Phenomenal Women

I loved The Avengers. Let's start there. I was skeptical going in, because I didn't see how having that many superheroes in one movie could possibly result in anything but a mad mixture of endless fight scenes interspersed with dialogue heavy scenes meant to summarize the plot, but luckily I was wrong. Hiring Joss Whedon (he of Buffy, Firefly, and Toy Story fame) to write and direct was possibly the smartest decision they could have made.

However, I loved The Avengers in spite of a glaring problem I had with the storyline. It's not an overcomplicated plot twist or an unrealistic character motivation. It's a lot simpler than that. In fact, it's obvious without ever seeing the movie. All you need to do is look at a movie poster. Notice how there's only one woman? Notice how many bloggers and critics and fans didn't notice? Yeah. That would be the problem right there.

I had a long discussion with Buggy about whether or not it was fair to accuse The Avengers of being sexist for only including Black Widow when there weren't that many female superheroes they could have picked in the first place. Sexist is a big word, and to be honest I'm not comfortable applying it to the way I feel about The Avengers. Instead, I think The Avengers is an example of a larger problem that exists in popular fiction, television, and especially Hollywood: the Strong Woman has become the Token Black Character. There's one in every story, but only one, and her personality can usually be boiled down to being 'tough.' It's fantastic that there are female superheroes, and doctors, and police officers, and scientists, etc. That's a huge step forward that a lot of people fought for a long time to achieve. But we've made that step, and now it seems like we've stalled. Would it be too much to ask for us to keep walking?

Strong Women Are Everywhere
Think about your own life. Think about the women you know. Is there only one or two who you'd call strong--independent, smart, capable? Unless you live in a black hole, the answer's no. In ten seconds I could name ten women I know personally or who are well know figures who are strong. Give me a minute, and I'll give you fifty. Madeline Albright. Isabel Allende. J.K Rowling. Aung Suu Kyi. Sandra Day O'Conor. Emma Thompson. Margaret Thatcher. Lady GaGa. Angelina Jolie. Cat Cora. Hillary Clinton. Sarah Palin. Hope Solo. Gabby Douglas. Malala Yousufzai. Beyonce. Love them or hate them, it's impossible to deny that each of these women is strong, intelligent, and talented in a way that has nothing to do with good looks. Strong women are everywhere--so why does fiction have such a hard time mirroring reality?

To me, the best example of a story with truly strong women is J.D. Robb's Eve Dallas books. What makes these stories so fantastic in their representation of women is Robb doesn't create Eve, a lieutenant with the NYPSD, in a vacuum. She doesn't make one or two strong women and call it a day, and, more importantly, she doesn't make strong women seem like anything out of the ordinary. The Eve Dallas stories are full of strong women. Within the main cast of a dozen or so recurring characters, roughly half are women. Half. Think about how strange that seems for a second. Try and list as many movies, books, and television shows where that's the case. Now, in how many of those stories are all the women capable and talented? How many cases are the women independent characters in and of themselves--they don't simply serve as 'the love interest' or 'the obstacle in the relationship?' The number I can come up with is depressingly small: Animorphs, Bones, The Descent, Rizzoli and Isles, The Circle of Magic, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and of course Eve Dallas.

What really makes the Eve Dallas stories special, however, is that there are an equal number of strong women present in the minor and supporting characters. Whether it's victims' families, other police officers, lawyers, witnesses, etc, there are constant appearances and mentions of women who hold leadership positions, demonstrate their intelligence, and show strength and independence. Of the stories I mentioned above, only Circle of Magic passes that test. We need stories that are filled with strong women--which doesn't mean replace the men with women. Real life is full of strong men and women. Is it too much to ask that fiction live up to the same standard?

A Woman Doesn't Need to Swing a Sword to be Strong
I love Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness series. First published in 1983, Alanna: The First Adventure introduced the world to a stubborn, thick headed, passionate and tough young girl named Alanna, who dreamed of being a knight in a world where only men could earn the title. Alanna was a tough and strong female character in an era where tough and strong female characters were practically nonexistent.

That was thirty years ago.

Alanna embodies an important step in the struggle for strong women in stories. She entered a man's world, defied stereotypes, fought for her dream, showed that a woman could be just as strong as a man, and scoffed at anyone who dared try and stop her. Alanna's journey mirrored the struggle that many women in the real world were fighting at the same time: the struggle to earn respect as scientists, politicians, sports players, etc. But, like Alanna, that struggle has essentially been conquered. It's time to take the next step, but writers, directors, and producers seem unable or unwilling to make the start.

Within the main cast of the Eve Dallas books, the strong women include a therapist, an MD, an ADA, multiple police officers, and a rock star. Eve herself hates the idea of shopping, finds fancy clothes a mystery, and actively avoids cooking and cleaning. In many ways, Eve embodies the 80s idea of what a strong woman looked like.

But this is 2012, not 1983. Strong women come in all shapes and sizes. As they do in the Eve Dallas books, they can love or abhor shopping. They can literally kick ass, or they can be intelligent and wise. They can gush over boys AND take down a perp with a handgun and a pocket full of cocaine. They can cry over sad movies and scream profanities at pushy cab drivers. They can love to sing and dance, or they can love playing soccer in the park, or--shocking!--they can love both.

Scarlett Johansen's Black Widow is an awesome character. But she falls into the same pattern that every strong woman seems to fall into today: she is a woman in a man's world. She is tough and aloof--no feminine weakness for her. She can literally kick your ass and she shows little emotion while doing so. She is serious and does not engage in bickering and jokes with the men on the team--she's above all that.

Women are strong and talented in a multitude of ways--there's no single image of a strong woman. Rosie the Riveter has passed the torch to chefs and artists, leaders and athletes, warriors and doctors. Rosie played her part, as did Alanna. It seems a shame that we can't continue the fight and fill our stories with phenomenal women of all shapes and sizes.

Now It's Personal
There's one final issue I'd like to address, and it's a point where even the Eve Dallas books, even the works of Tamora Pierce, falls down.

I have an awesome younger sister. She's at the top of my list of phenomenal women. She's no Primrose Everdeen--the thought of her as shrinking and shy is hysterical. If I ever tried to pull a move like Katniss and offer myself up to protect her, she'd tackle me into the dirt before the words left my mouth and call me an overprotective idiot. That being said, I'd still try, because I'd do anything for her, and she'd do anything for me.

The list of strong brotherly relationships goes back to literally the dawn of storytelling. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest existing story, deals with the relationship between two men who, while not born brothers, become brothers to each other with all the relationship implies: camraderie, protectiveness, support, trust, competition, love. Moving through time, the examples are endless: Hector and Paris in The Iliad. Jacob and Easu, Jonathan and David, Moses and Aron in the Bible. Caleb and Aaron in East of Eden. The Brothers Karamazov. Death of a Salesman.

Five years ago, there were three different television dramas that featured a pair of brothers: Supernatural, Numb3rs, and Prison Break. And that's only counting shows where the brothers are genetically related, not shows that feature bromances like Psych, Scrubs, and Rescue Me. Two years ago Rizzoli and Isles premiered, and it was treated like a big deal because it featured two female leads and the relationship between them.

I've already questioned why the strong women seem to be missing from much of television, movies, and popular fiction. Here's my personal bone to pick: where are all the sisters? I can't believe--in fact I know for certain--that mine and my sister's relationship is unique. Of the women I know who have sisters, many speak about the relationship as the most important one in their lives. So where are the stories that reflect what it means--what it truly means--to be sisters? We should have left the fairytales and stories such as King Lear behind a long time ago. But all too often, when a show or book does feature sisters, one is given prominence while the other is merely an obstacle or a competitor or an annoyance or an object to be protected.

I'll finish with a quote by Barbara Alpert: “Sister. She is your mirror, shining back at you with a world of possibilities. She is your witness, who sees you at your worst and best, and loves you anyway. She is your partner in crime, your midnight companion, someone who knows when you are smiling, even in the dark. She is your teacher, your defense attorney, your personal press agent, even your shrink. Some days, she's the reason you wish you were an only child.” 

Reading it over, it really seems a shame to me that there aren't more stories about sisters, because of all the rich possibilities that exist in such a relationship. We need stories that show women as they truly are, not as we've idealized them to be. Women who are sarcastic, smart, reserved, bubbly, amusing, quick-witted, practical, and foolish, wild dreamers and level headed planners. And we need to see women interacting with other women--not as rivals, but as equals. Not as the strong woman who stands out alone, but as sisters who fight and laugh and argue and defend with and for one another.

--Cates

How to Un-Mary Your Sue: A Few Basic Tips

Before I begin: for those of you that don’t know, the definition of “Mary Sue” I will be using throughout this blog post is that of a character who is insufficiently flawed or complex to be relatable for readers.  I use the term to refer to characters of both genders, because it doesn’t actually matter that it’s a woman’s name, considering the concept refers to a hypothetical construct and no one is actually named “Mary Sue” anymore these days.

I was recently reading through the famous and thoroughly praised (with good reason) Mary Sue Litmus Test, the original online measurement of whether or not one’s character was a dreaded Mary Sue.  I realized that while that particular test was both groundbreaking and eye-opening at the time when it came out a whopping seven years ago, it is already somewhat dated simply because people are so aware of it in online writing communities these days.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s still a great way for beginning writers to avoid some of the most common mistakes.  (For instance, it never even occurred to me the ways in which I would sometimes go out of my way to prove my one borderline-Sue character right until I saw them staring me in the face on that test.)  However, there is a lot more to a Mary Sue than just perfect beauty and infinite talent in everything and color-changing eyes as a mark of her half-vampire status. 

Frankly, the Mary Sue Litmus Test got too famous for its own good; nowadays the dreaded Mary Sue label is bandied around in writers’ forums and fan-fiction sites the way that Adolph Hitler comes up in vitriol-filled discussion boards.  Any character who has an unusual name, hair or eye color, or degree of talent in any area is branded with this (extremely hurtful) moniker by readers and dismissed to rot in the scrap heap.  On the flip side, amateur writers often think that so long as they take their otherwise unflawed character and give her an unflattering mole or an awkward phobia they somehow magically dodged that bullet and they are completely free of any sort of Mary Sue-dom.  All of this, whether people realize it or not, tends to come from relying on the Mary Sue Litmus Test as the be-all end-all authority on depth of character, when the creators themselves warn all over the test that it is at best a somewhat flawed starting point.

To give a somewhat amusing example, I recently ran real-life actor Jensen Ackles through the Mary Sue Litmus Test and it informed me that the actor/singer/director/model/amateur pilot with the startlingly green eyes and the creative intelligence balanced by devotion to his family and to helping charitable causes was a highly unrealistic flight of fancy that could not possibly exist in real life.  Similarly, people slap the Mary Sue label on Edward Cullen all the time and accuse him of being an unrealistic, underdeveloped character—and yet he squeaks by the Litmus Test with a passing grade.  I think that the problem is that people have started too often defining Mary Sues by the presence of certain traits (such as extreme beauty) when the original definition of the term referred to the absence of other traits (such as serious character failings).  And frankly the original definition is more useful for writers as a whole; readers the world over tend to be more concerned with whether a character is sufficiently complex than with whether a character doesn’t have more than three talents.  This is my own highly inexperienced, deeply biased, thoroughly self-congratulatory attempt to offer a little advice about how to get away from Mary Sue-dom.

Don’t mistake quirks for traits.  This one is an enormous pet-peeve of mine, most especially because it’s becoming a huge, whopping, deeply unfortunate trend throughout much of modern fiction.  For instance, a character who memorizes trivia about U.S. presidents has a quirk, not a trait.  A character who memorizes trivia about U.S. presidents because she tends to be socially awkward and spouts these facts as a way to fill gaps in conversation has a trait.  Dying one’s hair a different color every week is a quirk.  Doing it specifically as a way to test the boundaries of authority out of a desire to risk punishment is a trait.  It’s perfectly fine to give a character quirks (so long as you don’t go overboard), but you have to make those quirks say something about the person, or have a very clear origin somewhere in that person’s psyche, or else they’re just window-dressing for hollow dolls.

Similarly, don’t mistake demographic information for traits. Whereas I find the quirks-as-traits problem annoying, this one I find downright offensive.  Mental illness is not a character trait.  Homosexuality is not a character trait.  Judaism is not a character trait.  You can make your character a mildly depressed Jewish lesbian, but that won’t tell the reader anything about her personality unless you show her responding to her depression with strength or with humor or with bitterness, or have a moment where she struggles to reconcile her beliefs if her community doesn’t approve of homosexuality, or something like that.  No character can just be The Gay Friend or The Crazy Woman; it’s an insult to anyone who happens to be from that demographic characteristic to classify people just on their outward social labels.  One other one that drives me nuts: wealth is not a character trait.  How people use wealth can say a lot about them, but “wealthy successful straight Christian white male” can be just as much of a gross stereotype as anything else.

Put life on every planet; don’t just let space-junk satellites circle the sun. Okay, what I mean by that is the fact that (as someone who I can’t seem to find to credit once said), we are all the heroes of our own stories.  This is a bigger problem in fan fiction than original fiction—too often the characters and settings of someone else’s story are hijacked to exist as worshipful slaves for a single divine Mary Sue who descends from above to solve all their problems.  Even if you’re telling a story that takes place with an extremely tight first-person point of view or even entirely inside a character’s head (and I’ll save my feelings on that one for an angry blog post on offensive clichés that just won’t die), even the minor characters have to have their own lives.  It’s not enough just to get inside your protagonist’s head; you have to get inside the heads of all the characters that appear in your story.  Why is your villain acting the way she is?  How does your character’s father feel about her actions?  What is the best friend’s motivation for helping out the main character?  Often authors make the mistake of pouring all their love and devotion into the creation of a single brilliant character and then let everyone else circle around vaguely, having no life and no motivation outside of either helping or hindering the hero of the story.

Self-inserts, when done correctly, are actually okay.  One bit of inadvertent harm I think the Litmus Test has done the art of characterization is creating a somewhat unnecessary fear of basing characters too closely on oneself.  I’m more a fan of the “write what you know” school of thought, mostly because if I find a writer writing about something I know but that writer clearly doesn’t (being a girl dressed as a boy and growing up on the road are the two that I see most often), I tend to waver between being amused and being exasperated, but either way I don’t appreciate the story.  Obviously a word-for-word rendering of your own life story isn’t fiction at all, and a self-portrait with all the flaws omitted is worse still, but don’t be afraid of yourself.  Something Janet Burroway said (see, I remembered that source!) is that the best way to balance the familiar and the unfamiliar is to start with something totally foreign to yourself and then to fill in all the details with what you already know.  For instance, I was writing about an immortal traveler living in Belfast during the Irish Civil War, which was pretty damn distant for me, but when I needed to give him a job I had him work in the same type of industry I’m in, and when it came to interests I had him listen to my favorite music.  That way I could write with authority about at least some aspects of his life.  There’s really no need to make every single aspect of your character completely different from yourself; start with something different but don’t be afraid to plumb your own experiences for information when it comes to filling in all the gritty details.

Don’t try this at home: creating the Westley is not for the faint of heart (but worth a shot nonetheless). For those of you not familiar with TV tropes (the greatest website of all time), the term “Westley” comes from the main love interest of the book (and movie) The Princess Bride.  Westley has all the trappings of a Mary Sue: he’s unusually beautiful, incredibly smart, very strong, and has dozens of skills in everything from sword-fighting to storming castles.  And yet, whether or not he’s a Mary Sue, he is beloved.  No one accuses him of being a poorly developed or too-perfect character because the author successfully makes him well-rounded and relatable despite his infinite virtues.  The reader clearly understands his noble motivations, and he runs around as this larger-than-life tongue-in-cheek hero.  I would encourage everyone to strive for the Westley.  Not necessarily by giving their characters a million and one talents and making them the best at everything like he is, but by showing those talents in a ridiculous, self-mocking way that acknowledges the silliness of certain tropes, and by always giving the character concrete, clear reasons for possessing those traits or talents.  Westley has heart, soul, and character, and we can therefore forgive him for being too perfect to be real.  I encourage you to see if you can’t get the reader to forgive your character his virtues through making him intensely relatable and very logically formed. 

Every virtue—and every flaw—is almost always a double-edged sword. It’s very important to show how your character’s virtues can be flaws in the wrong situation.  To illustrate this, I refer to J.K. Rowling, who must have done something right considering an estimated 45% of the population of the planet found her characters at least tolerable enough to sit through over 5,000 pages’ worth of her writing.  Luna Lovegood has the potential to be the dreaded Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a subset of the Mary Sue that primarily consists of a girl who is aggressively quirky and perfect, and yet Luna is not, mostly because there are distinct, measurable drawbacks to her quirkiness.  Luna is unique to a fault—and as a result is so off-putting that she is often bullied by her classmates.  Though bullying is never okay, the reader understands why people would pick on her; her quirkiness makes her bizarre and hard to talk to.  Albus Dumbledore also has the potential to be a Mary Sue because of his vast wisdom, and yet Rowling easily dodges that bullet by showing that wisdom has made Dumbledore arrogant and often even manipulative because he tends to think so little of the people who are less experienced than he is.  The characters’ virtues—quirkiness, intelligence—lead logically to their flaws—social awkwardness, vanity.  Similarly, Ron’s biggest flaw—his ambition—becomes a virtue when he directs it toward helping Harry take down Voldemort, and Harry’s biggest flaw—his impulsiveness—continuously fluctuates between being a hindrance when dealing with difficult school situations and a help when battling Death Eaters.  There is no such thing as an absolute good quality; even imbuing your character with an excess one of the Cardinal Virtues can potentially be a downfall if, for instance, his great patience for others means he won’t confront people even when they are doing wrong. 

Make sure your traits make sense together. This one is sort of an addendum to the double-edged sword principle.  Your character’s virtues don’t have to be flaws and his flaws don’t have to be virtues, but having a character who is careless about her appearance and naturally very beautiful and insecure about her looks just doesn’t make sense.  Obviously most people are just born with some abilities, but let those abilities create your traits.  A character who is naturally very talented at sports might be chronically lazy because she never has to work hard to do well.  A socially awkward person might devote all her time to saving the world anyway.  Create balance through extrapolating naturally from the things your character does well to the things this very ability might cause her to fail at. 

Everyone has to laugh sometime.  Too often Mary Sues are absolutely dead serious about everything.  This is often because of a Terrible Past or else because of such Infinite Wisdom that the character doesn’t have time for trivial pursuits, and is often extremely off-putting.  Adding just a tiny bit of humor can go a very long way in emphasizing the core aspects of your character.  For instance, in the film of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when talking about the coming war with Peter, Aslan makes a veiled poke at his own omniscience.  Considering the quip is coming from freaking Aslan—he is God, after all—it’s surprising and delightful and makes a great contrast to everything else he says, which is generally dead serious.  Sometimes people do take themselves far too seriously, but that can be a character trait as well.  Don’t let even terrible sadness, when it must occur, prevent your character from smiling every so often as well.

Everyone has to cry sometime.  This is obviously the flip side of the same coin: no one has a perfect life, and in fact many people who are outwardly happy and composed are struggling with problems that would overwhelm many others.  A great way to make a lighthearted, witty character seem even more so is to show her breaking down and crying over a past relationship that ended badly, maybe, or a painful family situation, and then only a few hours later (or a few scenes later) once again bringing back that cheerful temperament.  I don’t mean that you have to have every single character in your entire book series spout witticisms left and right except when bursting into tears, but allowing a person’s mood to change will strengthen the readers’ impression of her core traits, not weaken it.  Let your characters reveal things about themselves they don’t want to. Let them get angry sometimes and be patient at others—find out what pushes their buttons.  In short, people often change a great deal from situation to situation, and a character will seem just as stock and cliché if she always reacts to both good news and bad with a single mood state as if she varies wildly in her temperament and intentions. 

That said, there’s a difference between character development and Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. Now, admittedly this is more of a problem in fan fiction than in original fiction, but it happens in original fiction as well.  This is the opposite of the everyone laughs/everyone cries problem: this is when a character, due to circumstance or time or plot developments, suffers from such extreme alterations of personality she is unrecognizable by the end.  Mary Sues too often start out irredeemably evil and suddenly suffer changes of heart that make them puppy-saving saints overnight.  It’s okay to have your character develop, to discover she was wrong about certain things, and to make an effort to change who she is.  But all of this should happen gradually, for clear-cut reasons, and in realistically small increments.  One great example of this is Eustace Scrubb from Voyage of the Dawn-Treader.  (The book, this time, not the movie.) Eustace dramatically changes over the course of the book, at least partially because he has the extraordinary experience of being turned into a dragon.  Before he’s moody, arrogant, and both unwilling and unable to adapt… And afterward he’s moody, tries to take other people’s opinions into question but often just goes with what he thinks is best anyway, and has adapted enough to Narnia that he then fails to adapt back to England once he returns.  Even though his behavior changes radically, his core traits do not.  He realizes his flaws and tries to account for them, but his flaws are still present, and though his virtues become more prominent they were there all along once you look for them; he learns to use his same traits in different ways without actually changing who he is. 

Know the canon. Again, this is obviously more relevant to fan fiction than to original fiction, but this can refer to knowing your own canon as well.  It may feel like you know your character very well—after all, you are her creator and her god—but inconsistencies are insidious, and they pop up even with characters you’ve been writing for years.  As Cates put it, learn to fear the Canon Sue, the character that ostensibly exists in the canon but has been altered in fan fiction to gain extra powers, be impossibly beautiful, or simply not have flaws.  As far as fan fiction goes, I’d recommend reading a few other people’s analyses of the characters you’re going to use—for instance, I had trouble putting into words how exactly Zuko changed over the course of Avatar the Last Airbender until I read of all things a Wikipedia article that phrased the process beautifully.  For original fiction, re-read yourself.  Just whatever you do, don’t try to force your characters to be a different way against their will, even if doing so would work better for the plot.  Such is the way to tears and cardboard-ness. 

There is such a thing as being too flawed.  Way too many of the just-starting-out writers I know try to get away from the horror of Mary Sue-dom by instead choosing to write about main characters who are so disgusting and irredeemable that they aren’t remotely appealing to read about.  Although there is plenty of space for the anti-hero in fiction—or even the anti-anti­-hero á la Dexter Morgan—the reader has to want to know more of this person’s story for some reason, and having a gross morally depraved character running around being gross and morally depraved without any sort of redeeming complexity is a major turn-off.  If your character is, say, a crime boss who kills puppies in his spare time, either give him a very good couple reasons for being the way he is—maybe he was pressured into the life by his parents, and he’s always hated puppies ever since one killed his hamster as a child—or else give him contrasting traits that make him ambiguous and complex.  Maybe he’s a clumsy but protective father, or he gives all the money he earns toward his ailing mother, or he is tortured at night by the fear he’s not a good person.  Maybe he’s an evil bastard through and through but he has a wicked sense of humor or is so delightfully clever in his schemes we love to watch him work anyway.  But the narration has to give the reader something to cling to about the character, or else there is really no point in continuing to read. 

Don’t lie. Most importantly, don’t lie to yourself.  The Mary Sue Litmus Test has a big warning up at the top that there is no point in taking the test if you’re going to fudge results or justify not clicking “yes” to traits you suspect your character might have, because you’re not going to get correct results if you do that.  Try and sit down with yourself and have a good, long talk about whether you’re being true to your gut about whether or not you have Mary Sues.  (I would, however, recommend against doing this out loud in public.)  If you do, it’s not the end of the world.  I happen to know of a whole list of things to try that will hopefully add some wrinkles to that cardboard perfection, written by this wonderful blogger Bug.  But this also means that you shouldn’t lie to your reader.  Don’t try to fix a Mary Sue by adding in a line in the narration about how she is temperamental, or whiny, or a bit of an airhead, and then never actually showing that trait.  And don’t try to edit your work selectively so that you only see how your character works well and not how she doesn’t.  Again, you’re lying. 

Have fun. I should clarify at this point that there is nothing morally wrong with Mary Sues.  They are just grossly unappealing, not crimes against humanity.  I think sometimes people agonize too much over creating absolutely flawlessly flawed characters in stories they never intend to publish.  Writing fiction serves no real practical purpose in the world, so if you want to have fun writing about an absolutely perfect person who goes around being perfect and never makes any mistakes, then by god go for it.  Just don’t expect anyone to read it or like it, which no one has to.  Conversely, if you find yourself slogging through the chore of finishing a story that has gotten out of hand or trying to reign in a character that you find yourself unable to relate to or like even though you created her, kill that sucker.  Considering the fact that making up stories exists purely for the purpose of being a combination of art and entertainment and should be the most entertainment of all for the creator, if you don’t like writing then don’t write.  Go out and be a doctor or a firefighter or a superhero instead.  Or go be a Mary Sue like Jensen Ackles.   

-Bug

The Fine Art of Walking Backwards

Since the end of my freshman year, I have been a student tour guide for my university. Yes, I'm one of those people who walks backwards while deftly avoiding sign posts and speeding students to take you around my lovely campus and tell you  our students' average SAT score, how small our classes are, and why our having a rock climbing wall means you should come to our school. Over the three and a half years I've been giving tours, I've come up with a laundry list of things I desperately wish I could say to prospective parents and students, but, for what will quickly become obvious reasons, have kept to myself. Here's a few:

I LOVE it when people ask me questions.
I know when I was touring colleges as a high school senior, I never wanted to interrupt the tour guide because I thought it might be rude, or that my questions were obvious or not important or silly. Now that I'm on the other side, I LOVE those questions, no matter how silly or frivolous they might be. (You can keep the rude ones, though.) Please be aware: if you say nothing, then I have to talk for 45 minutes straight. If you say nothing, then by the end of the 45 minutes, not only will my voice be gone, but I'll be reduced to telling you things you don't care about, like which foreign presidents have visited my school. Please, PLEASE don't hesitate to ask anything that comes to mind. I will gladly tell you about what it's like to live in a forced triple, or the names of the fencing clubs on campus, or what the best restaurants in the area are. All you have to do is ask. It will make the tour better for me and for you, trust me.

The only exception to the above rule is: I HATE when people ask, 'What don't you like about your school?'
To be totally fair: this was the question I asked on every. single. tour. I took in high school. It made and makes perfect sense to me why people ask this question: as a tour guide, my job is to accentuate the positive and make you want to come to my school. In order to get the full picture, asking this question makes a ton of sense. But please understand the difficult position you are putting me in: not only are you forcing me to speak badly about an institution that I love, but what may seem like no big deal to you may offend or turn away other visitors. Prospective students aren't the only ones who take tours: alumni and professors will often come too. If I say something like 'I wish the administration gave clubs a bigger budget,' or 'there are roaches in the older buildings,' or anything like that, then I risk upsetting and angering these visitors. If you want to ask, have the courtesy to wait and approach me after the tour. Once we are speaking one-on-one, I will be more comfortable and more honest, and I will honestly tell you: "while there are things that I dislike about ---- University, I would not be here and I would especially not be giving tours if I didn't really enjoy it. However, I do sometimes feel..."

Parents: your child is leaving home in a year--possibly even less. You should not be speaking for them!
This one absolutely blows my mind, possibly because my parents taught and expected me to speak up for myself since the age of seven or so. So maybe my expectations are unreasonably high, but: I find it completely unacceptable when 17 and 18 or even 15 and 16-year-olds are unable or unwilling to speak for themselves. (The exceptions, of course, are disabilities or language barriers.) This bothers me every time it happens, but especially when I ask the student a question directly ('what are you interested in studying?') and the parents answers, or, even worse, when the student starts to speak and the parent corrects or speaks over them. You are not going to live in your child's pocket their whole life--let them grow up!

Students: the same applies to you. You are on the verge of being an adult. Act like it!
Nothing, and I mean nothing, bothers me more than an apathetic teenager. Yep, I know it sort of goes wtih the territory, but: these are teenagers about to go to college, teenagers on the verge of becoming adults. I am giving up my time for absolutely no money or benefits in order to show you around my school. The very, VERY least you can do is act interested, even if you really aren't. Trust me, even though I have a polite smile pasted on my face, if you are slouched down into your sweatshirt at the back of the group with a scowl on your face, inside I am thinking of ten different ways to disembowl you. The absolute worst in when your parents are being polite and interested and you roll your eyes at every word they say. Going to college is a privelege, not a right. So even if your parents dragged you here and you have absolutely zero interest in this school, be polite. You look like an obnoxious small child and you are impressing no one and embarrassing yourself. Grow the hell up.

Do not, I repeat, do not bring children younger than fourteen on the tour (or even to the college) unless absolutely necessary.
One of the most touching moments I've ever had on a tour was when a seven-year-old boy came with his mom and his seventeen-year-old brother on a tour. As we toured around the school, I was worried that the boy was ill, because he kept biting his lip and looking at the ground and clinging to his brother's hand. All of a sudden, as I was about to show them a freshman dorm, the little boy burst into tears and sobbed, 'I don't want you to go to college!' It turns out that the boy thought his brother was leaving for college that day, that his brother wasn't coming home with him. It was adorable and sweet, but I also felt bad for the kid, and it completely disrupted my tour. However, he was far preferable to the kids who run screaming down the hall, climb on old furniture, or the tweens who talk loudly on their cell phones throughout the tour. Parents: this is a college tour. It is assumed that the people on the tour are prospective college students. We even have special tours for younger children. Unless you absolutely could not get a babysitter, please, please leave your fourteen-and-unders home.

Moms (and, occasionally, Dads) I really appreciate it when you keep me from walking into things.
What's surprising isn't so much that there's a mom on almost every tour who warns me every time I'm about to step off a curb or into the path of a post or another person (I walk backwards,) what's surprising is the occasional tour where no one tells me before I walk into something, even though they're watching it happen. I suppose this is the Bystander Effect, where people don't say anything because they all assume someone else will. Still, though, when my back is literally seconds from colliding with a lamppost, you'd think someone would speak up!

I appreciate your interest in my life, but please remember that I am a person, not just a tour guide.
I start off every tour with a little spiel, "My name is X, I'm from X, I'm majoring in X, and I enjoy doing X." I'll also mention my internships and that I studied abroad, before going around and asking each student about themselves (if it's less than thirty people) or asking people to call out some of their interests (if it's over thirty people.) Maybe once every four or five tours, I get a person (almost always a dad, occasionally a mom or student) who has some kind of connection to one of those areas of my life (they had the same major, they're from the same city, whatever) and feels the need to talk to me about it throughout the entire tour. I don't mind chatting with prospective students and parents--in fact, I enjoy it--but not while I'm meant to be giving a tour to twenty or so other people. I once had a man who, after I told my tour group that I had done a three-week class in Guangzhou, China, felt the need to spend the whole tour telling me about a business trip he once took to Beijing. It was disruptive and made it hard for me to cover the information that everyone wanted to hear--and yet, I will take that guy any day to the people who ask the invasive and rude questions about my life. It is not appropriate or polite to question someone's religious beliefs, heritage, political affiliation, sexual orientation, or financial situation--all things I have been asked on tours. There is a line, and you should know where it is. If you don't--know that if you cross it I will calmly and coldly tell you that it's none of your business, and I will make note of your name to the Admissions Department.

Teachers: I understand that field trips are sort of like mini-vacations for you, but if you expect me to do your job, then I will take a cut of your paycheck, please. 
For the most part, school groups are my absolute favorite sort of tour. The younger kids especially are super excited to see the school, and are perfectly content if I spend the whole tour telling them ghost stories, fun facts, stories about movies filmed at my school, and famous people who have visited. My absolute favorite moment ever was when a little nine-year-old girl asked me in perfect seriousness what college kids' bedtime is. Another was when a twelve-year-old boy, upon seeing a woman walk by while smoking, yelled at the top of his voice, "Smoking is BAD FOR YOU!!" You tell her, kid! But I am not a teacher, I am a tour guide, and it is not my responsibility to make certain your students behave. I have had tours where teachers wandered at the back of the group, ignoring their yelling, arguing students who are completely ignoring me. Two friends of mine, a guy and girl, once gave a tour where some teenage boys kept making blatant sexual comments about them--and the teachers ignored it. Once I took a group of rowdy fourth graders into our Student Center, only to have them run madly all over the place. One of the teachers looked at me and said, "You shouldn't let them do that." Really lady? Really? I love kids, I love showing them my school, but I flat-out refuse to be the disciplinarian for forty OOC kids. Do your job--or your school won't be invited back.

Rules are in place for a reason, and no, I am not going to bend or break them for you no matter how much you weedle or scowl at me.
You wouldn't think there would be that many rules to follow on a tour of a college, but people seem very adept at finding them and asking to break them. Specifically: I cannot show dorm bathrooms, I cannot show our gym, and and I cannot show a room in a dorm other than the one I have been assigned. The bathroom and gym rules exist to protect student privacy. I understand that other schools like to show their state-of-the art workout facilities, but I think it's good that my school refuses in order to protect student privacy. As for the dorms, we have freshmen called Dorm Buddies who sign up to show their rooms at specific times. This is to avoid putting someone in an uncomfortable situation and to ensure that every tour gets to see a room. I'm sorry you'd rather see Smith Dorm instead of Jones Dorm, but I am not going to change the rules for you no matter how pushy you become with me. If your student comes here, they will be going to a school that respects their students. Be content with that.

I have absolutely NO bearing on your student's admissions decision.
The exception, of course, is, as I said above, if a student is unusually--like way over the top--rude, then I will inform the Admissions Department, and that may negatively affect their opinion of you. But other than that, I have NO bearing on whether or not your son or daughter goes to X University. Therefore, do not feel the need to nudge your student into asking an 'intelligent' question in order to show their smarts or their interest. If you or they genuinely want to know then I will happily answer, but understand that I can pick out the questions designed to catch my attention and give me a positive impression of a student a mile away. For instance: "I am interested in study abroad. What are the chances that a double major in the honors college could study abroad?" Well, what do YOU think the chances are? Pretty good, obviously, which is why you asked. Most people aren't that blatant, but you'd be surprised just how far some will go.

Understand: if you ask about alcohol at all, in any capacity, you are putting me in an impossible position.
There's just no way I can win with this question. If I say that there is a healthy party life at my school, then I will chase away certain parents and students. If I say that there is minimal on-campus alcohol use and most students take part in other activities, I will chase away certain other parents and students. Reciting the university policy--that alcohol is only allowed in rooms where everyone is 21+--only makes people more curious. If you really must ask about alcohol--whether it's 'where are the best bars?' or 'I'm Mormon and don't drink, will I fit in?'--then please, please, please, approach me privately after the tour, and I will give you as honest an answer as I can. It's a college. Yes, people drink. Yes, people can be really stupid. No, I don't think we're a crazy party school. Oy.

The same goes for sex.
Duh.

Believe it or not, I actually enjoy doing this!
People always look amazed when they learn that I (and all the other tour guides) do this for no pay and little personal benefit. We do it becauase we love our school, and we enjoy interacting with people. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't do it. Take that as a huge endorsement for my school--you'd be surprised how many schools either hire their tour guides or have them on work-study programs. The fact that we have people who volunteer at my school--so many people, in fact, that we actually turn people away--should be a huge sign of how much the students love going here.

Cates

Make Me Smile: A Review of Sarah Micklem's Firethorn

I recently read Sarah Micklem's Firethorn, a high-fantasy novel for adults. To be perfectly honest, if I wasn't required to read it for class, I probably never would have picked it up. I put that out there just to acknowledge that this book is not the sort of thing I usually choose to read, so some of my feelings about it may be due to my lukewarm attitude towards the genre in general, rather than problems specific to this particular book.

To be clear: I love fantasy, but only certain types of fantasy, and even within the types I like I'm very picky. For one, I vastly prefer children's fantasy to fantasy stories intended for adults. The exceptions are pretty much Lord of the Rings and medieval literature like The Mabinogion and Sir Gawain. (Yes, I am a nerd. Sue me.) Then, even within children's fantasy, I vastly prefer 'low' fantasy--which, to me, is defined as fantasy that has its basis in the real world, like Diane Duane's Young Wizards books, to 'high' fantasy, stories set entirely in a fantasy realm with little or no connection to the real, modern world,  like Victoria Hanley's The Seer and the Sword. (Of course, my absolute favorites are the ones that take place almost entirely in a fantasy world, but manage to start or anchor themselves in reality, like Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, all of Eva Ibbotson's work, the Pendragon books, etc., but I digress.)

Firethorn is definitively both high fantasy, and intended for adults, not children. (I'm pretty sure anyone fifteen and up would be fine reading this, but that's true of most adult novels.) The thing was, even though Firethorn isn't my usual cup of tea (Twinning's Earl Grey, brewed for two minutes, with a slice of lemon if available.) there was a lot about it that was very, very good.

The writing was beautiful and flawless in a way that made me jealous with its flowing, lyrical language. The titular main character skated the hairy edge of Mary-Suedom (and, from what I heard, dove right off the freaking cliff in the sequel) but managed to be likeable, sympathetic, and engaging. The main thing that saved her (for now) was that she was flawed. She was naive, and impatient, and conceited at times in a way that made her entirely real and relatable. Then there was Micklem's world-building, which was phenomenal. Another review described it as 'typical serf and sword medieval with an Indian-Greek-Japanese mythology fusion,' which captures it very well.

Micklem's greatest strength is making this world feel incredibly real to the reader, from the sights to the sounds and the settings and, yes, the smells. For most of the novel Firethorn is travelling with a group of soldiers marching off to war, and there is no romanticising to be found. The entire experience is captured in gritty, realistic detail. Firethorn is travelling with the soldiers because she becomes the, ehm, "bed companion" of one Sir Galan, and though they have a mutual attraction that grows into something like love at the end, it is done in a very realistic, non-romantic way. Neither ever forgets that she is a mud (low-born) and he is a blood (noble) and therefore she is bound by law to obey him.

With all of that going for it, I really had to sit down and think to figure out exactly why I did not enjoy reading this book.

The one reason I knew I'd had an issue with it was because throughout I couldn't escape the distant feeling, like a minor itch, that Micklem had copied just a little too much of Firethorn's character from Tamora Pierce's Alanna of Trebond. The similarities were thus: both are redheads, both are healers who grow into their gifts over the course of their stories, both are stubborn and proud and suffer the consequences of their stubborness/pride, both are women operating in a mostly men's world, both grapple with their feelings for a high-born man because they fear losing their independence, and both are marked by a female god as special in the middle of a forest. All of what I just said could be and probably is true of other characters in literature, except the last point. Again, I'm probably over-reading it and I'm sure it wasn't deliberate. But I couldn't escape the feeling that I was reading about Alanna under a different name in a somewhat different set of circumstances.

The bigger problem though, and the reason I started this blog post, was that the book did not make me smile at any point while reading it. Now, again--this is not a cardinal sin. This is a problem that is specific to me, definitely not to every reader out there. But after thinking about it, that was the problem that I specifically could not overcome. There was nothing joyful in this book, and there was nothing humorous. I get that humor was entirely not the point of this story, but that didn't change the fact that it wasn't there, and therefore I didn't enjoy the book.

All of my favorite books, and even every one that I can recall enjoying, have made me smile.

I can and have read books mostly devoid of humor that I still enjoyed, like Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass. But I can still remember smiling when I first read about daemons, and the description of the kingdom in the North, and the bridge made of dust. If a book doesn't have humor, it needs to have wonder and awe, at least for me to enjoy it. To give a "literary" example, John Steinbeck's East of Eden is a heavy, serious, not-funny-in-the-least story. But the moment when Lee, Samuel, and Adam discover the meaning of Timshel gave me chills, and the ending, with its quiet promise of hope and redemption between Cal and Abra, gave me a happy, hopeful feeling inside.

Firethorn never did that for me. That's not to say the book is all doom and gloom, but it is heavy and serious, and even when things are going well or looking up for Firethorn, it's all still pretty grim. K.A. Applegate's Animorphs was even darker and heavier than Firethorn, for all that it was written for children, but it was still a rare book in the series that didn't make me laugh out loud. (Don't believe me about the darkness? Just try tracing Jake and Tom's relationship and character arcs sometime. If you're not weeping at the end, you didn't read the books.)

So my long, drawn out point is: I didn't like Firethorn because it didn't make me smile. Maybe I'm alone in this. Maybe it's because I'm addicted to happy endings. Maybe it's because high fantasy for adults really isn't my thing. Maybe it's because it started off with twelve pages of scenery and no dialogue, something that's sure to put me off. But I did not enjoy reading Firethorn, and I don't care for the book. To me, great literature--whether for adults or children, whether science fiction or literary novel, whether written a hundred years ago or a hundred days ago--are the stories that do it all. The ones that make you laugh, cry, smile, scream, tear out your hair and dance around the room. Great literature makes me smile.

Kates


P.S: On a mostly unrelated note: I strongly, strongly recommend reading Georges T. Dodd's review of Firethorn, and his objection to its (and other medievalist fantasies') portrayal of rape. Then, read Sarah Micklem's even better defense of her story and her character, and of rape survivors in general. Both of them have excellent points and present them in a logical, respectful, well-written manner. I'm going to meet Sarah Micklem tomorrow, and though I'll stay mum about my feelings about her book, I will thank her and congratulate her for her phenomenal, empowering essay.

Memoirs of a Soda Jerk

So a while back, there was an article in Reader’s Digest that collected a list of things that people in various professions wished they could say to their clients or customers but never would.  Some of them were amusing, some were surprising and gave me new insight, and some of the ones by doctors especially were downright terrifying.  Being that it is I have a somewhat unusual job—I mix soda and scoop ice cream in a 1950s-style soda fountain attached to a pharmacy on the main street of a small town in America—I figured I’d come up with my own list.  I should probably say that I love my job and I think it’s one of the coolest parts of my life right now, and that most of these are minor pet peeves.  However, they are also things that I wish people would take two seconds and consider before they acted.  None of these suggestions applies to every customer, or even most.  95% of the people that frequent the soda fountain are nice, fun, quirky, and extremely polite and considerate.  There are, however, a few I’d rather not have to deal with. 

Please use a little discretion in what you choose to disclose to me.   One of my favorite parts of doing my job is talking with the customers that come in as they eat their ice cream and sodas.  This includes hearing small snippets of people’s life stories can be fascinating – I once had a lengthy conversation with a traveling salesman about the similarities between Satanists and self-help books, and another with an architect about the philosophy of aesthetics.  These topics of conversation—and other ones such as career choices, books and movies, popular trends, political issues, and even the weather—tend to be entertaining and lively for all people, and are perfectly appropriate for casual social interaction.  Other subjects, such as hate-filled tirades against one’s landlord, explicit descriptions of past sexual encounters, thorough descriptions of one’s entire family history of mental illness, or brutally honest opinions about one’s fellow regulars, are not appropriate to talk about to a young woman you have only just met, and should probably be avoided in an establishment filled with many families.  Though I am flattered that you feel comfortable disclosing this kind of information to me, I also think you should be aware that you are making me and everyone else in the shop uncomfortable and you are potentially opening yourself up to social judgment.  So please, keep it casual when in public talking to someone you don’t know.

On that same subject, please use a little discretion in what you ask me.  Although, as I said, I love talking with patrons at the soda fountain, I also prefer to keep things professional, which means not giving out personal information about myself.  I will be delighted to answer any questions you might have about aspects of my job—how I keep my hands from drying out in the dishwater, what kind of ice cream soda I like best, and so on—and I will be happy to talk about other surface aspects of my life.  I enjoy answering questions about where I go to school, whether I live in the area, what my career goals are, what books I like, who I plan to vote for in the upcoming election, or what my major is.  I’ll even tell you my age, my heritage, and my home state.  However, expect me to deflect or else outright lie if you ask me what my last name is and how to spell it, how to contact me online, what my parents do for a living, how much money I make, what my real opinion is on my boss, how I feel about any of your fellow patrons, whether I’m studying psychology because I have a family member with a psychiatric illness, or any sort of question that starts with “Don’t you just hate…?” followed by the name of a person or group of people. 

Parents, don’t you think you’re going a little overboard on teaching your kids not to talk to strangers?  The parents I’m talking about aren’t the ones who like to keep an eye on their kids and prevent them from wandering off—this, in my mind, constitutes a healthy amount of concern.  The parents I’m talking about are the ones who don’t seem to notice or care when children as old as thirteen or fourteen are visibly intimidated by me.  I’m a five-foot hundred-pound baby-faced adolescent midget who is, as previously stated, if anything too polite.  I’m not that intimidating.  So it has me concerned when a frightening proportion of children refuse to look at me, talk to me, or respond to my questions about what toppings they’d like with anything more than a desperate glance at their parents for guidance.  I’m not asking that every child no matter how shy be forced into a full-on therapy session with me.  But I do firmly believe in parents who gently tell their shyer children to give their orders directly to me rather than using the parent as a middleman, or nudge their kids in the right direction with a “can you say thank you?” after I deliver the ice cream.  Again, I understand that some kids are shyer than others, but I also get incredibly rankled by parents who walk in , gesture to their children, and say “she’d like a hot-fudge sundae” without even consulting anyone, and then answer any questions or comments I direct at the child without giving him or her a chance to answer.

The “ring for service” bell is there for a reason.  No, that reason is not so that small children can ring it repeatedly and make me want to strangle them, which is what every single one who discovers the darn thing does.  It’s there so that when I step away from the counter to restock shelves or mop the floor or even just use the bathroom, I can figure out if someone wanders up to the counter in my absence.  But people will just stand there awkwardly and not ring it for a good fifteen minutes if I’m busy in the back for a while, or, worse, they’ll wander away without having rung it at all.  I promise I won’t be offended if you ring the bell.  If I didn’t want people to ring it then I could just as easily take it off the counter.  Please, please let me know if you’re waiting for service.  I don’t want you to be so polite you can’t get service, because though it might not seem like it ringing for me is in no way rude. 

If you just ordered three scoops of anything, I can tell you right now with absolute certainty that your eyes are bigger than your stomach.  Not to be stereotypical, but the only people who ever order three scoops of ice cream are males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five.  And none of them ever succeed in finishing that much ice cream; what’s left behind is anywhere from half a scoop to over a scoop and a half of ice cream.  The extra forty-five cents the soda fountain made because of the bigger order are not worth throwing away that much food.  Ice cream is a heavy, thick food with a ton of calories packed into very little space. There is just no way that people can ingest that much of such a heavy food without getting sick.  Frankly, the only reason I think we still have that option on the menu is so that people won’t feel like they’re getting a “large” when they order two scoops instead of one.  With the exception of one single rail-thin teenage boy with the metabolism of a Norwegian Ridgeback, no one has ever finished off three scoops of ice cream in one sitting.  And the teenage boy/garbage disposal came back after that and ate a milkshake and two bagels with cream cheese as well, so that just firmly cements the idea that he was a one-of-a-kind freak of nature. 

I wash your dishes after you use them.  Learning this should probably come as a relief for most people.  However, what this also means (that many people fail to consider) is that I have to handle any dishes that you just used.  So dumping all the trash in your pockets into your petal glass, hawking a loogie onto your empty plate, or (my personal favorite) sticking wads of used chewing gum to the rims of your bowls is inconsiderate and disgusting.  Even if we did have a dishwasher (which we do not), I would still have to scrape your wad of gum off our bowl by hand.  Considering that there is a trash can easily accessible at the end of the counter, and there are napkins available all over the place, I really wish people would stop and think for two seconds before creating an extra fifteen minutes’ worth of soaking, scraping, and disinfecting for whoever cleans the dishes by leaving gum stuck to bowls. 

I don’t know what you mean by “regular.”  There is nothing more frustrating for me than when someone comes in and uses the word “regular” at any point anywhere in their order.  A “’regular’ root beer float” could refer to the size, in which case the person could consider small, medium, or large to be “regular.”  It could refer to the type of ice cream, in which case “regular” could mean either chocolate or vanilla.  It could refer to the frequency with which this person has ordered root beer floats in the past, in which case it tells me nothing at all about size of type of ice cream.  It could mean that the person intends for the root beer to be “for here” not “to go”—or the other way around. It could even mean that the person simply knows that root beer is the most common vehicle for floats and the order itself is therefore “regular.”  I have no idea, and the use of that word starts of a string of twenty questions I have to use to narrow down what the person really means.  And don’t get me started on “regular coffee.”  For half the people that means “with the regular additives” as in with cream and sugar.  For the other half “regular” means black.  Except, of course, for the ones who mean “regular” as in “not decaf.”  Or the ones who want “regular” coffee as in small, the most commonly ordered size, or medium, the standard size.  Or the people who, as with the root beer floats, are simply referring to the commonality of the order either for themselves specifically or for the world in general.  I can’t tell which of the thousands of potential uses of “regular” you mean to employ in any given sentence.  I can use slang with the best of them—“diesel” for espresso or “unleaded” for decaf, “shamrock shakes” for those with Irish Cream ice cream and “black and white” for those with both chocolate and vanilla—but I can’t do a darned thing with ambiguity except pepper you with eight more questions to try and narrow your order down. 

Your sarcastic commentary is neither as amusing nor as original as you clearly think it is.  When I’m struggling to lift two ten-gallon tubs of ice cream at the same time, trying and failing to muscle open a stubborn cherry jar, literally up to my elbows in hot fudge, or otherwise visibly frustrated, you know what I really appreciate?  Customers coming up behind me and going “having fun?” as if it’s the wittiest thing in the world.  Mostly I respond to these inquiries by smiling and going “of course!” as if I had no idea the question could be in any way sarcastic.  It’s not that I don’t get it.  It’s just that the alternative is saying something I’ll regret. 

Please control your children.  Mostly I love having kids at the counter.  They are upbeat, funny, and as often as not more polite than their own parents.  They have an endless fascination with the tip jar that means that more than once I’ve had a whole gaggle of kids begging their parents to let them put money in—“Joey got to put a whole dollar in, can’t I put a whole dollar in?”—which never fails to amuse and delight me.  That said, I get very frustrated when parents don’t even comment on it when their kids scream, yell, knock things over, pull bottles off the shelves, make inappropriate comments about other patrons (“she’s really fat”), stand on the counter, tip stools over, or repeatedly pound on the “ring for service” bell when I’m already standing right there.  Generally parents are very good at trying to correct their kids gently or not let them get out of hand in the first place, but when a child of ten or eleven who is old enough to know better is repeatedly whacking the bell and screaming about how he hates chocolate ice cream, and his mother’s only response is a tired, “Michael…”  Well, gosh.  I wonder how your son learned to misbehave in the first place. 

This will no doubt come as a shock to a lot of people, but I actually like my boss.  Sure, she can be a little rough around the edges at times, but she’s also funny and considerate and more than willing to be flexible and she is very forgiving of occasional broken dishes or accidental cursing on my part.  However, even if I didn’t like her, this does not mean that I would ever consider mouthing off about her to a patron when asked, letting people get away with paying less to screw her over, doing anything that she would “never have to know about,” violating rules such as opening the register to give change because I didn’t care about her, or in any way validating statements such as “Isn’t ________ such a pain?”  I’m sorry that so many people apparently have such strained relationships with their employers, but that’s simply not true for me. 

This is not a low-calorie food.  That statement applies to pretty much everything we serve—ice cream is ice cream, soda is soda, and candy is candy.  None of that stuff ever claimed to be anything different.  The main ingredient in all three foods is some kind of sugar or saturated fat.  We have options such as soy ice cream, diet soda, or candy made with artificial sweeteners that have less sugar and fat than the full-blooded options, but that doesn’t mean that any of that stuff is remotely healthy, just less likely to cause you to gain weight.  I’m sorry there are no other options, but if you want to be healthy don’t order ice cream.  Or else do so in moderation—get one scoop with fresh fruit or nuts instead of the flavored syrups, and hold off on doing so more than once or twice a week.  And then enjoy it.  I do feel bad that there are people who are older or overweight and therefore can’t have as much junk food as I can while still remaining healthy.  But I still feel frustrated on behalf of anyone who spends half an hour agonizing over calories before ordering something with lots of ice cream and candy and extra hot fudge and then sits there looking miserable while eating it because the calories have become more important than the yummy taste.  If you’re going to feel guilty and miserable after—or worse, during—your caramel sundae because of your health, then I can guarantee you it won’t be worth it.  If you’re going to say “screw it” for a day and enjoy the heck out of yourself while being bad occasionally, then I say by all means go for it.  The point of ice cream is to make people happy, not healthy.  If you can’t get either effect out of eating dessert then I’d recommend a nice spinach salad instead. 

“Warning” had it right.  Although kids are some of our most awesome customers, my personal favorites are the old ladies who fulfill the poem “Warning: When I Am Old I Shall Wear Purple” to the letter.  These are the sweet grandmotherly ones who pull up to the pharmacy on ten-speed bikes or motorcycles, who call me “dear” and curse like sailors but always apologize afterward, and who eat ice cream every day because they can.  They tend to talk constantly about “kicking the bucket in a few years” and yet are some of the happiest, craziest, most fun-loving people I’ve ever met.  They learn my name and the names of the other regulars and actually remember, they ask me how my psychology degree is going even though I only mentioned it to them once several weeks ago, and they talk about Jesus in the way that has to do with loving everyone equally and not judging people who aren’t Catholic.  These women are what I want to be when I grow up.  No question. 

I just work here.  Okay, I’m being facetious, but it’s really true that people fail to grasp this.  What many people fail to appreciate is that I do not run the entire company, and there are therefore many decisions that are simply out of my control.  For instance, I do not mix the ice cream that I serve them, so I can’t do a darned thing if they want more chocolate chips in their scoop of mocha chocolate chunk, or less mint flavor in their Irish Cream.  I can’t spontaneously conjure a topping, flavor of soda, or type of coffee they would like to order but we don’t have.  I can’t help it if they think the fountain should open sooner or close later or switch to serving a different type of root beer.  None of these suggestions mean anything to me.  Furthermore, I get extremely frustrated when people blame me for things that simply cannot possibly be my fault: if their Maple Walnut is made with maple sugar not maple syrup, if their Butter Pecan needs more nuts, if their bagel doesn’t have as many sesame seeds as the ones we had last week, so on and so forth.  Yelling at me won’t change the fact that I have no influence over any of that.  In the same vein, I’m glad if people like a particular flavor, but compliments on the ice cream are meaningless to me.  Compliments on the presentation of a particular sundae or the size of an ice cream scoop I added to a float mean a lot more, as do suggestions for improvement in this area. 

It’s a soda fountain, not a restaurant.  This means that it works the same way as a café: you order at the counter, you pick your food up at the counter, and you drop your dishes off at the counter when you’re done.  On busy days especially I don’t have time to run six or seven bowls out to people who ordered and then went to sit outside, and I especially don’t have time to go running outside to collect the dishes that they left behind.  I’m considering implementing the Starbucks method, whereby orders are simply left sitting on the counter for people to pick up or not.  I’m a soda jerk, not a waitress.  If you expect me to bring your dishes to and from your table, I expect a twenty percent tip for my services, please. 

On the subject of tips, I have never once in my career done anything to merit more than a dollar or some change in the jar.  I may appreciate people leaving me two dollar, three dollar, or five dollar tips, but this also makes me very uncomfortable because it makes me feel like I’m getting more money than I deserve.  Like I said, I’m not a waitress.  Convention dictates that giving me more than a dollar or so is total overkill, and I agree.  I don’t cook food, or bring it to people’s tables, or even do much more than combine a few ingredients in a cup or bowl.  The single greatest factor that dictates how much people tip me is how big a wad of change I hand the person after that person pays.  I love it when patrons take note of the fact that I’m working hard and give me a small bonus, but the whole tipping thing is largely subjective, and I accept this fact.  So don’t feel obligated to tip, and most definitely don’t feel obligated to tip generously. 

If you notice that I’m a little cold toward you or I’m not as patient as I would normally be, consider that it might be something about your own behavior inspiring that response.  I have never once snapped at a customer, rolled my eyes, used a put-upon sigh, or even lost my temper at all.  I pride myself on killing people with kindness even when they’re themselves being rude.  However, about 90% of the time when I have observed this behavior in waiters, receptionists, or other café employees, it is as a direct result of something the customer is doing.  Snapping at someone making your food, telling the person to “hurry up” when there is really nothing the person could do to move faster, loudly pointing out a small mistake the person is already well aware of, criticizing something about the store the person cannot change, or telling the person that he or she is doing something wrong in an order not your own will not endear anyone to you.  Therefore, if you say something like “Why isn’t my damn coffee as hot as it’s supposed to be?” or “you just broke that cup; now you’re in trouble” or “Could you be any slower?” don’t be so shocked if the employee isn’t absolutely polite and pleasant in response.  It’s the golden rule, and it still stands. 

If I’m watching you unsubtly as you peruse the make-up aisle or fiddle with the tip jar, it’s nothing personal. The fact that I am watching you and being obvious about it has nothing to do with your age, or your gender, or your ethnicity, or the way you’re dressed, or in fact anything about you at all.  It’s just the fact that you exist, and you’re standing in the make-up aisle, and people steal from the make-up aisle of the pharmacy or attempt to do so all the freaking time. I don’t know what it is about cosmetics that causes people to have sticky fingers, but there you have it.  Everyone who spends more than ten seconds in the make-up aisle gets watched, and it has nothing to do with any sort of profiling.  What is really annoying about this is the fact that we would probably be more willing to overlook theft of food, toiletries, or medicine, but these items never get taken.  It’s just the make-up, which no one can claim to need to get by and yet be unable to afford.  The same overt watching policy goes for the tip jar: that’s my money, and you’re pawing through it.  I consider such behavior suspicious no matter who is doing it, and I will therefore be staring at you until you put the jar down.  Yes, we employees of the pharmacy are all perfectly aware that it’s rude to stare, but we’d rather lose money by failing to get your business than lose money and our products by having you walk out with full pockets. 

The fountain closes at 6:00 PM.  Lingering at the counter any later than this is frankly just rude. People excuse this one all the time by saying “but it doesn’t really close at six, right?”  Okay, I don’t know where so many people got it into their heads that employees secretly enjoy lingering at their workplaces for as much as an hour after the closing time, but this is simply not true.  I signed a contract that among other things stated that I would start work exactly when my shift began and finish when my shift ended, so that the company could be sure to pay me the correct amount for every single minute of labor I put in there.  I have a bus I need to catch just outside at 6:01, and on many days I have commitments that require me getting home immediately after work.  My coworker has a boyfriend who waits to pick her up after work.  More importantly, my manager is a mother of two young boys who need her home at a certain time.  The security guard who has to lock everything down for the night has a wife and son at home as well.  We’re all tired, we’ve all been on our feet for the past six to twelve hours, and we all just want to go home and have dinner with our friends or families.  When you fail to take our gentle suggestions to leave before 6:00, you prevent all four of us from getting home on time.  You inconvenience everyone depending on us.  There are plenty of other places nearby where you could drink your soda or milkshake.  Take advantage of one of those, because there is really just not justifying being that person.  Fortunately, people who do this are few and far between, but it only takes one person to throw the rest of us off. 

You are not the most important person in the universe, and I will therefore not be changing the rules of the fountain just for you. This applies to closing later, but to other things as well.  For instance, I can’t make change for a dollar unless you buy something.  I can’t let you borrow our phone.  I can’t give you free coffee, free cookies, or free refills.  Asking once and being told “no” once should be sufficient, because no amount of wheedling, pleading, yelling, whining, or attempting to bribe me will change my mind, and in fact the more of an issue you make of it the more I’m going to shut you down.  Don’t delude yourself into thinking that you’re the first person or even the umpteenth to ask me for any one of those things.  You are not special.  I’m sorry I can’t help you, but all arguing with me about it will do is piss me off. 

One scoop of ice cream costs $2.75, and two scoops cost $3.25.  I will not be changing this fact any time soon.  Like the previous statement, this only applies to a couple people who think that if they just argue enough then I’ll somehow magically decide to change the rules of the fountain for them.  I understand that some people have different financial situations than others, and I’m willing to make up the difference out of the tip jar if a person comes up three cents or ten cents or twenty-five cents short when paying for something.  I’ve been there; I know it’s embarrassing.  I’m sympathetic when a person is forced to change a two-scoop order to a one-scoop order because of lack of cash, and whenever this happens I tend to give out very generous single scoops.  If people forget to factor in tax when figuring out what they can order, again I’m willing to use some spare tips to make up the difference.  What I have no patience for are the people who want me to give them two scoops of ice cream but only pay for one, or the ones who think that if they wink-wink-nudge-nudge enough I’ll ring up their single scoop as a kiddie.  Ice cream costs a lot of money, and our prices are a lot fairer than many other places’.  As with other rules of the company, the more you try to get me to violate this the less likely I am to be willing to do so. 

If I forget something, remind me.  Or if I make an error in your order, let me know.  I promise not to be offended.  This happens most often when people order waters.  Considering a fair number of orders consist of “one strawberry milkshake with vanilla ice cream and an extra pump of syrup, large two-scoop Dusty Miller sundae with extra whipped cream, hold the nuts, two twenty-ounce cherry-lime sodas to go and one mint cola for here, a pint of caramel ice cream—oh, and a water,” I’d say it’s hardly surprising that the water is what I forget.  It doesn’t involve holding any combinations of ingredients in my head, so often it never gets memorized at all.  However, I’ve more than once realized that I forgot the water with a person’s order—only after the person had already eaten everything and left, having paid twenty-five cents for a water in a to-go cup that they never got.  I’m more than happy to get you a water if you ordered one and I forgot—but you have to tell me.  Furthermore, if you ordered your sundae with whipped cream and I forgot that, again remind me and I promise I won’t be offended, I won’t get angry, I won’t do anything more than apologize and get you what you ordered.  The last thing I would want would be to get an order wrong, have the person not tell me, and then just not come back over a mistake I could have easily rectified if I just realized I made it. 

I’m flattered that you think so, but I don’t actually run the damn country.  I can’t tell you the number of people that share this delusion.  “Why did you put sales tax on my soda?” they ask, or “how come your Hershey’s bars cost so much?”  Like I said, I’m flattered that you think so, but I didn’t put sales tax on the soda.  I didn’t decide the price of a candy bar.  I wasn’t the one who raised the price of gum to $1.49 for a fifteen-pack.  Those decisions were made by the federal government and the state government, or else by Wrigley Gum Company.  So if you want to complain about the fact that there is sales tax on luxury food items such as bottled water (which I privately totally agree with, by the way), then take it up with your congressman.  All I can do about it is make sympathetic noises or else shrug helplessly, depending on how angry you are with me over the decisions President Obama made. 

-Bug

My Small But Glaring Problem With Doctor Who

If I felt like it I could spend pages and pages simply listing all the many good qualities of this show, all the simply amazing ways in which it is smart, funny, heartbreaking, and highly well-crafted in many regards.  I adore most of the heroes of this story, both major and minor.  The Doctor is truly shown to be extraordinary rather than just stated to be so through his applied intelligence, charm, and willingness to do anything to avoid engaging in any sort of violence.  The women he travels with are themselves ordinary people and yet do such a good job of finding their way fumblingly yet heroically through the many strange situations in which they find themselves. 

That said, there is one huge glaring flaw with this show that I simply cannot overcome no matter how much I might enjoy its other aspects: that of the villains.  Or, rather, the lack thereof.  I know that alleged villains exist on the show, but frankly none of them frighten me.  As a matter of fact, I am most likely to spend the entirety of every single scene with a Dalek, Cyberman, or Sliveen cringing in horror at the sheer awfulness of the writing.  Cassandra left me rolling my eyes.  I couldn’t even pay attention to Davros because his dialogue was so unrealistic.  The Master made me laugh—at him, not with him.  With only very, very few exceptions—the Weeping Angels of Blink and the unnamed alien form of Midnight both come to mind—the villains of Doctor Who are so painfully one-note and flat that they are not frightening, not amusing, not even remotely interesting.  The unfortunate habit far too many of them have of repeating a word or phrase for no apparent reason is so cringe-inducing I have horrible flashbacks to the 1940s era of horror films.

It would be possible to say that the low quality of the villains simply comes from the fact that it was originally conceived as a simple children’s show—perhaps the writers preferred to present very simple conflicts and larger-than-life nemeses for our heroes to defeat in uncomplicated plotlines.  And yet there is more than ample evidence that simply because a show is intended for children does not mean that it is unable to have complex antagonists.  Just look at Avatar the Last Airbender; for much of the series the primary villain is a character the writers show in the second episode is just a scared kid trying to get home to his family.  Or in Teen Titans, when during Season 4 one of the main characters becomes the villain, albeit inadvertently, and is used as a tool to destroy the world.

Then there is the argument that in any sci-fi or fantasy show the villains simply don’t have to be human and therefore don’t have to be developed at all because no one ever questions the fact that in The Lord of the Rings there are no bad orcs.  (Except when they do…)  Finding counters to that argument also isn’t hard.  In Supernatural the primary villains are either ghosts or demons; even though these are purely malevolent entities that exist to do evil and nothing else, the heroes show compassion for beings that, as the show establishes, were once humans and generally more or less innocent before dying and becoming trapped either on earth (if ghosts) or in hell (if demons) until they went insane and lost all ability to do anything but destroy.  On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampires and demons are portrayed as more or less soulless killing machines—and yet several interesting questions are raised when one or two vampires, when forced to find an alternative to killing people to eat, start to become good, even possibly heroic people…  Somehow I just don’t see Amy and the Doctor teaming up with a converted Dalek to fight some greater evil anytime soon. 

It’s not just that it is all but impossible to suspend disbelief when listening to characters say something like “This is the ultimate victory!” (actual quote) or chant “exterminate, exterminate, exterminate, exterminate, blah, blah, blah,” and we are expected to take them seriously.  It’s not just that scenes of the main characters facing down badly constructed plastic-looking robots fail to raise the pulse rate of anyone who has gotten used to the human-like villains of everything from Star Trek on forward.  The issue of the banality of violence is also rather significant here.  In “The Poison Sky,” thousands of sentient beings are killed when the Sontaran ship explodes, and it is not only treated lightly but in fact played for laughs; after all, it’s just a bunch of aliens in weird suits getting blown up by a giant plastic Frisbee.  Or in “Age of Steel,” when actual human beings are being killed, often the effect is bizarrely funny because these are people who are being apparently cut down completely bloodlessly and with nothing but the prettiest of falls to the pavement by beams of pretty light.  Not being familiar enough with BBC networking rules to say, I might have to forgive the show for its lack of blood because of corporate meddling or other similar diseases.  Which is all very well and good, but doesn’t mean that the show has to treat people dying in battle like something that happens attractively and instantaneously.

The sheer amount of robot-on-human violence in this show is also quite disturbing.  For all that other sci-fi/fantasy shows (Battlestar Galactica, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Angel, Supernatural) may have infamously high body counts of main characters, Doctor Who is by far the most extreme example I’ve seen of a show carelessly and casually killing off ordinary uninvolved citizens.  Literally thousands of people are killed in pretty much every single season finale, and often in other episodes in the middle of the season, dozens die during an average week on the show, and this is all treated like it’s no real big deal, so long as the main characters remain untouched, which of course they always do.  The deaths, when they come, are inevitably always pretty, calm, and caused by laser beams that cause people to fall over silently without a mark on their bodies.  I’m not saying the show should have buckets of blood and gore like so many American programs do.  I just wish that it wouldn’t use its detached and overly simplified villains to prettify violence into no big deal.  It rather undercuts the otherwise powerful anti-war message of the show, doesn’t it? 

The writers of this show have demonstrated themselves as being more than capable of presenting complex characters, even minor ones, with just a few deft strokes of the pen.  They balance a show that is part comedy, part science fiction, part historical drama, part social commentary, and all human story with grace and intelligence.  So it really bothers me a great deal when the lovely fans of the show are asked to express genuine emotion when confronted with a talented actor doing all he possibly can to act against a twitching toilet plunger wielded to a trash can or a strangely mobile Tin Man that nonetheless has a three-word vocabulary and the intelligence—and ego—of a six-year-old.  The writers have demonstrated the rare ability to conjure villains that shock us, horrify us, and tug at our heartstrings all at the same time.  I just wish this would happen a little more often. 

-Bug