Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

I haven’t yet read da blogfather’s latest book.  I have it on my kindle, but the last few days having involved cat illnesses, stupid house tricks, even stupider car tricks and other such interesting, not to say terminally diverting occasions, I haven’t had the time to finish Necropolis and move on to The New School.  (And for those who have no idea who da blogfather is – Which planet did you just land from, and no, I will not take you to our leader.  There’s some discussion on who that is, and he official one is probably golfing – his name is Glenn Reynolds.)

I’ve read excerpts, and I’m looking forward to reading the book.

As most of you know, I came head to wall with how inadequate our school system is when the kids first entered middle school.  It wasn’t so bad with First Son, where the “problem” was simply plummeting grades and the teachers telling me they didn’t have anything new to teach him.  (Which considering he was in sixth grade, shocked me.)  It was solved by moving him to a new school and a more demanding program.

However, First Son has always been extremely verbal for a boy, and could compete handily in the world of education, even if it was geared to a more verbal presentation.

Second Son is more stereotypically male.  In many ways his brain is almost a stereotypical male brain, good with math and spatial reasoning, just now getting to his stride in verbal (though even in that he was fairly above average according to tests.)

But he also had some sensory issues, not uncommon in boys, for instance issues hearing, particularly in a loud classroom.

This made him very, very unlike the other children, and the school didn’t seem to know how to deal with “different” except by assuming it is willful.  So they kept punishing him for things he couldn’t help.  They also assumed everything he did was malicious.  That was before the whole bullying incident.  (And of course every time a kid is treated as different by a teacher, the kids pile on, anyway.)

Anyway – I’m not mad in love with American schooling.  Colleges are better, because they allow more choice and because the population is more self-selected, at least in STEM.

My own schooling would have been considered erratic by American standards.  I’m not absolutely sure whether Portugal too adapted the Prussian schooling methods.  Perhaps not, as, like Britain, it seems to have a dual path – to the professions and to academics.

The village was still transitioning from a stage in which the kids were taught what we’d consider elementary school by “dame schools” which is a fancy word for a woman with some learning (which could be just her letters and some cyphering) who would set up a one-room school in her living room.  Some took only girls and taught them to embroider as well as read and write.  My grandma dropped out at the equivalent of third grade, because she loved reading and writing (and had the most beautiful handwriting) but HATED embroidery and lace making and was tired of being called stupid because of that.

These teachers were colorful characters in themselves, I think.  Well, not my grandmother’s older sister, who ran a mixed school room, and whom I barely remember (she died when I was six) save for two things: at her wake, my grandmother taught me to make filet crochet in order to keep me quiet. It remains one of the few kinds of crochet I can do.  And she left me her glasses.  I think I played with them until I lost them, which is a pity and not just because they’d probably now be worth money.

But the lady who taught me for about six months, then brought me back to grandma with the recommendation she keep me at home till the public school teachers were forced by law to put up with me when I entered first grade was.  (No, I didn’t scream, steal other kids’ lunches, or refuse to work.  She could deal with all of those.  I was a barracks lawyer and every time she punished a kid I came to the defense.  Hitting me just made me talk more/louder.)

She had been some society girl, according to local lore.  (This could mean anything, including that her parents lived in the city and were moderately well to do/white collar.)  She got seduced by a married man, who bought her a cottage in this remote (then) village, and paid her bills until he got tired of her.  Then he left her adrift, amid the probably hostile, certainly judgmental, villagers.  I don’t know how she had the nerve, but she hung up the shingle saying she’d teach children for x a month.  She died doing it at eighty, respected, and having taught most of the village their first letters.  (My aunt who was the elder schoolmarm taught at the other end of the village, and I understand mothers – then – were more confident sending daughters to her.  She was also more expensive.)

My mom OTOH learned her first letters at a lady who went by the name “Barrel of Sewage” in her village.  Mom said it was the way she smelled.  Which goes to show.

But that’s the thing.  There was public schooling when I grew up, but people didn’t really trust it to teach kids the first stuff – at any rate it started much too late, around 7. Kids were sent to Dona Maria as early as three.  (Their formal schooling then often ended at ten.)

And formal schooling was less formal than you expect.  I remember my first day of school vividly.  No one had told me anything.  I woke up at the normal time, had my leisurely breakfast, then mom walked me to the school and handed me in.  All the other girls were already there.

But until fourth grade, and then only if the teacher thought you had the potential to test into the academic track, no one much cared when you arrived.  People went shopping with their mothers and were dropped off two hours late.  Parents came to pick up the kids really early.  No one cared.  We had a half hour recess midday when we were allowed to run around like crazy.  If the teacher was feeling poorly, which often happened, the recess could turn into an hour or two.  (Which is why we had time for what I now know were LARP.)

I missed every other week due to being sick, and no one said anything because a) they knew I as one of the better students and b) they knew I was sick.

When I tested into the academic track and went into middle school ( 5^th and 6^th) grade, things were more formal and stratified, but there was still a lot of slack, and provided you tested well, you got away with an awful lot.  Less in high school and still less in college, but even in college, I read blank papers because I’d forgotten to do homework, and it didn’t affect my grades any.

Some parts of it were terribly regimented (until the revolution we had to wear pinafores over our clothes.  The idea was a cheap school uniform, which I’d have tolerated better if my middle school pinafore color weren’t p*ss yellow which makes me look sickly and sallow.)  But most of it was almost endlessly adaptable and pliable.

What I mean is, encountering American “you must turn homework in on day so and so” was a shock to the system.  And the system here has got a lot more regimented since.

But even in high school and college, I had the benefit of three (full) free months in summer, two weeks Easter, two weeks Christmas and sometimes endless teacher strikes.

Benefit?  Well, yes.  That’s when I read and studied stuff the school didn’t teach (I always studied my brother’s books, for instance.)  This makes me understand completely Mark Twain’s bit about never letting school interfere with your education.

But then I came across this article.

Over many years, I’ve observed learning at one such place, the Sudbury Valley School, in Framingham, Massachusetts. The students, who range in age from four to about 18, are free all day to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t break any of the school rules. These regulations, which have been created democratically by the children and staff together, have nothing to do with learning; they have to do with keeping peace and order. The school currently has about 150 students and ten staff members, and it operates on a per-child budget that is less than half that of the surrounding public schools. It accepts essentially all the students who apply and whose parents agree to enroll them.

Today there are about two dozen schools in the United States that are explicitly modeled after Sudbury Valley, and still others that have most of its basic characteristics. Compared with other private institutions, these schools charge low tuitions, and some have sliding tuition scales. Students come from a wide variety of backgrounds.

To people who haven’t witnessed it firsthand, it’s hard to imagine how such a school could work. Yet Sudbury Valley has been in existence for 45 years and has hundreds of graduates who are thriving in the real world.

Read the whole thing.  I’m not saying that their model isn’t better than the current model, or that it won’t work spectacularly for many kids.  But…

But the school they’re talking about is called a “democratic model” and they are assuming (like the people who assume everyone wants to work hard) that every kid wants to learn.  In Hunter-gatherer societies every kid wants to learn because there’s no life outside the tribe (and there are no other models of adult, either.)  Here…

If we’d had a “democratic school” in the village, half the farmer girls would have learned nothing EXCEPT needlework, because they saw the use of that.  We routinely heard “I don’t need to know how to read to be a wife and mother.”

The thing about kids is that they’re kids.  They might want to learn, but not having any idea of what the world is like, learning the complete list of pokemans (once Robert’s ambition) is as important as the multiplication tables.  More, since it makes your classmates jealous.

We had direction from a schoolmarm, who told us that spelling, reading and arithmetic were not open to discussion. And everyone learned to read, including the deficient girl.

Was it wonderful?  Well directed?  Oh, heck.  We memorized train schedules for the entire country on the assumption they’d never change and we’d use them every day.  It was mandated curriculum.

But we did learn the basics, which we otherwise might not have.

I think in our tech-advanced and savvy society the solution is more complex than “this is the way every kid should learn.”

If the democratic school works for some kids, let them have the democratic school; if some kids learn better in a top down school let them have that (but make sure it teaches needed stuff, not indoctrination.)   If your kid learns better at home or in peer-groups, or via computer, or whatever, let them have that.

The virtue of our world as it now is – and the reason I say the next system to get hit is education.  Hit with new opportunities and the sort of opening up we’ve seen in Publishing – is that if one thing doesn’t work, you can do the other.

We shouldn’t be trying to identify “the one best method” but allowing sufficient flexibility within existing methods that kids can then learn as each learns best.

Is our current system damaging kids?  Assuredly.  Particularly boys.  If I had my way again, I’d have homeschooled the boys and hired tutors for the sciences.  Of course, I probably wouldn’t have started writing except the last four years, but it would have been worth it.

My boys are largely self-directed which is good – and demanding which is not from a mom-who-wants-to-be-writer pov.

But if I knew then what I know now, I would have tried.

And what we should be working on is opening possibilities for families, and letting them know what is available.  Also stopping the confiscation of tax money to favor only one model.

Can we do it?  I think it will happen one way or another.  The important thing is to be ready.

So I’ve been reading Necropolis, London and It’s Dead by Catherine Arnold.  I’m not even sure why.  I stumbled onto an excerpt on facebook, I think, and read it, and went out immediately and bought the book.

Yes, okay, so it’s a wee bit depressing … sort of.  It’s all about dying, death, and yes, the human remains as geological features, so to put it, ignored or built upon by the future generations.

I’m only halfway through – the last week having featured many, many interesting (and none particularly pleasant) incidents.  But it’s not actually depressing, in a way that I can’t explain.

It’s sort of like… like the Natural History Museum isn’t actually depressing, though it’s all skelletons, and species disappearing, and stuff.  But even after the great extinctions, more life comes up and flourishes.

In the same way, even after the plague, the survivors rebuilt and dealt with the massive amount of dead, not by going neurotic and weak at the knees, but by going on.  By building, living, loving and having more kids.

This admirable resilience is comforting, particularly when you confront our own age, where even smart people say things like “I couldn’t bring a child into this messed up a world.”  As opposed to our ancestors who brought vast batches of kids into worlds without antibiotics, basic sanitation, or often much personal freedom and where you lived or died at the whim of a monarch who was more often than not a nut case.

The book leaves a feeling, so far, of a life that’s sweet enough for us to cherish it, to enjoy the very process of being alive, despite the difficulties, the pain, and the sadness that are part of every life.

So far at least, there are no demands that this be fixed and humans be made to live forever.  (I, myself, would support the ability to live about double, so that the investment in kids would be just a part of life, not most of it.  But maybe it wouldn’t work very well to make kids a minor feature of human life.  Kind of like they’re being made now.)  And I have yet to hear a mournful note about the pollution of the environment with human remains.

Most of all what fascinates me, growing up in a place that is at least as old and inhabited as long as London, is that this sort of place is mostly built on dead people.  I mean, I sort of knew that.

I understand in the parts of France and Germany where the great battles of WWI took place, people routinely find bones or metal buttons or whatever while plowing and put them to one side, and go on to plant the field.

Where I grew up it was sort of like that.  When we dug for a garden or into a field that had lain fallow in living memory, we’d find bones (granted, most of them animal, even I could tell that.  Mostly cats and dogs because people used to dump dead pets) and sometimes bits of clearly ancient or at least medieval pottery or jewelry.  If it was usable you used it, but if it wasn’t, you put it in a neat pile in the corner of the field so it wouldn’t catch the plow/make it hard for you to plant.

Most of those sites are built over now, including the field where we used to grow our vegetables, (on a loan, sort of) and I would guarantee that whatever was found in the digging up of the basements of foundations for the apartment buildings, unless you were unlucky enough to dig it up while there are untrustworthy people watching, was never reported.

In a way this was a pity.  I always felt that the farmer who built the cow shed and found a Roman cemetery in doing it, should have reported it.  I mean, the entire village knew, but who knows what advancement of our understanding of Roman civilization lies under that cow shed.

On the other hand, Portuguese laws being what they are, they’d probably have confiscated the plot of land, and he couldn’t afford that.  (The sensible stuff they do in England, with bringing a team to do rapid study, then letting the building go on, is obviously the way to go, but I don’t know if it has made its way to Portugal yet.)

And yet on the other hand (Shut up you mutants.  I can has three) eventually the cow shed will fall down, and someone will dig up for another thing, and maybe by then the Roman Cemetery will be studied by more sensible people.

And that’s something I grew up with, that is more absent (though not completely, certainly not in the East) in America.  The idea that our present landscape, too, would one day become the foundation of the future.  That this too should pass.  And yes, the idea that death could come, swiftly, terribly and in great numbers.  Even our relatively bucolic place had a mass grave dating back to the Napoleonic wars.

I’ve since read – mostly diaries of British officers – what those wars did to the peninsula.  It gives you pause to realize that at some point significant stock must have been imported from elsewhere, too – look, even the work oxen were eaten by the two opposing armies.  So those humble cows I knew growing up had to have “foreign” ancestors.  Which is kind of amusing.

To be fair, all of us have foreign ancestors, of course.  Oh, I don’t mean just us Americans, who are, of course, mutts.  The idea that humans didn’t move around in the pre-modern age is fairly exploded.  For instance, the Roman Lady of Spittal fields, was not so much Roman as Basque.  Or perhaps one of her sisters moved to the basque region and had kids some descendants of whose survive.

This of course we know since the bog-man in Switzerland who is closer related to people in… Sicily, I believe.

And speaking of the peninsular wars – guys, there is a reason so many Portuguese have blue eyes, and I warrant it’s not just that they have Celtic ancestry in the North.

So in a time when my life seems to be determined to be turmoil and confusion, it’s relatively reassuring to find that humans can undergo much worse than this and survive.

Most of all, though, while reading this, I kept thinking “If Pratchett were still at his best, what magnificent book he’d make from this.”

Since I doubt he will, maybe I’ll eventually come up with an idea.  Which by itself will be life from death…

*According to Necropolis, there were body-picker-uppers close enough to that skit.

I wasn’t exactly a tomboy.  It’s more that, as I am now, I was almost completely oblivious of gender, in pursuit of things that were “interesting.”  (Not people who were interesting mind.  There my preference was and is male, and right now is concentrated on one person.  And he’s very interesting indeed!  So interesting I married him.)

Not that I wasn’t aware of being a girl, or of what was expected of girls.  Because I was born very small and very premature, my mom decided the normal clothing for girls in Portugal, which was skirts and skirts only (though this wasn’t a modesty thing.  This being the early sixties, most of the skirts even for kids were above the knee) would get me sick more often than wearing my brother’s cut-down pants.

Was this true?  Who the heck knows?  Maybe my legs/feet would have been desensitized to cold.  But it was easier for mom to cut down my brother’s worn-out pants and because she was an expert seamstress to make me pants from the same fabric, minus worn spots.  She also sewed leather patches on the knees, because I was forever falling.  That alone might have made me less sickly, because in that place, at that time, any scrape could turn into a serious infection, and I was always doing harebrained things like exploring nearby woods and balancing on top of my grandfather’s wood discards (he was a carpenter.  Sometimes he recycled wood, like architraves from pulled down buildings.  For some reason these in Portugal were often made of mahogany or Brazil wood or other woods it would be criminal to just throw away.  They also made lovely rickety piles in the background for me to play acrobat on.)

Anyway, the fact I always wore pants and had an extreme allergy to metal and therefore couldn’t have my ears pierced (there might be other reasons.  My dad has a horror of piercings, and the words “savage” and “mutilation” will drop from his lips when this is mentioned) made me in the local kids’ views “half boy.”

I didn’t like this, and – like the boy named Sue – I learned to fight before I could walk.

And I liked playing with dolls.  Okay, most of the playing with dolls involved styling their hair.  (People tend to think I’m nuts when I tell them hairstylist was a profession I actually considered/would have taken if I hadn’t qualified for college.)  This meant after about two years my dolls were bald and had to be replaced.  (Which explains the “good dolls” I was never allowed to play with.)

Weirdly, I never played dress up myself, except for, when mom was away, putting on her satin nightgown, her pearls and her high heels, and strutting about playing at being Empress of the known world.  But since I mostly spent that time directing imaginary armies and having imaginary people put to death, I’m not sure it’s a girly thing as such.

I didn’t take much to needle work until I was out of the house.  I think this is because my mom had a tendency to huff at how slow/clumsy I was, take the project out of my hands and finish it herself.  I don’t know what she thought she was doing, but she MUST have done something – which involved my discovering a passion for cross stitch/sewing during my exchange student year.  I still like it.

But I like making things – that’s something that remains – so I used to follow granddad around and learn to build stuff.  He called me his “boy” which means “helper” and was highly amused because none of his sons or grandsons took an interest.

I also liked reading – but when I wasn’t sick  (An intermittent thing) – I was a very active sort of kid, so I didn’t read all the time.  I built cities out of legos; I built landscapes out of dirt; I spent my time exploring fascinating places.  And I loved the equivalent of matchbox cars.  Not ball games, because I was dreadfully uncoordinated, and therefore barred from most of what the boys in my generation and place played at – mostly soccer – as much as out of the girls elastic or rope jumping and various games of dexterity/balance.

But the other games girls played, which mostly involved insipid stuff like telephone and gossip, and sitting quietly around bragging to each other, or treating their dolls like real babies, were really uninteresting after a while.

In my mid-teens, I developed an interest in making paper dolls and their elaborate wardrobes, but again, I like making things: paper, cloth, wood, clay…  I find making something out of nothing fascinating.  (Which now I think of applies to writing as well, I suppose.)

But even then, most girls weren’t interested in MAKING their paper dolls.  They were interested in collecting them and getting the real expensive ones.  Making the dolls characters in stories, and playing your made up story on the kitchen table was either annoying or boring to them.

The boys on the other hand, were often doing interesting stuff.  Okay, at my age when I was in elementary school, this involved (mostly) beating the snot out of each other, something that bored me as much as the girls’ mind games.

But my brother was ten years older, and his set, even in the village, did stuff like make little sail boats out of wood and sail them in the irrigation ditches.  Or play cowboys and Indians with pop guns around the village.  Or go watch the ox team draw up water for the irrigation ditch.

If I was well enough I was usually counted on to be trailing them, my hand in Alvarim’s (who it must be said had infinite patience for my following him around.)

And they collected comic books, and discussed them passionately.  And they read westerns (so did my cousin Natalia, but though a little more girlie than I was – she read romances – she was more like me than the conventional girl.)  They discussed that too.

I also hung out with my male cousins, on mom’s side, a year and two years younger than I.  They were tamer (at least around me) than the boys my age who seemed to pound each other’s head into the ground every other minute, but they played my type of thing.  Legos, and cars on pretend roads, and pop guns, and plastic swords…  Fun stuff.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I spent a lot of time around boys and young men, and then men.  I have the gift of “fading” which Wayne Blackburn claims to have too. (And I see no reason to doubt.)

Though at fourteen or so I decided I liked guys’ attention and know (or knew.  Right now I want ONE man’s attention, and he’s all too easy to get it.  I go up to him and kiss him.  that’s it.) how to get it, and can dress to attract it when I so choose, most of the time, if I’m out with a group of men and we’re just buddies (I now have a relatively large group of female friends, which is odd for me – though they’re Odd too, to be honest – but over half of my friends and the people I relate to, are still male) I have the ability to “fade” as a woman, so that while they don’t think of me as a guy (if you asked them they’d go “Uh?  No, Sarah is a chick.” Though they might say a lady if they thought I cared.) they also don’t think of me as a woman.  This means I hear more things, and know more things about men – apparently – than the average woman.

When I read Self-Made Man where the author spent a year as a drag king passing as male, I spent two thirds of the book going “how come you didn’t know that before?”  The differences were more in the milieu in which she passed, which was mostly working class.

Look, I have working class friends, like I have female friends.  I don’t judge people by the level of education they have attained.  But there is a sort of inverse-prejudice among normal manual laborers about “eggheads” particularly women eggheads.  So, I retain very few working class friends who aren’t Odd and usually better read than I.  She was submerged among NORMAL working class people.  So there are cultural differences there.

But the rest – bah.  I knew all that stuff.

I can well imagine why the modern feminists are the way they are.  They started off by playing with all girls.  (One of my earliest memories is of being dragged by the back collar away from a group of local (and very low class) boys with whom I’d been playing tiddly winks, while Grandma proclaimed “Boys play with boys and girls play with girls.”  My reaction to this was a mental – I wasn’t stupid enough to say it – “Poo! I’d rather play by myself than with those ninnies.” But I think it took in most girls.  Or perhaps they didn’t need the admonition.)

I suspect their first exposure to boys in a group was in some traumatic situation.  There were plenty of those for me too.  For instance, in elementary boys and girls attended separate school rooms, side by side.  The boys used to boil out of their side, in a pack, and do the stupid carp boys do when they’re showing off for each other: pull our pigtails, steal our books, laugh like hyennas.  There was also a group of multiple-year-repeats (meaning they were sometimes five years older than the rest of us) who were thorough bad lots, and who did worse, including feeling us up (which felt just wrong, and frankly was, since until fifth grade, when we went on to middle school) we were all basically boys except for one crucial difference.  Flat as boards, and just as scruffy. It got so bad, our teacher was afraid of them, and sometimes wouldn’t let us out until a father showed up to drive them off.  Most of these guys now have prison records, so this wasn’t just being fluffy.  This is when I discovered the weapon-like capabilities of my book bag, and would often lead the way out swinging it left and right.  (I was tall and big for a Portuguese girl of my generation.)

Anyway, those boys horrified me, though being me, it was less “Oh, ick, ruffians” and more “Oh, they make me sooooo mad.”

But I can see most normal women going “oh, ick, boys” and when the feminist establishment and for that matter the school itself preaches to them that men are a sort of untermench that have – inexplicably – oppressed women for centuries, they go a little crazy and start imagining things about men that even they would realize was insulting if someone said them about women.

Which brings us to this insanity.

They talk about boys being lazy and stupid, and they view this as perfectly logical.  There is a sneering hint that men are defective women.

Perhaps it is because I read a lot of history, and have come across texts detailing how women are defective men, and how women couldn’t learn like men, and how—

If you told any feminist that in a school system most teachers were men, the learning style was competitive/non cooperative – designed for most boys over most girls – that it required them to do things – instead of just reciting things – that it was designed for male development milestones and that most male teachers had been taught girls were bad/lazy – and girls were failing in record numbers…  They’d be up in arms.

But the same thing applies to boys, in our system right now, and the response is that boys are bad/defective.  And when boys won’t read books with girl main characters, it’s the boys who are broken, but back in my day when girls didn’t like books with boy main characters, we needed more books with girls as heros.

I’m tired of this stupidity.

I went through a genuinely anti-girl system, particularly when it came to the sciences.  It was assumed and not even questioned that I was stupider than all the boys, and it always shocked the teachers when I came up top of the class.

Well and good.  That’s fine and dandy.  I didn’t like it, and it should have been corrected.  (Most of my teachers were female, btw, they just believed boys were superior.)

But correcting it with myths of boys as defective and broken girls serves no one.

For one boys treated that way get broken.

I’m not going to say girls aren’t suited for STEM degrees.  If I hadn’t had digit dyslexia (not quite disnumeria.  I could figure out numbers fine, I just switched the representations around without realizing) I’d have taken engineering.  And my science grades were always great.

What I’m saying is that most girls, unless insanely pushed, have no interest in STEM degrees.  Just like most girls had no interest in playing with pop guns and could discuss dresses and frills for hours.  (Which bored me stiff.)

Men and women are different.  Women are more social-group-integration directed, for instance.  Also my teachers who believed “men are smarter” were not just victims of the patriarchy. Women IQs and general performance tend to cluster in the mid ranges.  This makes most women smarter than about half the boys.  But the other half of male IQs clusters more towards the exceptional end.  (There’s still a contingent in the middle, which is why it’s called average.  But boys throw out way more morons and geniuses than women do.  Which of course, makes the life of female outliers h*ll on Earth, but never mind.) Because of the self-selected environment – to go on to fifth grace academic (as opposed to vocational) track you had to pass a comprehensive exam that only about 1/3 the kids passed (sometimes less) – there were more exceptionally smart males than exceptionally smart females in the sample.  The morons of both kinds had been weeded out and there were more “normalish high” females.  Also, females hated having better grades than their friends and adjusted (this seems to be evolutionarily driven) while males committed to an academic career excelled and competed.

To be fair, though, the system as was allowed to me excel even as a female, while until college it seemed like the boys were getting downchecks FOR being male, regardless of what they did.  In college it’s somewhat more fair (and challenging.)  Also, I don’t think the teachers were indoctrinated against females and into thinking women were evil.  They thought us dumber, that was all.  Also, not one of my teachers ever suggested I should be MADE to behave like a boy or that females were obsolete.

The hate that pours out of this stuff when I hear it, besides seeming the personal problem of a generation of feminists, makes me sad for the boys getting this in school.  And girls too.

Look, boys might be “better” at science (grosso modo, on average, for certain sciences – I know extremely competent women in science.)  And girls might be “better” at social things.  But every lab needs someone who also understands how to coordinate a team of brilliant and not very social people. And every soft science should have someone who wants to measure and count and test against reality.

If we handicap and one gender, we handicap both and – eventually – civilization itself.  And let’s face it, we modern women are creatures of civilization.  Remove antibiotics and the pill, and life as a female becomes short, brutish and nasty.

That is one way to resolve the gender war.  But not one I’d wish on my descendants.

*Okay, so most of you know Kate.  She’s the person who shows up when a troll gets really obnoxious.  Usually the first indication I have of this is another of my friends telling me “Kate just vivisected your troll and is now feeding him his entrails.”  This is lots of fun and not a bit terrifying, because Kate is one of the nicest people I know.  (Of course she does write an awful lot of stone-cold bastages.) I met her … 9? (is it only that long) years ago, and she quickly became one of my closest friends, mostly because she’s one of the people I can argue and shout at, and it’s never personal.  (Well, unless she gets into my hairstyle or something, but she never has.)  She’s also my favorite person to brainstorm with — both ways — and to collaborate with.  We do a series of short stories in the Valdemar universe together and they’re a ton of fun, so supposing we stop spinning very fast in opposite directions soon, we’ll write a novel together.  Over these nine years, I’ve seen Kate go from “professional if it gets a good editing” to “Very, very good.”  I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next.  I just wish she wouldn’t infect me with her evil villains… but other than that, we’re cool.  So, without further ado, if you don’t know her already, meet Kate Paulk.  (And btw the idea she’s not interesting means she’s responsible for replacing my monitor.  Just get her talking about how many things in OZ can kill you, or interesting historical bad guys, and you’ll see.  (Okay, so once she and my older son made me want to fake death to escape their conversation, but it was quantum mechanics and they were getting ridiculously detailed.) Also, the woman who introduced me to the metaphor for my health as “Being up and down like a whore’s undies” cannot be boring.  Scary yes.  Boring, no.)

And lo! It came to pass that the fearsome Sarah did require of her Hun Kate an introduction, that the Raiding Party members be fully known to all Hoyts Huns. Thus, the Kate did… Oh stop laughing. To say I suck at this kind of thing is to understate to the level of bald-faced lie – and that’s after accounting for the usual issues involved in anything self-promotional.

So yeah, I’m Kate Paulk. I’m a writer. I haven’t written for fun in five minutes, thirty one seconds, and… Oh, sorry. This isn’t Writing Addicts Anonymous (who I really hope don’t exist).

I’ll occasionally throw a guest post or two Sarah’s way, and those of you who follow the Mad Genius Club know I blog there on Thursdays. Don’t bother with my website – it’s horribly out of date and  I really need to clean it up and do things with it, only I find it hard to believe anyone is going to be interested in me talking about things that interest me.

See, I was raised in a family that did the old “don’t big-note yourself” thing, the kind of ethos where it’s unutterably rude to put yourself forward. You don’t “impose” on other people and me being naturally introverted (I max out the introvert scale on every Meyers Briggs I take. Usually the other three letters are kind of flexible depending on my mood, what I’ve been doing a lot of, and so forth. I’ve been known to score 100% introvert and 50/50 on all the others), actually going out and talking to people is a challenge. Talking about myself is a no-no.

Besides, unlike Sarah, and Amanda, and Cedar, Dave Pascoe and… well most of you, I’m just not that interesting. There’s not much outside of “female, forty-plus, need to buy clothing in beached whale sizes although I do try to dress to hide this at cons, couldn’t be more middle-class WASP if I tried”. Well, okay, I was born in Australia and didn’t move to the USA until a little over 10 years ago. And there was the three months I worked as a contract geologist in a remote part of northern Australia – but that was mostly heat and flies, not exciting (the one “exciting” incident wasn’t a particularly good one to have to deal with).

And okay, there was that memorable time I drove from Houston to where I live now about an hour out of Philadelphia with an untreated broken ankle. In my defense, until about the end of the second day’s driving I thought I’d just sprained it. I didn’t know you could walk with a broken ankle, see, and I could – sort of – walk.

I’m not even all that aggressive (hell, I have to work at assertive). I’ve gotten damn good at protective camouflage of the “nothing worth noticing” variety, to the extent that I can and do fade into the background. It’s a way of not getting noticed by bullies – and trust me, girl bullies are way worse than boys. Boys will just hit you. Girls will wait until you’re elsewhere then destroy things you own, in a way that you know who did it but you can’t prove a damn thing.

I can get up a pretty decent kind of rant if something hits me the right – or possibly wrong – way. Sometimes I can manage epic rant, especially if the topic touches on one of my hot buttons. The rants are rarely spoken: I write them. I’m a lot better at picking up nuance from what people write than I am from face-to-face conversation.

What else? Politically I’m closest to small-l libertarian with odd quirks. On social matters I tend to figure that everyone gets to go to the hell of their choice so long as they don’t take anyone with them who hasn’t agreed to the journey. On economic matters, I dislike debt, I dislike deficit spending, and I lean to the view that if you can’t afford it you don’t do it. On defense, I figure it’s better not to go starting anything – but if someone else starts it you damn well make sure you finish it because if you don’t they will. Take that any way you choose – I don’t much care. I guarantee I could manage to offend every reader here at some point, and if I do it won’t be deliberate (I’m really good at accidentally stepping on people’s hot buttons), and any reaction I get won’t be my problem.

My problems are a bit too bloody all-consuming to worry about what people think of me. They start with the defective model body I got handed when I was born, with its weakness for auto-immune disorders. That turned into narcolepsy when I was 15 or so, and because of that I’ve spent the last 30-ish years living with chronic sleep deprivation and all the joyous medical things that flow on from that including depression. I don’t need recreational pharmaceuticals to get loopy. I just need to be a little bit overtired.

That means that for the most part my life consists of work, eat, sleep, and squeeze whatever writing I can into the corners. Exciting, no?

Other than that, I live with three cats and one husband, I have no children partly because the chemical cocktail I need to function has never been tested on pregnant anything, partly because I’d be a horrible parent (I spoil the cats shamefully when I’m not so wrapped up in book I’m not forgetting they exist), and partly because there’s way too much chance of any kid I have catching the genetic bombs in my family line – and that’s without considering the equally nasty collection my husband’s family is prone to.

See? Boring. I’ll try to rant properly the next time I show up here.

The good news is that I’m not sick.  After two days of rather strenuous physical effort, yesterday I felt as though I was ill most of the day, and was really worried I was coming down with something.

The day was fairly wasted for work, too, because Miranda-the-feisty shook her head so hard, the leech went flying and took a chunk out of her ear.  So they had to do what they’d been trying to avoid because of her heart, and put her under, and sewed up the ear.

So we went to pick her, and found out not only is her ear bleeding freely (It’s supposed to, till it drains the hematoma, but she’s also having continuous liquid diarrhea.  The blood was copable, but the diarrhea not so so much.  Which is a little worrisome as I don’t know if it will stop.  The doctor seems to think it’s the result of their giving her whatever, just to keep her happy while doing treatment, but I wonder if she was responsible for the mess upstairs.  anyway — okay, copable, but we’d have to confine her, and better not while her ear is bleeding.  After that, I suppose I can buy an old playpen with a vinyl bottom if needed, while we figure out what’s causing it.  If it’s her heart medicine it might not be stoppable.

We only found out about the issues when we got there, which means we hurried through the morning to go pick her up, couldn’t, came home and I had a long phone call with my mom, which in the circumstances I didn’t want to curtail.  So… I didn’t even sit down except to answer a couple of emails, I’m late with a set of short stories proofs (GAH) and I have contracts I haven’t sent back.

At nine pm I gave up thinking I could write, and just went to bed.  Slept till eight am.  And I’m not sick.  I am still a little tired, though.  This annoys me.  this body is definitely a lemon.  I shouldn’t still be tired from the week.

So, to amuse you: Charlie and I continue our series on the workmonster. My addition is less interesting than his article, since there isn’t much space for the workmonster when I’m battling all the other monsters.  You know about the devils who come and occupy the place from which a demon was exorcised?  Like that.  Only I wasn’t trying to exorcise work, precisely.

In other amusing stuff… London is discovering that when the government heavily subsidizes anything the prices go up.  I know, I know, you’re shocked, right?  Then again our colleges have issues with this.  Sometimes it seems humanity doesn’t learn.  I don’t know if that’s the result of really not learning or our education and newspaper establishment striving to obfuscate cause and effect.  Of course, people — connected, well to do people, who nonetheless I’d bet identify themselves as “being for the little people” are making massive money off these inflated prices.  So, once again, everyone’s money (taxes) gets funneled to the pockets of the well to do in the guise of helping the little people.  “Same as it ever was.”  And that’s why I drink and why I have to struggle not to drink more than I do.

Then there’s this piece of idiocy that thinks they’re going to make The Musketeer’s “relevant” or something.  I’m completely puzzled as to why Porthos is black.  I’m fully okay with black actors (do I need to tell you that?) and as despicable as his political opinions are (standard for Hollywood) I love a lot of Will Smith’s work.  I’m just getting sick — onto ARGH — of finding people of ethnicity that would not be at all common in the time and place the thing was written about, okay?  Like the Robin Hood series episode with a pretend nun (she’s actually a grifter) who is black and NO ONE REMARKS UPON IT.  In what?  13th century England?  Good heavens.  Look, guys, in my native village there was a lady known solely as “the Algarvia” (She who comes from Algarve — which is ANOTHER PROVINCE OF PORTUGAL.)  Her mannerisms and accent were considered odd, and I never knew her real name, because she was “A Algarvia.”  Someone who was black — as the mulato neighbor who eventually moved in — was “The black woman.” This was not rank racism, it was just that in a village where everyone was pretty uniform-looking and had been there for generations, you got known by what stuck out.  (I’d have been much more upset if my nickname was The Lighted C**t than The Black Woman, for instance.  The Lighted… er… one was lilly white.  Everyone knew her by that name.  I have no clue what incident originated the nickname.  Mind you, being the village, this could have been her misspeaking once and its being repeated.  Or it could be (a pune or a play on words, to quote PTerry) because chickens went by the same slang term, and she once accidentally set fire to a chicken (one hopes while cooking it.)  The other hypothesis scare me a little.

But the point is no one who looked that different would go unnoticed.

BUT Sarah, you’ll say, surely there were black musketeers.  I mean, Dumas’s own father was mulato.

Oh, there were mulatos in Paris at that time (and a little earlier) but this is the thing — those who were nobility were ALL KNOWN and talked about by that characteristic. So the chances of Porthos going undercover by changing his name… nill.  Zilch.  Nothing.

Worst of all, they made him a pirate, which means the idiots making this are probably basing it on … the Disney movie, not the works of Dumas.  I got so tired, while sending out the Musketeers because I got back “but isn’t he a pirate.”

Hollywood seems incapable of reading or even considering reading and just makes movies based on movies.   Apparently publishing prefers their books based on movies as well.  It is of course the result of their epistomological closure and refusal to take any new ideas that don’t religiously adhere to liberal cant, which in turn causes them to suffer what I call “third generation blight” which tends to take down totalitarian systems after 3 generations.  The first are the hungry people who got power, the second are chosen for their loyalty to the party line.  The third are chosen for that AND for not being smarter than the second.  Usually this means in three generations they achieve what takes an absolute monarchy where cousins marry cousins, ten.  I.e. they have rulers smart enough to figure out which end of a queen gets the crown two times out of ten.  Fortunately, considering our press and all, like Kim Jong Un, the press will hail them as masterminds and good at everything — so the people will never suspect.  Which brings us back to the London housing subsidies.  Though, of course, at least in Hollywood (And for the purposes of this Hollywood encompasses even British movie making establishment) people can — and do — stay away from these duds in droves.  Which they’ve been doing.  I hear Hollywood is pinched, but as long as they have no competition, they’ll make at lest enough money to keep going.  Heck, books did that for years.  I wonder when the equivalent of indie will start eating the cake of sclerotic Hollywood?  My son says not inside twenty years, but he’s a stodgy and conservative young man.  Well, he is compared to me.  He says, however, that I’m a fire-eating radical who tends to overestimate the ability of society changing for the better.

Bah.  I haven’t eaten fire in at least 36 years.  And I still think he’s stodgy.  So I rest assured that Indie will come to Hollywood too and maybe in 10 years or so.  And then we’ll have better movies and we’ll see Hollywood writhe.  Which is better sport than we’ve seen in years.

Which of course, will make me happy.

AND THEN we’ll leave everyone alone.  That will teach them.

UPDATE: By the by, Elf Blood Chapter is up.  And I finally collected all the back posts on the Elf Blood page for your reading convenience.  Kindly remember is first draft and continuity can get dodgy in these serials.  I’ll fix before I put it up for sale.

So, this is not a belly aching post.  Except it sort of is.  I’m now well enough to actually work most of the time, except…

Except this week has been insane.  For those not aware of it (those on the Facebook Diner know) my older nephew had a heart attack and surgery last week.  He’s now home and recovering well, but for a while there it was kind of shaky. 

I love all my nephews and nieces (including by marriage) but Jorge is special since I got to spend a lot of time with him before I married when he was five.  Also, he’s only 33, so a heart attack was alarming.

We had a friend drop by last Sunday (from out of state) so we had dinner with him at Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax, and that was a bright spot in a week that was otherwise just dreary.

Then on Monday we played with car trouble which necessitated a lot of phone coordination, so that halfway through the day I gave up even trying to write.  Tuesday I caught up on the non-fic, and Wednesday I started arranging leech therapy for the oldest cat.  (You probably don’t want to know.)  Thursday was The Day Of The Plumber.  Trust me, no details wanted — or will be given.  Just… no.  It pretty much highjacked my day from 11 am till eight thirty pm.

And Friday, after The Day of The Plumber (I think I’ll write it as a horror story!) I didn’t feel up to writing the chapter, but I thought I’d do it by the evening.  Except when I went to the attic to do the cat boxes, preliminary to doing the (usually) two hours of house cleaning I do to keep entropy slightly at bay, I found that one of the cats — probably while we were dealing with the plumber, so it was dry) had carpeted the attic in diarrhea.  It started at one of the boxes, but continued all through the attic, including nooks and crannies, where cats hide when scared.  Since the attic is storage space with stacked boxes, it was like a scavenger hunt that was no fun at all.  Also… let’s say the paint scraper was needed.  That’s all.  Then there were two thorough moppings with bleach-and-pinesol and piping hot water.

In Portuguese mythology er… excrement is supposed to presage money.

I’m gonna be SOOOOO rich.  And then I’ll hire someone to handle this stuff. 

Anyway, I finished cleaning at four thirty instead of one or so, as is normal.

BUT I hope we’re now done with the Chinese fire drills.

One of the car issues persists but I’m hoping it will be the obvious and simple solution.  (Can everyone hope for that?  Thank you.)

So today I’d like to do my post for PJM and then just write.

The amazing thing is that I AM feeling better.  I have to be.  I actually WANT to write.

Meanwhile, we’re pimping your fellow readers and commenters, so go and get something good to read.

Another Saturday is upon us, and so we bring you this brief shameless plug commercial interruption public service: the weekly reader promotion post! Again, future entries can be sent to my email. Happy reading!
The Free Range Oyster

Dan Melson

The Man From Empire (Rediscovery)

An arcology in the Empire has been destroyed, estimated casualties 18 million. Osh Scimtar, an Imperial Secundus, has the opportunity to follow the saboteur’s escape route if he goes immediately. He arrives at a technological but primitive world, just beginning the climb the Empire has already made, populated by humans whose ancestors must have been from the Empire. He meets a young woman who helps him learn what he needs to know to complete his mission on this unknown world with no knowledge of or contact with the Empire. A world known to its inhabitants as Earth.

Laura Montgomery

The Sky Suspended

A generation has passed since asteroid scares led the United States to launch its first and only interstellar starship. The ship returns and announces the discovery of another Earth. People are star-struck, crowds form in Washington, DC, and a boy from Alaska and two lawyers grapple with issues surrounding the question of whether ordinary people will be able to emigrate to the stars.

Look, the problem is I still haven’t had time to read back on what I have, and I’m afraid of getting mired in hopeless contradictions.  I was supposed to read tomorrow, but we had a household emergency (literally, house related.  Yes, we’re all all right.  It was just one of those “Oh, Lord, call the repairman then wait three hours for him to be done” — unable to leave kitchen, because he might need me — “then deal with aftermath cleaning.

Today I MUST clean (not all the aftermath got clean because it was late (and dark) by the time repairman was done.

It might not seem like it, but this year has been a slow upswing, though it’s also been a “dealing with the problems left over.”

I’ll try to post chapter tomorrow.  I’m not promising, but I’ll try.

I’m sorry — it’s just been argh around here.

Oh, yeah, if you need a minimum daily dose of Hoyt, Older Son is holding forth on Mad Genius Club.  And I have an interview up at Amazing Stories.

I’m so tired – so awfully, comprehensively tired – of people telling me that they would like to do this or that, but they “don’t have the talent.”

You know, I think the fault of this is of the stories we tell ourselves, right?  In movies, in stories, in all sorts of stories we tell, there is some sort of magical gift people have.

I mean, you know, Dumbo can fly, and the hidden prince can king it from the moment that he kills the villain or climbs on the throne or whatever.  And that fricken prince can pull the sword out of the stone, and every movie and book – every single one, plus five – that deals with the creative professions, it all hinges on the myth of talent.

Supposedly you’re born knowing how to do whatever you’re supposed to do, or at least being really, really good at it the first time you try it.  And then all you need is to be discovered.

If only!  Oh, if ONLY!

I’ve gotten to the point that whenever a novelist-actor-dancer-composer is discovered in a movie, and he asks something like “do I have any talent, doc?  Can I make it?”  And the other guy says the equivalent of “you got the goods.  You’re amazing,” I want to reach in, through the screen, grab both their heads and bonk them together until they stop.

The other part contributing to this, of course, is that creative work of any kind is often internal or weird.  I mean, you don’t see us, as you see sports stars – who, now I think about it also suffer from the myth of talent – bat the same ball over and over, slowly correcting our standing and our aim, until we get it.  No, you see us sitting in front of the computer, typing, and you don’t know that before we sat down to finish that story, we spent three days – while scrubbing toilets, ironing, doing the cat boxes and even reading – trying to figure out how to avoid that huge mess we know we made in our last novel, that THING that other people don’t see, but we know kept it merely good and not great.

And then when we manage it, it looks effortless and you go, “Oh, wow.  You’re just doing this stuff effortlessly.”

How I wish.  Some days it feels like I’m typing with what remains of my strength and pulling vivid scenes out of an energy I don’t have.

The other part, other than the stories we tell ourselves, is that I think people look – from outside – like they’re just like.  As Heinlein put it, “Luck is that with which the mediocre explain the work of genius.”  I’m not sure I believe in genius, either, but it’s definitely the way to explain away the often insane work that went into a “lucky” strike.

Back in 2003 when Dan had lost his job (as many did in the tech bust) and I was unemployed following the crash of the Shakespeare fantasies, we went to dinner with an old friend.  Dan used to work for him.  He knows us pretty well, and even back then had known us for more than ten years.

We were talking to him about how worried we were, with a mortgage, two young kids, and no prospects of a job on the horizon, since the entire field was in crisis, and he said “Oh, I don’t worry about you.  I worry about so and so and so and so, and myself even, before I worry about you.  You two are talented and lucky.  You’ll fall on your feet.”

Are we lucky?  I don’t know.  I know over the next year I wrote seventeen proposals and enough short stories to make five thousand dollars in short stories (at an average of three hundred a story.)

Are we talented?  I don’t think so.

Look, I’ll admit I had a certain verbal facility in Portuguese.  I’m told I could talk in sentences before I could walk.  Granted this would be far more impressive if I could walk before two and a half.  (I was really good at crawling.  My theory is that my issue was ear infections.  I still suffer from them as if I were a toddler.) I could read by the time I entered elementary.  I loved those days when the teacher said “Today we’re going to write an essay.” And I was writing my own “novels” (around 15k words) in the infamous pink notebooks, a chapter at a time during class, and passing them around my form for reading at break.  (You’re part of a form, you stay in a classroom, the teachers come to you.)

Part of this, though, might have very little to do with talent, and more to do with the fact that dad read all the time, and my brother read all the time, and my (girl) cousin read all the time.  Reading all the time was expected, so I did it, and then it seemed logical to try to write, right?  And I knew a little about it from having read so much (not a lot.  Those stories sucked.  Think lowest of fanfic, even though it wasn’t.  Well, unless it was Heinlein fanfic.  Um… now I think about it, maybe I haven’t grown all that much.)

The one gift I had was the least useful to the professional story teller.  I had a massive and varied vocabulary – but that might not be so much an inborn thing, as the fact that the entire family talked like that.

But then I came to the states.  You know the instinctive feeling you have for allusion, connotation and denotation?  Gone.  I was good at English, mind.  I spoke grammatical, correct English.  What I couldn’t was “feel” the language.  The first three years I kept telling Dan I was “blind”.   I.e. I didn’t know what words would evoke what feeling.

But I still wanted to be a writer.  So I had to immerse myself in American English, in its permutations and regional variations.  I read a lot, and I read everything, including but not limited to craft magazines, true confessions and tabloids.  I also listened to a lot of television.  Listened?  Well, I’m not visual.  And mostly I had the TV on for company while I cleaned house or whatever.  (I came from a loud and boisterous family.  Our little two-bedroom apartment in a complex that was empty during the day save for me and a couple of moms with kids, might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.  It felt lonely.  So I kept the TV on.  Mostly Disney because it was less likely to have snarls or explosions which would startle me while I was cooking dinner.  My inlaws still think I should write for children because they assumed I was really interested in children programing [rolls eyes.])

During those first five years or so, it wasn’t so much what I wrote (I think a novel and a short story) it was the preparation I made.  First, it was the reading, and the talking – with my husband, with friends – and a lot of listening.

The other part of it was my teaching myself touch typing and improving my speed so that I didn’t have time to think of every word I wrote, as I pursued story.

Talent?

I don’t think.  I still have those first stories somewhere.  Remember I was in my twenties.  They would read okay for a ten year old.

And I got rejections.  And I kept trying.  For years.  For many years, I was the writer of no future.  I topped 100 rejections by March every year.

And then things changed.  I placed second in a regional contest.  Mind you, that piece was grossly flawed, but placing second was an incentive to keep going.

And then came another win and… eventually my first acceptance, in 92, 8 years after I’d started trying to write seriously.  And then three more acceptances for that story before it saw the light of day (it killed magazines and publishers.)  I could sell nothing else, though.  That story was the only one that was a fully functional story and it took me another three years before I wrote another one, and could reproduce the effect at least half the time.

And then I sold a novel.  And another—

And sometimes I feel that I’m only now starting to have a glimpse into making my novels work.  Which is why I fight so much with them.

My husband and kids, who know me and my writing better than anyone else, agree with me.  They say I’m maybe halfway to wherever I’m going – if that far.

Climbing hand over hand.  On raw and bloody fingertips.

I was talking to a friend the other day and I said I must be the world’s least talented writer.  Given my education and the advantages offered me, after 28 years or so of practicing my craft I’m only now starting to get a glimpse of what I can do with it.

I’m either completely untalented or utterly stupid.  And yet – no, I’m not fishing for compliments.  It is what it is – I can write decently.  And I have made a career of it, even with my apprentice pieces.

So, clearly, it’s not talent that’s needed.

And I have to say everyone else I know who has made it in an artistic field might have talent – how in heck do you judge someone else’s natural gift without being them? – but even if they do, it’s not half as important as wanting to succeed and as sheer, raw, blunt stubbornness.

Years ago when hearing Connie Willis speak she said that in the dark of night, in the solitude of our own hearts, we know exactly how good or bad we are.

Maybe.  Right then, in the dark of night, in the solitude of my own heart, I knew I was an untalented hack.  But I determined to learn through raw effort what perhaps came easier to other people.  Because if it could be learned, I could do it.  And craft will substitute for talent any time and twice on Sunday – with the advantage that it’s controllable.  You can call craft to you at will, once you have learned it.

Is there talent?  For anyone?

I don’t know.  There are people that seem obviously, blindingly talented to me right off the gate.  I’ve mentored people who turn in a first book that makes me green with envy at their “talent.”  But is it?  Almost every one of these people have read for most of their lives and are smart and have a feeling for both language and people.

And there are people like my kids.  Inherited talent?  Or growing up in a household where we’d pause movies to discuss plots?  Is it like my “talent” for verbal expression in Portuguese simply the result of being immersed in this house?

I don’t know.  And I don’t care.  Maybe I even have “talent” whatever it is.  Maybe it’s a spark buried deep in you that only comes to life with work, craft and desire to get better.  In which case, how would you know it was there?

What I know is that it doesn’t matter.  If there’s something you want to do, you can do it (We’re assuming you’re not crazy enough to want to be an Olympic runner when you were born with no legs – though even there, there are workarounds these days.)  If you want it hard enough.  If you’re willing to work for it.  If you are too stupid to take no for an answer, and smart enough to know what you don’t know and to correct what you’re doing wrong.

Talent?

Maybe.  But never mind that.  Here, on the cliff face, climbing by the force of my torn fingernails, it’s the effort and the wanting that count for more.

I am perhaps not alone at least among people with a depressive tendency, in finding myself in certain situations (not as much now, frankly, but a lot when I was a kid) thinking I am useless and the world would be better off without me.

This was exacerbated, when I got pneumonia, at 33 – I was then a relatively young, unpublished (though working really hard at writing) mother of two, one just five years old, the other just past one – and the doctors told me this over and over in more or less explicit terms.

To make things clear, they wanted to do a biopsy (I had atypical intercellular pneumonia, but it was pneumonia and it reacted well to IV antibiotics the first two days, but then the doctors got fascinated with the fact that it was unusual.  I don’t honestly know if this was made worse by my having an accent) not to euthanize me.  However, as weakened as I was, my sister in law in Portugal (who is a medical doctor and whom my husband was speaking to on the phone sometimes three times a day) thought there was a good chance even a biopsy would kill me.  And the doctors weren’t reinstating the antibiotic, even though I’d reacted well to it the first two days.  Instead, as I refused the biopsy, they tried to convince me by pointing out even if I died it would be better for my family.  After all, what was I doing for them?  I didn’t even make any money, and my husband was missing days of work to be with me in the hospital.

When they convinced me to sign the authorization, while I was groggy from a laparoscopy (I think.  Whatever it is when they put a tube down your throat) which had caused a heart episode (I told them that if I was tachycardic it would be a really stupid idea give me atropine, but they told me not to worry my pretty head about it), my husband came back in time to revoke it and tell them he would sue them if they carried it on under the circumstances.  And then he told me to get up and get dressed, we were going to the other hospital in town, where they might give me the antibiotic and stop the nonsense.

This is where the fact that, by choice, I promised to obey him in my wedding vows comes in. (I did this because we’re both very hard headed and every association needs an ultimate boss.  Since we were moving to his country, where he knew the rules better, he was better suited to be the ultimate boss.  Oh, and you should have heard the hush that fell on the wedding guests when they heard me promise that.)  I thought he was out of his mind, and I was hooked to oxygen and IV feeding, and the last thing I thought I could do was get up.  But I’d promised to obey my husband, and he was giving me a direct order, for the first (and last, he knows better than to abuse it) time.  So I sat up, removed the stuff I was attached to, got up and went towards the locker with my clothes.  At which point the doctor screamed “Stop, we’ll give her antibiotics.”

They did, and I walked out of there under my own power a week later and was fully recovered save for exhaustion about a month later.  (I want to emphasize here that Dan wasn’t making these decisions on his own, but he was faxing my process, page by page to my sister in law who is a respected pathologist and also that because I was being treated by a team of six where no one was in charge, the mix up in doctor’s orders had already got me to stop breathing twice.)

I’m relating this not to illustrate how awful my care was at the time (it was pretty bad) but to illustrate that third parties, from the outside, bring their own biases to what other people are worth.

The bias might be “earning power” which seemed to be big with those doctors, as illustrated by the fact that they kept telling me I was doing nothing for my family.  (I still don’t understand how their families ran, but I presume they had nannies or something?  When I first came in and I told them I’d mostly been lying down for the last week – I was very ill, and we’d got a babysitter/friend to help – they did an ultrasound of my legs, because they were convinced my sedentary lifestyle had led to a blod clot in my lungs.  Again, I had a five and a one year old, with the one year old just starting to walk.  And I had a 2k square foot home that I cleaned myself (I still clean my home myself.)  And I did all the cooking and yard care, and most of the shopping for the family.  How they imagined that I had been lying down long enough and immobile enough to develop a blood clot is beyond me.)  But the other part of it was also “you’ll never be able to do anything for them.  You’re just a housewife.”

This was a value judgment.  And back then, when I was really ill, it was a terrible judgment, that made me feel that I shouldn’t be alive, and that I was a millstone around my family’s necks.

My husband told me it was nonsense, but of course I couldn’t believe it.

This echoes all the times in adolescence when I thought I was useless.

Now, some of this feeling of “born owing something” seems to be a brokenness inherent in everyone who achieves something.  Why, yes, we have something to prove.

Maybe if you could cure us completely of it, we would not ever achieve anything.  It was after that episode in the hospital that I started working hard enough to sell and eventually to make a modest living from it.

But at the same time, there are two caveats, one particularly important right now in the time of Obamacare when doctors and indifferent bureaucrats might decide you’re not worth the trouble of keeping alive: first, you have inherent value, and you should always advocate for yourself and your right to treatment and to stay alive; second, they don’t have a right to think you’re worthless – and you are worth far more than your economic contributions.

Looking back, if I’d died then, my younger son would probably have dropped out of sixth grade and left school – with who knows what future.  My older son would probably be different too.  And Dan would have been much lonelier not to mention harassed with the two boys to raise.  But also, I would never have been published.  Perhaps I flatter myself that my stories have helped or at least amused some of you.  If I’d died then, Athena would never have been written, or Kyrie, or Luce.  I like to believe it’s good I lived to write them.

The same applies to my depressive episodes in adolescence.  If I’d died then – and I often wanted to – I’d never have met Dan or got to have my boys.  I’d never have come to America.  I’d never have known my friends or read all the books I’ve read since.  I’d have missed the pleasurable moments in the last thirty some years – and I’d have missed what I’ve done that other people enjoyed since.

Since Dan and I are quite happily married – thank you – I think his life would have been sadder if I’d died at twelve or fifteen.

But even if I’d done nothing but exist, the very fact of existing makes an impact in the world, and if I don’t go out of my way to be nasty, (I try not to) that impact is mostly positive.

You are worth it.  You deserve to be alive.

Look, I’m not going to talk of lilies in the field who don’t toil – I’m not that good at flowers – but Dan and I have had – so far – ten cats.

I don’t know what use cats are. They are not particularly productive from an economic point of view.  (What they are productive of explains my obsession with litter boxes.)  But they are loveable, and we have loved them.  Just by being themselves, with their clown antics and their purring and the occasional cuddle on a cold night, they were worth more than the price of their food, and the occasional disasters caused by claws and marking.

You are worth at least as much as a cat, and perhaps more.  Even if you feel all you are is a burden on others, that’s unlikely to be true.  It takes a very barren mind and heart to be nothing but a burden.  Even if all you can give is a smile now and then, that might be the smile someone else needs to keep going.  And sometimes, even just the fact that you need help, is enough to give structure and meaning to someone else’s life.  We all know people who were caretakers for other people and who became better for it.

You are not useless.  You are never valueless.

The problem with our ever-more top-down and bureaucracy-controlled world is that people make decisions for/about other people’s lives based on economic value or other external markers.

But no measure can truly capture the value of a life (even a cat life.)  And if you’re alive and thinking and capable of even smiling, you are not valueless.  And you should never believe anyone who tells you that you are.

Tell the bureaucrats to take a hike.  And tell the internal voices telling you that you’re valueless to take a hike too.

And you, keep going with what you’re supposed to do.  You don’t know how wonderful things might be in the future – or what you might accomplish that you can’t even dream of.

(I’m trying to be good and not do new posts every day.  This one is perhaps not very… uh… significant, but it is (I think) funny.)

It started innocently. At the time we were living in the small mountain town of Manitou Springs. There were the two of us, (of course) our two sons and four cats. So the logical thing for my younger son to ask for, for his fourth birthday, was… two hamsters.

In a sign our lunacy was too far gone, we then named them Butterscotch and Fudge. And then – such our folly – we put them in an aquarium on the back porch. An aquarium covered only by fine mesh net.

Oh, yeah, one more thing – these hamsters were both female.

The cats left the hamsters curiously unmolested, but the hamsters clearly felt that they lived under hostile conditions.

In the dark of night, they would screech in their little aquarium like tribbles in heat. And in the summer – such our folly – we left the back-porch windows open. So their call went out to the world at large and – I only surmise this, but it’s almost certain – all over the rodent world little signs sprang up written in whatever it is rodents write in saying “Free the Aquarium Two.” And “No Mercy For the Captors.” Rodent students organized protests and there would have been rodent demonstrations at our door step save for the fact that at least one of our cats was the great calico huntress.

Squashed, ignored, desperate, digested the surviving neighboring rodents resorted to extreme measures.

His name was Jean Pierre and he was born in the yard of a neighborhood French family, from which he learned protest songs, a disdain for the establishment, and a tendency to smoke really stinky cigarettes.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It started as so many things did with Pete, our oldest cat. You name a cat Petronius the Arbiter, you get what’s coming to you. In this case, it probably wasn’t so much his fault. Pete was getting old. He was fifteen or so, and he caught a cold. As those of you in multiple cat households know, you really can’t have them all together when they are sick. So we locked Pete in the powder room in the attic where we tempted his fading appetite with truly stinky tuna.

Now, to get the action in this story, a little description of the locale must intrude. Manitou Springs looks like a village in an early twentieth century comic, with buildings perched at erratic intervals on the mountain side. Our house was near the top of one of the hills. Our garden was seventeen steps up from the street. The house itself was three floors high and my office was on the third floor. The only doors into the house were on the bottom floor, and we only used the front one, because the back porch one stuck. One of my boys had a door to a second floor porch, but to get to his room you had to walk through his brother’s room AND a bathroom.

The third floor itself, up a narrow staircase, consisted of small powder room, on the left (with a door.) Dan’s office, on the right, without a door (just a railing dividing it from the top of the stairs. And then my office, through the door straight ahead and taking up the entire front of the house. (Not as luxurious as that sounds, since most of it had sloping ceilings. It might explain something about my early writing, that I continuously walked into the side of the ceiling. HARD. To the point of giving myself near-concussion.

On that day, I was running up into my office, to get mail to take out, when I heard the oddest of sounds coming from behind the door of the powder room. It sounded like… an animal choking. I panicked. Pete was getting to be and a little odd, and I thought he was choking. I screamed for my husband, whose cat Pete was, because if Pete was having seizures, he was more likely to be calm with Dan dealing with him.

As Dan came running up the stairs, I threw the door open and…

There was a small, mad-looking squirrel cornered by Pete and making the tcha-tcha-tcha sounds which I believe are French squirrel for “you’ll never take me alive, nom d’un nom.”

So… Dan and I stood stunned in the doorway (not the least of which because a rodent had survived for minutes in a room with Pete.) We stared a moment too long. The squirrel ran between our legs and … into my office, where he holed up behind the printer, singing the Marseillese in squirrel. “Allons squirrels de la patrie” – or, in other words,(Squirrel languages being less differentiated) tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha.

After running in circles a while, we closed the door on Pete, got the phone, leafed madly through the yellow pages (yes, it was that long ago) and called Animal Control.

Most of them just hung up on us. They knew Manitou had a problem with rodents. Though they seemed to think the problem was endemic plague. And then a bright boy told us “Just leave the front door open and a path to the front door, and he’ll go straight out of it.” Now, this would make perfect sense if the path to the front door weren’t: Down the stairs (ignoring Dan’s office, which we couldn’t block) down a zigzagging corridor. Down another set of stairs (with railings we couldn’t block) past the entrance to the library (no door) and THEN out the door. But we were desperate. And Dan had a window in his office. We thought… Block the stairs. Open the window in Dan’s office. Take screen out. Get out of the way.

We didn’t of course realize that this was a special squirrel.

At first it seemed like everything would work. Spying his way clear, the squirrel bolted out of my office and to… Dan’s desk. Where he took advantage of a tiny hole in the back and holed up in a drawer saying tcha tcha tcha * (*translation “I am your worst nightmare, you oppressors of innocent rodents.”)

We called animal control again. One of them took pity on us and told us he wouldn’t handle it, but since the squirrel had probably got in through a hole in the roof, anyway, how about we call his friend who replaces missing roof tiles and has been known to capture the occasional wild animal. At that point, frankly, we’d have called Beelzebub and Sons, Animal Control and Soul Collection. There was something about a possibly rabid squirrel in a house with kids and cats that made our blood run cold. That the squirrel seemed to be singing protest songs from inside our desk file drawer just made it even scarier. For all we knew he was collecting our account numbers to pass to the squirrel resistance.

So we called the roof repairman, who was an almost preternaturally laid back man. We told him that the squirrel was holed up in the file drawer, that he’d been singing protest songs and that we were fairly sure we caught a faint wiff of galoises. He didn’t even look like we should be committed. He didn’t even ask us if the squirrel was wearing a beret. Instead, he said, “We’ll get him out,” in the tone of a man who has encountered the Rodent Liberation Front before.

For his first attempt, he opened the drawer a little, holding a trap at the ready. He said this often worked. But Jean-Pierre wasn’t JUST any squirrel. Instead of falling for the trap of the oppressor, he holed up further in the drawer, a little mad eye (not that squirrels have any other kind of eye) peeking over “accounts receivable” and his defiant tcha tcha tcha echoing throughout the house.

The unflappable rodent-controller sighed and said “Well, this is more risky, but I have some sleeping gas. I’ll just pump it into the drawer. He’ll be out like a light in no time.”

So he started pumping gas into the drawer. But Jean-Pierre had clearly trained for this eventuality by snorting a little bit of sleeping gas every day.

Once the normal dosage. Tcha, tcha, tcha!

Twice the normal dosage. Tcha, Tcha, tcha!

Three times the normal dosage. I laugh in the face of your puny sleeping gas. For years, I trained with lidocaine powder sleeping gas!

At that point the would-be captor opened the drawer just a little. Taking advantage of this, Jean-Pierre ran out through the opening and into the tinier opening of the drawer above it. Where he holed up saying “Never go up against a squirrel when desks are on the line!”

By now the unflappable man was thoroughly flapped. “I’ve never seen a squirrel do this before,” he said. “It’s like he’s a commando squirrel or something.”

To which Jean-Pierre replied Tcha Tcha Tcha (squirrel for “make my day.”)_

“I’m going to try something I’ve never tried before. I’m afraid of hurting him, but if I give him more gas, I’ll kill him.”

We said okay and fine. Without saying a word – because by then he knew Jean-Pierre understood human English – the man made a little lasso. Then he quickly opened the drawer with one hand, while lassoing Jean-Pierre with the other.

To everyone’s surprise – but PARTICULARLY Jean-Pierre’s – it worked. And, faster than Jean Pierre could formulate curses profane enough, the rodent-catcher threw him a little carrier and shut the door on him.

Our kids, of course, being ours and therefore of dubious sanity, wanted to see the squirrel before the man repatriated him in another neighborhood.

I’ll never forget the squirrel standing inside the cage, looking at us in unquenchable fury. I swear he was holding up his little squirrel fist and singing We shall overcome. Za, Rodentia! (Tcha, tcha, tcha.)

The punch line to this is that a couple of years later, we moved to the neighborhood to which Jean-Pierre, or, as the kids call him, Super Squirrel, had been relocated.

The very first night, I hear our less-than-bright cat, Euclid, make the sort of meowing sounds that mean that he’s scared of something. I run downstairs. Euclid is staring out the dining room window. And there – in the dark of night (since when are squirrels nocturnal?) is an elderly and bedraggled squirrel, dancing along the fence, taunting our cat, singing tcha, tcha, tcha.*

*Allons Squirrels de la patrie……