if he does say so himself, he is on the wrestling team too and will talk with the visual arts kids too

it’s a wonder he doesn’t get chosen to be class officer, honestly

he’s actually pretty good in history and math but will cry when it comes to science

eliza helps him with his chemistry homework and alex definitely uses that as an opportunity to flirt

and legit, eliza is a goddess. definitely in choir. so sweet sounding. gets solos.

and angelica?? she kills it in academics but is also involved in a whole bunch of protests after school

she is that girl who will walk around the cafeteria with petitions for people to sign

she’s also running on 99% coffee because she does not have time to sleep

and how could i forget  p e g g y ? ? ?

okay, so fight me on this, but homegirl does volleyball

she’s wonderful at it too

and she is also that kid who takes every cooking class for her electives???

she just wants to have fun in high school, tbh

she’s pretty popular too, which means she goes to every after school function

she is at every football game with face paint and everything

the dances??? she lives for them

maybe she even helps plan them despite not being an sbo

school spirit? she embodies it.

omg,,, i almost forgot aaron

so he is definitely trying to be valedictorian

he eats, drinks, and embodies school work

he has definitely founded the debate club and is the president of it despite alex trying to challenge him for that position every year

omg,,, he has history the class haha with theodosia and he tries so hard to impress her in it

the teacher will always pair them together for assignments because burr becomes a blushing mess and y’all know everyone ships it

he also attends every football game because theo goes to them to watch her boyfriend and he is reduced to heart eyes the entire time

until hamilton comes over and makes fun of him

aaron’s strong suit is definitely history and math

math is the one class that aaron is above alex in and he will never let hamilton live it down

he also has a class about law and the courts that he, alex, madison, and jefferson share

which naturally brings me to madison

this boy is a part of the jazz band, okay??

and even though a lot of people don’t come to the performances, jefferson is always in the front row

it’s cute, okay???

he’s also such a book worm

like, he is never without a stack of 5 novels that he is going to read and every textbook for every class

he is organized - he uses a planner.

everyone likes him

he has an ap literature class that he lives for

he’s also very fond of shakespeare

he is a proud member of the shakespeare club

everyone tries to make him the president of it, but no one wants to fight eliza or tell her to step down

speaking of eliza, madison is totally good friends with her

he also gets along pretty well with laurens

they have physics together

LAURENS

so he is a chill dude

definitely is taking zoology and biology

science is his king

but he’s also on the baseball team

which means the hamilsquad is at every game

and they are loud

he’s probably taking spanish as a foreign language just to get the credits for it

he has that class with maria, btw

for some reason, he really likes to color-code notes???

he has all of the colored pens and highlighters and what not

that doesn’t mean he studies, tho, because he most definitely does not

also,,,, he has airpods

AND FLUFF ENSUES.

[msclaritea]

The Consequences of Jean Paul and Food For Thought, an excerpt from Aurora's Feather: The Queer Decoding of The Sign of Four.

"Some things should not be hidden behind glass. They were made to be touched."

    “How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of nature! Are you well up in your Jean Paul?"

"Fairly so. I worked back to him through Carlyle."

"That was like following the brook to the parent lake. He makes one curious but profound remark. It is that the chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness. It argues, you see, a power of comparison and of appreciation which is in itself a proof of nobility. There is much food for thought in Richter.”

Now, this was odd. Jean Paul Richter never became friends with Von Goethe, who disliked some of his literary methods. Goethe even dubbed him 'A Chinese in Rome' due to his perceived overuse of Orientalism in his writings..."but in Weimar, as elsewhere, his remarkable conversational powers and his genial manners made him a favorite in general society.”  Carlyle liked him.

Goethe spoke often of, especially in his play about striving and strife, itself, but so had other Romantics, so why use a quote from another author, already so close to the thoughts of the original muse it seems ACD has been using so far, especially if Goethe didn’t even like the guy?

You know something I have finally picked up on, is when having to look into historical figures, there is the official version...and then there is the rest that gets left out, which is a theme that seems to be peeking out from this story; that of an incomplete tale, searching for wholeness; the same theme that was used in BBC Sherlock.

Enter Warm Brothers: Queer Theory In The Age of Goethe by Robert Tobin, which contributed to most of the following information.

                Jean Paul

Johann Paul Friedrich Richter at one point changed his name from it’s more German sound to Jean Paul, which was French and what German society considered effeminate.

While most Romantic novelists wrote in the positive about Marriage, he usually wrote the experience as a negative; a deadly trap.

When he decide to marry, J.P. was quoted as saying “what he wanted was a woman to cook for him”.

18th century blurred the lines between homosexuality and heterosexuality. A person could have several ‘friends’ of different sexes, but could only love one person. Under the guise of friendship, people could say and write things that sound incredibly queer. Some men did not want their spouses to know about their letters, but others who were more pro-feminine, shared their lifestyle with their wives.

He coined the term “love of friends” used as a term among German homosexuals in the 20th century.

Jean was upset with the Christian faith, in part because he could not engage in health, fun horseplay with his male friends.

He once wrote to a friend, "Love must have something physical, a twig, down to which it flies. Send me a twig!” 

   (Seriously, these German dudes are killing me!)

Jean Paul is...or should be...considered an important voice in Love, Romance, and Homosexuality in German literature.

His novel Siebenkas is about Same Sex Desire, Orientalism, and a Love Triangle. From Transcendental Masturbators: Jean Paul's Siebenkas:

"Siebenkäs found Jean Paul leveling a more general critique at the Romantics and at Fichtean Idealism. This novel has been called “the first German marriage novel.” It appeared at a time in which the theory of marriage and the theory of self-consciousness were curiously intertwined. Jean Paul's critique of philosophical language threatened the self-understanding of German Idealism, construing it as a radicalization rather than a partial repudiation of the Enlightenment. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften showed that a married couple has sex while committing imaginary adultery. The erotics in the Wahlverwandtschafte imagined the four partners (real and imaginary) in four different sexual arrangements."

  Orientalism

The Orient had a reputation of an ‘excess of intercourse’ and that it ‘exuded dangerous sex’. It is probably not a coincidence that increase in colonization to parts of the Orient run parallel to the popularity of it’s ‘Sexual Exoticism’ in widespread European literature. Germany reinforced cliches about Sex and the Orient, codified and promoted them in literature and philosophy.

The 19th century British explorer Richard Burton mapped out what he called the SOTADIC ZONE; an area outside of Europe that seemed more prevalent to Homosexuality and Pederasty. (For Burton, pederasty and homosexuality were "geographical and climatic, not racial," meaning it could be found in all the red bits.)

The countries included Morocco, Tahiti, Siam, the West Indies, Northwest America, India, Arabia, Algiers, Egypt, Turkey, China, Siberia, Italy, Constantinople and more within this zone.

Many Europeans, including Wilde, regarded North Africa as ‘a playground full of potential partners’. Italy was well known for its male prostitutes. Hans Christian Anderson was quite ‘distracted’ by them.

Goethe penned an Orientalist novel The East-Western Divan. It turns out that among Goethe’s many interests, it included Eastern Religion and Literature. In an amenable nod to Jean Paul, he stated that “A man who has 'penetrated' the breadth, height, and depth of the Orient, will find that no author had approached the Eastern poets and other authors more than Jean Paul.”

From Holmes quoting Jean Paul, if one were to assume that he wasn't merely referring to Paul's general philosophies, but his other 'foods for thought', then that would have to point to the German novelist being an advent for same sex male friendship AND desire, his use of Orientalism, in Paul's case, BOTH of very close male-male friendships, and Exotic male bodies. He wrote novels, poetry, and papers on the subject, particularly about the acceptance of close male friendships, be they homo-social, homosexual, or otherwise.

(Incidentally, the story within the story of Small, and his exotic adventures...where is it set, again?)

"In response to an ongoing public feud between a local Gay poet and a known homophobe, Goethe took up the cause of homosexuality when it was under massive attack. The attacks had begun in earnest in 1807, not only in response to Goethe’s championing of Winkelmann in his essay of 1805, but in a politically charged campaign against the supposedly treasonous Homosexual Johannes Muller...the attacks on Muller, one of the most celebrated historians of his day, were venomous, for the first time, bringing Nationalism to bear on the interpretation of Homosexuality (at the same time, incidentally, when anti-semitism took on a particularly modern virulence)”

“Man, esthetically is after all much more beautiful, superior, more complete than woman. Once it had arisen, such a feeling then can veer off easily into the animalistic, brutishly physical. Pedarastry is as old as Humanity, and we can therefore say that it is found In nature, even as it is AGAINST nature.”

At this point in the meta, I was almost finished, and had saved Jean Paul for one of the last pieces. I almost stopped here, but I kept having a thought: WHAT IF 'FOOD FOR THOUGHT' REFERRED TO SOMETHING ELSE? A POEM OR OTHER BOOK BY PAUL?

From Amazon: "Life of Jean Paul F. Richter Volume 2", by Eliza Buckminster Lee and William Howitt, is a replication of a book originally published before 1845. It has been restored by human beings, page by page, so that you may enjoy it in a form as close to the original as possible."

This book includes a quote, from a critic, on a piece of work:

Only...the critic above was not speaking about Jean Paul, but Fredrich Schiller, and his highly praised piece of work,

The Philosophical and Aesthetic Letter and Essays of Schiller.

 Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) is best known for his immense influence on German literature. In his relatively short life, he authored an extraordinary series of dramas, including The Robbers, Maria Stuart, and the trilogy Wallenstein. He was also a prodigious poet, composing perhaps most famously the “Ode to Joy” featured in the culmination of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and enshrined, some two centuries later, in the European Hymn.[1] In part through his celebrated friendship with Goethe, he edited epoch-defining literary journals and exerted lasting influence on German stage production. He is sometimes referred to as the German Shakespeare; his are still among the most widely produced German plays both in Germany and internationally.

In addition to his literary accomplishments, Schiller was a formidable philosophical thinker. Between 1791 and 1796, he authored a range of theoretical works that are both sophisticated and original. These writings primarily concern aesthetics, but they stake out notable positions on ethics, metaphysics, ontology, and political theory as well. Together, his essays helped shape one of the most prolific periods of German philosophizing; since then, they have served as a significant source of philosophical insight from an aesthetic practitioner of the highest standing.

"As we shall see, Schiller’s solution to Kant’s belief that morality can only be achieved by negating man’s negative sensuous impulses, is to educate the emotions of man, in order to bring them into harmony with reason. For Schiller, a human being who has achieved such harmony, by transforming his selfish, infantile erotic emotions into agape of truth, justice, and beauty, is a “beautiful soul.” Moreover, since only such a person is truly free, durable political freedom can only be achieved by deliberately fostering such an aesthetical education of man’s emotions among the population. Because Schiller’s writings are such a devastating critique of the philosophical basis for continuing oligarchical oppression of humanity, academic agents of the oligarchy, taking advantage of the abstraction of Schiller’s argument, have gone so far as to attempt to deny his opposition to Kant, even to the point of lyingly portraying him as a Kantian".

Thomas Mann did a life-long study of Schiller in Queer terms for decades, and asserted in his last work Essay on Schiller, that the philosopher had an intense love for Goethe:

"The great adventure of his life, his experience of passion, of passionate attraction and repulsion, of deep friendship, deep desire and admiration; of give and take, of jealousy, of melancholy, envy and proud self-assertion, of lasting, affective tension...was an event between man and a man. It was his relationship with Goethe."  Mann asserts that Schiller was the completely 'masculine' writer, that wanted to attribute to Goethe a 'feminine manner'.

The intense male friendships in many of Schiller's works have resulted in the inclusion of his works in various compilations of 'Gay Literature', including Bullough's Bibliography of Homosexuality. His piece Wallenstein is a known source for Gay Male History. During Schiller's time and beyond, his work was considered so Queered, that it seems 'The Appropriation of Schiller' actually became a thing. You will find his influence in plays, essays, adaptations, cinema.

So prominent was the talk about Schiller's perceived Homosexuality in Queer circles, that a Satirical magazine, Jugend, featured in one issue a drawing of two boys, resting, and overlooking a bridge and a tower, complete with a quote from Schiller. Sascha Schneider, untitled, 1897, Queer Schiller?

 From Warm Brothers: "Let us leave the realm of psychoanalysis and return to Schiller . As Jane Bennett points out, confining Schiller to the purely abstract, to concepts like humanity and liberty vitiates his most heartfelt beliefs. Schiller was quite capable of writing abstract theses but chose instead, to write dramatic plays. In the abstract thesis, he went to bat for Aesthetics...for that realm of experience that attempted to bridge the gap between the mind and body; that attempted to connect sensual pleasure with thought. Schiller's hope, in the Letters of Aesthetic Education on Humanity, was that people could will to do what they ought to do. 'The 'willing' is often a sensual, physical, bodily act. The drama attempts as to flesh out the moral problems that Schiller confronts by giving these problems to people with actual bodies. By ignoring the sensual, physical, bodily in Schiller's dramas, readers have tended to turn him into an intellectual, concept artist, which is at odds with his philosophy of art. Schiller had begun his career with writings on the mind/body problem, inspired by the medical models that denied the separation."

Faust is academically seen as a treatise on Schiller's Letters. And the skull that Faust has is based on the actual skull of Schiller's that Johann kept for a short time.

If HoImes sees himself in this story, as Goethe and Watson as Schiller, he may have just hinted to Watson that he is a man of faults, but that he yearns to have a more human existence; a friendship that goes beyond the platonic, and to be made whole, through a sensual, physical act.

After all of this, everything just seemed to go quiet. I stopped working for a while, and started to cry.   

@sarahthecoat  @possiblyimbiassed  @holmezyan  @theconsultinglinguist @iamsherlockedbyholmes @impossibleleaf  @raggedyblue  @elldotsee @gosherlocked  @elwinglyre @consulting-nerd-of-many-things @bluebluenova @devoursjohnlock @may-shepard

[brightbeautifulthings]

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

"There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me."

Year Read: 2019

Rating: 3/5

Context: I took a contemporary American fiction class that loosely centered on 9/11 stories, including novels like Don DeLillo's Falling Man and Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge. Since Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close wasn't on the list, I can only conclude that not only did my favorite professor not like Foer's novel (which I doubt informed his choice overly much; he had a tendency to spit whenever he talked about Jonathan Franzen, yet Freedom was still on the book list), he also didn't consider it important enough to teach. I find this both sad and hilarious. I gravitate toward 9/11 novels because it's one of those events that divides American culture clearly into Before and After. I'm new to Foer's fiction, but I probably wouldn't put it on my list either. Trigger warnings: death, death of a parent, death of a child, suicide, PTSD, trauma, anxiety, terrorism, falling, body horror, burns, graphic images, some snobby comparisons to DFW, and a total failure to condense my thoughts into < 1,500 words.

About: Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is devastated by his father's death in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. More than a year later, he discovers a key among his father's belongings that doesn't fit any lock in their apartment. It's in an envelope labeled Black. Estranged from his mother and unable to connect with other kids his age, Oskar devises a plan to meet every person named Black in New York City and ask them if they met his dad. He's determined to reconnect with his father any way he can and learn the truth of their last scavenger hunt, but Oskar is haunted by his father's last messages on the answering machine from inside the tower and, since his body was never recovered, that he will never know the full truth of how he died.

Thoughts: Interesting premise, shaky execution. My overall sense is that if Foer had spent more time on the story and less on the structure, it would have been a more effective novel. It's like a lot of these kinds of books in being slightly weirder than the actual world. Nothing that happens absolutely couldn't happen, but it's highly unlikely that it would all happen together. (What kind of parent lets their nine-year-old wander New York City by himself, especially following 9/11 when everyone was highkey paranoid?) I don't mind experimental novels done well, but ELIC is experimental-lite at best and not altogether ground-breaking. The text is supplemented by photographs, pages of writing on top of writing, single sentences on a page, and various other stylistic diversions. It's not so overwhelming that a novice to this kind of fiction would have trouble following the plot, but with one or two exceptions, these additions don't feel like a necessary part of the text; the story would have read just as well, and possibly better, without them.

My favorite exception is the chapter edited by a red pen, the only confirmation we have that Thomas Schell ever read his absent father's letters, and an ironic comment that he had the emotional distance to grammar-check them; he even circled the "I love you" in the complimentary closing like he would circle a correction. The other exception is a tougher pill to swallow, and it's hard to imagine why Foer thought it was a good idea to include actual photographs of the falling man in his book. If you didn't know what it was, you might not realize what you were looking at right away, but the images of people jumping to their deaths out the windows of the World Trade Center are a ubiquitous part of 9/11 history. (Is it ubiquitous because books like this brought attention to it? I was in middle school, so I don’t remember.) Like most things that are done for shock value, putting them in the book is in extremely poor taste.

I don't care that much for Foer's prose. The chapters cycle among Oskar, his grandmother, and his grandfather's perspectives. Oskar's chapters read exactly nothing like a nine-year-old kid's and seem mostly an excuse to include juvenile humor, random facts, and quirky observations (much more, in fact, like a 20-year-old male writer's perspective). His grandfather's are an onslaught of run-on sentences, comma splices, and spelling mistakes, and as a father who walked out on his wife and unborn child, he's possibly the least sympathetic character in the story. Much like real life, characters wander in and out of the narrative without any attempts at reason or closure. This is most noticeable with the Mr. Black who lives in Oskar's building, who randomly decides to remove himself from Oskar's search for no apparent reason and is never heard from again.

There are attempts to draw parallels among Oskar's experience with 9/11, his grandparents’ experiences with the bombing of Dresden, and, more loosely, the atomic bombings in Japan. Aside from the fact that they're all tragedies that leave dead and traumatized people in their wake, I have a hard time comparing 2,000 deaths to 20,000 deaths to a potential 200,000 deaths. (Once you start adding zeroes, is that not a whole different level of atrocity?) The book does better justice to 9/11 than any of the others, and it's an interesting look at how we struggle to make meaning after something so horrific and meaningless happens to us.

In that respect, the novel itself is an act of meaning-making as we struggle to piece together the various kinds of text and the different perspectives and timelines. Like most books of this kind, it puts a lot of responsibility on the reader to make it into a coherent story. Like most books of this kind that aren't done that well, it doesn't do enough work of its own to make a meaningful story. I wasn't expecting closure from a book like this (which is good because there is none to be had), but there's also no impression that Oskar is bringing his experiences together in a meaningful way--so there's no chance for the reader to do that either. The overall message seems to be that there IS no meaning to them. On one level, I might agree; it may be impossible to bring meaning to the death of a parent, particularly one who died in such tragic circumstances.

But the other stuff, the living part where Oskar met so many people and affected so many different lives, is open-ended to a frustrating degree. It's not quite as nihilistic as a lot of post-9/11 fiction; Oskar's search ultimately brings him back to the most important people in his life, which is a strong message, but it doesn't bring a whole lot of sense to anything leading up to that. Forcing readers to draw their own conclusions is a fine strategy, but I would have preferred to see Oskar's conclusions as well after I followed him through an entire book. In that respect, the film does a much better job in bringing Oskar's experiences together into something meaningful. We get to see how it was actually a bonding experience for him and his mother, and how touching all those lives brought something important to them and to him. This is the kind of thematic closure I was hoping for from the book, and the film just made it more obvious that it isn't there.

Notes on David Foster Wallace connections: I'm one of those terrible snobs who compares every contemporary literary fiction novel written by a white dude to Infinite Jest, and Foer doesn't seem at pains to hide the references. My favorite is a picture Oskar has of a tennis player on the ground, but he notes that from the expression on his face, we can't tell if he's won or lost. This is an A+ IJ reference, since it's rife with tennis players, sinister smiley faces, and confusion over whether people are laughing or crying. The others are more inscrutable. I have no idea what to make of Oskar playing Yorick in his school play, other than that his teachers are strangely morbid in dressing up a kid in a papier-mâché skull to play a dead guy. I'm sure that's not traumatizing at all. IJ is a loose Hamlet retelling, so Foer could have picked any other Shakespeare play to avoid the reference; I'm just not sure what it's saying. The last includes mild spoilers for both IJ and ELIC, so proceed with caution. In possibly the weirdest and most pointless detour of the book, Oskar and his grandfather dig up his father's empty casket and fill it with notebooks. Again, I have no idea what to make of this. While Oskar is very bothered by the fact that it's empty, we don't get the sense that he gains a lot of closure from this mad adventure. It's clearly a parallel to Hal and Gately digging up Himself's grave, except in IJ, they have good reason for doing so. Thoughts and theories from people who have read both? I'm interested to hear interpretations.

[punk-rock-pixie]

1-100

I need to be careful what I ask for lmao

Spotify, SoundCloud, or Pandora?

Spotify

is your room messy or clean?

It’s messy rn just cuz I was looking for something

what color are your eyes?

Hazel

do you like your name? why?

Yeah. Picked it myself.

what is your relationship status?

single

describe your personality in 3 words or less

Really McFuckin Gay

what color hair do you have?

Black and blue

what kind of car do you drive? color?

Grey chevy cruz

where do you shop?

I’m a slut for Barns and Noble lately. Dropped $60 on classic ghost stories, Norse Mythology, and a Deathly Hallows journal. I’ve dropped over $100 literally in the last two months on books. I don’t work anymore though so that won’t be a thing anymore

how would you describe your style?

Sad college kid chic 

favorite social media account

Youtube

what size bed do you have?

Queen

any siblings?

One older sister.

if you can live anywhere in the world where would it be? why?

The Nordic region. They’ve been doing so much right in terms of education and gender equality. 

favorite snapchat filter?

The anime one

favorite makeup brand(s)

NYX, E.L.F. and Bare Essentials

how many times a week do you shower?

I shower every other day, but I wash my hair like every 3-4 days to keep the color in.

favorite tv show?

Currently, really love trollhunters. 

shoe size?

Like a 7 in mens or something

how tall are you?

5′6.5″ The half is so important to me because I’ve hardly grown since 2012 

sandals or sneakers?

Trick question- no shoes at all. Our feet get hurt like men.

do you go to the gym?

Rarely, but yes.

describe your dream date

Dear god. Almost any date I’d be okay with. Coffee? Sign me the fuck up. Hang around a park/go on a walk? Lemme get my heckin sneakers. Cryptid hunting in the wee hours of the night? You just won my heckin heart buddy.  

how much money do you have in your wallet at the moment?

Like $30-$40 I think????

what color socks are you wearing?

None sock

how many pillows do you sleep with?

Too many for my own good.

do you have a job? what do you do?

Not anymore :)))) There weren’t enough hours.

how many friends do you have?

How many friends? Many. How many close ones? Like 3-4

whats the worst thing you have ever done?

Something I’d rather not say.

whats your favorite candle scent?

Lavender always but peppercorn and pumpkin are the ones I’ve been using lately.

3 favorite boy names

Marshal

Ethan (NOT BECAUSE OF NESTOR)

Quinn

3 favorite girl names

Rose

Sadona

Rickie 

favorite actor?

Always and forever Chris Evans, but also Hugh Jackman found his way back to my heart recently. The Rock, Ramin Karimloo, Sean Gunn, Michael Rooker

favorite actress?

Zoe Saldana, Zendaya, Melissa McCarthy, Allison Janney, Julie Andrews, Maryl Streep.

who is your celebrity crush?

See above two questions, but mainly Hugh Jackman, Chris Evans, and Zendaya

favorite movie?

If you couldn’t tell, I’m hyperfixating on Greatest Showman, but also Book of Life, Monster in Paris, 1937 Phantom of the Opera

do you read a lot? whats your favorite book?

My favorite book is Dracula currently, but I also love Dodie Clark’s “secrets for the mad”, most of Shakespeare’s plays and Edgar Alan Poe’s works

money or brains?

Brains. 

do you have a nickname? what is it?

I have way to many dude.

how many times have you been to the hospital?

Like 7-8 I think???

top 10 favorite songs

In no order:

-I’m counting all of greatest showman as one

-Cat Stevens: Father and Son

-Raspberries: Go all the way

-Silver: Wham Bam Shang a Lang

-Babeo Baggins: Thunder Bird

-Dodie Clark: You

-Beatles: Wanna Hold Your Hand

-Vanessa Paradis and Sean Lennon: La Seine 

-Dear Evan Hansen: For Forever

-Karen O: Moon Song

do you take any medications daily?

No but I should probably get back on them.

what is your skin type? (oily, dry, etc)

Normal to oily

what is your biggest fear?

Abandonment :) Also I have claustrophobia

how many kids do you want?

I mean if we’re talking baby goats, as many as I can afford.

whats your go to hair style?

I kinda just brush my hair back and hope for the best

what type of house do you live in? (big, small, etc)

It’s not a mansion, but it’s pretty big

who is your role model?

@thatsthat24

what was the last compliment you received?

From @mild-soapog something about how I deserve a wholesome life and honestly I just love Elle???

what was the last text you sent?

“Hey, how are you feeling?” to a former coworker

how old were you when you found out santa wasn’t real?

I grew up Jewish so I never really thought it.

what is your dream car?

I don’t really care tbh. I’m pretty happy with the one I have.

opinion on smoking?

You do you just not around me cuz I will cough like a mad man.

do you go to college?

Soon

what is your dream job?

Professional film or stage actor or singer/guitarist in a band

would you rather live in rural areas or the suburbs?

suburbs

do you take shampoo and conditioner bottles from hotels?

Nope. I’m a good noodle.

do you have freckles?

Several

do you smile for pictures?

Yes, but only after make a bunch of stupid faces

how many pictures do you have on your phone?

659

have you ever peed in the woods?

Yes and uh 4/5 would not recommend 

do you still watch cartoons?

Yup

do you prefer chicken nuggets from Wendy’s or McDonalds?

Neither.

Favorite dipping sauce?

hek dude idk 

what do you wear to bed?

Usually like a tank top and underwear. if it’s super cold I’ll wear sweats too

have you ever won a spelling bee?

Have I ever even competed in one????

what are your hobbies?

Guitar, singing, ukulele, drawing, writing poetry

can you draw?

I’d say so

do you play an instrument?

Check hobbies with the addition of bass guitar

what was the last concert you saw?

I think it was a Beatles tribute band???

tea or coffee?

Both

Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts?

Starbucks

do you want to get married?

Honestly, first let me find someone local that will love me for more than 4 months

what is your crush’s first and last initial?

HJ, EJ, EN. 

are you going to change your last name when you get married?

You mean… IF I get married

what color looks best on you?

Blacks and purples

do you miss anyone right now?

Several people

do you sleep with your door open or closed?

usually closed

do you believe in ghosts?

Yes and no???

what is your biggest pet peeve?

chewing with your mouth open, snoring, pen clicking, leg jiggling (if it’s in my peripheral vision)

last person you called

My crush actually. He and I are friends and I asked if we wanted me to hang with him after school since he had to stay up until I had my callback scheduled

favorite ice cream flavor?

Chocolate chip cookie dough and cookies and cream

regular oreos or golden oreos?

What the shit are golden oreos

chocolate or rainbow sprinkles?

Rainbow cuz I’m queer

what shirt are you wearing?

 A black tank top

what is your phone background?

a greatest showman wallpaper

are you outgoing or shy?

it depends on the situation

do you like it when people play with your hair?

Yes but ONLY IF THEY ASK BEFORE HAND.

do you like your neighbors?

I don’t even know my neighbors

do you wash your face? at night? in the morning?

Both

have you ever been high?

nope

have you ever been 

Nope

last thing you ate?

Like half a pizza

favorite lyrics right now?

Idk my favorite currently, but these are the ones that keep circling my head

“When the world becomes a fantasyAnd you’re more than you could ever be‘Cause you’re dreaming with your eyes wide openAnd you know you can’t go back againTo the world that you were living in'Cause you’re dreaming with your eyes wide open

So Come alive”

summer or winter?

Winter

day or night?

Night

dark, milk, or white chocolate?

All????

favorite month?

October-November

what is your zodiac sign

Scorpio

who was the last person you cried in front of?

Honestly, I have no fuckin clue lmaooooo

[arinsaffron]

Eurydice

You all know the story of Eurydice and Orpheus, right? 

If you don’t, I’ll give you a summary. Basically, Orpheus was considered one of the best poets and musicians of Ancient Greece. He used to play the lyre, which made Eurydice fall in love with him. The day of their wedding, she got bit by a snake and died. Orpheus went to the Underworld to rescue her, and Hades let him take her soul back to the Living World, the only condition was not to look back. Orpheus, obviously, looked back at her and thus, Eurydice was taken back to the Underworld. That’s the story we know, that’s what mythology says.

But then feminism made its appeareance. 

Carol Ann Duffy published a book in 1999, called The World’s Wife, in which she tells the stories of women of history from their own point of view. It includes "Little Red Cap", "Thetis", "Queen Herod", "Mrs Midas", "Anne Hathaway" and many others; including Eurydice. 

Now, listen. This poem is a masterpiece, in my opinion, and here’s why. 

It starts by saying: 

Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground.

With that “girls” it’s clearly stated that this poem was made for women. It doesn’t matter if it’s the readers, or the other women included in the book. Eurydice says she’s already dead and lives where “the words had come to an end”, as a reference to Orpheus and his damn poetry.

So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door.

Eurydice is “in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe”. So Eurydice is, literally, resting in peace, away from the dude who writes poetry and shows off about it. 

Orpheus called her “His Muse”, with capital letters. She doesn’t have a name of her own anymore other than His Muse. 

The dude who once threw a tantrum because Eurydice pointed out that his rhymes were weak has shown up at the Underwold.

Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize.

The funny thing here is that “Big O” is an eufemism for a female orgasm. Go figure. 

And of course, Orpheus is there to retrieve His Muse by doing the only thing he’s good at; singing and playing the lyre.

Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears.

Eurydice says that “things were different back then”, but in the next stanza we’ll find out they remain the same until today. The gods loved Orpheus, and his poetry was so moving, even the rocks would cry.

The line “aardvark to zebra” is so pleasant; the animals picked for this symbolize all of the animals, from A to Z. 

Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc.

“Bollocks.” What are you? British? (Scottish, mind you.)

“I’d done all the typing myself” implies that Eurydice had been dragged into this artistic world unwillingly, and she’s not having it. She’d rather speak for herself, have her own name and voice, instead of an epithet. 

(Dark Lady was the epithet used by Shakespeare. Although, Anne Hathaway differs from Eurydice.)

In fact girls, I’d rather be dead.

AND SHE IS. But Orpheus can’t leave her the fuck alone. 

But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal.

Here we have it, the connection to one of the previous stanzas, more especifically to the “things were different back then” line. Because “Gods are like publishers, usually male.” There’s so much to say about this, I don’t even know where to start. 

We’ve already stablished that Orpheus was a poet, possibly the greatest poet in Ancient Greece. And if we look back at mythology, it’s said that Eurydice fell in love with him because of this poetry. Therefore, we can deduce that his writings were mostly about love, passion; the Ἔρως, if you will.

But even if the subject of his writings shall remain a mystery, what we do know is that women often had to change their names and publish their books under a male/androgynous pen name because publishers think that a book written by a woman is not gonna be succesful. Even if men often write cheesier stuff than women, but that’s another story.

Orpheus strutted his stuff.

And oh, did they gods like it. 

The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears.

Sisyphus was punished by Zeus to push a stone uphill for all eternity, and Tantalus was punished by staying inside a lake, with fruits and food close to him, but he would never be able to eat any of them. And even they took a break from their punishments to listen to Orpheus’ poem. And they’re all so stunned by him, they don’t even bother asking Eurydice if she wants to go with him or not.

Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life - Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife - to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths…

Yeah, Eurydice isn’t happy, but the gods decided for her, so  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

She’s nothing else than a literary figure for Orpheus, and after his writer’s block, he’s decided to go save her from the Underworld. 

He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever. So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked.

And of course Orpheus, after his performance, now isn’t gonna even ask Eurydice how she’s doing. At all. 

Talk about keeping the appeareances. 

Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this - I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey.

Again, the “girls” reminds us that Eurydice is talking to a group of girls, setting the record straight. 

She was dead, why couldn’t he leave her alone? And she’s willing to do anything to make him look back. 

It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke - “Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again… “

The “when inspiration finally struck” makes reference to Orpheus’ quality as a writer. Women are also capable of getting inspired. And what she did was tease his ego to make him look back...

He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me. What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone.

...and it worked! Eurydice went back to the Underworld, just like she wanted.

The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

The dead are talented, yes, even more than the living, who “walk by the edge of a vast lake”, meaning the living are always close to death. 

The “wise, drowned slience of the dead” implies that Orpheus’ poems are of no significance, since only death brings true peace and wisdom. 

[shkspr]

I have been thinking for a hot minute about a number of dead gay writers who haunt me every day in spite of the fact that I’ve never read any of their work, and I posted about it elsewhere but I thought I would use this platform to really flesh out the details of it, because why not? It’s an interesting phenomenon. I think it’s interesting. Nobody’s forcing you to read it. Enjoy.

A.E. Housman

I believe my obsession with internationally renowned pop singer-songwriter Michael Holbrook Penniman, commonly referred to as MIKA, is well-documented. Thanks to his influence, I am now almost constantly thinking about A.E. Housman. 

MIKA has a song entitled “Heroes,” which is a poignant piece of poetry about the treatment of war veterans, and the opening line goes, “the kids in their hundreds tomorrow will march through the door / they’re fighting someone else’s war.” And he explains on the commentary album that this line is based off the Housman poem “The Lads in Their Hundreds.” Before he said that, I had never heard of Housman, and now I’m always thinking about Housman, and I don’t really know why. 

Also, the album that “Heroes” appears on is called The Origin of Love, and while I am not sure if this allusion was intentional, I am reminded of Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love, which is about -- you guessed it -- the gay life of A.E. Housman. Everything comes full circle, and A.E. Housman is cackling in his grave at the fact that I cannot stop thinking about him.

Lord Byron

It is at this point that I need to specify that in this context by “gay” I mean “attracted to the same gender” and not “100% Grass Fed Homosexual” because applying modern sexuality labels is anachronistic blah blah blah and there is some contention about Byron and it seems pretty clear that he was bisexual but the point is: I know he liked dudes and I know his face haunts my every dream, even though I cannot even name a single thing he ever wrote. 

The bottom line is he was very depressed and very pretty, and friends with Mary Shelley, and that really speaks to me for some reason. Regardless, I know next to nothing about him and I intend to keep it that way. 

Although I’m fucking always thinking about this masterpiece from the Toast wherein Mallory Ortberg (my eternal savior) posits that “do you realize i’m never going to be able to have sex with the rain” and “i want to have a threesome with the moon and jealousy” are things Byron would say. It truly touched my soul and I have a deep connection with Lord Byron, or at least his fictionalized 21st-century text message persona, courtesy of Mallory Ortberg. 

Christopher Marlowe

There is too much to say about Kit Marlowe. I first found out he existed when I watched the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love (cowritten by Tom Stoppard, of A.E. Housman fame, everything really does come full circle), in which he, in the span of two scenes, utterly rocked it. I then developed a deep affinity for him on a personal level, because why had I never heard of him before? 

I love Shakespeare, I love Shakespeare so much, but it hurt my feelings that I had heard so much about Shakespeare and never ever had Kit Marlowe shoved down my throat in a high school English class. I then took it upon myself not to read any of his work, but rather to immediately google whether he and Shakespeare did it. 

As far as I can tell, there is no firm consensus on this (meaning I could find literally not one thing on the subject, possibly because it never happened but also possibly because of a cover-up?), but there is substantial evidence that Marlowe was a gay, independent of any rumored relations with Will.i.am Shakespeare. 

There is also some scholarly debate that says that Marlowe faked his death and proceeded to assume William Shakespeare as a pen name and they are in fact the same person, and while I don’t know if I believe it, it is the kind of conspiracy theory I can get behind.

Honorable Mention: Oscar Wilde

Wilde gets an honorable mention because he belonged properly on this list until very recently, when I bought his complete works and began reading them, specifically because he was haunting me so effectively. I’m only eight chapters into The Picture of Dorian Gray, and I’ve read exactly six of his poems, and that’s it. 

Regardless, good old Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, a beautiful man if ever there was one, a brilliant writer whose gravesite deserves many kisses, possibly my only friend in this cruel world, speaks to me in my dreams. This was another one brought to my attention by international man of mystery MIKA, specifically the song “Good Guys.” Although I had heard of Oscar Wilde many times, I had never thought of reading his work until this song came into my life.

The song laments the lack of good gay role models nowadays, and includes nods to several more dead gay writers who haunt me daily, but most prominently it has a catchy chorus containing the lyrics “If we are all the gutter, it doesn’t change who we are / cause some of us in the gutter are looking up at the stars,” which is a reference to a line in Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. 

This one line in one song made me go absolutely rabid over Oscar Wilde immediately, possibly because of the very clear contextual allusion to gay hardship that MIKA threw at me, but I like to think it also has something to do with Wilde himself. Anyhow, eight chapters deep in Dorian Gray and I’m getting gayer by the second, so thanks, Oscar. 

Also, similar to my experience with Kit Marlowe, I find myself hurt and confused at the fact that nobody ever urged me to read Oscar Wilde. It seems obvious now, like I should have been doing it my entire life, and while I knew he was fairly popular, nobody told me what he was about, and I believe that’s entirely on everyone but me.

The Dead Gay Writers list actually goes on for ages, but everybody else on the list haunts me in the sense that sometimes I’m minding my own business and their name pops into my head and I’m confused and gay for a second and then I go back to living my life. That makes for a much less interesting post, so I went with the top three and an honorable mention, for brevity’s sake, and I use the term “brevity” very loosely.

[theliterateape]

Cleaning Toilets on Grave Yard Shift is a Trip, Man

by Don Hall

As a freshman in college (way back in 1980), I knew living at home was not going to work for me. Part of it was that my stepfather (at the time) flat out told me he would pay for my way if I majored in criminal law and I wanted to major in music. I had a scholarship for the tuition but needed to make some bread to pay for a place to squat when not practicing my trumpet and studying music theory.

A friend of a friend recommended a gig working nights (midnight to 9:00a.m.) on a cleaning crew for a few of Wichita’s more prominent restaurant/bars. It paid well and it fit my schedule, so I bit.

I met the Boss at midnight at the local Chi-Chi’s. Having worked as a waiter there for exactly three hours, I knew the location. I walked in and he sized me up. Can’t remember his name but I recall that he looked hard. You know the guy — pot belly as hard as a rock, a permanent five o’clock shadow, a shock of wirey hair poking out of a weathered ball cap.

He handed me a pair of enormous hard rubber gloves and we walked back to the kitchen. “Turn it on and power wash the place.” He growled as he passed over a thick black hose with a nozzle.

“Power wash?”

“The water is frigging hot as hell so don’t get it on you if you can help it. Spray everything. There are drains on the floor so don’t worry about that. They’re supposed to put away the pans and cooking stuff but if they didn’t...” and he grabbed the hose back, took aim at a metal bowl half-filled with dried up refried beans and cockroaches, and blasted it across the room. “...target practice.” And he cackled like he’d told a dirty joke about a whore and a priest.

There was a checklist beyond target practice. The floors of the entire place. Carpets. Bathrooms. We didn’t do the windows but we did disinfect the surfaces and table tops.

He and I cleaned four bars that night. I was handed a weekly schedule. I never saw the Boss again.

On my next scheduled shift, after a day of classes, rehearsals, and four hours of sleep, I met the crew. This time we started at Joe Kelly’s Oyster Dock. It was a fish place (duh) with a huge circular bar in the middle and a hard wood floor made with huge planks of aged wood. The crew were two other guys, both about a decade my senior. 

Duffy wore lots of black leather. He had a dark blue Mohawk and had a fifteen inch knife strapped to his left leg. He rode a motorcycle and wore mirrored sunglasses even in the dim recesses of the restaurant. He also was a frothing Born Again Pentecostal Christian.

Tim was a classic burnout. Think Jeff Bridges in The Big Lewbowski but without the charm. He’d done a lot of drugs in his younger years and it showed in his perpetually stoned demeanor and vacant stares. That night, he told me his favorite job he’d ever had was as the manager of The Circle Cinema, Wichita’s since closed down porn theater. He loved that gig but got fired for being caught getting a hand job by a sixteen year old girl.

Now, being eighteen years young, I can’t say I was the brightest bulb in the lamp but my wattage outshone these two retards like a lighthouse lamp eclipses a Christmas Tree strand.

Within a week, Tim handed me a note from the Boss. Scrawled in black pen and in all caps, it read: YOU ARE NOW THE CREW SUPERVISOR. EXTRA $3.00 HOUR. YOUR (sic) IN CHARGE. Neither Duffy nor Tim cared much. They weren’t big thinkers so having the college kid tell them what to clean and in what order wasn’t a problem.

Of the two, Duffy was the more focused. All I had to do was give him the order (“Do the floors, disinfect the bar, hit the kitchen.”) and aside from him jawing on and on about Jesus and Christian Rock all night, I never worried about him.

Tim, on the other hand, was like working with a child. Almost every night, I had to talk him through the order of cleaning the floors (“First sweep. Then vacuum. Then wet mop. Then dry mop. Then buff.”) The guy was just barely there on most nights and spent long smoke breaks at the bar in between each step. “Which one now?” he’d ask in between drags on his Winston Lights.

Neither of them would clean the bathrooms. Ever. That was the only area that my Supervisor authority ran dry. Any time I’d even suggest that Duffy do the bathrooms he’d go into a full-on rant/whine about it. Tim just ignored me when I’d task it to him. So, the bathrooms were almost always my domain.

Here’s a bit of knowledge to dole out. Drunk men are juvenile. They piss on stuff. They piss on the floor around the urinals. They piss on the toilet. They piss on full rolls of toilet paper. Like Storm Troopers in Star Wars, their aim is for shit.

Drunk women on the other side are monsters. Filthy and almost angry in the bathroom. Shit smeared on the walls. Used tampons stuck to the floor. Half-empty glasses left in the corners covered in lipstick. Half-eaten food on the sinks. 

I don’t know if when half-cocked on Long Island Ice Teas the longstanding rage at being paid less and treated like a pair of tits on legs seeps out like a poisonous sweat, but going into any women’s restroom after a Friday or Saturday night of business was like entering the threshold to hell.

I found my rhythm, working the grave yard shift and going to classes during the day. I didn’t sleep much but I was eighteen and had more energy than a weasel on crack so that never seemed a problem. Duffy and Tim were both odd founts of random knowledge and they’d tell me stories of women they’d been with, of other jobs they had, and conspiracy theories about Iran and Russia and mind control via the television.

There was the time Duffy spent an entire shift on target practice and grabbing crock ware bowls filled with roaches and microwaving them. There was the night Tim forgot about his cigarette and caught a vintage Coke sign on fire in Willy C’s Cafe.

And then there was Walter.

Walter was a skinny-as-a-matchstick kid (actually he was five years older than me) with a pompadour haircut and out of his tiny body came the voice of James Earl Jones. It was a dissonance to hear him talk with this booming gravitas and then see the pipsqueak dude uttering the sound. He was also a fantastic actor. I knew Walter from my regular casting in Wichita’s Shakespeare in the Parks and, when he was looking for work, I hooked him up.

Now there were four of us and we could hit two bars at the same time. I always paired up Duffy and Tim because regardless of the work, Walter and I had grand, sweeping conversations about theater, art, movies, and music. We also both really like to prank each other.

Walter’s pranks came in the form of phone calls and plastic vomit. It was as if he spent a lot of time at a Spencer’s Gifts and just couldn’t get enough. My pranks were mean. I was gifted my sense of humor from my grandfather who was known for tricking his son into believing he was deaf by talking to him for hours without making a sound and taught his grandson to try to catch rocks with his head.

One night as I’m buffing the floor in one of the restaurants and Walter is on bathrooms, Walter comes out from the women’s. His face is as pale as a sheet of paper and he looks mortified. I shut down the buffer.

“D-Don. I can’t. I mean, I just can’t...”

“What is it, dude? What’s going on?”

“There’s a...it’s in the toilet...there’s a fetus in the toilet...”

“A fetus? Like an aborted fetus?”

“Yeah...”

“Oh, fuck. OK. Why don’t you buff and I’ll go check it out.”

The relief on his face was visceral.

Sure enough, when I take a look in the third stall, there is what appears to be a curled up, pink fetus floating in the bowl. I’m a bit horrified until I notice the tail. A long thin tail one might see on a...oh. Apparently, this rat has been in the sewer system and the water has gradually peeled off every strand of fur, leaving nothing less than a curled up, pink dead rat in the toilet.

And, yes. I’m a a horrible asshole.

I’m a bastard because I put on my rubber gloves, picked the rat up by it’s tail, put it behind my back, and walk out to Walter. I feign horror. I make my lower lip tremble. He shuts off the buffer.

“Was it...?”

“Yeah. A fetus. A dead baby in the toilet.”

“Oh my god. Oh my god.”

“I think it’s a boy fetus. How about you CHECK!” and I hurl the rat at Walter. It hits him square on his skinny chest and he lets out a high-pitched scream so alien to his deep vocal stylings that it creates another sort of disconnect. He squeals a second time, like a tea kettle or an actress in a Jason Voorhees movie. His eyes roll back into his skull and he drops like a sack of flour onto the floor.

I laugh so hard I feel like I might go blind or have a stroke.

Walter quit that night. I cleaned the rest of the place myself. A week or so later, I caught up with him at Shakespeare rehearsal. I offer my apologies but a few others want to know why. And, in his booming voice, he tells the tale of the fetus with epic flair and manages to recreate his screech to boot. When he was finished, we all applauded him and he took a bow.

I worked this crew for a full year before transferring schools to another state (better scholarship with a good high school friend in the marching band). It’s funny how my memories of this graveyard shift gig eclipses my memories of my first two years of college but isn’t that the fun thing about the narrative of our lives?

[thedailychalkboard]

Stage Fright

In his play ‘As You Like It’ William Shakespeare penned these famous words; “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”  Such a profound statement, yet it isn’t given the widespread attention I believe it so dearly deserves as a valid analogy that carries such meaning for society today. Shakespeare was one wise dude and that’s why his words are still with us, and studied, to this day.

Lest you grow weary that I should be quoting the Bard, and wonder too soon where this will lead, it may help you to know that I was born and raised in a town whose claim to fame is having one of the world’s leading Shakespeare companies. Sadly it was many years before I could fully appreciate the magic of the written word to shape the opinion and thoughts of communities, societies, and even whole nations.

My upbringing was what can only be described as lower middle class frequently dipping into the upper reaches of the lower class. I mention this simply to inform your understanding and to put into context my personal experience. Like it or not each of us is the product of our respective environments even as we may try desperately to deny or escape them. Born of parents who worked at physically exhausting, repetitious manual labor, I grew up understanding what hard work is. I also knew from an early age that I wanted something more than what I observed around me.

I was raised in a household with parents who wouldn’t be considered well educated by today’s standards. My father didn’t graduate High School choosing instead to join the service during the Korean Conflict. Hard work and financial struggle, replete with its inevitable mental and physical stress and strain, were no strangers to our home. It visited often. My father was a dreamer and a doer. He was always seeking to make a way in the world that would bring fame and fortune to our doorstep. Some fleeting successes were followed by failures of greater duration. Most were brought on by a poor understanding of how to properly invest and gain financial traction while resisting the temptation to overspend. These episodes became increasingly difficult to recover from. My parents made due the best they knew how. Knowledge can be a powerful force to be reckoned with

I grew up sheltered from many things in life. Among these was a strong, loving base of family support and strong, meaningful friendships. Both were foreign to me.  I suspect some of you reading this may be able to relate to what I am telling you. What I ask is that you don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t want your pity I want your attention. I want you to understand how a life lived on the very edge of success and failure, constantly blown, like the gossamer seeds of a dandelion plant, between what is considered to be the economic right and wrong side of the tracks, can shape a person’s perception and actions.

My dad was excessively overbearing and had difficulty showing emotional or physical love to myself and my younger sister. Mom pretty much went along with what dad said and did. I understand. It made things easier for her. Discipline for us kids was meted out in a corporal manner. It was often given without a full understanding of what had happened and why. We would find ourselves being punished for things we didn’t do. My dad liked to yell and to use a thin leather strap to set us straight. He didn’t drink and didn’t have vices of the type usually associated with abusive family life. No, this was a more hidden and subtle form of abuse that denied a child their natural desire to be curious, explore, discover, share and belong and to be heard. It felt incredibly oppressive at times. I find myself wondering why this was. My father was certainly not raised in an atmosphere of denial. What turned the tide in his life to such an extent that his children suffered, not so much from the physical abuse, but the emotional and mental abuse of being denied the life of a normal child? But such was life for us.

Growing up in a town where cultural and creative things abounded, yet having a family that didn’t participate in such things is to me the ultimate abuse of a young mind. Not even considering the free concerts, local music and theatrical events, we weren’t allowed to participate in activities and organizations that our schoolmates or neighborhood acquaintances were involved with. I would have loved to have been a Cub Scout. Fat chance, the answer was always no. I wanted so badly to go to neighbor friends on a weekend to play or camp out in the back yard overnight. “NO.” “But why?” I would ask. “Because I said so”, was the answer my father always gave.

“Because I said so”. In my experiential opinion these are four of the most insidious and useless words in existence when directed at another person, their dreams, desires and curiosity. This empty phrase was one that I not only lived with the duration of my formative years, despising deeply, but the very same phrase I found myself using as I reached adulthood. The apple, unfortunately, hadn’t fallen far from the proverbial tree and I had learned the lesson well.

You may be wondering right now why I’m relating this personal sob story to you. You are right to wonder why but not to think of it as a sob story. The truth is much to the contrary. It illustrates why a strong will, determination to never give up and a passionate desire to overcome negative environmental influences in a person’s life are so important to the happiness of each and every one of us.

I could have turned out much different than I have because of my unconventional upbringing. I endured the mean things kids do like being called names and even ostracized by some of my classmates in grade school. I was called names because I wasn’t allowed to participate in things outside school. Yes, it certainly did hurt and didn’t seem fair at all, until I realized that I was the person who had to determine how my life was going to turn out. Not my dad, my mother, my schoolmates or those who called me names and perceived me as odd. You see I determined when I was about 13 years old that I wasn’t going to be a loser no matter what. I was going to discover what I was good at and pursue it doggedly until I became the best at whatever this was. So what the heck does this have to do with Shakespeare?

The whole world is one gigantic stage and we are controlled by those stage directors who we are forced or allow into our lives to control us. We aren’t alone on this stage, and must take into consideration the roles of others who occupy the stage with us, but ultimately we write our own lines and decide which of the acts we are going to participate in. When we walk on stage at birth every opportunity in the world is available to us. As we act and interact we discover that we must accommodate those other actors on the stage or risk being branded bad players or, even worse, ignored extras. So my question to you is do you perceive yourself as the best player you can be on the world stage, a bad player, or merely a bit player who has a walk on and then departs, soon to be forgotten?

I wrote earlier about the four most insidious and useless words in my opinion being, “because I said so”, and how this phrase was passed down from my father to me. When preparing for our role on this stage of life we sometimes take the wrong directions from either the wrong director or a bad actor. We may not realize this until someone in the audience comes to us and has the guts to ask us one simple question. This is the most fearful and confrontational question you will ever be asked by someone because it means you now have to explain yourself. And this is the stuff that causes anger, misunderstanding, fear and hate. We want to answer “because that’s who I am” or “because I said so”. Those are easy answers and mean we don’t have to think about the question, just continue on as we are. We don’t ask ourselves this question often enough, and I suspect it’s out of fear of what our honest answer will be. The one question that shoots fear straight into the heart of anyone on the stage of life is, “Why?”  Why do you act, think, and feel, react or believe the way you do? Fortunately a near and dear fellow companion, friend and soul mate, who continues to occupy my little part of life’s stage, did ask me this question many years ago. That one question caused me to honestly confront and begin a dialogue with myself. Once I did, and realized how insane saying “because I said so” is, my whole life’s stage began to change.

I suspect that many people on life’s stage, my father included, never stop to contemplate this question of “why” with any serious intent or genuine desire to soul search for the truth. If they were to allow themselves to do so they might just understand what real fear is. To admit that you are wrong and need help and direction from others to correct the flaws in your character is a giant leap forward. It’s a step far too few people exercise their right to take. It’s the ultimate in stage fright for them and they just refuse to go there. That’s when you remain a bit player in life and never progress to a leading role.

 In Hamlet, another of Shakespeare’s more famous plays, there’s a speech by the protagonist about life and coming to the end of its toils. In brief summary Shakespeare writes, “…What dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.”  One can take its meaning as traditionally accepted in its entirety, but when taken out of context from the whole of the speech, I can imagine this small snippet’s meaning to be, ‘what will people think of your performance once you do part your ways with this world? Will your dreams become theirs?’

My encouragement to you is to not fear life, and the hand you’ve been dealt whatever it may be. Face and defeat any misgivings and stage fright you may feel. Take what you’ve been given in talent, interest and passion and create something of wonder.  Never give up, fiercely guard your integrity and be truthful, honest and giving in all you do, even as others refuse to believe in you or understand what you know to be true. Along the way, consistently ask yourself the all important question of “Why”. When you can consistently answer that question without any hint of hesitation or stage fright you are on the right path.  It’s never too late to leave your decisively positive and indelible mark for others who will walk this stage, when you are but a dream to follow and live up to.

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