Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk...

Mace had always hated telling stories, sharing experiences, recounting the mundane details of his day to anyone. Things happened around him, not to him. He made absolute sure of that.

There was one exception to this rule, an exception that burned him from the inside out. Violet happened to him, over and over again from his first conscious memory of her through the beginning of the end of the world, when he left her until the exact second he looked behind him to see her stumble and fall, the crack of a gunshot piercing her shoulder, now a violent bloom of red.

In that moment he felt nothing but the burn of hatred – for the men who shot her, for the crowds that kept running, for Violet for falling. The fear did not come until he realized that she wasn’t where she had fallen. In the moments between when she had been shot and when he had forced his way against the tide of people to where she was, she was gone. And the soldiers kept coming.

He had no choice but to turn around and sprint away. As it was, he had wasted precious seconds just staring at the drops of blood on the floor, flashing in between the pairs of fee that dashed by. They seemed to exist as light spots behind his eyelids as he ran.

He knew what Violet would have done in this situation, had it been anyone other than him. She would have asked questions, issued threats, bashed heads. She would have done something. Mace didn’t do, he moved around doers and doing. He, in fact, didn’t.

The crowds dispersed into well known hiding places where they felt safe. Mace slowed to a walk. The buzzing in his head competed with the desire to sleep, to forget that the past day had ever happened. Violet’s disappearing act could mean that she was dead, or worse but mace was numb to the thought. He only wished that his head would stop buzzing, that his skin would stop crawling.

He looked up. There was a circle of men outside his crawl space – middle aged me, which was weird enough. They weren’t wearing gray Agency uniforms and they weren’t dead and that’s where most middle aged men went. He fought the sudden urge to antagonize them, to get himself killed. He suppressed it because he didn’t know what it was and he didn’t want it so he turned around and left, as quietly as he came.

His backpack was cutting into his shoulders. There was nowhere to go to sleep so he went to the nearest station, found an unused bit of wall to lean against and pulled out a book. It took ten full minutes of reading it before he figured out what the book was.

He had long ago perfected the art of being invisible. It was easy to go unnoticed in a world you tried your best not to touch. The one person who went for him found himself face planting in the cement floor by a quick twist of Mace’s feet. He didn’t look up but the knowledge that there was a stain of blood, that it would be red like Violet’s, made the buzzing start again.

The chaos in the station slowed around him. There is no night underground, but there was usually a few over lapping hours during which the majority of people slept.

So Mace attributed his lack of attention to a lack of necessity when there was suddenly someone sitting next to him. He saw the flash of gray in the corner of his eye. A curse spilled out of his mouth before he could stop it.

My sister graduates from high school this year...

It's 2010. It's been 2010 for almost a month and a half now. I turned 21. My mother's birthday is today, but I'm not going to tell you how old she is because it would be mean. It's 2010 and I don't know what I'm doing with my life any more than I did last year. I'm still a college student. I dress like one, I eat like one. I probably think like one. I probably act like one...

(Side note: In a recommendation a boss of mine wrote for me she said that I could be a Jane Austen character if I weren't so well-adjusted. Just about everyone I know said that I'm not really well adjusted. I just am really good at faking it.)

Not much has changed. The census is this year. It is time to be counted. I've been writing again. Sometimes I do it when I'm supposed to be paying attention. Sometimes that's in politics class. What does it say that in the class that is supposed to be teaching me about what I want to do with my life, I can't stop writing about people and things that don't exist. Does it help that I do it in other classes too?

And now, for a presentation on the role of art in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Through an examination of the way that Dorian Gray is treated as a piece of art throughout the novel, we can see the truth of these statements.

At the beginning of the novel there are two Dorian Grays – the one in the portrait and the real live breathing one. The portrait is two dimensional. It is all surface and symbol and no soul. It is also an interpretation, Basil’s interpretation and impression of Dorian Gray the person. Dorian Gray, the person, however, is Beauty personified. He lives and breathes. He interacts with the world around him and the world acts on him, but he is beautiful and people merely treat him as a work of art. For women he is clever and charming and beautiful and rich. For Lord Henry, he is a sort of experiment.

Once Dorian gives his soul to the painting of him in exchange for eternal youth it as though he is trying to become a work of art – an amoral symbol that exists only on the surface. Lord Henry encourages this. He calculates his statements to inspire Dorian to a life of pleasure and pleasure only. There is no good, there is only what you enjoy. Basil, at first, seems to see only the idea of Beauty in Dorian. Society, too, goes along with this idea of Dorian as simply Beauty.

Dorian however paves a path of destruction where ever he goes. He has no moral code, only a double life and a status to maintain. It is only when Dorian takes Basil’s life that he begins to fall apart. Humans cannot exist as merely amoral, beautiful symbols. They cannot be art. They act on the world around them, and the world acts on them. Though Dorian does not change on the outside, he does change inside. When Basil sees what has happened to the portrait he painted, he knows what is inside Dorian and is filled with an abject horror.

Dorian cannot exist as merely art, and he cannot die as merely art. In stabbing the portrait, he stabs himself, and when he regains his soul, he regains the appearance of one who has been as corrupted as he has. It is the act of annihilating another that undoes him. Despite his lack of morality and his lack of a soul, he cannot escape the manifestations of guilt and fear that plague him. When he attempts to destroy the work of art, the portrait, he destroys himself because he has become the portrait and it has become him.

We see this too with Sybil Vane. She is, to Dorian, a work of art. She is beauty and fictional characters and manifestations of Shakespeare’s ideals. When she becomes human, when Dorian creates in her these real feelings of love, she can no longer portray ideals. [“A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures…he lives the poetry he cannot write. The others write the poetry they cannot realize.”] Dorian then no longer loves her. He cannot appreciate her as a person, but only as art, and that destroys her.

Humans are not supposed to be art. It is true that they have surfaces that can be beautiful personified, but there lies beneath that surface a soul and a heart and a brain. There is curiosity and love and fear and death and sex. There is action. In order to be merely symbols, we will annihilate ourselves. [see: suicide bombers]

Probability and Simplicity

In An Abundance of Katherines by John Green, the protagonist puts forth the idea that relationships are predictable mathematically. That is, you can graph a relationship and figure out, based on the Dumper/Dumpee dichotomy, how a relationship will end. I think that the proposition is supposed to be ridiculous...and maybe it is. But I've sort of found that relationships do have a sort of predictability. Obviously I don't have a lot of experience to back this up, but we always seem to go for what's different. If you pathalogically fight with everyone, you'll go for the person that doesn't fight back, that gives you a raised eyebrow and a simple question when you try to shout them down. If you're quiet and meek and people generally look past you, you'll go for the person that pulls you out, that actively looks at you.

Of course, I haven't finished the book so I'm not entirely sure what John Green is getting at, so there will be more on that when I finish the book.

I just finished Suite Scarlett by Maureen Johnson and I have to say that it was pretty fantastic. Upon finishing it I didn't have the reaction that I usually do after watching movies/reading books/seeing tv shows about high school and adolescence, which usually goes something like this - "This person has obviously been middle aged their whole life. High school was nothing like this." Instead it was interesting and funny and real. Teenagers getting drunk wasn't the END OF THE WORLD. There was no "this is what I learned, so can I not be grounded" conversation. I thought that the main character was someone I could have known in real life. It wasn't heavy or self-conscious, but it still managed to say something about the complexity of decision-making when you don't even know who you are yet. And it didn't hit you over the head with anything.

Young adult literature can do that. It often has something to say that it slips in under your radar, something you don't even notice is being said, but makes you feel better once you've read it. It is empathetic, when done correctly. Satre doesn't know everything and you can't live your life based on Joyce and Nietzsche. This seems unrelated, but it isn't. Because I know literature snobs (whom I love dearly) who are miserable. Because they seem to miss this point. There is a kind of beautiful, paradoxical complexity in the simplicity of cartoons, young adult literature and McDonalds.

Of course, I'm not sure I can tell you what that means. What it means to me is that things stripped down to their barest bones are often easier to understand. There hard answers to Yes or No questions and that we won't get anywhere if we can't see that. Harry Potter presents us with what seems like the obvious answer to a question - is this worth fighting for? - and shows us the heroism behind it. For good people it seems obvious. Of course you fight for people who are oppressed. But there is a heroism behind that that is important to understand. From what I've read of John Green (Looking for Alaska and about 60 pages of An Abundance of Katherines) the dramas and tragedies of adolescence are important, however inconsequential they seem in retrospect, because they are what make us. We are a combination of the events we've experienced and the things we've learned, though they may be intangible and impossible to articulate.

McDonalds french fries and chocolate milkshakes are delicious and they might be awful for you, and contain all sorts of incomprehensible things that clog arteries and upset your digestive system, but that's not really that important. Sometimes its better to enjoy the simple things because complications create distractions. And that turns once beautiful things into irrational, improbable things that don't really exist.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is beauty in the little things that make the big picture. And that when you stare too long at the big picture, it starts to disintegrate.
This isn't to say that life can be broken down into its simplest parts. Life is in the gray and impossible to understand in its entirety. I only mean that perhaps, by looking at things simply (i.e. hungry people need food, sick people need doctors, slaves need freedom) we can reach the more complicated stuff (how to achieve all of these things, why people do or don't help, how we can get more people to help). Examining the existential, nihilistic, and abstract ideas that may or may not have built humanity, and which can never be used or proven, doesn't seem like a good use of our time. The meaning of life doesn't matter. What matters is that we're here, and we've got to do something with it.

(Disclaimer: I like obscure Russian writers as much as the next guy. Tolstoy is a personal favorite. Victor Hugo and I go way back. My next projects include James Joyce's Ulysses [for class] and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged [not for class]. But its not life building philosophies or anything. I like to think i get something out of everything I read.)

Don't you ever get tired of saying its not Shakespeare...

People give you weird looks when you say you love Harry Potter. They give you weird looks when they find out you listen to wizard wrock and read fanfiction and yeah, okay, occiasionally write it. They give you strange looks when you have two hour conversations about the Maurauders who were, at best, peripheral characters, and in some cases, parenthetical.

So why are we still talking about it? Why can't we let Harry Potter go?

There is something beautifully simple in the series. Not the characters, who are wonderfully complex and who explore the whole spectrum of humanity. J.K. Rowling's characters are easy to relate to. They are real. Our hero is not perfect. Those who are mean and bitter are not always evil. Those we like are not always good, do not always make the right choices. The story is occasionally hard to read and sometimes the wrong people die. The plot is most certainly not simple. Rowling weaved throughout seven books a series of intricate details, a web of memories and lies and truths and plotting and manipulation. When we reached the end of the series, not all of our questions were answered, not all of the problems resolved.

The simplicity lies in that there is something to fight for. There is a line in the sand that everyone in the series must step to one side of. What starts out as a simple story of a boy, mistreated, orphaned and unloved, finds himself in a magical new world, complete with its own villians and its own history. As Harry grows up however, we find that there is more to this new world. We find that Harry, as young as he is, does not choose to enjoy his childhood. His close friends do not choose to let him fight alone.

Perhaps what makes the Harry Potter series so great is that it is based on choices. From the very beginning of the story - the parts that we never really read - choices define the characters. They do not simply sit by and let things happen. We have James Potter, who was the only son of rich parents who spoiled him. He was a pure-blood. It would have been unbelievably easy for him to sit back and claim that Voldemort was other people's problem, that it had nothing to do with him. Instead he fought for the love of his life, sometimes against her, and in the end he died protecting his family, choosing to give up his life for the slimmest hope that his love and his son would survive.

Sirius Black could have listened to his family. He could have believed them and he could have been in Slytherin. But he wasn't. He was friends with James Potter and he chose to love his new, adopted family. And when the world he had chosen turned its back on him, believed the worst of him, he didn't give in. He stayed good, even when no one believed he could but himself.

Lily Potter chose James. She, after years of fighting him, we are told chose to love him. And in the end she chose her son over herself. She stood in front of him for almost no chance at all that Voldemort might spare her son.

Severus Snape was not a good person. He was mean and bitter and obsessed with what he couldn't have. He was stuck at age 15 when the smallest things are the end of the world. To the end of his life he retained his anger and his hatred. But he did not stay evil. He, in the end, chose to fight for good, to switch his side of the line and to put all of his energy and effort and lifeblood into making sure that Voldemort did not triumph.

Harry's life was defined by these choices. He was alive because of them, he loved because of them. Not because they forced him into any path but because he chose to learn from them, to take away the idea that loving makes you a better person. That just because the right choice is also the most difficult one does not make it any less right. And he does this by making mistakes. By relying on his friends who chose to stay with him, who chose to stand next to him and fight even when they might die, when they might have to watch loved ones die. And Harry, at the age of 11, when most of us barely know ourselves, decided that he was going to fight, that he would devote the entirety of himself to fighting Voldemort. Harry Potter chose a life that was full of danger and loss and grief on the chance that he could make the world better.

This story shows us a group of people who lived and loved and fought with as much verve as any of us could ever hope to have. They gave up everything to fight not just for what is right, but for the idea that everyone, every single human being has a right to their own existence, to live as freely and as happily as they possibly can. This story shows us that living means making mistakes. It means that sometimes you miss the bigger picture, and that your mistakes do not define you. We can always change our minds. We can always change our decisions and change sides. Harry Potter has taught us that we can always fight, we should always fight and that the chance of making the world better is all we need. Because if we aren't fighting for good, than evil is winning. Even if we are just sitting back and watching. Harry Potter taught us the price of passivity and the triumph of action. Harry Potter taught us that our choices matter and that we can and must choose to love.

Oy. Vey.

The Twilight phenomenon seemingly came out of nowhere. One day, there were a million Facebook bumper stickers worshipping a mysterious Edward Cullen, and the world hasn’t looked back since. And really, what’s not to love? Edward Cullen is perfect. He is the boy that every girl wants, and every boy wants to kill. He is loyal and intelligent, with a spark of sarcasm and a dark secret. And he loves with abandon, without guard, reserve or arrogance. He loves wholly and completely and would stop at nothing to make the love of his life happy. And he’s a vampire, if you’re in to that sort of thing…

Of course, Edward Cullen is not the only reason to read the Twilight books, though he is certainly reason enough. In addition to a love that rivals the great epic loves of history, there are battles, super powers, evil, blood, and snarky teenage werewolves. Though the series cannot, by any means, be called Shakespeare no matter how well Bella and Edward’s love rivals that of Romeo and Juliet, it has depth. Twilight is a series about choices. Bella, a human, falls in love with a vampire, Edward, whose instinct is nothing more than to kill her, no matter how much he loves her. Waiting in the wings is Jacob Black, a shape-shifting werewolf from a Native American tribe who exists to stop vampires, and who loves Bella and who can give her a human life. She has to choose between them. She has to choose what she will give up to be with Edward. Their story is messy and complicated and real. Stephenie Meyer does a beautiful job exploring this, showing the complexities and unbelievable challenges that they will face.

So imagine our surprise when we read Breaking Dawn, the final installment in the Twilight series, and we find that Bella does not have to make any choices. She does not have to choose to become a vampire. She does not have to choose to give up her family. She does not have to choose to give up Jacob Black. She does not have to choose to give up even the ability to have children. She loses nothing. She makes no choices. Stephenie Meyer gave us an empty cardboard box for a final installment, filled with two dimensional characters defined by nothing but their ability to lament circumstances. There is no creativity, no allusion to the differences of Bella and Edward’s relationship, in Bella’s pregnancy or in Jacob’s imprinting on her baby. It was a cheap attempt to give every character what they wanted. Jacob’s imprinting was probably the worst because it ripped from us the last bit of truth and beauty – the inexorable intertwining of his overwhelming love for Bella and the indescribable pain that she causes him.

Stephenie Meyer killed her own story. She turned a beautiful, complicated, messy and inspiring love story into a self-satisfying, empty, spineless piece of nonsense, proving that her first three books were good in spite of her, not because of her. They were not of the highest quality literature, not by any definition, but they had something to say, and they said it well – not only as entertainment, but as the kind of book that gets under your skin and makes you think. But that was obviously not the point, so we, feeling used and betrayed, must condemn Breaking Dawn to the realm of things that do not exist. We have lost all respect for Stephenie Meyer – her first three books are now shaded and touched by the series’ cowardly ending. She has been brought to light as someone who is not an author. Authors understand that stories write themselves. Characters, once created, are not clay to mold. They might as well be living, breathing people for all the ability that we have to change them. It is almost as if we, authors, can only write what has already happened. But Stephenie Meyer changed the ending, and in doing so she took something from her characters, twisting them into mere shadows of themselves. We just have to be sure we don’t let her take the original story from us as well. Let Breaking Dawn go.

All marriages are mixed marriages - Chantal Saperstein

Can someone please give me a valid, secular reason why homosexual people should not be allowed to get married? I have yet to find one, though I am more than willing to address some of the invalid reasons people have proposed.

1. Something about it corrupting the American family: First of all, just because you tell them they can't get married they aren't just going to suddenly go out, marry people of the opposite sex and have their 2.5 children. You're just going to keep them from the benefits that married couples have even while they live as all married couples do. Second - how about that 50% divorce rate. Don't you think that has more baring on the American family, corrupted or not? Isn't that much closer to illegitimating love and family? Why don't we just make divorce illegal?

2. It is uncomfortable and awkward for children to go to school saying that they have two dads or two moms. You know what else is uncomfortable for children? An affinity for reading rather than playing outside. Braces. Glasses. Parents with AIDS. Parents who are criminals. Living in a smaller house than your friends. Being unable to answer a question in front of your class. Being the only African American child in an all white class. Having a speech impediment. Guess what people, kids are always going to feel awkward and out of place. Its part of being a kid. Having two dads or two moms is only one more thing in a long list of things that make children feel uncomfortable.

Religion has no place in government. Even if 99% of the country were Christian, it wouldn't be fair for them to legislate their values over that other 1%. No one is saying that you can't be a practicing Christian. But I don't necessarily want to live by your religious standards, whatever they may be. And I shouldn't have to. Nor should anyone else, be they homosexual or straight. The government shouldn't be in the business of defining marriage. Marriage is a religious ceremony and if churches want to refuse to marry gay people, fine. That's their perogative and the government shouldn't infringe on that either. But every "marriage" should be a civil union under the law. All people, be they the same gender or not, should have the same rights as all other couples who live under a civil union.

This isn't a hard concept to understand. We're all people. Everyone does things that other people don't approve of. We can't legislate love. We can't legislate people's personal lives. We can't determine who can be in a relationship with you. And if you want to be joined to someone under the law, then you should be allowed to - visitation rights, social security and all. We are all human. First and foremost, we should start there.

In defense of President Obama

This may be a bit late, but with the upcoming troop surge in Afghanistan, its important to remember something about the last eight years.

We've been fighting two wars. This seems to have slipped through the cracks in light of the controversy surrounding the war in Iraq, but we were in Afghanistan first and the more troops and the more discussion and the more controversy that went into Iraq, the more resources were diverted from Afghanistan. What is particularly interesting (read: terrifying) about this is that Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the US on its own soil, was in Afghanistan. NOT Iraq. So what exactly were we doing in Iraq?

No one is arguing that Saddam Hussein was a good guy or that the situation for Iraqi's was not dire. But given the rhetoric that President Bush and the Republican party relied on so heavily (national security, prevention of nuclear proliferation, safety of the American people) it is interesting to note that while Saddam was not a particular fan of the United States, it didn't seem that he had any immediate plans against us, whereas Al Qaeda seems to ALWAYS have plans against us. Al Qaeda, who in our absence, has moved in to Pakistan and seems perilously close to Pakistan's seat of government and nuclear weapons.

It seems as though the people who are currently arguing that the election of President Obama has made the United States less safe, mainly the previous administration and its ardent supporters, have missed the news for the past eight years. While we have been fighting in Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan has regressed, Al Qaeda has gained new ground. The plight of the Afghani people has been ignored. That is our mire now. That is our unfinished business.

The troop surge that President Obama has planned for Afghanistan is necessary for this unfinished business, for the protection of Americans and Afghani citizens alike and for national security. Before we can move on to other concerns, we have to take care of the messes that had been left behind - the economy being only one.

So yes, President Obama is using the same methods that President Bush used in Iraq, the same methods that President Obama opposed in the context of Iraq. But let us please remember the key differences. Al Qaeda was definitely based in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda definitely wants to attack the US. It seems to me that President Obama is actually make up for the LAPSES in national security committed by the previous administration, who diverted resources from a war that was clearly in the interest of national security to one that we're still unclear as to the reasons of.

This is the war we have to finish. Not only in the interests of national security, which are immediate and pressing, but also in the interests of humanity. We can't leave the Afghani people wondering where we've gone an who they are left with anymore than we can leave in power a group that wants us dead.